"Whazzup, Word?" said Ceese.
Word looked at him like he'd seen him for the first time that moment.
The door to Word's house opened and his older sister Andrea leaned out and called to him.
"Get in here, Word, it's time to eat."
Word looked back down the road, then glanced at Ceese as if he wanted to ask a question.
"Word!" said Andrea. "Don't act like you don't hear me."
Word turned and walked back toward the house.
Raymo was a half-dozen steps ahead. Ceese ran to catch up.
"What you talk to that boy for?"
"Look like he was having some kind of problem," said Ceese.
"Just a little kid."
"My mama used to tend him and his little sister in the summer," said Ceese.
"She ever tend that older sister?" asked Raymo. "She hot."
"She wasn't then," said Ceese. It was weird to think of Andrea being "hot." Or maybe it was just that Raymo never thought that any girl was too rich or too smart or too pretty for him. Nothing out of reach for Raymo.
"Keep up," said Raymo.
They got to the top of the hill but Raymo insisted they walk right to the end of Cloverdale, where a fence blocked the road off from the upper part of Hahn Park. You could see the place where the golf course bottomed out, like a big green bowl. Or more like a green funnel, because at the lowest point you could see where a big culvert split the grass to capture all the runoff from the rain. Ceese didn't know if that water was piped down to the little valley by the hairpin turn where the drainpipe stood up like a totem pole. So he asked Raymo.
"How could it?" said Raymo.
"It's got to go somewhere."
"They got that huge drainage up there, you think they dump it down in that little valley so that one little pipe carry it all away? That little pipe just for the runoff from below the park."
Like you know everything, thought Ceese. But he didn't say it, because there was no reason to make Raymo mad, and besides, he was probably right.
"All right," said Raymo. "People seen us up here. Now they see us ride down."
"You know I can't make that hairpin turn."
Raymo looked at him like he was the stupidest kid in the world. "We don't want to make the hairpin turn, Cecil. We want to get off the road and onto the grass and up into the trees to smoke that weed you're carrying. Or did you think you just started growing weed in your pants?"
"I just don't want to fall down on the asphalt," said Ceese. "Scrape myself all up."
"Well, here's what you do," said Raymo. "You go real slow, back and forth across the road.
And then tomorrow, when you get down to the hairpin, you can wake me up and we'll go smoke the weed for breakfast."
With that, Raymo pushed off and scooted along the level part of the road until he could turn and start down the slope of Cloverdale.
Ceese was right behind him. Hating every minute of it. Not because he didn't like the exhilaration of speed, or the rumble of the asphalt under his skateboard wheels. What he hated was Raymo going faster than Ceese ever could, while waving his arms and squatting down and standing up and even raising one leg like a stork, all the while whooping and calling out to Ceese. And though Ceese could never understand the words, since Raymo was facing away and his voice was mostly lost in the noise of the skateboard, he got the message just fine: You always a loser compared to Raymo.
He only want me around so they somebody to watch him be cool.
Why can't he ever do something just because it's fun?
Son of a bitch. I'm going to stop hanging with him. Smoke this weed, that's it, I find somebody don't think I'm dumb.
Of course, Ceese had made this resolution before, about a dozen times, but so far he'd never actually gone so far as to say no when Raymo showed up and told him what they were going to do that day.
Ceese never even hesitated. That's what his decisions were worth.
I got no spine. Had me a spine, I'd be cool too. Not cool like Raymond, my own kind of cool.
The guy who didn't need nobody. Stand alone, stand tall. Stead of tagging along like a little brother.
That's what I am. Always somebody's little brother. Got plenty of brothers, but what do I do?
Go and find me another.
By the time Ceese got to the hairpin, Raymo was nowhere in sight.
This was the part that Ceese always dreaded: stopping. He liked the kind of hill where at the bottom the road just goes straight for a long time. He liked going for the distance. But here, that wasn't possible. One way or another, he was going to end up off these wheels. He could do it all splayed out in the street like roadkill, or he could do it by running up into the grass and falling all over himself like a dumbass.
Better to be a dumbass on grass than... than...
He searched for a rhyme, even as he steered toward the place where the grass looked softest.
Than a toad in the road.
His board hit the edge of the road and flipped on the rocks before reaching the grass. Which meant that he was off the board before he had a chance to jump high enough to make sure he landed on the grassy slope. This was not going well. All he could do was try to stay airborne and roll when he hit, so he didn't come home grass-stained. Better bloody than grass-stained, he learned that long ago. Grass stains got you whipped, but blood got bandaids.
He landed on his face in the grass and flipped kind of sideways, twisting his neck so that when he finally stopped rolling down in the tall grass, he lay there for a few seconds, wiggling his toes to make sure his neck wasn't broke. He wasn't sure why that worked, but that's what the guy at school said, Don't move your neck, that just makes it worse. Instead, wiggle your toes to make sure you can.
"Look like you trying to mow the grass with your chin, fool," said Raymo.
"Where were you?" asked Ceese.
"Lying behind the hill. You sailed right over me."
Raymo broke up laughing. "I can't believe you. Complete klutz, can't ride, can't even fall right, damn near broke your neck, but you still funny. That why I hang with you."
"Yeah, but why do I hang with you?" said Ceese.
"Cause I'm cool as you wish you was," said Raymo.
"Guess that's it," said Ceese.
"You hang on to any of that weed?" asked Raymo.
Sure enough, it wasn't in Ceese's pocket. He leapt to his feet, discovering just how sore his elbows and knees were—and fully grass-stained. He was already back at the slope heading up to see if the bag had fallen out of his pocket where his board hit the gravel, when he realized Raymo was laughing. He turned around, and there was Raymo, holding up the bag.
Ashamed, both of his panic and that he lost the bag in the first place, Ceese sauntered back toward the older boy. "Who needs weed when I can get high on inertia?"
Raymo cocked his head and made his eyes go buggy. "Inertia? In-er-she-ah! You already been to college or something?"
"You took that class," said Ceese. "You learned about inertia."
"I learned about it for the grade, I didn't work it into my conversation to show off how smart I am."
"Sometimes I get tired, you calling me dumb."
"I didn't call you dumb," said Raymo.
"You always call me dumb."
"I call you a dumb-ass. But not just plain dumb."
Ceese was angry and ashamed and he hurt all over and he was going to catch hell for all these grass stains. But he couldn't afford to answer the way he wanted to, because then Raymo would beat the hell out of him and, worse, stop being his friend.
So Ceese stood there and looked at the only thing sticking up out of the grass that wasn't Raymo: the rusted-up drainpipe.
There was something moving at the base of the pipe.
His first thought was that it was some kind of animal. There were squirrels everywhere, but this looked taller, and a different color. And shiny. What kind of animal was shiny? An armadillo? A really huge wet toad?
"Where you going?"
Ceese ignored him. What kind of dumbass couldn't see he was heading for the drainpipe?