Read When Skateboards Will Be Free for Free Online

most and consumed in vast quantities. I found it incomprehensible that it could flow so uninterruptedly from the soda fountain. My mother explained to me that the milk was not free, that none of the food was in fact free, and that she had paid a onetime fee for everything, but since I did not see money change hands I felt as if all was free. And it was here at Oberlin that I began to draw a strong association between revolution and summertime and grassy fields and all-you-can-eat.
    That evening, as dusk began to fall, my mother and I walked to the skating rink on the other end of campus, wherethe first meeting of the convention was always held. I sat beside her on a folding chair while comrades filed in, filling the place, their voices bouncing off the round bubble of the rink so that a thousand people sounded like a million. From out of this crowd I could hear the faint calling of my name.
    “Saïd!”
    The voices were far off but coming closer.
    “Saïd!”
    I stood on my chair and strained to locate their origin.
    “Saïd!”
    And suddenly, out of the crush of comrades, two small comrades emerged, brown eyes and brown hair, bearing an odd and unlikely resemblance to me: my brother and sister.
    “There you are!” they shouted.
    I was shocked by how much taller they had grown since the last time I had seen them. And my sister’s hair was long now, like a woman’s, and my brother was showing the signs of a mustache. They each wore little buttons on their collars that said
Join the YSA
, because they were members of the youth wing of the party, the Young Socialist Alliance. I suddenly felt shy in front of them, and I flinched when they touched me.
    “I caught a fish!” my brother exclaimed, bending down and picking me up into his arms.
    “Should we fry the fish tonight?” my sister asked.
    “No, no, no,” I squealed, and in this way I was coaxed into laughter.
    And then my mother came over. “Hello, Jacob,” she said with a stiff formality, extending her hand for him to shake.Some of the comrades offered to slide down so we could all sit in a row, and when we were settled in, my brother and sister told me which dormitory they were staying in, and they told me a funny story about unpacking, and they told me that my father was somewhere in the front of the audience, or in the middle of the audience, and that he wanted to see me, but he couldn’t see me just yet because he was discussing things with the speakers, but soon enough. Then they asked me what funny things I’d been doing the last six months, or the last year, or however long it had been since we had seen one another, but before I could tell them, a speaker took the stage, a hush descended over the skating rink, and my brother and sister took out their notebooks and pens.
    “Welcome, comrades,” the comrade said into the microphone, his voice echoing. And so the speeches began.
    There had been a time in the beginning when we had all been together. Five of us. But things did not go well, and about three years after my father left, my sister was packed up and sent off to a mysterious neighborhood in Brooklyn where my father was said to be living with a female comrade from the party. I retained a single memory of my sister, from when she was probably eight and I was probably three, and she was kneeling in front of me to take off my shoes, but, unable to figure out how to undo the knot, what was supposed to be untied became tied tighter. And the two of us laughed and laughed.
    In her absence, my brother and I filled the apartment with elaborate games. He was twelve years old, and so I was more than happy to parade behind him as his second-in-command. “Our bedroom is the jungle,” he would say, “and our beds are lions.” Or he would say, “I’m Superman and you’re Batman.” But just a few months after my sister left, my brother was also packed up and sent away, leaving me with a final image of him digging his hand into a cereal box and