In the scene I remember best, Tony lay bleeding on the floor of the cave where they’d built a ramp to skate. All the ramps they skated had these cool names: one in the sewers was called Ratwall and the one in an ocean-front cave (a la The Lost Boys) was called Angel’s Lair.
I’m not sure how my 7th grade novelist thought they lit that cave. Torches maybe? Candles? Or some sunlight falling through openings in the ceiling?
Anyway there was a giant half pipe and Brian and his Crew used to skate there. Tony had gone down inside and confronted Kevin, a friend with a bad drug habit who had betrayed the Crew. Kevin stabbed him.
Brian found Tony, bleeding, tried to patch him up, realized he couldn’t get him out, and finally held him, weeping, while he died.
I wrote that scene a dozen times. Best friends in their final moments together. Betrayal. Violence. Devastation. Loss.
What did my seventh-grade novelist self know about such things? Only what she’d read, seen in movies, and imagined.
Imagined.
For the duration of the year we lived in Aptos, California, I imagined what it would be like to have a group of really cool skateboarder friends. Brian would lead them of course, with Tony as his best mate, Jason and Joel as identical twins, and Kevin, the Judas among them.
All those days in the window seat of the house in Aptos, scribbling in pencil into spiral notebooks imagining the day I’d be a novelist. My name on the cover of a book. My characters walking around in people’s heads. Thirteen-year-old me building the foundation of my ambition. A dream.
And this year, it’s been realized.
I have a book. It’s not Tony bleeding in a skate ramp cave, but it is Tony bleeding, dying, and Brian’s loss. His regret. His shame.
It’s a hard book to read, I’m told, because it’s so sad. And yet I don’t feel sad by it. I’m glad to have released it. Freed it. Freed them all to breathe among the readers like feathery seeds of dandelions adrift on the breeze.
In freeing them, I also feel free. And nervous (will they like it?). And proud (look what I made!). And relieved. This thing I’ve been working at, this thing I thought one day I’d do, I did it.
Here’s the link to the book’s site. And where you can buy it on Amazon. And the Launch Day event on Facebook. There will be giveaways and behind-the-scenes and merriment and Q&As and suchness. Find me on Instagram for videos. Check out the trailer here.
More than anything, though, even if you never buy my book, find that dream you had that time and figure out how to make it happen. Because there’s a fulfillment beyond comparison in doing so.
