Confession #1: I did it for the boys.

My neighbor, whom I knew since we were in elementary school, grew up to be a hunky chunk of skateboarding man-meat. Suddenly, he didn’t want to hang out with a girl who made him dress up in costumes for homemade videos; he wanted to spend all of his time kick-pushing an expensive piece of plywood. Since I found him easily accessible, I didn’t bother pursuing other boys. I bought some men’s DC’s and a World Industries deck my mother approved of. (“I’m not paying for skulls,” she told me.) As I think back on it now, it’s silly to think he’d actually be interested in me. I dressed like a boy (eventually owning more oversized skate shirts than he did) and had no idea how to put on make-up.

Confession # 2: I was not a badass.

Though I spent every available moment at the skatepark and could 50-50 the shit out of the grind rails, I was hiding something behind my solid kick-flips: I was a straight A student. What the punky kids didn’t see was that I would race home after school, finish all my homework and then head to the park. My teachers seemed concerned when I showed up to school everyday in a black hoodie covered in Sex Pistols patches, but my parents knew I was in bed by 9 PM and could safely rule out drugs and alcohol. The closest I got to getting wild was when my skater friends and I cleaned out the gas station’s stock of energy drinks.

Confession # 3: I was jealous of posers.

Coincidentally, the year after I got heavy into my hobby, Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi” made it big, and all the girls at school started wearing ties. This made me so angry, I made an Anti-Avril website with beginner’s HTML and loved labeling people with the P-word. Upon later reflection, I realized that I didn’t hate Avril, I hated that all the pretty girls were suddenly interested in the hot piece of ass I was trying to hoard. These girls would line up at the skatepark and call me over to ask things like, “You’re friends with Jake, right? Is he single?” A couple of times, I made stuff up. In actuality, he was single and looking for girls exactly like them. He later went to prom as a junior with the hottest girl in the senior class. And my date was overweight.

Confession #4: I miss it.

My skateboarding years were some of the most carefree of my life. It was a gateway to other obsessions like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and DDR, which I had ample time to master. I spent my summer’s ollying off of things that were labeled with “No Skateboarding” signs and eating way too many sticks of Laffy Taffy. On the weekends, I got to ride in shady Cadillacs with my skater friends, windows rolled down and Rancid cranked up, to locations with “sweet stair sets.” I got to impress cute boys with my clear griptape and vocabulary words like, “bushings.” Now, I wear heels and figured out how to put on mascara, and I spend more time concerned with the volume of my hair than on my stereo.

– Heidi Thomasoni is slowly coming to terms with aging.

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