I hadn’t planned on going back to school for the afternoon, but I didn’t have any plans to get myself killed. William Hodge had awakened the maniac who lived in my brain. The true maniac who believed that almost anything was possible on a skate-board. The maniac who was certain he could defy gravity, skate up the side of a half-pipe, launch into the air and not come down—if he so decided.
So I followed William Hodge the ten blocks away to his home, a one-story suburban-looking house with a sloping paved driveway. It was only starting to sink in.
“So, what do you think?” he asked.
“About what?”
“About my house?”
“Nice, I guess.”
“You see the roof?”
“Yeah.”
“The driveway?”
“Yeah.”
“The roof is where you start. The driveway is where you land. Point A to Point B.”
I scratched my head. I sussed it out. Point A to Point B. I know how insane it sounds, but I was thinking it through. If it’s worth doing, do it. If it’s not worth doing, do it anyway. Low roof. One-story drop right onto a downward sloping driveway. I’d seen something like this in a video once. A major opportunity for an intense drop. You’d just have to lift a little when you left the roof and make sure your back wheels hit the ground before your front wheels.
William brought out a ladder and braced it against the roof. “Are your parents home?” I asked.
“They both work.” He climbed the ladder, carrying his bike under one arm. When he got on the roof, he walked the bike to the peak, put on his sunglasses and said, “Now watch this.”
He stood on the pedals, let go of the handbrakes and started to roll.
I have to admit that it was beautiful. A boy on a bike in mid-flight right outside the front door to his own home. I expected a thud or a grunt upon landing, but it wasn’t like that at all. The rear wheel touched down, and then the front, with immediate forward momentum down the steep driveway. When William approached the road at lightning speed, he applied the brakes and let the rear wheel skid into a controlled slide.
“Amazing,” was all I could say.
William walked his bike back up the driveway to me. “Your turn.”
If I’d had any second thoughts, they were erased by Hodge’s performance. I nodded. I climbed up the shaky aluminum ladder and felt the gritty feel of the shingles under my feet. I looked across the street at the neighbors’ houses and saw a man and a woman standing in their front doorway, pointing at me. I wondered if they might call William’s parents or even the cops.
I figured now or never.
“Just watch out for the gutter,” William yelled up.
I set my board down, held it in place with my foot, and then hopped on and began to roll. I stayed half-crouched until my wheels were off the shingles, and then applied a little upward jump as I ollied slightly, leaving the surface. I was ready to fly.
The only problem was one of my rear wheels caught the dreaded gutter.
My board was slightly off centre as I drifted and dropped. I tried to correct it as I fell through the sky. I thought I had things under control. But I guess I didn’t.
As I hit—much harder than I expected— front wheels first, my board was cocked sideways. I was off balance. The front trucks smashed apart as I landed, and ball bearings went flying. And so did I.
My board flew out from under me, and I slammed hard on the driveway. My hip took the worst of it, followed by my shoulder. I rolled and yelped in pain from the fall. When I stopped, I was pretty sure I had broken something. How could I not have?
But as I got to my feet, I discovered I was still in one piece. Oh, I ached all over, and, as I looked up again at the roof, I wondered what I had been thinking.
William was standing by the driveway. He didn’t rush over to help me. But he didn’t laugh either. “Whoa, dude. That was awesome. I thought you had it for sure. You want to try it again?”
I think he was serious. If I hadn’t been in so much pain, I may have gotten angry at him. But then I had thought myself a skate god capable of acid-dropping off a roof. I had no one to blame but myself.
I grimaced as I bent over and picked up what was left of my board. I’d done some serious damage to both sets of trucks and wheels. Not only was my body hurting but my board was messed up. I decided to call it a day.
“See ya ‘round,” William Hodge said as I hobbled off.
I wondered how Jasmine would react when I told her what I had tried to do. I found that out pretty quickly.
The next day at school, she tracked me down. I was walking down the hall with my busted skateboard. It didn’t work, but I felt naked without it. She came up from behind, put a strong hand on my shoulder and spun me around.
“Are you out of your mind?” she said. Kids stopped and stared at us. Then she looked at my board with the busted wheels.
“You really tried to skate off Hodge’s roof, didn’t you?” I could tell by the fact that she was nearly screaming that she was not impressed.
I shrugged. “I guess I did.”
“Why?”
“Um. It seemed like the thing to do at the time.” I hadn’t expected I’d have to explain why I did it.
“Hodge is a pig. Him and his stupid bike. I’ve watched him at the park. He acts like he rules the place.”
I don’t know why I felt I should defend him, but I heard myself saying, “He’s a little rough around the edges, but when you get to know him—”
Jasmine cut me off. “Are you guys friends now?” Oh boy, was she mad.
“Not exactly.”
“Well, if you’re skateboarding off his roof, you must be pretty tight. You’re not a very good judge of character, are you?” And then she turned to walk away. “Good-bye,” she said, with her back to me.
I was still only getting to know Jasmine, but she was an important part of my life. I didn’t know what to do, but my instinct told me to hang back. Why was she so mad at me anyway?
