Why You Rode Skateboards

For a long time, girls weren’t beautiful. Nothing was beautiful. All you did was ride skateboards and play video games and eat macaroni and cheese every day after school. Then, girls got beautiful. Your friend who was a girl and lived down the street got beautiful, as well as not your friend anymore. And the girls only made it worse. They wore low cut pants and low cut tops. They wore bricks for shoes. Over the summer, girls had become incomprehensible things. They said in their minds, look at us, we’re beautiful now and we know you think we are beautiful and there’s nothing you can do about it.

And so you tried to ride your skateboard outside after school like you always did, but everything was different. Now you rode skateboards to impress them and not because it was just something you did.

And then you got a car. It was your Dad’s old car and you knew how to fix it up from reading magazines. You installed a loud stereo and big rims. You drove around with the windows down and played music that made other cars vibrate at red lights.

One day, a girl noticed your loud, low car and decided she liked you. You heard about the girl from a hierarchy of friends but you didn’t do anything about it except hold a pillow at night while you slept.

And your parents began to ask you, had you thought at all about college? And you told them that, yes, you had, that your plan was to go to a two year college and then transfer to a four year after that, because it would be cheaper those first two years, and you didn’t have the grades anyway.

Your History teacher called your parents and told them you were failing and that you needed to retake History over the summer and that you wouldn’t be able to walk in the graduation ceremony. That night, your father sat down with you after dinner and let you drink your first beer. It was a warm Budweiser from a can and tasted horrible and you wanted another one.

Your hierarchy of friends told you after school one day that the girl who had liked your car was now going out with another guy who smoked cigarettes and raced his car with other people somewhere at midnight. You told them you never liked her anyway.

One morning, you found out that terrorists had flown planes into the World Trade Center in New York City. You had never been to New York and you had never heard of the World Trade Center.

They cancelled school the next day and you woke up late with nothing to do. You decided to rummage through the garage and beneath some exercise equipment, you found one of your old skateboards. You took it out and tried some tricks in front of your house. You were stronger now and could ollie higher than ever before. You took off down the street, jumping over cracks in the sidewalk. After turning a few corners, you saw a group of girls walking in front of you. You rode off the sidewalk and into the street and soared around them without glancing back.