Read Magic Street for Free Online

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.
    "Look like you trying to mow the grass with your chin, fool," said Raymo.
    "Where were you?" asked Ceese.
    "Lying behind the hill. You sailed right over me."
    Raymo broke up laughing. "I can't believe you. Complete klutz, can't ride, can't even fall right, damn near broke your neck, but you still funny. That why I hang with you."
    "Yeah, but why do I hang with you?" said Ceese.
    "Cause I'm cool as you wish you was," said Raymo.
    "Guess that's it," said Ceese.
    "You hang on to any of that weed?" asked Raymo.
    Sure enough, it wasn't in Ceese's pocket. He leapt to his feet, discovering just how sore his elbows and knees were—and fully grass-stained. He was already back at the slope heading up to see if the bag had fallen out of his pocket where his board hit the gravel, when he realized Raymo was laughing. He turned around, and there was Raymo, holding up the bag.
    Ashamed, both of his panic and that he lost the bag in the first place, Ceese sauntered back toward the older boy. "Who needs weed when I can get high on inertia?"
    Raymo cocked his head and made his eyes go buggy. "Inertia? In-er-she-ah! You already been to college or something?"
    "You took that class," said Ceese. "You learned about inertia."
    "I learned about it for the grade, I didn't work it into my conversation to show off how smart I am."
    "Sometimes I get tired, you calling me dumb."
    "I didn't call you dumb," said Raymo.
    "You always call me dumb."
    "I call you a dumb-ass. But not just plain dumb."
    Ceese was angry and ashamed and he hurt all over and he was going to catch hell for all these grass stains. But he couldn't afford to answer the way he wanted to, because then Raymo would beat the hell out of him and, worse, stop being his friend.
    So Ceese stood there and looked at the only thing sticking up out of the grass that wasn't Raymo: the rusted-up drainpipe.
    There was something moving at the base of the pipe.
    His first thought was that it was some kind of animal. There were squirrels everywhere, but this looked taller, and a different color. And shiny. What kind of animal was shiny? An armadillo? A really huge wet toad?
    "Where you going?"
    Ceese ignored him. What kind of dumbass couldn't see he was heading for the drainpipe?
    As he got closer, though, he could say that the thing he spotted from the slope was just a handle of a plastic grocery-store sack.
    Then it moved, and since there wasn't any wind and none of the grass was moving, it meant there might be an animal inside it. Maybe a mouse or something. Trapped in the bag.
    Well if it was, he'd set it free before Raymo even knew it was in there. Because Raymo was bad with animals.
    It wasn't a mouse. It was a baby. The smallest baby Ceese had ever seen. Stark naked, with the stump of the umbilical cord still attached. It wasn't crying, but it didn't