I stumbled off down the hall with my busted skateboard. The other kids at school treated me like I was invisible, like I didn’t matter, and they didn’t care. I was getting used to that. She was different.
I spent my life savings getting my skate-board repaired. a couple of days without skating and I was going through withdrawal. I was antsier than ever in school. More distracted.
On Wednesday, I failed to hand in my history homework. On Thursday, I drew a blank in English class when asked to write an in-class essay on “Why Poetry is Important” and on Friday, I flunked a math test. Back in Willis Harbor, teachers would take pity on me and give me extra help after school, or, in some cases, give me a passing grade just so I could move on. Here at Random, it wasn’t going to be that easy.
It was a bad week all around.
But when Sunday morning rolled around, I jumped out of bed, skipped breakfast and cruised down to the skate park with my new wheels. It was empty. No Jasmine. And the place was full of broken glass. It looked like some creeps had been drinking there the night before and just broke their beer bottles. Jagged chunks of glass were everywhere.
I was about to leave, but I couldn’t face sitting at home on a Sunday morning. So I grabbed a plastic bag from the garbage can and I started picking up the glass.
I tried singing a couple of Dead Lions tunes, but I couldn’t remember the words. I tried focusing on what I’d have to do this coming week to get my grades up, but that only made me feel worse. And then I thought about my mom. Something about picking up broken glass made me think about her. I’d put her out of my head for the most part. She’d left us, and we were on our own. She was working on a new life far away, and I might never see her again. I felt rotten that there was nothing I could do to pull my family back together.
And that’s when the tears came. I was kneeling now, picking up the smaller shards of glass, realizing I’d never get this place safe to skate on. There were too many fragments. I started to raise my ha
nds to wipe my eyes but stopped. My fingertips were bleeding, and I had tiny slivers of glass stuck in them.
That’s when I heard skateboard wheels. Someone approaching the park. I looked up, my face still wet from tears, my vision blurred. And I saw her.
Jasmine. On her skateboard. With a broom in her hands.
chapter seven
“Quinn, are you okay?” Jasmine asked. And then she saw my bleeding fingers. And the fact that I was crying. “Don’t touch your face.”
I can’t imagine how pathetic I looked. And I was feeling so humiliated that Jasmine was seeing me like this. I’d hit an all-time low. But then an amazing thing happened. Jasmine set her skateboard down and walked over to where I was kneeling on the pavement. She took my face into her hands in a very gentle way and wiped away the tears. I closed my eyes.
Time stopped. I think I slipped off into some other dimension. I was in free flight. Weightless. Drifting through sky.
As she pulled away, I opened my eyes and stood up. She seemed embarrassed. We both were suddenly shy and awkward. I tried to say something. Anything. But I didn’t have a single word to utter.
Jasmine focused on my bleeding fingertips. She led me to the drinking fountain and washed them until the glass slivers were gone. There was some blood, but the cuts were tiny and the bleeding had stopped.
“Bet they don’t trash the skate park back in Willis Harbor,” she finally said, still sounding shy and uncertain.
“No skate park to trash.”
She looked back at the glass at the bottom of the half-pipe and in the bowl. “This really makes me sad.”
My own sadness had disappeared. Jasmine had taken care of that.
“Why were you crying?” she asked.
“I was crying?” I was going to pretend that had not been happening. But I wasn’t a very good actor.
“Yes.”
So I told her about leaving Willis Harbor and how poorly I was doing in school and about my mother.
“My mother died when I was seven,” she said. “Sometimes I can’t remember what she looked like. And then my grandmother died a year after that.”
“I’m sorry.”
She smiled a little then. “Do you know how pathetic you looked kneeling on the pavement with all that broken glass?”
“Pathetic is good, right?”
“In this case, yes.”
So she told me more about losing her mother and growing up with a father who could never get over the loss of his wife. “There were women who came and went. Each tried to be a part-time mother, but it never worked. It wasn’t their fault.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m realizing nothing can change the past. And I need to get on with my life.”
“What do we do now?”
She took a deep breath and grabbed the broom leaning by the trash can. “We clean up this place so we can skate. It’s Sunday, remember? It’s our time.”
As we worked, I told her about my life back in the Harbor, where I learned to skate on the only paved road that passed through the place. She seemed to like hearing about my old home, so I told her one of my favorite stories.
“I remember one foggy morning, I was ripping downhill in a total, flat-out speed session. Then, out of nowhere, there’s a big buck deer with a huge rack of antlers standing on the road in front of me. He’s looking at me trying to figure out what I am, I guess.
“The deer wasn’t expecting a kid on a skateboard to come racing out of the fog. I didn’t know what to do. And neither did the deer.
“When you’re going that kind of speed, you can’t carve on the board and siphon off much energy. You could scream, of course. And I did that. I decided to crouch down on my board and put my hands over my head. I’m not sure why. Maybe I thought I could go under the belly of the deer.”
“You’re making this up, right?” Jasmine asked.
“No way. It’s true. Heck, I figured I was going to just plow into this wonder of nature. And then this amazing thing happened.
