“You’re frozen!” he yelps, jumping off the curb and pulling me up. “Come on, let’s get you inside somewhere.” He does this little step move, and his board flips right up into his hands.

“So, that was awesome.” I’ve never known anyone who really knew how to skate. A couple of my friends have longboards, sure, but that’s just to get around, not really for fun.

He crinkles his forehead. “All I did was pick it up.”

“Pretty sure you just worked some kind of skater magic and it flew into your hand. Do you do any other tricks?”

“Tricks?”

“Like, can you jump on stuff and slide across it?”

“Yes.” He laughs. “I can jump on stuff and slide across it.” He says it in a way that tells me these moves have actual names, but not in a way that makes me feel bad for not knowing them.

I tuck my jacket tighter around me. “Show me.”

“You’re freezing.”

“I can be cold for another minute or two. Show me.”

“Yeah?” he asks, like he’s shocked I want to know more about something that so clearly matters to him.

“Yeah,” I say, dropping onto one of the long marble ledges that run the length of the park. “Show me what you got.”

He slides his board forward and runs after it, picking up speed when he hops on and shoves off harder and faster than I ever could. His wheels tear across the asphalt, dipping and racing with every thrust of his foot as he jumps and flips the board in the air. If my ride was music, then his is a symphony, and I don’t want it to stop.

I clap—I can’t help it—and he spins the board around to face me with a whizzing sound. He shakes his head like I’m ridiculous and sends the board forward again, racing toward me.

I tuck my feet up to avoid a collision, but he just sticks his tongue out and lands a jump on the marble wall beside me, the middle of the board skidding down its length like he’s surfing. He flips the board off and lands on it without missing a beat, turning wide in the direction of the steps to slide down the rail onto the sidewalk below.

I stand up. I can just barely see the top of his head over the wall. He skates around and back up, doing the flippy thing again before coming to a stop right in front of me. He’s a little bit out of breath, his cheeks pink from exertion and the cold, and he looks at me through his hair, waiting.

I want to be cool. But I also want to totally fangirl. I settle on “That was friggin’ amazing.”