The Rollerblading Club

2-8-06
Lunch was always a silent ordeal. Phil (my brother) and I would always eat as quickly as possible, careful not to make too much noise with our silverware, and careful not to leave anything on our plates. My portions were smaller, so I would always finish first, but the second we were both finished we would rush downstairs into the garage. There, we would put our rollerblades on and skate out the back the door.
As soon as the door slammed shut, we would start talking. We were not allowed to speak English to each other, or anywhere inside the house, so we would wait until we were out of earshot to start speaking English. It was not a rebellious thing; we have always felt more comfortable speaking English to each other.
As we skated down the street, we would play games together. We would pretend we were giants or lions… We would easily slide into the roles, playing whole-heartedly as we closed the distance between our house and the houses of our friends, Kelly and Brian. They lived about seven minutes away.
Sometimes, they were both already in the street, practicing their skating. The four of us made up what we called “The Rollerblading Club”. We would get together as often as we could and would rollerblade around the upper part of our neighborhood.
Kelly and I are older, so we were the leaders. Phil was the cunning one, and Brian was… the fool (we called him Monkey Man).
As we would come upon Kelly and Brian, Phil and I would be in the middle of our game. Of course, as we would get nearer, the other two would overhear us. Kelly would rollerblade up to us, squealing to a halt,
“Hi guys!” she would say, “What ‘cha playing’?” and we would skid to a halt, too. Phil and I would give each other meaningful looks and say something like:
“We’re playing this really cool game about giants…” We would explain the game to the other two, but Phil and I had been playing “make-believe” together since before we could talk. It would be hard for others to join our game.
So we would find other games to play. Kelly loved to make up stories about life on other planets. We would pretend we were Muscle Dogs or Showmians from Eressness. Or we would admire each other’s pokémon cards, “cool” or not.
We would skate around on that one flat street, Nancy Lane, until we ran out of ideas. The sky would be a bright clear blue, everything would be tinted yellow by the sun and we would hear someone call to us from afar,
“Hey guys!” And we would all turn and look. It was our friend Jenna and her brother, Keenan. Neither of them liked to skate, but they would invite us to over to their house for the rest of the afternoon.
They lived half-way down a big hill. Getting down it on our skates was always an adventure. Phil would walk on the edge of the grass with Jenna and Keenan, Kelly and I would make slow zigzags one in front of the other, and Brian would just let himself go down the hill and he would stop himself by running into Jenna’s garage door.
At Jenna’s house we would jump on the trampoline together, trying all sorts of jumps and flips. Or we would swim in the pool, doing handstands and diving for sinking objects. And when we were tired, we would sit on the lawn chairs by the pool eating fudgecicles and drinking ice water.
Then around 5:15pm, just as the sun would start to set at the bottom of the hill, Phil and I would skate back up to hill talking about the games of today, and looking forward to the games of tomorrow.

That's a pretty piece. But it's not very realistic. I think that might have happened once, it's not something that happened everyday. And even then, some details are made up and/or exaggerated. It's still cute.