Skate Freak

by Lesley Choyce

  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.”

  chapter thirteen

  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 o
n 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.

  chapter fourteen

  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.”

  She surprised me. She said, “I’m listening.”

  “Your course is over soon, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And if you came back here with the course completed, you’d get a job, right?”

  “I already have a job lined up. Besides the pay is way higher here.”

  “But so are the living expenses. You said that.”

  “Well, yeah, but we’d adapt.”

  “But you could find a job here that you’d be trained for?”

  “I think so, yes. But we’ve already got your father enrolled and in a little while, we’ll both have good jobs. It’s what we’ve dreamed of.”

  It was what my mom had dreamed of, yes. But my dad, he would have been happier in Willis Harbor, working in the smelly old fish plant. He looked at me now, a curious twinkle in his eye. He did not want to leave at all.

  To my mom I said, “What if you finish your course and you come back? We live together while you work and Dad goes out there to take the course.”

  “But then we’d still not all be together,” she said.

  “I know, but it would be temporary, right?”

  “I guess so. You mean, he’d come back after the course?”

  “It’s not that long. He’d be back before I was out of school.”

  My dad had stopped packing the suitcase. He was smiling now.

  My mom was hesitant. “It’s not at all what your father and I agreed on. How does he feel about this?”

  My father said nothing. He just gave me a thumbs-up. “I think I could persuade him.”

  There was silence on the other end. My father’s eyes were tearing up.

  “And if we did this,” my mom said, “made this sacrifice for you—and it would be a sacrifice—what would you do in return?”

  “I’d work my butt off in school. I’d get good grades.” These were perhaps the most unlikely words to ever come out of my mouth. All my life I’d been getting Ds and Fs. Sometimes the Ds were gifts from teachers. Now I was promising to get Cs. I could do it if Jasmine helped me. I knew I could.

  Both of my parents were stunned. I mean, speechless stunned. I had never, ever in my life played the school card. Now it was out there, I’d have to live up to it. But only if they went for my plan.

  “Put your father on the phone,” my mom said.

  I handed Dad the receiver.

  “Let’s give the boy a chance. Let’s do it,” he said.

  But I knew my mom was already convinced.

  It wasn’t until spring that Jasmine and I had a chance to return to Willis Harbor. My mom drove us. She and Jasmine had gotten to know each other when Jasmine came over to tutor me. I felt bad that I was so slow, that I took up so much of her study time. But I loved being with her.

  My father was having a rough time with his course. He was like me. We weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed when it came to classroom learning. But he was going to make it, and he’d return. And then we’d be together again as a family. Things hadn’t really worked out yet for my mom. She had a job, but it was an office job. It seemed no one around here was willing to hire a woman to run the big machines. But she said that would change. She wouldn’t give up.

  Over the winter, Hodge and I had become friends, and that changed both of us. We lost the need to compete with each other at the skate park. We became allies of sorts, even though we never really understood each other.

  And he never did pay me the twenty bucks he owed me. But I let that go. Letting things go was one of my lessons. Hang onto the good stuff. Let the bad stuff go. And don’t hold grudges.

  I promised to bring him to Willis Harbor and show him the Ledges. But that was for later.

  On this bright but cool spring morning, Willis Harbor looked a little dull, a little worn around the edges. The empty houses, the sad streets. But the sea gleamed in the distance. And I always thought that the sea represented hope.

  “I want to live by the sea, someday,” Jasmine said.

  “Yeah, me too,” was my answer as we passed our old house. It looked like it had not been lived in for many years rather than several months.

  My mother surprised me by pulling into our old driveway. She got out and unlocked the front door of the house and walked in. Jasmine and I followed.

  It was again like going back in time. I led Jasmine up to my old bedroom. The furniture was still there. Dust and spider webs covered everything. She just walked to the window and looked out.

  “You can see the ocean from your bedroom. And you can see the rocks.”

  “That’s what I woke up to every day.”

  “I bet you’d love to move back here right now, wouldn’t you?”

  “No,” I said. “I made this promise about school. And I can’t make it work without you.”

  She nodded. She knew it was true.

  We left my mom alone at the house for a while, even though I could tell it wasn’t easy on her. We grabbed our boards from the car and headed toward the Ledges.

  Some of the rocks were quite wet, so we had to limit ourselves to the higher parts. But the granite felt smoother than ever beneath us. We skated cautiously, but this was somehow more beautiful.

  It was a dance, a dance on granite by a fierce blue sea.

  And then we walked further out to the point, where the rocks were rough, but you can climb up higher and look further toward the horizon.

  “Think you’ll really move back here someday?”

  “Someday,” I said. “But not yet.”

  When we walked back to the house, my mom was taking the For Sale sign down. Dark clouds were approaching with a new sharp wind off the sea. The day was turning cool and damp. There were rough times ahead for all of us. The gravity of things would pull us down. And there would be walls ahead. But the walls wouldn’t stop us. We would use them to blast up into the heights and prepare for the next challenge ahead. Whatever that might be.

  Award-winning author Lesley Choyce has written sixty-eight books and is a year-round surfer at Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia.

 

 

 
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