Leave It on the Track - Hardcover

Fisher, Margot

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593858395 ISBN 13: 9780593858394

Verlag: Dutton Books for Young Readers, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

From Reese's Book Club LitUp Fellow Margot Fisher, a moving debut about healing, self-acceptance, and queer first love, set on a roller derby team

Morgan “Moose” Shaker barely survived the fire that killed her fathers in their beloved roller rink in small-town Utah. Now she has to move to Portland, Oregon to live with her much older half sister, Eden. Eden’s doing her best, but she’s hardly ready to be a parent to a sixteen-year-old she hasn’t seen in years. Plus, barely-out-of-the-closet Moose worries that she’s not ready for super-affirming, rainbow-flags-everywhere Portland. Her anxiety and frustration are at peak levels.

Fortunately, Moose finds an outlet for her emotions and a surprising group of friends in roller derby. Her teammates help her grieve her dads and confront her queer imposter syndrome. And even though it's against league rules, she might be falling for a teammate.

Heartfelt, funny, and romantic, this debut will make you want to lace up your skates, pull on your pads, and hit the track.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Margot Fisher (she/her) is a writer of queer books for young adults, a roller derby athlete, and a Capricorn, among other things. She was selected as a Reese’s Book Club LitUp fellow in 2023. Margot writes from Portland, Oregon, where she lives with a dog and a garden that’s always a little out of control.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

We wait in line at the roller rink for fifteen minutes, even though Papa made a point to get here early. The chaotic line for the Finney’s Mesa Rollerdome always stretches around the corner on Friday nights. There’s a family of four behind us—a dad on his phone, a mom trying to stop her little kid from putting on their plastic Fisher-Price skates outside, a preteen in a hoodie avoiding looking at the rest of his family. The preteen has reached that phase of waiting outside the rink that comes with stoic patience. He’s too old to be running around like the little kids and too young to be huddled in a group of his friends being obnoxious on their phones. So he’s standing, slightly apart from his embarrassing family, clutching his skates and probably looking forward to getting inside and being able to roll away from them. That was me a couple years ago, awkward and unsure of myself even though I’d been skating at the Rollerdome all my life.

Dad is completely unbothered by the queue and falls into conversation with the guy in front of us, a dance skater who’s new to Finney’s Mesa. Dad’s always been able to do that—zero in on some- one new, say just the right thing to get them smiling, opening up, dip so suddenly into conversation that they don’t notice when the line’s moving. I’ve never managed to figure it out.

“Dad made another friend,” Papa says to me with a bemused look. His skates are slung over his shoulder, laces tied together, the black suede striking against his bright red jacket. Papa always dresses nice when we go skating—nicer than church, he’d say, even though we’ve never been to church. This is our church, he said once when I was little, skating between him and Dad and clutching both their hands. The church of eight wheels. He’d ripped it off the name of a famous roller rink in San Francisco, polished wood laid down in the shell of an old church with makeshift lights and a DJ booth set up every weekend. Papa’s always showing me old skate videos from the famous roller rinks, pointing out the way the floor is curved or the types of wheels people used in the ’90s as though I can see them in the grainy footage.

We get inside to the ticket stand, where Dad hands our skate passes to Gemma. She’s slouched in her scuffed wooden booth, grumpy expression contrasting with the sequined top hat and glowstick necklace someone made her wear. “Happy Friday, Gemma,” Dad says smoothly, and Gemma cracks a rare grimace.

“It’ll be happier when I can go home,” she says as she stamps our passes. “Hey, Moose,” she says to me, “nothing better to do on Friday night?”

It’s our usual routine—Gemma acts like seeing a sixteen-year-old at the Finney’s Mesa Rollerdome with her parents on Friday night a month before school lets out is an affront to human nature. I ask her if she knows of any other exciting social activities happening in deadend Finney’s Mesa; she rolls her eyes, stamps my well-creased pass, and slides it back to me, along with a Tootsie Roll from her stash under the counter.

