Status: Chapter 25 to come!

Reach for the Sky

Boring.

Before the boys would let me go home to recover, we made a “quick” stop over in Arco, Italy - where I was reminded how much couch time sucks when I was forced to watch Travis and Roner jump off an enormous Limestone cliff face from the ground with “Cowboy” Kenny Bartram. Broken ribs and a parachute were not a good combination.

After the boys had their fill of BASE jumping, we were all rushed to the airport in order to catch our flight, which we almost missed due to a complication with the containers the bikes were being shipped in (those Italians did not know how to tie down dirt bikes!).

Finally, my feet were back on American Soil… or rather, American-carved wood. Long boarding had been a pretty big deal back in Florida, where the hills we had were rather small and easy to “bomb.” Here in Maryland, apparently the sport wasn’t quite as popular - probably because of its high casualty rate, I mused as I stared down the steep grade of Travis‘s long, curving driveway.

I hadn’t been home more than five minutes before Travis busted up into the room Jolene and I shared, and threw himself down on my bed, complaining of boredom. He needed a stronger prescription for his ADD, if only because I couldn’t keep risking bodily harm on a regular basis for his entertainment, my health could only last so long between the dirt bikes, ATVs, and the random, insane stunts the boys managed to talk me into. But Travis’s boredom and wandering eyes were why I was even considering bombing the hill that was his driveway; the closest I had ever gotten to a hill this big was a bridge in my hometown, and no bridge could be this steep. Slowly, I forced my helmet over my head, and knocked against the smelly old knee guards Travis had dug up for me with my knuckles before I threw Godfrey a shaky thumbs up.

“You ready, Scottie?” He called from behind the camera, perched behind Pastrana on one of the stock Suzuki ATVs the gangly youth kept around for no reason. I shrugged.

“Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.” Shakily, I let the board fall onto the ground, catching the tail with my foot to keep it from shooting down the enormous hill.

“This is such a great idea. Send the girl with three broken ribs down the hill on a long board. I’ll call the ambulance now and save time,” Jolene commented dryly from atop her pink Big Wheel, beside a dirt bike-mounted Andy, who held another camera. “This is gonna be great.”

“Quit yer whinin’!” Andy commented, as I placed my front foot down on the board and let the other foot join it. There was no way in hell I was going to push off to start the descent, so I pumped my body forward much like a snowboarder would.

“… What happened?” Somehow, I had gotten from the bamboo Sector 9 to the ground where I was more than happy to lay as Roner dressed my road rash with a first aid kit that DeChamp had come up with. God, my ribs needed more time, I should have been laying on the couch and not the asphalt.

“Well, you crashed a little.” Bell informed me, laying his dirt bike on its side.

“Just a little, not a lot? What’s your definition of a little crash, did I sketch out or what?”

“Scottie’s a little concussed at the moment,” Travis said into Andy’s camera, as Godfrey knelt down to let me watch the footage of my little “run.”

“Well it looks like Jolene got along famously. Did anyone help her up?” Jo’s big wheel had lost a wheel, and behind my flying form I could see her grab the missing back wheel and the bike and carry it down the hill with a panting Achilles. “Man, I had good form there… Oh, that’s what happened…” I could clearly see where I began to get speed wobble from not carving wide enough for the incline I was on - which was, apparently, impossible with the width of the road I had been on as I had been carving from one side of grass to the other. I had been right to assume that the driveway required much more skill than I had in the realm of long boarding. “Man, my side hurts. Where’s my morphine drip, nurse Erik?” The blond chuckled nervously as he poured generous amounts of rubbing alcohol on the wounds - the patches of missing skin on my forearms and palms burned and bubbled, and would eventually become nasty scars.

“Rubbing Alcohol? You’re such an idiot, Erik!” Jolene shoved him aside and capped the bottle, going instead for hydrogen peroxide.

“So how uncoordinated was I?” I was certain that I looked like some stupid chick that had jumped on a long board just because I thought it would be cool - which was very close to the truth.

“Actually, you looked kinda cool until you fell, it seemed like you knew what you were doing… until you fell.” With a sigh and a wince, I rolled my eyes at Travis as Jo taped thick gauze pads over my elbows.

“You’re not calling the ambulance, are you Godfrey?” Gregg stopped mid-dial like a deer in the headlights with a camera balanced under his arm to stare at Andy, who somehow managed to look menacing while recording the wound-cleaning process. “Don’t you dare, you remember what happened last time they took someone in the ambulance?” Godfrey looked down at his feet, as if he were a bad child, and pocketed his cell phone.

Travis and Jo lifted me to my feet by my armpits and allowed me to stand unaided, wobbling only slightly with one hand on Achilles’ back for moral support.

“So no more stunts today, right Scottie?” Thankfully, Travis didn’t smack my back as I thought he would, but placed a steadying hand on the small of my back as I began to teeter toward the house in compliance with his “gentle” suggestion.

“Yep.” Jo thrust the long board into my hands as she walked beside Travis and I - while I had taken a beating, the board was largely unscathed. “God, nobody told me when I came out here that it would be so boring!

“Boring? Boring?!

“Now you’ve done it, Scottie. Travis and boring don’t coexist well,” Jokingly, Jolene pulled the long board from my hands and used it as a bodily shield from Travis’s rage.

“I am not! Boring!

“That’s a pretty epic pout from someone who claims to not be boring,” I teased, as I pushed into the house behind Roner and Bell. “Tragic, really.”

Travis looked about ready to burst for a few minutes as I settled down on the couch with Achilles and a Huevos film, and sulked around the kitchen before his watch alerted him to the time. The kid was really a dork - he ate lunch at his grandmother’s with his family nearly every day, a trait I might have envied if I thought about it long enough. Bell, Gregg, Jo and Roner only hung out with me by the couch until Jolene said something about a backflip.

Before I knew it, I was sitting with only Achilles and my cell phone for company. Occasionally, one of the boys would rush in with a camera and show me footage of someone doing something retarded on some moving vehicle, but largely I was left to my own devices for the afternoon.

Sometimes, the Pastrana compound was the epitome of boring.