I don’t think I told you yet, I think I forgot, so I’ll tell you now. On Friday (yesterday), all throughout the school day I was getting warnings about “Chicagoland Rink.” - You know - the place we are going to hang tonight.
When I was in my typing class, I was talking to this smart girl Savannah just before the bell was about to ring. I told her I was going to this place called, “Chicagoland Roller Rink,” to hang out and do some breakin’, when she cut me off and gasped.
“There are a lot of gangbangers that hang out there all of the time. My brother told me all about that place; my bro won’t let me go there … and he won’t hang out there anymore either because of all of the riff raff.” Savannah had told me just as the bell rang, so that’s all I knew … UNTIL....
On that same day, in gym class, this dude Riley said: one day his Uncle Mike was there (at Chicagoland Rink) and someone got shot inside of the place, right in the leg, with a pistol.
Then this other dude in my gym class, Anthony, chimed in and corrected Riley, “In fact someone did get shot at Chicagoland Rink but it was in the parking lot, not inside the rink. It was all over the TV news and in the newspapers and everything. And he got shot in the butt, not in the leg,” Anthony had said. The way Anthony explained it made me believe him but I tried not to think about it too much.
The more people I told I was going to Chicagoland Rink; the more people that had stories for me about how I’d better be careful if I went there. It made me feel like I must have been living under a rock or something because I had never heard any of those stories before.
Also on Friday, during my lunch period, when I was waiting in line to order my food, these two girls; SummerWind and Mariah told me, “We know of Chicagoland Rink because our neighbor from down the street told us how we better be careful if we ever went there. Something about, if you get caught wearing the wrong colors up there you’d find yourself in a heap of trouble or whatever,” Mariah said as she rolled her eyes and then added, “as if,” in a tone that meant she wouldn’t be going there anyway. She was a preppy bookish type that obviously didn’t “wear gang colors.”
“As if we would go up there,” SummerWind agreed, who was also a very straight laced but cool girl.
Anyway, everyone I had talked to about “Chicagoland Roller Rink” last Friday had something shady to tell me about that place-and that was the only thing that sort of had me buggin’ after I had visited Bob. I had meant to ask Bob if he knew anything about that place, but he had fallen asleep by the time I had remembered to ask him.
It’s weird, I didn’t think of Bob as a cancer patient the whole walk home on Saturday. I just kept thinking about how he didn’t like Foo Foo water. Which I guessed was anything that wasn’t just pure H2O. When I wasn’t thinking about foo foo water, I was picturing Bob’s bald head eating chocolate and getting tickled with feathers. I can really think about the weirdest things. Anyway, I thought about all of this junk while I walked home from the hospital that day: Chicagoland Rink, feathers, “real H2O,” and chocolate - I’m such a scatter brain sometimes but that was what was on my mind and I wanted you to know – I hope you don’t mind?