On Fridays, the rink comes alive. The neon carpet underfoot vibrates from the speakers, the space crowded with people lacing up their skates and half rolling, half stepping awkwardly around the benches. The ugly stained carpet around the edges of the rink is there to slow you down and keep you from plowing at full speed into a little kid with a plastic tray of nachos. It’s like a gentler introduction to moving with wheels on your feet. See? Papa said to me once when I was little and just learning, clutching his hands with white knuckles as I wobbled to my feet. It’s not so different from walking on the carpet, right? He’d gently pried my hands off his and made me roll along the lace-up area, letting me stumble over a crease in the carpet and slapping his thighs in approval when I steadied myself without help.

Tonight, the overhead lights are shut off in favor of flashing lasers and a disco ball, and the floor is packed with a slow-moving ring of skaters decked out with glow sticks. We squeeze through the crowd to our usual spot by the lockers, a carpeted bench between the DJ booth and the arcade. Papa uses a key from his belt to open our locker, tossing in his wallet and jacket. “Where’d your friend go?” he shouts to Dad over the music, and Dad gives him a playful shove.

“Can you move?” I press, waving my coat in Dad’s face. “Some of us are here to skate.”

“Okay, Your Majesty,” he says, taking my coat and stuffing it into the locker with his. “You gonna keep up with these old men tonight?”

“Are you?” I ask, reaching out to spin one of the wheels on his skates. “Sounds a little crusty. Cleaned your bearings lately?”

“Not since someone lost the bearing press.”

“My turn,” Papa proclaims, dramatically fake shoving both of us apart so he can squish his bag into the locker.

Dad and I sit on the carpeted bench to pull our skates on. There’s an eyelet near the toe of my left skate that’s started lifting out of the leather—probably just from these skates being three years old—and I use my pinkie to pop it back in before I slide it on my foot. “I need new skates,” I tell Dad, threading the laces in the special pattern he showed me years ago, the one that helps lift my arches so my feet don’t cramp. “These are gonna fall apart soon.” The lights, in the shapes of pink flowers and stars, rove over my hands.

“Oh, come on,” he chides, reaching down to pinch the toe of my skate and check the fit. “We can just slap some duct tape on there and buy you another year at least.”

“I will buy you new skates when I’m in SLC next month, favorite child,” Papa says, sitting down on my other side to put his skates on.

“That’s why you’re my favorite dad.”

“Pushover,” Dad says across me, and Papa gives him one of those annoyed-yet-lovesick looks. They always flank me like this when we lace up—when I was little and first learning to skate, it was so they could each grab a hand and pull me to my feet. Now it’s ritual. I finish lacing my own skates and give Dad’s a tug to make sure they’re tight, but not too tight. Dad and I like the high-top rhythm skates with dance plugs instead of toe stops, but Papa still wears sleek black artistic skates from his figure roller skating days and refuses to let either of us touch them.

I’m always ready first, and I stand and pat Dads on the head. “Too slow!” I tell them over the music, and they wave in lazy acknowledgment as I head to the skate floor.

The minute my wheels hit polished wood, I’m sailing. I weave in and out of the throngs of other skaters, deftly maneuvering my way around the floor and scanning for familiar faces. While Friday-night skate always draws a handful of newbies from Moab proper shuffling across the floor, the regular crowd is the heartbeat of the rink. I wave to Sam and Mike, the two old dudes who show up every night to skate slowly around the outside and talk about sports, no matter how crowded it is.

“Hey, Moose,” Sam says, barely audible over the music, and I turn to skate backward in front of them.

“Who’s losing this weekend?” I ask.

“Cougars are a fucking mess this season,” Mike sighs. “Your dads follow the Cougars?”

“They definitely don’t.” Dads—the only gay couple in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Dutton Books for Young Readers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593858395
• ISBN 13: 9780593858394
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland