Skate Freak
Lesley Choyce
orca currents
Copyright © 2008 Lesley Choyce
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Choyce, Lesley, 1951-
Skate Freak / written by Lesley Choyce.
(Orca currents)
ISBN 978-1-55469-043-5 (bound).—ISBN 978-1-55469-042-8 (pbk.)
I. Title. II. Series.
PS8555.H668S49 2008 jC813’.54 C2008-903218-7
Summary: Quinn Dorfman is struggling at school and is watching his family deteriorate and, since moving to a new town, has trouble enjoying his passion, skateboarding.
First published in the United States, 2008
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008929088
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Cover design by Teresa Bubela
Cover photography by Getty Images
Orca Book Publishers Orca Book Publishers
PO Box 5626, Station B PO Box 468
Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA
V8R 6S4 98240-0468
www.orcabook.com
Printed and bound in Canada.
Printed on 100% PCW recycled paper.
11 10 09 08 • 4 3 2 1
For Jody
chapter one
If it’s worth doing, do it. If it’s not worth doing, do it anyway. That’s my motto. It keeps me going.
Leaving Willis Harbor knocked the wind out of me. Moving to the city was not my idea. I liked my old hometown by the sea. I had lots of time to myself. I had the sea. I had my skateboard. I was the only skate-boarder in that small town. And I had the rocks, the Ledges, as they’re called. At the Ledges I pictured myself as the boy with wings. The Wingman.
That’s not what they called me in the city. The guys I met at the skate park on the commons tried out a whole lot of names on me. But the one that stuck was this: Freak. Skate Freak.
That first Friday afternoon it was crowded at the downtown skate park. Everybody knew each other. There were kids on Razors, rollerblades, mountain bikes, freewheelers and, of course, skate-boards. The skaters ruled. The other kids were just in the way. And the skaters—well, some of them were good.
I’d never skated a real skate park, not a manmade one anyway. Back home, I had the main road, a paved roadside ditch, one church railing and—the big challenge—the Ledges. The city had half-pipes and railings just for skaters (unreal!) and more curved concrete than I’d ever seen. At least I’d found something about this ugly place that I liked.
Skateboarding always made me feel in groove, totally chilled and high-wired at the same time. At the skate park, though, I felt none of that. I slapped my board down, kicked for speed and dropped into the middle of the bowl. Way too many people were zigzagging crazy patterns back and forth. It was madness.
I was getting some nasty looks. But I couldn’t leave, even though that was what those ugly staring faces said without one word. It was clear I was not liked. Was it the way I looked? Was it my hair? Or was it just me?
That’s exactly what it was. It was me. I was new. I was not one of them. This is what they did here. Make the new guy feel like used toilet paper. Then flush him.
And flush they did.
I dropped down one side of the half-pipe and rolled up the other. I wasn’t trying to impress anybody. Two guys looped around me on their boards, breathing down my neck—some kind of test. I decided to be cool and pretend nothing was happening. I had as much right to skate here as they did.
I had to kick my board up twice to keep from running into a couple of younger kids, barely rug rat graduates. They both shot me looks like they hated me. For what? I kept wondering.
For being alive, they seemed to say. But that was just in my head. I kept at it, smooth and easy, nothing fancy. I increased my speed so that I hit the lip of the half-pipe, almost got air but didn’t, and then I drove for the bottom, angry enough that if I had run into someone, I wouldn’t have cared.
From behind, someone finally spoke. “Hey, freak,” were the words.
The guy on the bike who spoke the words slammed down on me. The front wheel of his bike landed on the backs of my ankles. I folded forward until my knees hit the ground. The rest of my carcass followed until my lips were kissing concrete.
And all I thought was, Man, I hope my board is okay.
I’m not saying it didn’t hurt. It hurt a lot, especially where my forehead followed my lips into the relationship with the concrete.
I lay there trying to figure out which part of my body hurt the worst.
I decided it was my pride. Sure, my lips were bleeding and my head was scraped and hurting and the backs of my legs felt like—well, they felt like someone had landed a mountain bike on them.
And the guy on the bike was riding away. He never went down. He had used me like I was just another rock in an obstacle course. I saw the name on the back of his jacket: Hodge. What kind of name was that?
As I lay there trying to recover, I realized that people were laughing. And then a skater coming down the half-pipe was yelling at me. Actually, it wasn’t one, but two. The second skater was coming from the opposite side.
I waited for the delivery, but it never came.
Both skaters swerved around me and continued on. They were good. I rolled left, grabbed my board and decided to limp home.
The wingman had lost his wings. The boy who flew had been grounded.
chapter two
I had been at the new school—Jerome Randall High, or random High as the kids called it—for almost a week. It’s safe to say I didn’t fit in. Willis Harbor was only an hour’s drive away. But it was if I had come from another planet.
