Skateboard Renegade (6 page)

He needed a really good earring for when the guys saw him. Brian already had that fake diamond stud. Zach wondered what the
other guys would be wearing. Iron bars? He doubted it.

Now where could he get an earring in a hurry? Zach wondered. He perked up his ears and listened for the presence of someone
in the house. Nothing. Mom and Dad were still at work, and Zoey was probably over at Lorena's.

Zach tiptoed into his parents' room and opened up his mom's vanity table. He examined the half dozen pairs of earrings lying
in the top drawer, but none of them suited his purpose. They were all much too ladylike.

And then he remembered the small cubic zirconium studs he'd seen in Zoey's ears. They weren't for pierced ears, and they weren't
really diamonds, though they did look like them. Zach decided one of the little clip-on studs would do nicely.

He'd have it back by dinnertime, and she'd never miss it. True, she'd discovered the missing money in a hurry, but that was
different. Even if she missed the diamond, he could just give it to her and tell her he'd found it on the floor.

Confident that he was pulling off a harmless, easy little operation, he stole into Zoey's bedroom and quickly made off with
one of her studs. He took a moment in front of the mirror to fasten it to his ear. Then he went outside, put on his gear,
and pushed off for Moorehead Park.

He could see the guys at the far end of the playground as he skated toward the park entrance. They were in full gear, helmets
glinting in the late-afternoon sun. They were practicing going down a flight of four steps one by one. It was a pretty hard
trick to learn, and falls could be particularly painful if you happened to hit the sharp edge of a step with an unprotected
part of your body.

As he passed through the park gate, Zach caught sight of a sign that read:
MOOREHEAD PARK CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS STARTING MONDAY
,
SEPTEMBER 12. WILL REOPEN NEXT SPRING
.
A PROJECT OF YOUR MUNICIPAL COUNCIL
,
JAMES T
.
TAYLOR
,
MAYOR
.

“Next spring!” Zach gasped. “Why does it have to take so long to repave a stupid playground?”

He let out an exasperated groan. Where were they going to go now to practice? Today was
Wednesday. September 12 was next Monday. That left them only four more days after today!

He slalomed across the playground to join his friends. “Hey, you guys. Did you see the sign?” he called out to them.

“Yeah,” Farrell said. “Can you believe it?”

“I'm gonna make my dad talk to the mayor,” Sam said, his face hot with anger.

“What's your dad gonna do? Beat the mayor up?” Brian challenged him. All the kids laughed, except Sam and Zach. Zach knew
he ought to laugh along, just to show he was one of the guys. But he couldn't manage it. He just didn't think making fun of
poor little Sam was funny.

“Where are we gonna go?” Zach asked, looking at Brian, because he was always the one who decided things among them. “The sign
said, 'closed till spring.'”

“We'll find someplace,” Brian assured him.

“Okay, you guys,” Zach said. “Let's see what everybody looks like.” He removed his helmet, and let them see his new 'do.

Instead of the whoops and cheers and jokes he expected, he got stone-cold silence. “What?” he asked,
his smile faltering as he saw his friends stealing guilty glances at one another. “What's going on?”

One by one, they removed their helmets. Sam, Kareem, Farrell, Jerry—not one of them had gone through with it!

“What the —! I can't believe you guys!” Zach felt the blood pounding in his ears again, and he knew his face had to be as
red as a beet.

“We kind of chickened out at the last minute,” Jerry admitted.

“We're gonna do it, though,” Sam hurriedly assured him.

“Soon as we get the money together,” Kareem put in. “See, our parents didn't want us to do it, so they wouldn't pay for it.”

“Especially after what happened with the police,” Farrell added. “Thank you, Brian.”

“Shut up,” Brian said. He skateboarded up to Zach and put a hand on his shoulder. “I'm proud of you, man. You're the first
to do the dirty deed. Except for me, of course.”

“Yeah,” Zach said quietly, letting Brian give him their most elaborate, special handshake.

“It looks good on you, dude,” Brian assured him.

“Yeah, thanks,” Zach mumbled, unconvinced.

“Hey—I'm getting a tattoo next week,” Brian told him. “You wanna come with me?”

“Um … maybe …”

“You're a true rebel, just like me,” Brian told him with a slap on the back. “Not like the rest of these wusses.”

