The Skip-It was a plastic ring you put around one ankle, with a curved arm that swept out and around your foot in a circle, with a ball on the end. You swung your leg in a tight rhythmic motion and the ball whipped around your shoe and you hopped over it with your other foot. You did this in the driveway. You did this on the back patio. You did this in the strip of crabgrass between your house and the neighbor's, which was, technically, not your yard, but the Skip-It didn't seem to care about property lines.
What the Skip-It cared about - what it was, fundamentally, designed to make you care about - was the small digital counter set into the ball.
That counter was the whole point.
The Object
The Skip-It had been around since the 80s in some janky off-brand version, but the one we knew - the one we had - was the early-90s Tiger Electronics relaunch with the LCD on the ball. Three lurid plastic colors per unit, never coordinated, all of them slightly translucent in that way 90s plastic was. Hot pink and yellow and purple. Or aqua and orange and lime. Some configuration of every color that wasn't allowed in your school's dress code.
The ankle loop had a soft plastic sleeve inside it that was supposed to prevent it from chewing up your skin. It did not. By skip number forty, you'd have a small ring of bruise on the inside of your ankle, the exact diameter of the loop, and you'd notice it that night in the bathtub and think "huh" and not really do anything about it.
The arm was a single piece of bent plastic - rigid, slightly flexy under load - about two and a half feet long. The ball at the end was the size of a small grapefruit and weighed almost nothing, but at speed it became, in physics terms, a problem. Anyone walking through the area was assumed to know what they were doing. Pets cleared out. Younger siblings got an unscheduled bruise.
The ankle loop had a soft plastic sleeve inside it that was supposed to prevent it from chewing up your skin. It did not.
And on the ball, set into a little inset window, was the counter. A four-digit grayscale LCD. The kind of screen that needed about a quarter of a second of perfect light to be visible at all. You couldn't really read it while playing. You'd stop, you'd squat down, you'd cup your hand over the ball, and you'd squint at the number. Then you'd stand back up and try to beat it.
The Mechanics
The skip itself was deceptive. It looked easy. The kid in the commercial did it for what appeared to be three uninterrupted minutes on a sunlit suburban driveway, smiling, never once losing her form. You assumed you would also do this.
You did not.
What actually happened was: you put the loop on your ankle. You stood with your weight on the other foot. You swung your loop-leg in a small horizontal circle, trying to get the ball started. The ball traveled approximately one quarter of the way around your foot before falling slack to the ground. You picked it up by walking forward two steps. The arm dragged. You tried again.
After maybe six attempts, you got the ball moving. It picked up speed. You hopped over it with the other foot. You hopped again. You hopped again. Suddenly you were doing it. Your leg had become a little engine, the arm was a centripetal blur, the ball was a colored streak passing under your foot in steady rhythm. You were skipping it.
This lasted, on average, about twelve skips. Then the ball clipped your shoe. The arm went slack. The momentum died. You stopped. You squatted down. You looked at the counter.
It said twelve.
You tried again.
The Number
The counter was the thing.
Without the counter, the Skip-It was a piece of plastic on a string that you whipped around your ankle. With the counter, it was a score. A personal best. A measurable, verifiable, undeniable record of how good you specifically were at skipping a piece of plastic, that you could announce to your friends, and that they could not contest because the number was right there on the ball.
The counter never reset on its own. That's the part nobody tells you. It was cumulative. You picked it up the next day and it remembered what you'd done. There was a tiny reset button somewhere on the housing - you had to find it with a fingernail - but mostly nobody pressed it because why would you. The number was your number. It was a permanent record of every successful hop you had ever made in your entire life as the owner of this particular Skip-It.
So a 213 wasn't 213 in one go. It was a lifetime total, accumulated over months of driveway sessions and afternoons and that one weekend at your cousin's house. You knew, looking at the 213, that 200 of them were probably your best continuous run, and the other thirteen were the partial credit you'd earned the day you got it to twelve, plus the one stray skip you'd grabbed at school during recess on the asphalt where the ball didn't quite roll right.
But you didn't break it down. You didn't say, "well, the real number is the best uninterrupted run." You said, "I'm at 213 on my Skip-It." Anyone trying to interrogate the methodology was being a baby about it.
The number was your number. It was a permanent record of every successful hop you had ever made in your entire life as the owner of this particular Skip-It.
This was the trick. The counter was designed to feel cumulative, to keep climbing, to never not be encouraging. Every time you went outside with the thing, the number went up. Even if you only got six skips that day, you got six more. The ball remembered. The ball was on your side.
The Battery
Then one day the counter started fading. The digits got thinner. The little segments stopped showing up at all unless you held the ball at a very specific angle to the sun. You could still skip. The arm still arced. The ball still spun. But the number was gone.
The counter ran on a watch battery soldered into the ball. Not a slot. Not a screw-down cover. Soldered. There were YouTube tutorials about cracking your Skip-It open with a butter knife and replacing it, but that was a decade later. At the time, when the counter died, the counter died, and the Skip-It became, in a single afternoon, a piece of plastic on a string that you whipped around your ankle.
You played with it for maybe another week. The hop was still kind of fun. The motion was still hypnotic. But you couldn't tell anyone how many you'd done. There was nothing to announce. No proof. And the whole appeal collapsed.
The Skip-It ended up in the bin in the garage with the other plastic things, the snake jumprope and the broken water rocket and the deflated Skip Ball, where it stayed until someone donated it to a yard sale, where it sat on a card table for $0.50 with the dead counter blank-windowed and ignored, and was eventually bought by some other kid who did not know.
What it Was
I don't think the Skip-It was a good toy. The exercise was probably real - you were doing what was essentially a low-grade plyometric drill for forty minutes at a time - but the toy part of it, the bouncy plastic mechanism, was thin. A single rotation. A single skill. A bruise on your ankle.
What was good was the number. The number on the ball that climbed up, and remembered, and never quite punished you for being bad at the actual skipping part. You hopped twelve times, the number went up twelve. You hopped eighty times, it went up eighty. The Skip-It never asked you to be consistent. It only asked you to keep going.
I sometimes think this is the first time I encountered a counter that mattered more than the activity it counted. There would be others. Steps. Reps. Streaks. Notification badges. The little number in the red bubble that's three hundred forty-seven and you don't quite know what it's three hundred forty-seven of, but you know it has to come down. Or go up. Whichever way it's supposed to go.
I was nine years old and I was hopping in a circle in my driveway to make a plastic number get bigger. Nobody told me to. Nobody made me. The number was just there. And the number was the whole thing.
The ball remembered. The ball was on my side.
I miss it a little.