I had never been good at school. I could draw. I was good at that. But words on paper were not my thing, and numbers were not my friends. And teachers. Well, teachers either thought I was stupid or stubborn, or, worst of all, they felt sorry for me.
I had no ambition other than to skate for the rest of my life. Get on my board— which thankfully was not busted in the bike incident—and skate. Maybe make enough money to buy some new trucks and better wheels sometime. That was my ambition.
But there was one good thing about school. Only one: the girl I saw putting a skateboard into her locker.
She wasn’t in any of my classes. I only saw her in the hallway. I wasn’t one of those dudes who could walk up and say, “Hi, my name is Quinn Dorfman, but you can call me Dorf.” Not for a second.
I was the kind that slinked around the hallway like a stalker. How pathetic is that?
My father had taught me no social skills at all in his considerable time of unemployment. My mother had given up on that too. And on us, I was beginning to think. After my old man was laid off and the unemployment money was running out, she had decided to go out west and get what she called “a real job.” So if I was going to figure out how to meet this girl, I was on my own.
I was too shy to ask anyone who she was, so I just thought of her as Skateboard Locker Girl (SLG for short), which sounds incredibly lame, but that’s what I called her.
After the skateboard accident, I was walking around school with a fat purple lip and a scab on my forehe
ad that looked like a piece of pepperoni. The look added to my aura of loserness, I’m sure, but I didn’t care. I thought I’d let my face heal a little before I tried to speak to SLG.
But she caught me watching her from down the hall. It was as if she could sense someone was staring at her. She turned. And smiled.
At least I think it was a smile. I’m not sure. It was an almost-smile at least. But the bell rang right away, and she slammed her locker and fled.
SLG had long dark hair, dark eyes, a beautiful face and, oh yeah, she had a sweet custom skateboard from Homegrown Skateboards, one of my favorite board makers. I vowed that some day (after a bit of facial healing), I’d walk up to her and tell her straight out that I liked her board.
That’s what I would do.
After school, I retrieved my own beat-up board from my locker and spit on the right front wheel for good luck. Some younger kids saw me, and I could tell I grossed them out.
“Sorry, dudes,” I said, “it’s what I do.” As if that explained anything.
I don’t like having to explain myself. I do what I do and I have my reasons.
Or not. But I do what I do anyway.
Outside, it smelled really funky. There was a brewery down the street and, well, it smelled like a brewery, I guess. As I cruised down the sidewalk on my board, I sniffed at the funky air, sang some of the lyrics from the Dead Lions song, “Garbageville,” and I thought about Willis Harbor.
I didn’t wear earbuds or have an Mp3 player in my pocket. I don’t do that. I make my own soundtrack. I don’t sing as well as Linus from Dead Lions, but I like hearing my own voice. I sing lyrics from my favorite bands: Dead Lions, Dope Cemetery, crime of the Century, Skate Moms and Poorhouse. Sometimes the music is just in my head. And that’s cool too. The songs remind me of my old life—the good old days.
Aside from skateboarding, home life in Willis Harbor had not been great. My father worked at a fish plant and my mother was a waitress at a restaurant that was busy in the summer and slow in the winter. Then the fish plant closed, and so did my father.
It was a crummy job, but once he lost it, he seemed to give up. My mother was making next to nothing in tips since summer was over. Then she saw the ad in the paper. It was for free training for women to operate heavy equipment— something to do with oil drilling or mining. But we’d have to move out west.
My father didn’t want to move. And neither did I.
But I guess my mother did.
She left. I thought she was coming back, but that didn’t happen.
My father’s plan of action was really no plan at all. We’d move into the city and something would come of it. He thought there would be a good job for him in the city. Maybe he was thinking of getting a job at the brewery. Maybe he thought a job would just happen. Just jump up and bite him in the ass.
But it didn’t.
Pretty soon the unemployment money would run out. Then my father would have to stop watching television twenty hours a day and get a job.
My after-school routine in the city was to skate the streets until dark. Then, sometimes, skate some more. I stayed away from the skate park though. The streets seemed safer. Cars I could understand. Territorial skate dudes I could not.
I found some good rails—at churches mainly. All the city churches had excellent railings. Many of them were empty during the week, so I could get a couple of amazing slides and grinds and move on before anyone hassled me.
Back in Willis Harbor, there was only one railing—at the church, of course. Reverend Darwin, a very religious black man from Ghana, saw me popping ollies and grinding down the handrail one day, and he came out to talk.
“How do you do that?” he asked.
“I see it in my head. Then I just do it,” I said.
“It’s very beautiful, this thing you do. Your parents must be quite proud.”
“Huh?” I had been expecting him to yell at me.
“It’s good to see a young man doing something worthwhile with his life. Do you believe in God?”
“Yes,” I answered to please the reverend. If it allowed me to do the only railing in town, I’d believe in God.