“I'm getting a tattoo, too!” Sam insisted.

“Tattoo-tu-tu!” Brian mocked him, and everyone laughed—even Sam this time.

Zach didn't even crack a smile. He was furious with his friends for backing out and not telling him.

Everyone in his new school thought Zach was the biggest weirdo in the entire universe. On top of that, he now owed his little
sister forty bucks, plus he had to give Zoey skateboarding lessons for two whole months! Sure, it had been fun the first time,
but two months was going to be an eternity!

And for what! His so-called friends had hung him out to dry. They'd chickened out, and now he'd gone and made a total jerk
out of himself!

And as if all that weren't bad enough, soon they weren't even going to be able to skateboard, because Moorehead Park was going
to be closed till spring!

“So how's life at Geekhurst Academy?” Brian asked him.

“It's okay,” Zach told him, staring at the broken pavement.

“Yeah, I'll bet you fit right in, too,” Brian joked. Now the general laughter was being directed at Zach instead of at Sam.

“Like I said, it's pretty good. The computer stuff is awesome.”

“Great. Yeah, well anyway …” Brian turned away, uninterested in hearing any more about Zach's school. He rode off, did an
awesome grab over a fire hydrant, and made a soft, smooth landing.

“Hey, Zach, guess who Sam got for homeroom?” Farrell said.

“Who?”

“Sienkiewicz!”

“Get out of here! She's awesome.”

“He is so lucky, isn't he? I swear, he's got every good teacher in sixth grade.”

“Whose math class are you in, Simon?” Kareem asked Farrell.

“Sullivan's.”

“Is he good?”

“He talks too fast … like this …” Farrell did an imitation of Mr. Sullivan, and Kareem laughed. Then Jerry joined in with
a story about his chemistry teacher. Soon all the other boys were talking about life at Brighton Middle. “Ronnie Seifert likes
Laura Osborne …” and “Richmond put a rotten egg in Freddie Barnes's locker. …”

Zach knew most of the kids they were talking about, but it all seemed far away somehow, as if he'd crossed a giant ocean to
a distant shore.

“Did you see that incredible food fight in the cafeteria during lunch?” Jerry nudged Kareem, and both of them broke into hysterics.

“You had to be there,” Jerry said to Zach apologetically. “It was a riot—literally!”

Zach tried to keep up, and even to throw in a comment once in a while. But he felt so sad, he almost wanted to cry. It was
his old life they were talking about—a life he'd never get back again.

Finally, he couldn't take any more. He pushed off on his board and started practicing some of his freestyle tricks. He tick-tacked
across the pavement, did a few wheelies and one or two pretty good ollies.
When it was time to leave, Zach boarded home alone, full of bitterness and regret.

Why had his parents transferred him away from his friends? Why had he gone and bleached his hair without making sure his friends
had done it, too? And how was he going to fit in at his new school?

He stopped inside the front door of his house to check himself out one last time in the hall mirror, and gasped in horror.
His earring—Zoey's “diamond” stud—was
gone!

“Oh, great. This is just great!” Zach said, smacking his forehead with the palm of his hand.
“Now
what am I gonna do?”

He would have retraced his steps back to Moorehead Park, but it was already too dark outside. And tomorrow morning, while
he was at school, some preschooler running around Moorehead Park would probably pick up the earring and swallow it.

Man, Zoey was going to kill him when she found out. He was cooked. Toast.

History.

“Wait a minute,” he suddenly thought aloud. “She'll never know I stole it. It could have fallen on
the floor and gotten vacuumed up or something. It could have fallen out of Zoey's ear!”

He was safe, Zach reassured himself. No way could this ever come back to haunt him.

“It's her fault anyway,” he told himself. “If she'd had the guts to get her ears pierced, that earring wouldn't have been
the clip-on kind. They fall out much easier.”

Of course, he'd have to go buy Zoey a new pair as soon as he got enough money, and give them to her as a present. That way,
he wouldn't feel so guilty about “borrowing” the earring and losing it.

Meanwhile, though, he had to have an earring. He needed one for school tomorrow. Without it, his hair looked totally wack.
“Oh, well,” he mused as he snuck into his sister's room. “One earring's no good to Zoey anyway. And two could have gotten
lost just as easily as one.”

