Our Friend, Ted - Second Draft

Chapter 4 - Josh

It was a warm sunny day in the suburban Chicago area that late June day. The sky, cloudless, radiated blue to the earth below.

It was a lazy summer day, with mom and dad at work, and our neighbor, Becky, was sitting in my home, getting twenty bucks an hour to watch daytime soap operas and tell me not to get into any trouble.

“Don’t go too far,” she said, when she turned her head away from the television for just a brief moment and saw me heading for the door.

I told her I was going down by the hill to meet some friends and do some biking by the park.

“Be back by lunch,” she said. “It will be ready in about an hour, OK?”

“OK.” I turned and headed out the front door and climbed on to my freedom. A ruby red Huffy, with silly protective padding on the cross bar and above the stem.

I hopped on and pedaled away, feeling my freedom grow like the plot in an action movie.

I was super excited when I got near the park: The jump was still there.

The previous week, my friends and I had been biking there, and we had found an old sheet of plywood that had been lying on the lawn of one of the houses nearby. My friend, Jimmy, always the one to egg random adventures on, he had been the one who had grabbed it, stole it, and suggested we lay it down on top of some logs and use it as a jump.

No one had the balls to disagree with him. Because if you did, he would laugh at you, and everyone else would follow his lead. You would be the kid no one talked to for a week.

We all pitched in, running to a small bank of trees nearby, scouring for as many large branches as we could. We each grabbed a couple, me and John and Terry and Al. We brought them back out to Jimmy, our project manager. He pointed to where the branches should be put down in the small bank and then laid the plywood on top.

It wasn’t a big ramp, just eight or nine inches off the ground, but we all took our turns going off of it.

Al was the one who was able to get the biggest jump, pounding the pedals as he got close to the ramp and soared over the grass pit below it in slow motion, the ET of our circle of friends.

It was magical, majestic, as his bike touched down and he bounced up and down in his seat, and then braked hard and looked back at us, his fists pumping up and down in the air. Jimmy, John, Terry and I jumped up and down.

The ramp was a victory.

When it was my turn, I was so nervous. I wanted to throw down my bike, run home, crawl under my bed covers and cry the weekend away.

But I didn’t. I went over the ramp, even though it seemed to move below me, and got a small air time, landing down ten or twelve feet away.

It was the least impressive of everyone who jumped, but so what.

I did it. Me. I was awesome when I wanted to be.

But today it’s just me and the ramp. The rest of my friends had gone off, to camp, to shop, to the movies, to somewhere.

Only I stayed back, adventureless.

I looked toward the ramp, then pedaled away from it, getting fifty or sixty yards in between it and my bike.

I was going to take this jump on. No matter what.

I jumped up onto my pedals, pushing down with all my strength. I sped up, pedaling faster and faster, and the ramp was speeding up to me, as though it was the moving object and I was stationary.

Finally my front tire grabbed a hold of the plywood and pulled my bike on top of it.

There was no turning back now.

As my rear tire jumped onto the plywood, I felt the pile of branches moving below, even more than when I went over the jump the first time.

And I remember realizing then that before I set off, I had never checked that pile again. Never checked to make sure it was steady before I jumped as Jimmy had done the first time we all jumped over it.

That’s when I felt the pile of branches begin to fall, and my tires gripped hard onto the plywood, pulling it forward as I kept slowly, slowly, slowly going over the ramp.

By the time my front wheel had finally peeked over the edge, looking out into the open sky over the end of the plywood, I realized it was pointed down, right toward the grippy dirt underneath, with the plywood pointing in the wrong direction, the up end closer to my rear wheel than my front.

The earth came to my face all too quickly. There was nothing I could do.

And as I lay in pain, bloodied, broken, my bike strew about, I met my friend Ted.

I just didn’t know it yet.