Matt had lots of friends after that. Everyone wanted to be around him. In fact, it got to be a problem sometimes, like when he wanted to get some schoolwork done. He and Sally went snowboarding all the rest of that winter, and when his cast came off, Spengler joined them. It turned out that he was as good as either of them, although you wouldn’t have known it to look at him.
Uncle Clayton got a big promotion at the firm. Then one day, he announced to Matt that he’d quit in order to start his own firm. “I’ve gotta be my own boss,” Clay said. “It’s just the way I’m built.”
Matt’s mom wrote him lots of letters, and he enjoyed bragging to the other kids about her work overseas. He hoped that when she came back, she’d come here and the three of them — she, Matt, and Uncle Clayton — could live together in Dragon Valley.
Melissa and Matt became friends again, but things were never quite right between them after what had happened. And as for Riley Hammett — well, four weeks after the contest, someone (Matt was sure it was Courtney) came forward to accuse him of setting off the fire alarm that day in January. Soon after, Matt heard that Riley’s parents had found a half-used can of spray paint stuffed in the back of their son’s closet. Three weeks later, they pulled him out of school and sent him to a boarding school in Utah.
Spring came, and with it the end of snowboarding season. But Matt would never forget that winter — the time when he went from being a scared kid with no real home to being a real hero, the one and only SNOWBOARD CHAMP.