![]() He kept thinking about what two camp counselors had been saying to each other when they thought he was out of earshot, while they were waiting for his mom to pick him up. He thought back to the last place his mother had dropped him off at, a day camp with arts and crafts and the like. ![]() Hiking trips, workshops, music and dance classes, workout programs. Though he was just learning to read, Austin could tell they were for various community events. Behind a glass covering were several fliers. They looked happy, even with their inexperience and falls.Īustin looked at a bulletin board near the lobby entrance. On the rink, there were now just a mother and her two children. Even the receptionist and the person renting skates were nowhere to be seen. But now he was bored, so he quit the game and went to the rec center lobby. Side distractions were one of the few things he could consider himself actually good at due to the amount of time he spent on them at all the places his mother took him. Plus, while skating, he could swear he felt the rink tremble once or twice.Īustin was relatively successful with the game. There were too many people jostling about, too many sharp blades, and staff from the rec center seemed to be nowhere in sight. ![]() He could sense even at his age that the rink was too crowded and that something might happen. ![]() Even if there was no water under the ice, he had seen people get hurt on the crowded rink, and had nearly been run over several times by bigger skaters. There was no possibility of "falling through the ice", the rink was perfectly safe. His mother assured him that such a thing would not happen, that modern indoor ice rinks simply didn't work that way, that it was just two inches of ice on a concrete floor that was kept frozen and polished and replenished every hour or so by that big machine. That he would just fall through, or that there would be too many people on the rink and the ice wouldn't support all their weight, resulting in the ice breaking and them all falling through into the water. As he played the game, he thought about what his mother had told him when he voiced his fears about ice skating.Īustin was perpetually afraid that he would fall through the ice and drown. There was a hockey arcade game, and he found this much more enjoyable than actually skating himself. Occasionally, other kids and sometimes their parents would drift in and out of the arcade, but for the most part Austin was alone. There was a small video arcade nearby, and his mother had given him money to use for food and games. It took some struggling but he managed to get back to the rink entrance and take his skates off on the bleachers. He didn't think his mom would mind if he took a break. At least then he had gotten to spend some time talking with one of the fair performers.Īustin was now cold and sore from falling down, and wanted to get off the rink. Or at the Renaissance Fair when he was left with another family of strangers who in turn left him at an acrobatics and juggling show and came back for him several hours later, by which point he had watched the whole show a dozen times. Like at the fishing day camp, where he spent the whole time fumbling with his kiddie pole while the two instructors focused on helping the kids who actually had a chance of catching something. Austin was used to being left behind and forgotten about. It wasn't the first time this had happened. He had been pathetically hugging the wall of the rink attempting to stay upright while skating when the familiar feeling of absence hit him. It was maybe an hour or two later when Austin realized the family had left the rink. Their mother showed him how to put on his states and tie the laces, but he was a beginner, and couldn't keep up with the five boys who were all experienced skaters. The boys were all older than Austin and didn't seem interested in skating with him. She dropped him off at the indoor ice rink and left him with a couple and their five boys. This somewhat confused the boy, as she hadn't told him she wanted him to learn to skate before that day. She said it was time for him to learn to skate. No one believed Austin the first time he told the story, and as the years went by, everyone became more and more concerned at his steadfast conviction in its veracity.Īustin was seven years old when his mother took him to the ice rink.
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