Ragtag Friends

Hey there I’m James and I love to skateboard which is actually what I am currently doing, and I also live in a small suburban neighborhood where kids run wild. Being seventeen and a skateboarder in a suburban neighborhood is not a good look because all of the old people here think I’m a delinquent. Traveling on any kind of wheels that aren’t gas powered is so freeing because you feel like you are gliding through the air following wherever the wheels take you. I reach the pointon my ride where I normally stop to take a breather, that is until I see some old man on the ground yelling at a group of boys that is currently biking away while the leader in front waving an old wooden cane. These are delinquents and these are a bunch of no-good twelve year olds. I start picking up speed again and try to gain on those kids in a high speed chase and because they’re just kids and some of them still have training wheels on the back end of their bikes. 

This is also not the time to try and question the decision to take that man's cane at the moment, so I just kept going when out of the corner of my eye I see this other group of twelve year olds, but these are little girls on rollerblades who are following close behind me. The group looked as if they were also in hot pursuit of those boys. A lot of thoughts are going through my head at the moment so I just decided these girls are my friends in this chase. While all of us are gaining on the boys I yell out my name to introduce myself to my little ragtag group of heroes beside me, “HEY I’m James, do you know these kids?!” one of the girls who is rollerblading as fast as I am skating comes up beside me a says back to be , “HEY JAMES, and we don’t them, but we were skating around when we saw these jerks steal that man's cane and then we saw you and joined!”. The smallest girl spoke up with a plan to cut the boys that were facing forward off and asked if I would tail the boys while they took a quick turn left. In like twenty more seconds I caught up to the boys who were successfully cut off by the cool group of girls in rollerblades. The girls had chased off the boys by the time I got to a full stop in front of them. I spoke up in exhausted breaths, “ You girls are super rad and great on those skates.” the girl who had spoken up to me earlier tossed me the cane and said, “Yea we know you’re pretty good on that board.” All four of us introduce ourselves and I found out that the girl who first talked to me was Riley and the shorter girl was Emile, but the quieter girl finally spoke up to tell me she was Carson. We talked for a bit and we all decided that we were pretty bunch superheroes on skates which should be a comic book serious by the way. 

All of us talked for a bit longer, but it was getting darker by now and during our high speed chase we traveled pretty far trying to catch those boys so we went our separate ways when Riley say, “ Anyways we told Emiles mom that we’d be back before it got too dark outside, so see ya later sidekick.” After that the girls zoomed off and I backtracked to the old man who was at this point sitting on a bench with his face in his hands, and I can’t help but wish those girls were here with me to take the credit for this act of heroism. I told the old man that it was really those three girls who caught the culprit, but he really did not seem to care and only wanted his cane back, yet he did give me a twenty dollar bill. 

That was a week ago and every now and again when I am cruising around the neighborhood I see that group of girls rollerblading around and if they spot me we wave at each other with huge grins on our faces. Those girls, I later found out, only live two blocks away from me and every now and again they set up a lemonade stand and they told me about how they saved enough money through their business to buy their own rollerblades. I told them that they made great lemonade and I would probably be their source of income for their next purchase which they told me that they were looking to buy skateboards, definitely not inspired by me, so any money they received would be going into their fund. To me these sweet little rollerbladers were like little sisters to me, and it might seem weird but I eventually started to get invited to all of their birthday parties and I invited them to mine for dinner with my family and all of us had a cookout from time to time. On my next birthday they all came over to my place so that we could skate together and when they showed up with a wrapped box I was surprised to say the least, but once I opened it I legitly was so happy looking down at bright pink rollerblades that were covered in all kinds of girly stickers. The girls told me how they had been saving up together to buy me a pair and then they all decorated them for me and I know I will cherish them forever, and I promised that I would wear them to get around in college which means they’re going to have to teach me to skate if I was going to keep up on my promise. That group of girls and me grew pretty close and just because some boys decided to terrorise that old man for no reason.