Skate Freak by Lesley Choyce Read Free Book Online Page A

were mostly empty. I tossed my board down and began to cruise along the sidewalk, dodging a few pedestrians. I thought about going to see Jasmine. She’d invited me over a couple of times. She wanted me to meet her father. But I had chickened out. No, I wouldn’t go over there tonight.
    I headed to the skate park. I’d heard it was a tough place at night. No little kids banging their boards around the kiddie bowl. No daytime regulars. Just a whole other scene. Kids with pellet guns. Drug deals. It’s one of the reasons that some people had proposed taking a bulldozer to the skate park.
    I’d never seen the place with lights before. It had a steely cold feel to it. It felt like a different place altogether, a place where bad things happened.
    Some older kids were skating the pipe. And at least a dozen older guys and girls—nineteen, maybe twenty years old— were sitting on the benches and on theconcrete, drinking from cans and passing around a bottle. Nighttime at the skate park.
    The three guys skating stopped and joined the others, slugged back from the cans. Laughed and hooted.
    I cruised over to the half-pipe and noticed broken glass at the bottom again. It wasn’t hard to figure out where that came from. Like before, there were jagged chunks of bottles, but the other guys skating hadn’t bothered to clean it up. Heck, maybe they were the ones who busted the bottles.

chapter twelve
    Just go home,
the voice in my head said. But then someone cruised past me on a skateboard and jabbed me in the ribs as he went by. He had a hood up, and I couldn’t see his face. With a few swift kicks, he was up the wall and making a one-eighty turn at the lip, and then dropping a gloved hand to graze a turn and avoid connecting with the glass in the pit. He popped back and forth a couple of times, and then raced straighttoward me, hood still low over his eyes, like he was some kind of phantom.
    I thought he was going to plow right into me, but I held my ground.
    He came to an abrupt stop inches from my face, kicked his board up into his hand and popped the hood down. Hodge. His breath smelled funny. I think he’d been drinking beer.
    â€œHey, Freak. I figured this was past your curfew,” he said.
    â€œI don’t have a curfew,” I said. I pointed to his board. “I thought it was strictly bikes for you. I didn’t know you skated.”
    â€œOnly at night when the little weasels have all gone home and there’s elbow room.” He paused. “One on one?” he asked.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œWe got the pipe to ourselves. You follow me. Then I follow you. Move for move. See who loses it first.”
    â€œWhat about all that crap at the bottom?”
    â€œIt makes things more interesting.”
    I shook my head no.
    â€œC’mon. We can bet on it. Twenty bucks.”
    Leave it to Hodge to turn it into a contest. “Na.”
    â€œLook 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.”
    â€œYou 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 feltsomething 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.