Teenage Riot

All of us were boys only some were taller or already in high school, and almost nothing else mattered but to learn some new trick, to pull off something we saw in a skate video, wind cutting around our bodies when we flew off the lip of a ramp, grabbed the board and twisted into a 180, kicking a leg out and landing it, the only way to run through the neighborhood was to run through it together, flipping off cops and skinheads, I almost don't even remember girls but a vague sense of the taste of bubble gum and how they smelled so different from us, sitting in some kid's basement drinking his parents' vodka, we grew out our bangs, moved in a pack, jumped in when some one of us got jumped, so when a man we had never seen before came up and started beating on Simon, one of us dropped his skateboard, walked over to the man like someone walking into a bank and stabbed him. The man, startled, sat down, right there on the asphalt, right in the middle of his new consciousness, kind of looking around.