Skate Freak (6 page)

“Only at night when the little weasels have all gone home and there's elbow room.” He paused. “One on one?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“We got the pipe to ourselves. You follow me. Then I follow you. Move for move. See who loses it first.”

“What about all that crap at the bottom?”

“It makes things more interesting.”

I shook my head no.

“C'mon. We can bet on it. Twenty bucks.”

Leave it to Hodge to turn it into a contest. “Na.”

“Look at it this way: I'll probably lose. The bike is my thing. I just skate as a sideline. You are the full-meal deal. You skate all the time. You've got the advantage.” He had that devilish grin again, the one that had prompted me to skate off his roof.

I had come here to skate, to get my mind off that phone call. I couldn't go home. “What the heck,” I said. “Sure.”

“You first.”

The crowd on the sidelines was watching as I pulled up into the pipe. Hot on my heels was Hodge, move for move. He'd obviously done this before. I dropped in, skittered over some of the smaller chunks of glass, rolled up the other side and took my first bite of air. Hodge was right behind, making contact with the wall just inches behind me. The next time I took the wall, I felt
something not quite right, tiny particles of glass had embedded into my wheels. Each time I tried to turn, there'd be a hard spot where the wheels would lose their grip and slide. Not good. I eased up a bit. Hodge noted that I was on cruise control. And then we stopped at the top, both of us kicking our boards up high into the air and catching them.

“Quite the circus act,” he said, breathing hard. “But that was just warm up, right?”

I remembered the bet. Twenty bucks. Twenty bucks that I didn't have. “See those guys?” He pointed to the older drinking crowd—our audience. “They got money on this too. They know who you are. They've seen you. Some think you're good. Some think I'm good. Whoever wins, some of them are happy. Whoever loses, some of them are not so happy.”

“I'm out,” I said. “I don't skate for money, and I don't want people betting on me. This sucks.”

He shrugged. “Then pay up. I'll explain that you wimped out.”

I could see I was in a no-win situation. I felt trapped. “Okay, your turn,” I said.

That devil smile again. I tried to pick the glass out of my wheels, but he was already off. I was the dogman this time. Hodge knew how to work me. He made it easy at first, slow and graceful moves, some rail-slides across the lip, some full-on drops, not connecting until halfway down and always avoiding the worst of the jagged glass. We went on like that for about ten minutes. I could sense he was getting tired. I was thinking I might win after all.

And then he misjudged. His trucks caught on the lip and he lost it. I watched the shock on his face as his feet lost his board, and then he was falling backwards down into the pit. His shoulder bounced him once, and then he rolled onto a broken bottle.

I was already down onto a cleaner part of the bottom of the pipe, so I kicked my
board up and ran over to him. There was blood on the ground. He was lying on his back. The look on his face said he was in pain.

“Someone call an ambulance,” I yelled to the older guys. But they were getting up to split. No one seemed to be in the mood to be a Good Samaritan.

A police car had just driven up onto the edge of the skate park.

Hodge let out an unearthly howl. He was in serious pain.

Two police officers came running over. I think they believed we'd been in a fight. Maybe they thought I'd knifed Hodge.

“Stand back and don't move,” one shouted at me.

“He's hurt,” I blurted out. “We were skating. He fell on a busted bottle.”

One officer called for an ambulance while the other carefully rolled Hodge over. A chunk of the bottle was lodged in his lower back.

Hodge was crying now. I watched as
they put pressure on the wound without taking the glass out. I felt scared and helpless. And angry at myself for getting lured into a stupid bet.

When they hauled him off in an ambulance, I had no idea how bad the injury was. The cops asked if I wanted a ride home, and I said yes. They were cool enough about it. They said they were sorry about my friend but that we shouldn't be there at night.

My father was sitting on the back steps of the apartment building when we pulled up. One of the cops recognized my father and said, “Oh, he's your son.”

“Is he in trouble?” my dad asked.

“No. He's okay,” the officer said. “Just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Later the next day, I made a few phone calls to try to find out what happened to Hodge. The hospital said that he wasn't there. That's all they'd say. I fumbled through the phone book looking at last names until I found a David Hodge and the street name I was looking for. I dialed.

Hodge answered.

“You okay?”

“I'm alive, aren't I? Or do you think you are talking to a ghost?”

Hodge told me that he had been badly cut and lost some blood. They had to stitch him up, and he'd probably be proud of the scar for the rest of his life. But there wasn't any real damage. He'd think twice before making bets again and doing something stupid like that. Or maybe not. It's hard to say.

After that, I finally got up the courage to go over to Jasmine's house. I needed someone to talk to. She was home alone, and we sat on her front steps. I told her about the skate park scene, and it seemed to really trouble her. Maybe I should have stopped there, but I went on to tell her about what my dad had said. That we might move out to be with my mother.

“Do you want to move?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “of course not. I want to stay here.”

“But she's your mother.”

“And she was the one who left. I don't
think my dad really wants to go. I think he wants my mom back though. We both do.”

“Aren't you mad at her for leaving you?”

I had thought about that a lot. “I don't know. Not really. I think she did what she had to do.”

“But your dad can find another job here, can't he?”

I realized, yet again, that I had grown up in a different world from Jasmine. Her father was some kind of businessman. He made good money. “My father worked in a fish plant,” I said. “He didn't graduate from high school. He can probably find a job doing something, but it's more expensive living in the city than he thought. We're just scraping by. And now that he's lost his job, it doesn't look good.”

“But I don't want to lose you,” she said.

It was wonderful hearing her say that. But everything seemed so impossible.

“If you move away, we'll grow apart,
won't we?” she said. “It won't be the same. Everything will change.”

