We’d been going faster and faster and faster. Our eyes half-closed and our arms stretched wide. Neither of us saw the car pull up from the driveway until it was almost too late.

Di came to a screeching halt, her board crunching on the road.

And I swerved. I might have been successful if I had been better at keeping my balance, if I weren’t already overstretching and overcompensating. But while I managed to avoid the car, my board snagged, and I went flying for real. I did the same thing I did during the fight: I stretched my arms in front of me to break my fall. I figured it’d be easy enough to catch myself, and I didn’t want to hit my helmed head on the curb.

Pain shot through my arm like spikes of ice. I didn’t hear the snap of bones breaking, but I felt it. Diana was at my side immediately, and one of the neighbors must have phoned my parents, because they showed up minutes later. I don’t remember what they said, but I remember crying and my mother holding me, comforting me. My dad oh-so-gently carried me to the car so he could drive us to the hospital.

Diana brought my skateboard and helmet home so I wouldn’t have to worry about those, and every one of them cared so deeply that, even though the pain made me sway, I felt rooted and protected. When I got back from the hospital with my wrist in a cast, Diana showed up with a bouquet of flowers her mother had bought for me. Dad cooked my favorite meals, and my mother bought me books to read while I recovered.

But oh, how I loathed the skateboard. I knew it was irrational. It was the car and the maneuver and pure, bad luck. But I didn’t care for a rational explanation. I didn’t want to look at that skateboard anymore, and if I could have managed it, I would have found a way to snap it in two.

I asked Dad one night if that was bad. To think of violence against this inanimate object that had no blame in my spending six weeks with my arm in a cast.

He sat down on the edge of my bed and smiled. “I don’t think it’s bad,” he said in that soft bass of his. “You are hurt, and that is understandable.”

“But?” I prompted. Dad preferred to always look at both—or all—sides of a question. At least back then.

“But you may think of it as a learning experience,” he said, with a hint of a smile.

Internally, I groaned.

“Practice forgiveness, Emmy,” he said. He bent down and pressed a kiss on my hair and then left me before I could think of a counterargument. Before I could tell him that I was too old for his pet name. That I didn’t care about forgiveness and I didn’t want to practice it either.

I never broke that skateboard, and I went skating again with Diana in the spring, when we both turned eleven. I wore it down, not with anger but with play.