Skateboard Renegade Page 5

  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.”

  9

  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 wo
und 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!”

  Zach grabbed the three pairs of jeans and went downstairs. In the laundry room he put them into the washing machine, set the water temperature for extra hot, and started the washer.

  There. That and about two hours in the dryer on high heat should just about do it, he figured. He'd have three brand new pairs of narrow-leg jeans, just right for Amherst Academy.

  “Zachary! What in the world did you do to your new jeans?!” His mom looked horrified as she held up pair after pair, now shrunken pitifully, way beyond even tight-leg size.

  “I … I guess I messed up doing the laundry,” Zach said. “I thought they were pre-shrunken, so I put them in on high heat.”

  “Oh, my goodness …” His mom shook her head in dismay. “I don't know what is the matter with you, Zachary Halper. But your father is going to go ballistic when I tell him you need new jeans again. We just bought these for you.”

  “But I need new ones, Mom!” Zach begged, feeling guilty now. “Even you can see that!”

  “I don't see why I shouldn't just make you wear these,” his mother said, frowning. “You could probably still wear them, if you fastened them with a big safety pin.”

  “Mom!” Zach shouted, his voice cracking pathetically. “Give those to Zoey! You have to buy me new clothes!”

  “I don't have to do anything, young man, and neither does your father. I'll speak with him, and we'll see what he says. Meanwhile, you just wait in your room.”

  Zach stormed upstairs, furious at his parents and at himself. If they didn't cave in, he was going to be down to a single pair of skateboarding jeans: the pair he had on right now—in fact, the ones he'd worn yesterday, too. How many days in a row could he wear one pair of jeans? Good grief!

  His mom knocked on the door of his room, then came in without his permission.

  “Your father says you can have one new pair of pants and that's it,” she told him. “Considering the way you've been behaving, I think that's more than fair.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Zach murmured, barely audible. “Sorry I ruined my jeans.”

  And he was, too. He was sorry about everything: sorry he'd bleached and spiked his hair, sorry he'd taken his sister's money, sorry he'd lost her earring, sorry he'd stolen the other one, sorry he'd ruined his jeans, sorry he'd gone to Amherst—sorry he'd ever been born!

  In the end, he went for a pair of khakis. It was what the kids at Amherst mostly wore anyway. Besides, they were on sale, leaving him enough money for a bottle of hair-coloring rinse.

  He still had his one pair of wide-leg jeans to go skateboarding with. Plus all his sweatpants. It would have to last him until Christmas. But at least he could get his hair back to normal.

  When he got home, he went straight into the bathroom and locked the door. He followed the instructions on the bottle, and fifteen minutes later his hair was something like its usual brown color. Zach then took a big scissors, and cut the spikes out of his hair as best he could.

  In the end, it didn't look too bad. Kind of uneven on top where the spikes had been, but all things considered, it could have been much worse. Zach got dressed in his wide-legs and T-shirt. It was time to give Zoey her second skateboarding lesson.

  But first, he returned the second earring to the nightstand where it had been before he “borrowed” it. Even though he liked the way it looked on him, he didn't need it for school anymore. Besides, the last thing he needed was for Zoey to see it in his ear, notice the resemblance to her own earrings, and then go looking for them.

  “There,” he said, putting the earring back just the way he'd found it. “That's one thing I won't have to worry about anymore.”

  “Okay, kick—turn!” Zach instructed. “Good!”

  Zoey beamed a brilliant smile back at him. For the last hour, he'd been teaching her and Lorena how to do different kinds of turns. He'd set up a series of obstacles for them to zigzag around. When he'd paid Zoey back for everything, he'd go out and buy some real cones, he told himself. It would be worth it to make a real skateboarding course right here in the driveway. Maybe he could even scare up some plywood for a ramp!

  “My turn, Thack!” Lorena called out.

  “Okay, Lorena. Zoey, take off the pads and stuff.”

  “I'm not done practicing yet!” Zoey protested.

  “Come on, Zoey, give her a turn. She's your friend.”

  “Oh, okay.” Zoey turned over the gear to Lorena and sat next to Zach on the steps.

  “You look much better this way,” she offered.

  “Yeah, right,” Zach said, scowling.

  “You do. I don't care what you think,” she said. “And you know what else? You're a good teacher.”

  He looked up at her, just to make sure she was serious. “Thanks,” he said, smiling.

  “By the time two months is over, I'm going to be a better skateboarder than you and your friends,” Zoey bragged.

  “We'll see about that,” Zach said with a laugh. “Whoa, Lorena! Remember to tuck your head under when you fall!”

  “I'm okay,” Lorena said, picking herself up off the pavement. “How do you do that kick turn a
gain?

  Just then, Zach saw a sight that chilled his blood. His friends were skateboarding around the corner, calling his name and whooping loudly. If they caught him giving his little sister skateboarding lessons, they'd never let him hear the end of it.

  “Quick, Lorena—give me all the gear!”

  “Why, Thack?”

  “Never mind why, just give it to me!”

  “Halper!”

  “Hey, guys!” Zach turned and waved to his friends as they approached. At the same time, he grabbed the board, and turned his back on Zoey and Lorena, hoping they'd have the good sense to get lost in a hurry.

  The smile vanished from Zach's face as he got a good look at his buddies. They had all bleached and spiked their hair!

  “Oh, no!” he groaned.

  “We did it!” Sam crowed. “I told you we'd do it! Hey, how come you got rid of it, Zach?”

  “I got tired of it,” Zach muttered weakly. “I figured you guys chickened out, so …”

  “Yeah, well now you're gonna have to go get it done again,” Kareem said. “Gotta look like a crew.”

  “I'm not getting it done again,” Zach said. “Sorry. You all should have done it when you said you would. So too bad.”

  “You all look stupid,” Zoey piped up, stepping forward. “Why do you all want to look so freaky?”

  “This your sister?” Brian Jeffers asked.

  “Uh, yeah,” Zach said, wishing he could make Zoey disappear—and Lorena along with her. “Yeah, this is Zoey. She's nine. And that's her friend Lorena. I'm … I'm baby-sitting them,” he fibbed.

  “Oh. Gotta make some ducats, huh?” Brian said with a wink and a nod.

  “He's not baby-sitting us!” Zoey contradicted. “We're not babies!”

  “Quiet, Zoey!” Zach said through gritted teeth. But it was too late. All the guys cracked up.

  “Yeah, we're big girlth,” Lorena added. “Thack's giving uth thkateboarding lethonth.”

  Oh brother, Zach thought. That's all I need. Now they're gonna be imitating poor Lorena's lisp all afternoon.

  “Oh, that'th tho thweet!” Brian mimicked, drawing a huge roar from the other boys.