Free Skate Freak by Lesley Choyce Page A

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 becool 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. Aftermy old man was laid off and the unemployment money was running out, she had decided to