“Just as I was about to collide with Mother Nature herself, the deer leaped over me. I tilted my head up to see him flying over me. And I do mean flying. That deer was getting some serious air. And then he was gone.
“I lost it at that point, of course, my mind blown by a skateboarding miracle. I saw the headlights of a car coming up the hill. Time to bail. There was really only one option. The drop-off into the ditch along the road. I slam-dunked into the mud and water.”
Jasmine didn’t say a word. She just laughed and tapped me with her elbow. “Come on. Let’s get back to work.”
It was almost noon before we had the place safe to skate on. We got on our boards, and it was different this time. We owned the place. And when we skated together, we were in sync. We were working with each other, not competing. It was like a dance. It felt like nothing I’d ever experienced.
And that’s when it dawned on me that I was in love.
We only had the place to ourselves until about twelve thirty, and then Hodge and a bunch of bikers arrived. The spell was broken, but we’d had our time.
chapter eight
My mom called again when my dad wasn’t home. This time she wanted to talk to me.
“I miss you, Quinn. I wish we weren’t so far apart.”
I missed her too. It hurt. But I was still mad at her. “You’re the one who moved away,” I blurted out.
“I know. But I had to leave. I was dying back there.”
“It wasn’t Dad’s fault the fish plant closed.”
“I know that too. But it wasn’t just that. It was everything.”
“Was it really that bad?”
“For me it was. I’d lived there all my life. I raised you. I worked at the crummy restaurant. I hated it.”
That last bit hurt. I was silent.
“I didn’t hate you. I love you. And I think I still love your father. I just did what had to be done.”
“Yeah. You left us.” My voice was hard.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Dad’s got a job now. Why don’t you come back?”
“I’ve got to finish my course—another month. And I’ve already got a job lined up. I’ll be able to send you some money. Things have been pretty tight up to now. But up ahead it looks good.”
I didn’t want her money. “You think you’ll be happy out there?”
“I think I could be.” Which meant that she was thinking about never coming back. Until then, I believed she’d finish the course and move back. Now it was starting to sink in.
“Do you miss Willis Harbor? Do you miss the sea?”
“Sometimes.” She didn’t sound convincing. I was fairly certain I’d lost my mother for good. But the anger had all drained out of me.
“I just wish things could be like they used to be,” I said, my voice sounding weak.
“I know, Quinn.”
“Bye, Mom.”
“Bye. I’ll talk to you again soon. I promise.”
And I hung up.
I called Jasmine, and I told her about my phone call. I don’t usually open up to anybody about my personal life. But this was different. Jasmine was different.
“Can you take me to that town where you grew up?” she asked.
“You really want to go?”
“Yes. Will you take me?”
“Absolutely. We’ll take the bus there Saturday.” And then it dawned on me. “Oops. I forgot. I don’t have any money. I used every cent I had fixing my skateboard.”
“Which is why you should not skateboard off people’s roofs. It doesn’t matter though. I’ll pay.”
“You will?”
“Sure. Girls pay for some things. You give me the tour, I’ll pay the fare.”
“Cool.”
chapter nine
Saturday was a bright warm day. The bus was crowded, but we found two seats together near the back. We both had our skateboards. People stared at us as we went down the aisle. Funny how older people think t
hat anyone with a skateboard is a troublemaker. I just don’t get it.
“This is like an adventure,” Jasmine said, sitting down beside me.
“It’s like going back to my past,” I said. “I haven’t been back home since we moved to the city.”
She smiled. The bus began to pull out of the station as she put her hand on my arm and leaned against me. If I had been carrying any troubles in my head, they immediately vanished.
“Ever wonder what it would be like to skate on the moon?” she asked.
“What?”
“Think about it. The moon. Not the dusty part but some place solid. You’d have such low gravity, you’d get major air.”
“I never thought about it. But isn’t it the gravity that gives you speed? You go down and then you go up, using momentum?”
Jasmine looked surprised. “Yeah, you’re right. I hadn’t really thought about it that way.” She was about to say something else— something like, For a guy who isn’t smart in school, you’re actually pretty bright. But she didn’t. It just kind of hung in the air.
“What kind of rocks would be on the moon?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. I think there’s a lot of nickel.”
“No granite?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Today, I get to show you granite. Today, I show you what it’s like to skate on granite.”
The bus dropped us off on the hill by the main road. We walked down the turnoff that led to Willis Harbor. In the distance you could see the sea sparkling in the sunlight.
Jasmine seemed dazzled by how beautiful it was. “This is amazing.”
We were back in my world now. A powerful mix of so many emotions swept through me that I felt dizzy. I was home.
Just then, a truck came up behind us. It was loud—no muffler. I recognized the sound. It was Reggie, an old fisherman friend of my father’s. I turned and waved as he approached. The truck roared to a stop.
“Quinn,” he said. “Good to see you, lad. Hop in.”
I smiled at Jasmine to let her know it was okay. We opened the squeaky door and got into the truck. The truck smelled like oil and exhaust and fish. Without me asking, Reggie stopped in front of my old house, and we got out.
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