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.