RIDING AWAY

CHAPTER 1 - Joyeuses Fêtes!

Nine months later...

"Hey guys!" Michelle Moritz greeted Riley and Shawn before glaring at me and mumbling "Loser!" the way she did every day, with her thumb and forefinger forming an L.

My friends grunted as they always did while I simply showed her my middle finger.

Riley, had been louder than Shawn so I guessed he was regretting hooking up with her yet again that week.

To be honest, I was partly to blame with her strong dislike of me.

She'd tried to be friendly with me freshman year, and even invited me to a pajama party at her house. The truth was, I hadn't minded the stuffing ourselves with ice-cream and cookies while watching cheesy movies in her own home theatre part, but I'd thought the whole makeover session was pretty gruesome so while they'd all been painting tiny green unicorns on their toenails, I had escaped outside with my board for some much needed fresh air.

What I hadn't anticipated was that her older brother, Cole, and his friends were having a party of their own at the pool house at the same time and that my little disappearing act would be interpreted as a pathetic attempt at getting noticed by some of the most popular guys at school.

I'd tried explaining the truth but she wouldn't have any of it and had started calling me Loser the following Monday. The nickname had stuck, especially after the whole Liam debacle of last year.

"I'm so glad we're done with school for two entire weeks after today..." I sighed in an exaggerated way before sitting down at our usual table by the skateboard ramp. "So about this surprise Boot camp..." I started before putting a chip in my mouth. "When will you tell me where we're going?" I asked as nonchalantly as I could, hoping to get a real answer this time.

I frowned when Riley almost choked on his food at my question. His reaction was pretty excessive considering I'd asked variations of that very question every day for the last couple of weeks, since they'd announced that I had to get ready to be mind-blown by the next camp we'd attend at winter break.

Extreme sports camps were our thing.

That's where we'd first met when Mickey Faulkner, skateboarder extraordinaire, and accessorily Shawn's father, had decided to organize the very first Tiny Champs' X-camp.

He'd advertised the camp for kids aged between six and ten, and twenty-seven nine and ten years old kids had signed up on top of Riley and I who were five at the time. When he saw that we were still alive after one day of skateboarding and acrobatic jumps in a foam pit, when several others had gone home in tears already, he'd decided to bring Shawn along the following day.

The three of us had been friends ever since.

If Shawn had decided to walk in the steps of his father and to stick to skateboarding with a bit of surfing on the side, Riley and I had fallen in love with snowboarding when a couple of years later Shawn's dad, whom Riley and I now called Uncle Mickey per his request, had taken us along on one of their many family weekends.

I hadn't set a foot in a ski resort in nine months, and I'd spent both Spring break and the entire summer alone in my small house brooding about Cruella, Liam and beautiful Carla Broise, so Riley and Shawn had deemed it necessary to organize a Blake intervention which they'd named, Free Blake.

I'd tried to tell them that the obvious comparison they were thus making between that albeit gracious but still pretty fat orca and me wasn't especially flattering but they'd just ignored me, promising me an extraordinary and life-changing experience I'd never be able to forget.

"Are we going to Disneyworld?" I teased them when they still hadn't answered me a few seconds later.

Riley cleared his throat uneasily.