Magic Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

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