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 Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 3:35 pm
Fish was late for their first class, which in the book of Crowley meant that his friend hadn't been there when he'd gotten there. This would normally cause puzzlement, but today it caused annoyance because he was all ready to tell Fish about this cool sport he'd heard about on the television. Parkour, it was called, and it looked like a ton of fun, like if you took soccer and running and, heck, every sport in the world and balled it all up into one great big awesome. He absolutely had to tell Fish. Parkour spoke to him, called his name, Crowley, Crowley!
He realized he was probably a bit too excited for the topic at hand and settled back into his chair to wait out the last five minutes before class with sports fantasies, and just before the bell rang, he heard someone come in the door. Turning to look, he saw Fish, except Fish had this weird light blue thing on his arm. A cast?! What the hell had he done?
Crowley fidgeted in his seat until the teacher looked back to the board and started a long lecture. He turned to Fish then, and with the deadly intensity of a predator who's captured his prey, he asked in a hushed voice, "What the heck happened to your arm?!"
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Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 3:52 pm
Fish beamed at Crowley in a way that totally said 'have I got a story for you'. "I broke it," he informed his friend, rapping his knuckles against the cast. He lowered his voice, afraid the teacher might turn around and yell at them.
"It was so cool!" he enthused. "You know the main stairwell?" he asked. "So, I was looking around school for things to surf on, because you can surf on water and roads with the right board so I figured you have to be able to surf on other stuff, too, yeah? So I took off my shoes and climbed up on the banister and surfed down it and it was so cool."
He scribbled down a note about the year Barton was founded.
"Until, of course, the part where I fell off and this meanyface named Ylaine threatened to tell a teacher what I was doing. And when I fell I broke my wrist. It hurt soooooo bad. But the surfing part was amazing."
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Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 6:18 pm
"Yeah," said Crowley, leaning in for the story. What about the main stairwell? It was stairs. What did it have to do with Fish breaking his arm? Surfing, yeah, he knew that, they'd gone surfing sort of with Feely, but he hadn't known you could surf on the street. It sounded like something fun to do, he would have to check it out.
He was dumbfounded. And amazed. And envious. He was planning to do the same thing once class got out. "Down the banister," he echoed; he never would have thought of that. Not in a million and five years. Unlike his friend, notes were completely forgotten. Who cared about the founding of the Guard when there was banister-surfing?
With a nod, he agreed, "It must've been. I wanna try it."
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Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 6:42 pm
"It woulda been even better if I hadn't lost my balance at the very end," agreed Fish, also quickly losing interest in what year the town wall was constructed. "We can go during lunch," he continued, "No one watches the staircase. You can try it."
The teacher turned around. Fish looked down at his paper and scribbled something about an early mayor and waited for her to look away again.
"You've got better balance than me, anyway," he conceded when they were free to talk again. "You could probably make it all the way down."
He had no problem admitting Crowley was better than him, but only because they both knew it to be true.
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Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 7:21 pm
"Cool," he said in a hushed tone, already imagining the triumph in store. There was nothing Crowley Howl couldn't do if it was sports-related, not one thing. Well, nothing he had encountered yet, and he hadn't yet conceived of or attempted to play a sport that he couldn't win. He was too busy daydreaming to pretend to take down notes on something he didn't care about.
He shrugged, trying to be nonchalant but there was a kind of gloating joy in his eyes. "You're better'n me in the water, though," he said. "Still can't swim, Mother's scared I'll drown myself."
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Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 7:35 pm
"Lame," groaned Fish, sighing through his gills. He knocked his cast gingerly against the table for emphasis. "I get this thing off in a month or something," he explained. "It'll be the middle of June by then. You should come over and I'll teach you."
Fish was confident he would be an excellent teacher. And having a best friend who couldn't swim was positively unacceptable for the aquatic boy.
"Feely said she an' Levi would help me pick out a board of my own," he continued, "But I don't know if they're gonna do it any time soon 'cuz I can't exactly get this wet."
He made a frustrated face and tapped the cast gingerly against the table again. Clearly he was trying to be badass but being badass hurt quite a bit.
"So what's up with you?" he asked.
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Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 8:11 pm
"And stupid," said Crowley, "I jumped out a tree yesterday and didn't get hurt." It was true. And while he hadn't checked to see how long he could hold his breath, he knew that he wasn't exactly easily breakable. As for the whole learning-to-swim deal, that sounded good, so he groaned, "Can it be June yet?"
No, it was apparently still mid-May. What a crapshoot. "Can I go with you, when you do go? Sounds like fun." And it would be something to do on a hot summer day. He was willing to bet there wasn't much to do at home during the summer, other than soccer with the teabots.
Then Fish asked what he'd been up to and that was just the end of any pretense at paying attention. "I read about this sport," he said really quietly, which only served to highlight the intensity of his expression. "It's called free-running, or parkour. I saw some videos on the TV. It's amazing, we've got to learn to do it. Seriously."
