While Gabe set the table and chopped up lettuce for a salad, I slipped my feet into his sister’s Rollerblades and was a little surprised to find that they fit almost perfectly. I stood up and wobbled a bit. Gabe came over to check on me.
“How do they feel?” he asked.
“Good,” I said. He looked down at the skates and bent to press his fingers into the space just above my toes, like shoe salesmen sometimes did.
“They’re a little loose,” he said. “But I think you’ll be okay if you wear a second pair of socks. I’ll go get some for you.”
-Forty-five minutes later, our stomachs full of spaghetti and our arms full of skates, socks, helmets, and pads, Gabe and I left his apartment and started walking toward the Métro stop at La Motte Picquet Grenelle, about five minutes away.
“So I thought you said you grew up in Florida,” I said to make conversation along the way. “How come your sister lives in Brittany?” I tried to shift the weight of the skates from one arm to the other as we walked. They were getting heavy.
“She’s actually my half sister,” Gabe said. He glanced over at me. “Here, let me take those,” he said, coming to a dead stop in the middle of the street. “I’m sorry. I should have offered.” Despite my protests that he didn’t have to, he grabbed my skates and handed me his much lighter helmet and pads to carry. I thanked him, and we started walking again.
“So Lucie is your half sister on your dad’s side?” I asked after a moment.
Gabe nodded. “Yes. He’s still in Brittany. My mother, of course, still lives in Florida. I spent every summer with my dad, so I’m close to Lucie.”
I absorbed this for a moment. Then I realized something. “So when you said in the UPP story that Guillaume had grown up in Brittany, you knew that because you spent summers there as a kid? You knew who he was from when you were younger?”
“Yes,” Gabe said quickly. “That’s right. But I thought you said we weren’t going to talk about work tonight.” We had reached the Métro entrance, and before he could say more, we had to scramble to get our tickets out with our hands full. By the time we were through the turnstiles and had boarded the Nation-bound 6 train, Gabe was already on to another subject, asking me where I had lived in college. I let the whole Brittany issue go. After all, he had answered my question; it had been bothering me for days how Gabe had known so much about Guillaume’s background.
The Pari Roller was, without a doubt, the craziest thing I had ever seen.
We joined thousands of other skaters in the Place Raoul Dautry, between the train station and huge Montparnasse tower, just in time for a brief lecture, in French, from the roller organizers about safety and road rules. Gabe quietly translated for me as I pulled on my knee pads, the extra socks he had loaned me, and his sister’s skates. He helped me fasten Lucie’s helmet on my head and grinned as he adjusted the strap.
“Why, you look beautiful, Emma,” he said, patting the top of my helmet once he had tightened it on. I made a face at him.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure I’m really hot with my hair squished into a mushroom shape under a big, hard helmet.” I rolled my eyes.
“You are hot,” Gabe said, looking surprisingly serious. I opened my mouth to say something smart in return, but before I could, the whistle blew and we were nearly run over by a sudden onslaught of skaters descending on Paris.
“Let’s go!” Gabe grinned down at me. He put a hand on my arm and helped steady me as we made our way into the crush of bodies on wheels. “You ready?” he shouted over the noise that came from twenty thousand sets of wheels grinding over the pavement in unison.
“Uh-huh!” I nodded nervously, and off we went, swept away in a tide of skaters.
For the next hour and a half, we barely said a word to each other, although Gabe kept looking down to make sure I was with him. I was—and I spent the entire skate in awe. It was the fastest and the hardest I’d ever bladed, but it was next to impossible to fall behind with a tide of thousands to sweep me forward every time my energy faltered. My rib cage vibrated with the gentle, steady roar of the thousands of wheels around us, and I marveled as we made our way toward the river, passing the Eiffel Tower far off to the left, then up past the impressive Opéra on the Right Bank and through the ninth up to the Gare du Nord, the station I’d be returning to tomorrow morning to take the Eurostar to London. We snaked through several neighborhoods I didn’t recognize, and everywhere we went, people stood along the sidewalks, cheering and waving as we roared by. I felt like part of a parade.
By the time we arrived, breathless and drenched in sweat, in the Place Armand-Carrel, a big park in the nineteenth on the opposite side of Paris from where we’d started, it was eleven forty-five. I scooted onto the grass and, like thousands of other exhausted skaters, collapsed onto my back.
“That was amazing,” I breathed to Gabe, who was standing over me, looking down in amusement.
“I’m glad you liked it,” he said. “But you realize we’re only halfway done.”