2. The Rebellious Skater
The Rebellious Skater
Evening’s hunger told Gus he should probably finish sketching, and he headed back toward the parked Chevy to drive home for dinner.
On his way, he heard distant laughter and scratching noises he couldn’t quite place.
They came from a concrete park he didn’t remember from his childhood.
As he walked closer, he passed a sign that read McNair Skatepark.
Gus had never heard of it. The park had smooth, sloping concrete mounds, wells, and ramps that rose high above his vantage point.
Various cliques of kids and teenagers loitered around.
Curious, Gus stopped to peer through the chain-link fence for a better look and witnessed a strange world.
Shirtless, sunburnt teenage boys with baggy shorts rode skateboards up and down steep ramps.
The skaters passed joints and chugged beers while vibing to music playing from a boombox.
Pretty girls with silky hair and ripped jean skirts sat on the edges of the park, smoking cigarettes and chatting.
Several skaters followed each other in a line around connecting wavy concrete bowls.
Three boys attempted to skate on a flat railing.
Only one of them succeeded, and when the other two wiped out, the guys all howled in laughter together.
Gus’s eyebrows raised. It was a ridiculous sort of impressive, the gutsy tricks the skaters could pull off with just a simple wooden board beneath their feet.
One particular boy around Gus’s age had messy dark hair, strong muscles, loose ripped jeans, and a red shirt with cut-off sleeves.
He downed a Hamm’s beer, crushed it against his skull, tossed the empty can, and stuck out his tongue in pure joy.
He was… brazen. The rebellious boy grabbed his skateboard, slid down into the bowl, and shot up the concrete lip into the sky.
Flying like an eagle above Gus and all the other skaters, he bent his torso to briefly grab his board mid-air, and then twisted back until he faced his crew below as the board flipped under his feet.
Gus’s jaw lowered by itself. The boy landed back on his board effortlessly and smoothly glided back down the side of the bowl with a yelp born of adrenaline.
“Hell yeah, Bridger!” one of the riders called out to the boy as the rest of the skaters slapped their boards against the concrete, applauding him. Bridger zoomed to a stop.
Gus, dazzled, caught himself beaming as wide as the other skaters.
He felt drawn to their group even though he was yards away, hidden behind a fence.
One of the older boys of the skate crew turned aimlessly away from the group and spotted Gus.
This snapped Gus from his admiring trance.
The taller, rough-looking guy squinted at him curiously, almost suspiciously.
Gus turned his head away in embarrassment and snuck away from the fence.
Later that night, under the desk light in his attic bedroom, Gus coughed as he dusted off a years-old Apple computer his dad had been storing in his room.
The dial-up finally connected and Gus launched Internet Explorer.
He typed “skateboarding” into the search engine.
Gus scrolled through pictures of pro riders, read skateboarding articles, and watched choppy videos of trick demos.
There was so much Gus didn’t know. He wanted to absorb all he could, but he soon stopped on an image of a young professional skater hitting a rail.
The man was handsome… and shirtless. His torso dripped with sweat under a harsh sun in various action shots of him showcasing classic skate tricks.
Gus lingered on the final photo, in which the young man posed for a skateboarding magazine.
The man held his skateboard in his arms and flashed a dashing smile.
He looked like a slightly older version of that wild skater boy from the park.
Gus lost himself in the picture. In all his art classes growing up, he always struggled with reconstructing the human form.
These curving and twisting tricks achieved with only body and board were so fascinatingly different from anything Gus had seen before that he couldn’t help but analyze every swerving curve of this man’s muscles.
He liked how the sides of his torso elongated, how the bulk of his bare shoulders created traceable lines.
The poses the skater could strike were art. He loved it.
Gus straightened up awkwardly—he had never stared at a shirtless man without feeling like he’d be caught—but then leaned back in. Alluring aesthetics like these had always grabbed him. He just wanted to analyze the man’s form, that’s it. Gus zoomed in on the picture.
Out of nowhere, a pixelated pop-up materialized, a voice blurting out, “LOOKING FOR SEXY GIRLS NEAR YOU?!” A photo of a woman with big hair and wearing a wet bikini bounced around on Gus’s screen.
His head sprang back in shock. Disturbing female moaning erupted from the speaker and Gus fell out of his chair in his rush to tear the cord from his computer.
