Story Time
Read Chapter One free.
The whole opening chapter — read it right here, then grab the book to find out what Jonny finds.
Chapter 1 — The Last Bell
The final bell rang, and the whole classroom came apart at once.
Chairs scraped. Backpacks thumped onto desks. Somebody's binder slid off the edge and hit the floor, and nobody stopped to pick it up.
"Two weeks," Mia said, high-fiving Leo hard enough to make him wince. "Two entire weeks."
Jonny already had his skateboard out from under his desk, spinning one wheel with his thumb. "No homework. No pop quizzes. Nothing but sun and concrete."
They joined the flood of kids pouring into the hallway. As they passed the front desk, Mr. Henderson looked up from the stack of papers he'd been squaring off.
"Don't spend all of spring break at the skatepark, you three." One eyebrow went up. "It'd be a shame to spend the second week in a cast."
"We'll be careful," Jonny said.
It wasn't exactly a lie. He just had a different idea of careful than Mr. Henderson did.
Outside, the April air still had a bite to it, but the sun was doing its best. Jonny dropped his board on the sidewalk before they'd cleared the school steps and pushed off, and Mia and Leo ran to catch up.
"Last one to the park buys snacks," he called back.
Whispering Pines Skatepark was already loud when they got there.
Little kids screamed on the playground just outside the gates, hauling themselves up the ladders and dropping down the slides. The roundabout creaked. A line for the ice cream cart stretched halfway to the parking lot, and the smell of it followed you around the whole park.
Jonny, Mia, and Leo stood at the fence and stared at the line.
"I'd trade a kidney for a rocket pop right now," Jonny said.
"Not standing in that." Mia wrinkled her nose. "Absolutely not."
Then Leo spotted a kid from their grade walking back from the cart. "Liam! Hey — Liam!"
Liam changed course and ambled over, already halfway through a rocket pop of his own. "What's up?"
"Five bucks if you go back and grab three." Jonny held out a folded ten. "Please. I'm begging you."
Liam looked at the ten, then at the line, then shrugged and pocketed it. "You're lucky I like you."
By the time he came back, Mia had her camera out.
She always had it out. It hung around her neck on a strap she'd covered in stickers, and she'd been putting photos on the park's blog since the fall — pictures of little kids in helmets twice the size of their heads, of the teenagers grinding the long rail, of Jonny doing something dumb. Parents read it. Kids read it. She was pretty sure the ice cream guy read it.
She wanted to write for a real newspaper one day. She figured you had to start somewhere, and somewhere was a skatepark on the first Saturday of spring break.
Leo, meanwhile, was on his knees beside the picnic table with his backpack open, swapping the wheels on his board.
"I printed these last night," he said. He held one up so Jonny could see. It was translucent orange, with a lattice pattern cut through the middle that looked like the inside of a bone. "Ninety-two millimeter. I redesigned the core so there's basically no drag. They're stupid fast."
Jonny took it and turned it over. It weighed almost nothing.
"Can I try them?"
"Tomorrow." Leo took the wheel back. "I want to test them first. I don't know how they hold up on a hard landing yet."
"Tomorrow," Jonny agreed.
He said it easily. That was the problem with Jonny — he always meant it when he said it.
For the first hour, everything was perfect.
Jonny warmed up along the flat, weaving through the smaller kids, popping little ollies just because he could. The sun had been on the concrete all morning and he could feel the warmth coming up through his wheels. A cluster of kids by the playground fence stopped to watch him, and he rolled past them slower than he needed to.
Then he headed for the half-pipe.
He hit the transition with speed, climbed the wall, and came off the coping with air under his board. At the top he reached down and grabbed the edge — just for a second, just long enough — and dropped back in clean.
Somebody on the deck whooped.
Above him, Leo's drone hummed along the top of the pipe, tracking him the whole way down. Leo watched the feed on his phone, one hand shading the screen.
"That's the shot," he said to nobody. "That's absolutely the shot."
Mia was already halfway across the park getting the same run from the other side.
"That was so clean," she said when Jonny rolled up to her, breathing hard. She turned the camera around so he could see the little screen.
He leaned in. "Whoa. Are you putting that one up?"
"Obviously."
"You have to put that one up."
"Jonny." She pushed the camera lens gently into his chest. "Obviously."
The trouble started when Jonny stopped skating and started watching.
Over on the funbox, a group of the older kids were flowing through everything one after another like it was nothing. Kyle threw a kickflip over the whole box and landed rolling. A tall kid named James dropped in and grinded the entire length of the handrail without so much as a wobble.
Jonny stood there with one foot on his tail and watched them, and something in his chest went tight and impatient.
He was good. He knew he was good. He was probably the best kid in his grade at this park.
But good for your grade wasn't the same as good.
He pushed off.
He started small — a shove-it over the little gap by the quarter pipe. The board spun flat under his feet and he caught it and rolled away, and it felt so easy it made him greedy.
So he went bigger. A frontside one-eighty off the quarter, sloppy on the landing but he rode it out. Then a rock to fakie that he only half committed to. Then a tre flip that ended with him hopping off and chasing his board across the flat while a couple of the little kids laughed.
He didn't care. His heart was going and his hands were buzzing and every single time he got a trick, he wanted the next one more.
Forty minutes in, Jonny rolled back to the picnic table, sweating through his T-shirt.
Leo's board was lying on the bench. The new wheels caught the sun, orange and strange and glowing a little.
Jonny looked over. Leo was twenty feet away with his back turned, crouched over his phone, cutting drone footage together.
Just one run, Jonny thought. I'll put it back before he even looks up.
He should have felt how different it was the second he pushed.
He did feel it, actually. The board leapt forward under him like it had been waiting all day. Three pushes and he was already going faster than he'd meant to, faster than he ever came into the pipe, and there was a half-second where the sensible part of his brain said bail, just bail, step off and laugh about it.
He didn't bail.
He hit the transition and the wall threw him.
He came off the coping higher than he'd ever been in his life — high enough that the top of the ramp dropped away underneath him and there was nothing above him but blue. For one long, silent moment he hung there, and it was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
Then he reached down for the grab.
And his back foot wasn't where he thought it was.
The board slid out from under him and just — went. He felt it leave. His arms went up and out like he was trying to hold on to the air itself, and the sky turned over, and the world went slow and quiet the way it does when it's already too late.
He had time to think one clear thought.
Leo's going to be so mad about the wheels.
Then the concrete came up to meet him.
Mia heard it before she saw it.
It wasn't a loud sound. That was the thing she'd remember afterward — it wasn't loud at all. Just a flat, hollow knock, like someone dropping a bowling ball onto a driveway.
She turned around with the camera still up.
Jonny was lying at the bottom of the ramp with one arm folded underneath him, and he wasn't moving. He wasn't moving at all. The board rolled away from him on its beautiful new orange wheels and clattered against the far wall and stopped.
The whole park went quiet.
"Jonny," Mia said.
She dropped the camera. It swung on its strap and banged against her ribs and she didn't feel it.
"Jonny!"
She was running before she knew she'd started. Behind her she could hear Leo shouting, and the drone hitting the concrete somewhere, and then somebody older yelling don't move him, don't move him — but Mia was already on her knees on the warm concrete beside her best friend, saying his name over and over, waiting for him to open his eyes.
He didn't.