The phone call from his mom had thrown Matt off stride. Here he was, trying to look ahead, make new friends, get adjusted. Hearing her voice pulled him right back into missing Chicago and his home. Maybe it was the bright neon lights from the street below or maybe it was being homesick, but he didn’t sleep well that night.
“Everything okay, dude?” Uncle Clayton asked him over breakfast the next morning.
“Huh? Yeah, why?”
“I don’t know . . . you look a little out of it.”
“I’m okay,” Matt assured him.
“Did you have a good talk with your mom?” he asked, watching Matt closely. “I guess she likes her new job.”
“I guess,” Matt grunted. He avoided his uncle’s gaze. Clay was silent for a moment, then he drained his coffee cup and said, “Well, I like my job, too. So I’d best be off.” He grabbed some architectural drawings from his drafting table, rolled them up, and stuffed them into cardboard tubes. “Hey, you wanna go boarding Sunday? Do a few jumps, maybe tame the half-pipe?”
“Sure!” Matt said, instantly cheering up. But then he remembered. “Oh, wait, could we maybe go on Saturday? I kind of told this girl in school I’d go with her on Sunday,” he said.
Clay shot Matt a grin. “Really?”
“It’s nothing,” Matt said, feeling the blood rush to his cheeks. “I mean, she just asked me if I wanted to go boarding with her.”
“Impressive,” Clay said in the same gently teasing manner. “She asked you?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know. There’s this other kid . . . .”
“Sounds complicated,” Clay said, bundling the tubes under his arm and fishing his car keys out of his pocket. “I want to hear all about it tonight. How about over dinner at Bulko Burger?”
“I’m there!” Matt said, returning Clay’s smile. His mom would never in a million years have taken him to Bulko Burger.
On the bus ride to school, he sat near Spengler again. He knew everyone on the bus was pegging him as a loser for making friends with Spengler, but he didn’t see any of them rushing to get to know him. In fact, so far only Melissa and Spengler had shown him any kind of friendship.
And what was so awful about Spengler anyway? At least he had a sense of humor. Besides, Matt didn’t have the heart to pretend he didn’t see him back there, all alone. And after all, Matt wasn’t a sheep, was he? He could sit wherever he wanted.
“How’s it going?” he asked Spengler.
“Foot in front of foot,” Spengler replied. “Getting by.” “I hear you,” Matt said.
“How about you? Everyone making nice-nice to the new kid?”
“Not everyone,” Matt admitted. “You know how it is.” “Oh, I do.” Spengler nodded sadly.
“Hey, I never asked you. How’d you break your arm?” Spengler snorted. “Snowboarding.”
Matt waited for him to tell the story, but Spengler didn’t, and then they were at the school.
Well, he’d survived the bus ride, at any rate.
Going snowboarding with Melissa was another thing, however. He was starting to think it was not such a good idea. Riley had warned him to stay away from her, and Matt had already had one run-in with Riley. He sure wasn’t looking for another. He believed Courtney when she said it was not a good idea to get on his bad side.
Maybe Melissa would forget she’d asked him to go. He could pretend he’d forgotten, too. He’d go boarding with Uncle Clayton, and Riley wouldn’t bother him.
But Melissa was waiting for him in homeroom. With Abby watching the whole thing from her desk, Melissa came right up to him and said, “Hi, Matt!”
“Oh, hi,” he said, giving her a pathetic little wave. “So I talked with my mom about us boarding on Sunday. Is it okay if we pick you up at ten o’clock?” she asked. Her big green eyes bore right through his brain, burning out whatever brain cells were primed to turn and run.
“Yeah, ten’s good,” he said. “But, um, could I talk to you for a minute in private?”
“Sure. Why, what’s up?” she asked, as he led her toward the back of the classroom and away from Abby.
“What’s with you and Riley Hammett?” he asked her point-blank.
“Huh?”
“’Cause if you’re going out with him or something, I don’t want to get in the way.”
“Going out with him? Puh-leez.” Melissa rolled her eyes and clucked her tongue. “He was my so-called boyfriend for two weeks at summer camp, and then I broke up with him. He won’t stop bothering me, though.”
“You mean he still likes you?”
“I guess,” she said with a shrug. “Who knows, who cares? I don’t like him that much. He’s too mean.”
“He is, huh?” Matt said, cringing. Great. Just great. “Don’t worry about Riley,” she said, patting him on the arm. “I mean, we’re just going snowboarding together, for goodness’ sake. It’s not like we’re going out or anything.”
“Right,” Matt said, half relieved and half disappointed.
“And even if we were, what business is it of his? Anyway, I’ll bet you could beat him in a fight. You’re from the hood, right? Everybody there knows how to fight.” She winked, gave his arm a squeeze, and returned to her seat.