B
've been meaning to ask you,” Benny Santangelo said as they sat together over lunch. “Is that your real hair?”

Zach laughed so hard that the milk he was drinking squirted out of his nose. “Quit it! You're gonna make me ruin my clothes!”
he told Benny, wiping himself off with a paper napkin as he tried to stop laughing.

“Seriously, is it?”

“Stop!”

“Okay, okay. But … well, what were you thinking when you decided to get that done to yourself?”

“I don't know what I was thinking,” Zach confided, sighing miserably. “To tell you the truth, I'm about ready to shave it
off and start from scratch again.”

Benny nodded, then said in a deadpan voice, “I'd suggest using one of those hair-removal products. It'll hurt less than a
razor, and it'll grow back slower.”

Zach blinked. It took him a second to realize Benny was joking around with him. Then he cracked up again. “You're a sick man,
dude,” he said, giving Benny a high five and a smile. “Seriously, though, I'm not gonna shave my head, one way or the other.”

“No, that wouldn't be good,” Benny agreed. “You'd look just as weird.”

“Weirder.”

“And all that trouble for nothing.” Benny thought for a minute. “I guess you're stuck with it until it grows out a little.
Then you can get a buzz cut and start fresh…. Or …”

“Or what?”

“Or you could go to the store, buy a rinse, and color your hair so it looks like normal.”

Zach considered this for a moment. “What about the spikes?” he asked.

“You'd want to try cutting them off, I guess,” Benny said with a shrug.

“I don't know how good a job I could do of it,”
Zach said. “I might make a real mess of my hair, and then I'd
have
to shave my head.”

“If you ask me,” Benny said, “it's worth the risk. Look, you said none of your friends had the guts to bleach their hair.
So you're the only one who wound up looking like a space alien.”

“There's one kid, Brian, he was the first to do it. But I don't know … it looks good on him, somehow. It fits him.”

“He's a space alien?”

Zach laughed. “Kind of. Anyway, you're right. If they didn't have the guts to do it, why should I keep my hair like this?
I guess I'll try the rinse-and-hack method.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Benny said. “Er, what about the earring?”

“What about it?” Zach asked. “I like the earring.”

“Oh. Okay,” Benny backed off. “That's cool, I guess. It would be better if it wasn't a clip-on.”

“Dang! Is it that obvious?” Zach moaned.

“Only close up,” Benny replied from across the table. “From a distance, it's very convincing. And I'm sure it's less obvious
under a skateboarding helmet.”

“It is,” Zach assured him. “Definitely.”

“Now … ahem,” Benny said, clearing his throat. “The, er, pants … ?” He pointed discreetly at Zach's wide-leg jeans and shook
his head disapprovingly. “Lose 'em.”

“Yeah, right,” Zach said with a grin. “I should walk around here in my underwear.”

“You know what I mean,” Benny insisted. “Don't you have any normal pants? Those would fit me, but on you, they're ridiculous.”

“It's the kind skateboarders wear,” Zach explained.

“So wear them skateboarding,” Benny suggested. “All the kids are getting a good laugh out of them. If you want to be the subject
of everybody's jokes …”

“So what am I supposed to do about it?” Zach demanded. “All my jeans are like this!”

“You know,” Benny said, eyeing the jeans, “those things shrink if you wash and dry them on high heat. You might want to try
altering
a few pairs—as an experiment.”

“I can't believe I'm getting fashion advice from you, of all people,” Zach shook his head in dismay.

But the more he thought about “altering” his jeans, the more he liked the idea.

He started pacing back and forth across his room —which was not easy to do. He had to kick aside all the clothes he'd tossed
on the floor during the previous week and never picked up.

There were his three new pairs of skateboarding jeans—the kind with the wide legs all the way down. He'd had to really battle
with his parents to get them to buy him those jeans. And now that he was going to Amherst, he looked like a total geek wearing
them to school. Benny was right—those three pairs of jeans were ripe for “alteration.” And he'd still have the pair he was
wearing for skateboarding.

He knew his parents would never agree to buying him new, tighter-fitting jeans for Amherst. He could just hear them now. “We're
not made out of money,” his dad would say.

And his mom: “Those jeans we bought you in July are still practically new. Don't be such a slave to fads and fashions!”