“Move, kid! Cars need to get in there,” he said, even though there weren’t any cars around.

By the time I got up to the counter, the guy was so mad that he’d gone outside to yell at Ben. While he did that, I stole two chocolate bars. I didn’t even look at what kind they were. I just kept an eye on the camera on the wall while I put our drinks on the counter. When I reached into my pocket with one hand to get my money, I grabbed the two bars with the other hand so the camera couldn’t see. It was the most dangerous thing I ever did, except jumping into the gorge and being unsupervised at a ranch.

When handlebar guy came back, he stared at me hard, like he suspected me of stealing something. And I stared right back from inside my helmet, but my knees felt kind of wobbly. He couldn’t see my face properly and neither could the camera. It’s extremely easy to turn into a delinquent.

Outside, I gave Ben his drink and we got on our bikes and rode off. He didn’t put his hands on his handlebars. I tried to copy him but I nearly wiped out and I spilled half of my drink all over my hand and nearly fell over a bunch of times, but I pretended having sticky, freezing ice water all over my hand didn’t bother me. We rode all the way back to the school, where we went down some railings using his pegs and gapped the stairs and hit a few walls.

Then we started messing around in the dugout. Ben found a tennis ball and we threw it against the wall for a while and then we sat on the bench, just sort of being. It was relaxing.

“We went to visit my dad,” I said.

“How was it?” asked Ben.

“Lame.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I talked to my mom this morning.”

“How was that?” I asked.

“Kind of hard. She cried. She always cries.”

“Sorry,” I said. “My mom cries a lot too.”

Ben threw the ball up into the air and caught it. Over and over.

“If I go see her, I might not be able to come back,” he said.

“That’s rough.” I thought about saying more about my dad and the visit, but I thought it was better to listen. And I didn’t tell him he should go visit his mom because then I would lose my only real friend here. That was selfish, I guess.

Ben stopped throwing the ball and just held it on his chest as he stared at the roof of the dugout. Someone had written a bunch of swear words up there. We both noticed it at the same time.

“Must be hard to write curse words up high like that,” he said.

“Do you think they brought a ladder?”