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Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 8:21 pm
"I wish I had your luck," grumbled Fish, rubbing his arm sourly at Crowley's mention of jumping out of a tree. It wasn't that he resented the other boy for his athletic prowess - he was just the tiniest bit jealous. Also, he was going to play up this cripple thing for as much as it was worth.
His eyes lit up at the words 'free-running' and 'parkour'. Even the name sounded cool. He paused as the teacher turned around momentarily, and then hissed, "Come on! Tell me more about it!"
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Posted: Tue May 19, 2009 12:41 pm
He hardly called it luck, but wasn't going to argue with the cripple. It would be sort of like kicking a puppy. Or kicking the injured Fish, which is exactly what it would be if he actually deemed to kick his friend. Which he wouldn't.
Now it was his turn for a story. "I looked it up in the computer lab yesterday," he said out of the corner of his mouth. "It's like, an art or something. It's moving fast even if there's all kinds of stuff in the way, like walls or bushes. I saw videos, these guys were crazy fast, like it would take them five minutes to go over all these walls and stuff it was insane. We have to learn it, it is imperative."
Then he paused. "I'll teach you when your arm is better," he said. "It's also called, like, l'art du displacement or something."
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Posted: Tue May 19, 2009 1:38 pm
"Dude," whispered Fish, eyes lighting up, "That sounds awesome."
He pushed his notebook aside, thoroughly distracted. "We need to go to the computer lab and check this out, like, pronto." He glanced over at the teacher. "I don't think we can get away from Boring McBoringface, though."
"Do you think we could start while my arm's still all wrapped up?" he asked. "The doctor said it should stop hurting in a few days." Impatience, thy name is Phineas.
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Posted: Tue May 19, 2009 6:22 pm
He nodded solemnly and twice. "It is," agreed Crowley, who also really wanted to go to the computer lab, though it was more to show off what he'd learned than anything. He looked thoughtfully at the cast, then up towards the teacher. Then he looked back to the cast.
"You could tell the teacher your arm really hurt," he said, "And then I'll pretend I'm going to the bathroom, or something. We could go to the computer lab now and not wait for recess or after school."
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Posted: Tue May 19, 2009 6:38 pm
"You think she'd let me?" asked Fish.
Well, it was worth a try. He raised his uninjured hand and waited for the teacher to turn around. When she called on him, he did his best to sound like he was in agony. "Uhhh, I think the tylenol they gave me is wearing off," he groaned. "Can I go to the office? My arm hurts really bad."
The teacher gave him a nod of dismissal after considering it for a moment. Fish, still playing the invalid, got up from his desk and wobbled towards the door. Once outside, he walked a few paces down the hall and leaned nonchalantly against the wall, waiting for Crowley to join him.
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Posted: Fri May 22, 2009 7:43 pm
"Worth a go," Crowley muttered, turning to face forward since it seemed like the right thing to do. He waited until Fish was given permission to leave (it was a very good impression of nerve-burning pain, he figured) and then stared at the clock impatiently for a minute and a half. He wanted to wait for two minutes, but couldn't wait any longer after that and snuck off to grab the bathroom pass, waited for the teacher to acknowledge that he was going, and dart outside.
He grinned with relief. "That didn't go too bad," he said, and he started to lead the way off to the computer lab. "What if someone's watching the lab? Do we say we have a project, d'you reckon?"
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Posted: Fri May 22, 2009 7:56 pm
Fish had extremely limited experience with the computer lab, but it sounded like a good enough idea to him. He nodded. "I bet that'd work," he agreed. Almost anything could be passed off as a project, considering how many different subjects the students took and how little conversation there seemed to be between teachers sometimes.
He started off down the hallway, then paused and looked hesitantly back at Crowley. "It's this way, right?" he asked, just to make sure. Getting them lost wouldn't do them any good.
"Um," he said, "You'd better go first."
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Posted: Mon May 25, 2009 3:40 pm
"Yeah, I think," said Crowley, who generally went outside after school to play some sport or another and wasn't sure which way the Center's computer lab was, either. He was pretty sure that it was this way, down the hall to like the left or something. After a moment's thoughtful hesitation, he started off down to the left. His stride didn't resemble anything so much as a childlike, unrefined prowl, a sort of rolling gait that was more of a full-body motion than everything.
It took a little longer than expected, but eventually he found the computer lab (luckily unoccupied, though there was chalk smudging indicating that either the cleaning crew had missed it or someone had just left). After sitting down at a computer in the back and logging on, he pulled up YouTube and typed in (slowly, and kind of clumsy) "parkour". Clicking on the fourth video down, he leaned back to watch it.
"See," he said, like that was all that he needed to show Fish.
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