Things got pretty sullen after that. We just sat on the steps staring at the traffic, neither one of us speaking. All I could think about was losing her and how bleak the future would be. It was like a heavy metal door shutting on a beautiful part of my life.

Her father pulled in the driveway then and got out. Jasmine introduced me, and I could tell he wasn't impressed. I had a habit of leaving a bad first impression on adults. He asked how I was doing in school and what I wanted to do after high school. I said I didn't know. I hadn't figured it out yet. The end of high school was a long way off.

Jasmine's father looked at his watch, and then, to end the conversation, he said, “Jasmine, you better come in and get ready. We're going out, remember?” He walked inside and closed the door.

“He's got a new girlfriend,” Jasmine said.
“He's taking me to a restaurant to meet her. We've been down this road before. He's attracted to very shallow women.”

“It must feel strange.”

“It does. And he always wants my approval. But I haven't really approved of any of them. I keep hoping one of them will be like my mom. But that's probably impossible, because I don't remember much about her. I have this image in my head and a feeling about what she was like, but she keeps fading. I miss her all the time, and I don't even really remember her. At least your mother is still alive.” She sounded very sad now. I understood what she was trying to tell me. I should go out west and be with my mom.
I had to do it.
It was the right thing.

Her father opened the door again. “Jazz?”

“I'm coming,” she said and got up and went in.

“Tomorrow's Sunday,” I said.

“Yeah.” And the door closed.

My mom called that night. She wanted to talk to me again.

“You'll love it out here. You can see the mountains from the city.”

That's all she had to offer. Mountains? No ocean?

“It'll be a fresh start for all of us.”

“I don't want to start fresh,” I said.

“There's a girl, right?”

“Yeah, there's a girl. But it's more than that. I want to finish high school and then move back to the Harbor.”

“But it's dying. There's nothing there for us.”

“It's changed. But it's my home.”

“It
was
a home for all of us. But not anymore.”

“I went there with Jasmine. She loved it. It felt so good to be back. At least it's only an hour bus ride away. But if I move away now, I may never come back. I'll lose everything.”

“I'm sorry, Quinn. But your father is going to enroll in the program here. While
he studies, I'll have a really good job. Do you know how much that means? Pretty soon, we'll both have real jobs. Good pay and steady work.”

“How do you know that it's always going to be like that? What if something changes and there's no work?”

She let out a sigh. “Then we cross that bridge when we come to it.” She paused. “I'm sorry, Quinn. I know this is hard on you.”

“So it's a done deal?”

“We need to do this. For all of us.”

I didn't say anything further. I hung up. I felt so frustrated.

And then my father came into my room and said we'd be flying out in a week. “That will give us enough time to settle up some things here. Maybe if I lower the asking price on the old house, we could have some cash.”

I know it sounds like a terrible thing to say, but just then, I hated my parents for what they were doing.
Jasmine was not at the skate park Sunday morning. I cruised around for a while, but my heart wasn't into it. I waited for an hour, just sitting on the bleachers hoping she'd show up, but she didn't.

When the little kids started arriving, I was in a foul mood. I went to a pay phone to try to phone Jasmine, but all I got was voice mail. It was starting to sink in. She believed that me having my mother around was more important than anything in the world, and she was willing to let me go. She'd move on.

I sat back down on the bleachers and felt powerless and got angrier by the minute. Finally, I got back on my board and pushed out into the crowd of kids. A few got out of my way. The ones who didn't, I carved around. I went into the bowl first and then into the half-pipe. My rage gave me more speed and power than I'd ever felt before. I pumped hard, threw myself up into the air above the lip and out, dropping like a
stone but always connecting with the wall, blasting across the bottom and up the other side.

The kids were smart enough to clear out and let me have it. Anyone seeing me for the first time would have thought I was more than a skate freak. I was a skate terminator.

Gravity fed me, and then on the sweep up, it released me and I soared. Boy with wings. Wingman. The Great Flying Dorf. I kept getting faster and popping higher into the air. A lot of the kids were standing on the sidelines, watching in disbelief.

And then something happened.

I was midair, grasping the back of my board with two fingers, preparing for the drop when it popped into my head. Two words.

Take charge.

It was what skateboarding had taught me. You either let things happen and just cruise along. Or you take charge. And
make
things happen. All my life I'd allowed
adults to make decisions about my life. Parents. Teachers. Other adults. Some adult was always in charge. I was just a kid. But when I was on my board, I was responsible for my every move. I felt free and alive— no matter how difficult the situation was. In fact, the more difficult, the better.

All this occurred in a flash. And then I was dropping out of the sky, connecting, arriving at the bottom of the pipe and kicking my board up.

It was time to go home.

My father was packing clothes into a couple of old beat-up suitcases when I got home.

“What time is it where mom is?” I asked.

“Three hours earlier. Why?”

“Think she'll be up?”

“Why?”

“Because we need to call her.”

He stopped packing. “You still think you can change this, don't you?”

“Let's just call her. Let me talk.”

“Quinn. Look, I'm broke. She's sending us money for airfare. I don't have a job. I tried to stay, but it's just not gonna work.”

“I need to stay here. I need this for me.” I was thinking of Jasmine. I was thinking of leaving Willis Harbor forever and going to the other side of the country. I was thinking about living unhappily ever after.

“I'm sorry, but your mother made the right call. We gotta go. Once we get on our feet out there, we can think about a way to come back.”

“But that could take years.”

“It might.”

“I want to talk her. I want for Mom to see this the way I see it. And I want you to hear it too.”

My mother sounded groggy on the other end. It was early out there.

“I have an idea,” I said. “It's not perfect. But it's an idea.”