Right. Let’s do this.

Helmet—double-check.

Mouth guard—check.

Visor—down.

Pads—tight.

I restrap my gloves and grip my wheel rims. Breathe. Dad won’t be home from class for at least an hour. A good daughter wouldn’t want her father to worry.

All Dad’s ramps and jumps and angled steel grind rails made from old I beams have just been sitting out here getting dusty since he gave it all up. Someone has to use them.

Three, two, one … drop!

Whoosh. Wheels. Adrenaline.

One glorious, wind-rushing moment.

I lean. Find that perfect balance point. Hit the landing.

Then my wheels skid sideways, spinning me out. Ow.

Ale runs over. “You did it!” she yells. “Sort of. What’s my name?”

I push up, spitting out a mouthful of the sand that padded my wipeout, and squint at the hand she’s waving in my face. “Um … Ale? Rhymes with sail?” This is how people who don’t know her usually say her nickname. It’s actually pronounced Ah-lay.

“Ha-ha,” she says.

“Just kidding.” I tell Ale to grab a wheel, and we get me rocked upright.

She grins. “That was so cool.”

It totally was, even though I dumped at the end. Now that Dad’s so busy fixing cars all day, and running to night class three times a week, and taking in extra work here at his home shop … what he doesn’t know won’t even worry him.

I will stick that landing.

Then I feel my left handrim wobble. “Crap.”

Correction—I’ll stick that landing if my raggedy wheelchair doesn’t fall apart on me first. I spin the wheel a few times, testing the handrim—yep. Definitely a loose screw and some bent metal.

“You want to try and fix it?” Ale asks. I keep my repair kit right in my top desk drawer, and basic patch jobs are easy enough. I’m tempted. After hitting that air once, I’m totally hungry for more. But Dad won’t be that late.

“Let’s call it for today,” I decide. “Got a few orders backed up, anyway.”

Sidewalks aren’t exactly a thing out where we live, but my yard has more square feet of pavement than anywhere this side of the Dollar General parking lot. Ale’s family owns a paving company, and my dad swapped them two years of free truck maintenance to pour glassy smooth walkways from our house to his shop and a bunch of places in between. One even cuts through the scrubby patch of woods to Ale’s place.

We hurry up the long ramp to my porch and hurtle inside so fast the Spanish moss wreath Nonny made almost falls off the front door. If my grandmother saw me now, she’d make a sour-lemon face and predict I’ll crash across the living room and through the opposite wall one day. It’s a double-wide, Nonny, I giggle under my breath, imagining her right here, not a cardboard box. Nonny would drop her dentures if she’d seen my little sand-eating stunt back there. Especially if she saw how we got me and my chair up that quarter-pipe in the first place. There’s a metal work platform—a set of two portable steps with a railing—that Dad attached to the backside of the quarter-pipe back when we used to ride this ramp together. I can get up it myself, though it goes a lot faster with Ale there to pass up my chair instead of just hauling it up with the cobbled-together pulley system I usually use when I’m doing it solo.