Right. Everyone from the hood knows how to fight, he thought. Everybody but me.
Dragon Valley Middle being such a small school, news traveled fast. In this case, it traveled like lightning. Everywhere Matt went that day, he could feel kids’ eyes on him. He could hear the whispering behind him that stopped whenever he turned around to see who it was.
In the cafeteria, he felt like every eye was on him, but whenever he tried to catch people staring at him, they looked away just in time to avoid being caught at it. Except for Riley. Riley stared right back at him with what could only be described as the evil eye.
Matt thought he knew why, and in gym, Riley confirmed it. “What did I tell you yesterday?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“Don’t act stupid with me. You know.”
“Oh. About Melissa?”
“Yeah. Your new snowboarding buddy.”
“You heard, huh?”
“I couldn’t help hearing,” Riley said. “Everyone’s talking about it.”
“Everyone should keep their mouths shut,” Matt said, looking around the gym in annoyance at the other kids, who were watching this little spat develop. Spengler was right, he thought. Baaa . . . baaa . . .
“I’m gonna have to teach you the way things work around here,” Riley said. He put an arm around Matt’s shoulders, then clamped down tight like an iron claw.
“What do you mean?” Matt asked him, wincing in pain. Riley was at least four inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than he was.
Riley leaned close and whispered into Matt’s ear, “You show up at the slopes with Melissa, and you’ll find out what I mean.”
Matt’s shoulder hurt for the rest of the day. When he got out of bed the next morning, he noticed two bruises where Riley’s fingers had dug in. Riley had meant to intimidate him. But instead, Matt found he was getting angry. Any thought of canceling the snow-boarding date with Melissa vanished as he stared at the black-and-blue marks.
Still, Matt was glad Melissa had suggested Sunday instead of Saturday. It gave him a day to practice his moves on his snowboard. Lots of kids from school were there, and many of them said hello to him. He returned their greetings and introduced Clay to them but didn’t want to hang out with them. He was here with his uncle.
Then he caught sight of Riley, surrounded as usual by his group of friends. Riley returned his glance, then looked beyond him as if to see who else Matt was with. He must have realized Melissa wasn’t there, because he gave Matt a slow smile and nod. It was as if he were saying, “I see that you did what I told you to.”
That made Matt even madder, but it also made him a little nervous. How would Riley react tomorrow, when Matt showed up here with Melissa instead of Uncle Clayton?
He pushed the thought away quickly. He’d asked Clay to work on his jumps with him, and his uncle was only too happy to oblige.
“We’ll start with some ollies first,” Clay said.
They rode the lift to the top of one of the intermediate slopes, one with a lot of small moguls on the way down. “Okay, here’s the deal,” Clay said. “You get some speed, then move your weight to the back of the board, so the tip is coming up off the snow.” He demonstrated on the flat ground, and Matt tried to imitate him. “Then push off your back foot, jump up, and lift the board off the snow. Here, watch me, then you try it.”
It was fun for Matt to watch Clay make his way down the hill. Clay was tall and thin, almost like a beanpole, and when he did airborne tricks and jumps, he flew sky-high. He did an ollie first, then pulled up on one side of the slope and shouted back up, “Okay, now you!”
Matt leaned into the hill and started his descent. As he approached the mogul, he crouched slightly at the knees, then pushed off just as he hit the top. He kept his balance in the air but landed a little hard.
“Keep your knees bent until you’re back on the ground,” Clay advised him, demonstrating on the next mogul as they made their way to the bottom of the hill.
They worked on landings some more, then on getting more and more air in their jumps. “Make sure you do a nice turn after you land,” Clay told him. “It’ll help control your speed so you don’t go flying into someone.”
Been there, done that, Matt said to himself. But he kept his mouth shut.
They did half-cabs — 180-degree turns while riding fakie. “Don’t worry, these take a lot of practice,” Clay counseled when Matt had trouble nailing the jumps. “Keep your body centered and straight. Remember to land flat.”
Finally, at the end of the day, Clay taught him to do 360s. “Use your upper body to start the spin,” Clay said, demonstrating with a gorgeous jump.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Matt shouted down to him.
“Come on, try it!” Clay called back.
Matt did. To his surprise, he nearly landed it. In fact, his surprise was probably the reason he got distracted and wound up falling.
“Never mind, that was a good one till the very end,” Clay told him as he picked him up out of the snow. “You keep practicing those. And remember how I told you to fall.”
By the time they got home, Matt was sore all over. He ate a quick dinner, then collapsed into bed, wondering how he was going to go boarding again tomorrow. But he knew that he would drag himself to the slopes somehow, for two reasons. One, he wanted to get to know Melissa better. And two, he wanted to show Riley that he wasn’t afraid of him.