He pivoted and skated back. “I’ll brake for you,” he promised, coming up beside me and holding out a stiff arm. And he did try. But it was a hill and not a gradual slope of land that even a baby could handle, as certain people still claim, so he couldn’t brake enough for both of us. We flew ever faster until we nearly reached walking speed, Sébastien’s wheels screeching against the pavement to no avail and me trying to get my own wheels to screech against the pavement to no avail, until I shrank backward out of this suicidal velocity and fell fesses-first onto the pavement, with a force that would leave dense purple bruises on all relevant flesh for a couple of weeks before they faded.

As my face crumpled in a way that would have made a three-year-old proud, Sébastien crouched beside me, betrayed by worry into exasperation. “What did you do that for? If you hadn’t gotten scared, you would have been fine.”

Things had been going from bad to worse, relationship-wise, for the past hour, but this was the last straw. “If you hadn’t made me do this, I would have been fine, too!”

“Made you?” Sébastien drew back his head. A four-year-old who had just created his best fresco all over his mom’s freshly painted walls couldn’t have been more wounded at her reaction. “It was a present. You said you wanted to learn how to skate!”

“For fifteen minutes on a flat, enclosed, protected surface!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.

A cyclist rounded the corner at that moment, his face set warily at all the yelling. His expression lightened with comprehension when he saw me on my butt on the pavement, skate-chunky legs stuck out in front of me, and Sébastien crouched beside me, caught between concern and exasperation. “Ça fait mal,” the cyclist told Sébastien sympathetically. That hurts.

The worst of it was he clearly meant the sympathy for Sébastien and not for me. Men.

On the next hill, observers could see three Frenchmen holding on to the pants of one American rather like you might hold a toddler’s diapers, braking with all their might in order to avoid reaching a speed that would make the American start screaming again—basically, anything over a few feet an hour.

Fortunately, that left none of them free to take a picture. It was just a good thing Virginie wasn’t there with a camera. “Where is Virginie, anyway?” I asked when we were on flat ground again.

The guys flexed their hands to restore circulation, massaged their calves from all the braking, and exchanged glances. “Virginie doesn’t really like skating with us,” Sébastien admitted.