He ripped the wire out and the small speaker fell to the ground. The room went quiet.
“Everything okay up there?” his father called from downstairs.
“ALL GOOD!!!” Gus yelled back, wishing he could evaporate.
Silence was all he heard in return. Gus prayed his father wouldn’t come up to his room. After awkward seconds that felt like years, Gus realized his dad had gone back to bed. His hearing was terrible. Gus sighed in relief.
That whole week, Gus couldn’t stop thinking about skateboarding.
His next day off, he searched for any sort of skate store in town.
It wasn’t until evening that he found what must have been the only one in Livingston.
It was called Damage Boardshop. Gus pushed open the glass doors and peered around the space.
It was a bit run-down and there were no other shoppers.
However, rows and rows of colorful wheelless skateboards with excitingly intricate designs hung from the walls.
Gus’s eyebrows raised. He didn’t know where to start.
A plump and tired middle-aged woman with poorly applied makeup sat behind the counter. She flipped through an outdated fashion magazine while uncoiling a long strip of Hubba Bubba to put in her mouth. She did not look eager to engage with Gus. In fact, it seemed like she wanted him to leave.
Gus lingered, bobbing his head to the store’s ambient 90s muzak, admiring each and every skate deck.
He stared at the merchandise for much too long and was being much too quiet.
The woman glanced up, smacking her gum, and gawked at Gus.
She looked confused about what he wanted or how to help him. She angled her face toward a back room.
“Hey Max…? Max!” the middle-aged woman called out. “You back there? I need you up front.”
There was no response. Gus glanced at the woman. She smiled in a feigned customer service way, then got up from her slanted chair and disappeared into the back.
Crashing sounds from a video game blasted as the woman entered the messy employees room of her skate shop.
She immediately sighed with discontent at the empty beer bottles and food wrappers that cluttered the space.
Her gruff, wifebeater-wearing son, Max Stevens, had a skateboard on his lap and was playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 on Xbox.
To his left sat his best friend, Bridger Owens.
The woman knocked on the wall to grab her son’s attention. “Max, you’re twenty-two. Can you stop with the damn games?”
Bridger turned, but Max ignored his mother.
“I need your help with a kid out there,” his mother urged.
“Tell your new boyfriend to do it,” Max snarked back.
“Don’t start,” she replied. “Jay’s busy.”
“Yeah. Fat ass is busy eating our food and stainin’ our couch,” Max said, still gaming.
“What was that?” Max’s mom huffed, grabbed the remote off the cluttered coffee table, and turned off the TV.
Max whipped toward her. “What the fuck!” He groaned and rolled his eyes.
Bridger eyed the agitated Max and grimaced awkwardly. He wanted to escape the room. “I’ll… meet you at the park, dude.”
Max leaned his head back and sighed. He held up his arm. Bridger dapped him up, then headed out the back room and toward the front.
Max’s mom gestured out to where the customer waited. “Go out there.”
“Fuck! Fine. But I’m leaving right after.
” Max stood up and returned the board on his lap to its place of honor on a side console.
It sat next to an old framed image of his father posing with champion skater Rodney Mullen.
The high-quality skateboard, signed with Sharpie, read: To my little pro boarder. —Dad.
As Bridger sped through Damage Boardshop’s storefront, he breezed past Gus, who was still perusing merchandise around the corner.
A bell chimed as Bridger exited the front door, but Gus was too busy lifting a shiny bright red deck off the wall to notice the sound.
The board he held was firm, strong, and bold.
Gus smiled as he inspected the craftsmanship of its smooth edges that he knew his father would have appreciated.
However, when seeing the $150 price sticker on the board’s base, his eyes fell.
The small amount of money he was making from working in his dad’s shop was supposed to go toward college.
He could never spend that much, especially not on a hobby he didn’t even know he could do.
Gus placed the board gently back on its shelf. He crossed his arms.
A new person walked into the room from the back. Gus turned. The tall, strong Max Stevens dropped into the chair behind the counter. Gus noticed a bruise on the young man’s shoulder before he pulled out a light jacket to throw over his wifebeater. Max squinted at the scrawny Gus. Gus looked away.
“Looking for anything specific?” Max questioned him. “We’re about to close.”