“Excellent,” he said, patting me on the back. “Bless you.”
Then he went back in the church. Willis Harbor was that kind of place.
In the city, I made the rounds of a half dozen churches after school each day until the Friday after the bike incident. I had still not made contact with SLG, though I almost got up the courage twice before turning into a wimp.
I was at the Baptist church near the brewery. Some people were inside practicing for a wedding. I should have just gone down the street to the Catholic church. But the Baptist rail had a sweeter slide.
I had just made my move down the rail and was planting myself back on the sidewalk with that satisfying whack of wheels hitting concrete, when the police car pulled up. An officer got out almost before the car stopped.
I swallowed hard.
“You know that’s breaking the law, right?” the cop asked.
“Um,” I said. I wasn’t good at skill-testing questions.
“You’ve probably been warned before, right?”
“Not really,” I murmured. “Back home...” I was going to explain about Reverend Darwin, but I didn’t have a chance.
“I don’t know where back home is,” he said. “But in this city, damaging property like that is an offense.”
“I wasn’t trying to damage anything. Maybe I scraped a little paint off but—”
“I’d call that vandalism. That’s what I’d call it.”
The wedding party was on the steps now, staring at me as if I’d just murdered someone.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re lucky, you know that?” the cop said.
“I am?”
“Yeah, we just had this campaign shoved down our throats by the mayor. We’re supposed to make the city more kid-friendly.”
“Well, that sounds like a good thing,” I stammered.
“For you. It means that I won’t fine you this time. I won’t take you in.”
“Thanks,” I said. I was trained to be polite when someone was giving me a break.
“But, I am going to confiscate your board,” he added. And with that, he grabbed my skateboard, turned and got back into the police cruiser. “If you want it back, you have to come down to the station with a parent.”
And he drove off.
With my board.
chapter three
My father was watching a rerun of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire when I walked into the dingy apartment. “C. The answer is C,” he said to the TV screen.
“Dad?”
“Just a minute.” He didn’t look away from the screen.
I heard the contestant on TV answer, “D. Final answer.”
“Sorry, the answer is C” the show’s host said, and the audience sighed.
My father turned to me and said, “If that had been me, I would have won fifty thou.”
“Dad, I need you to go to the police station with me.”
“The police station?” he said, his voice rising in volume. “What did you do?”
“Nothing really.”
“Must have been something.”
“It was nothing. I was skating in front of a church. A cop came and lectured me. Then he took my board.”
“Then why do we have to go to the police station?”
“To get my skateboard back. He said I need to bring a parent.”
“Looks like I’m the only one available.”
“That’s what I was thinking. Can we go there now?” I was feeling naked without my board. I felt lost. Almost dizzy.
“No,” he said. “I think maybe this is a good thing. Time to stop fooling around with kids’ stuff like skateboarding and move on.”
I thought about calling my mother’s cell phone number, interrupting her in her heavy equipment class maybe. But I thought I might start crying if I heard her v
oice on the phone. I wished there was something I could do to pull my family back together. But I knew there was nothing I could do. Nothing at all. So I went into the kitchen and microwaved a slice of frozen pizza. It tasted like crap. I’d put it right up there as the number one worst piece of pizza I’d ever nuked. The worst I’d ever eaten. Maybe the worst piece of pizza on the planet.
Saturday morning. Six AM. This was not territory I was at all familiar with. Someone was shaking my shoulder.
I opened my eyes. My father was standing over me.
“Get up, Quinn.”
I looked at him, looked around at my crummy room. Oh yeah, I had to say to myself every morning. I’m not in Willis Harbor anymore. My life is a disaster. I tried to focus on the clock. The number six on the clock confused me. “It’s Saturday, right?”
“Right.”
“I don’t have to get up for school.” I noticed then that my father had a jacket on. His hair was combed—that was totally weird.
“No, but you have to get your butt out of bed, get dressed and go down to the police station with me.” He was smiling now. I hadn’t seen my old man smile since before my mom left. I guess he felt sorry for me losing my board after all. This was more like the father I knew back in Willis Harbor.
I shot out of bed and scooped up yesterday’s clothes from the floor.
The city was strangely likeable in the early morning. The streets were nearly empty. I was beginning to see some possibilities. We made it to the cop shop by six thirty.
My father was nervous. “We’re here to see about the boy’s skateboard,” he said to the tired man behind the desk.
“Skateboard?”
“Yesterday,” I said. “He said I needed to come down with a parent.”
“He who?”
“The police guy.”
“You don’t know his name?”
“He didn’t tell me.”
“You should’ve asked.”
My father interjected, “It was only yesterday. Could you please help us find it?”
“Been a long night,” the man said. He let out a sigh. “Okay. We got this room with bikes and skateboards. Let’s go have a look.”
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