bergmanns:
Ezra was not athletically inclined. He never had been athletically inclined. Even as a kid he’d preferred crouching in the dirt to watch ants parade back to their nests with crumbs of food or filling in the lines of a coloring book to tetherball or red rover, but skating had always been the exception. He wasn’t even sure he could completely rule it a sport. Sports weren’t fun. Sports usually ended up with him getting knocked into the dirt by a guy three times his size. If he got hurt skating it was because he’d made a mistake or he’d been too ambitious. It was his fault, not the inescapable consequence of having the constitution of an uncooked spaghetti noodle.
His board had been stored away for the winter, either resting against his desk or on his legs as he painted a new design on its belly. But now the clouds were clear enough to see slivers of blue cushioned between the clouds and the snow had melted away just enough to leave the playground of Broadripple’s back stairwell clear for skating. It was against the rules to skate on campus, but Ezra found that people rarely populated the back staircase. To anyone else, all it had was a pretty dismal view of a soccer field and the outcrop of trees behind a fence. But to Ezra there was a plethora of rails, stairs, and stretches of pavement for him to explore.
He wound up for a kickflip, board spinning beneath his feet before the wheels clapped back down on the pavement. He careened, nearly tipping over before he righted his balance. Ezra laughed for what felt like the first time in ages.
“Out of practice, I guess.” He pushed his foot off the ground to accelerate, winding back to where his companion lingered at the stairs. “You know how to grind a rail?”
Griffin had an obsession with Ezra Bergmann. More specifically - his art. It was good and it was different and Griffin wanted to plaster it on the pages of his magazine. But every time he poked around the Art Room, Ezra shut him down. He’d insist that his art wasn’t for mass public consumption, which would send Griffin on a rant about how he and Ella were hardly consumerists, but that hardly did much to sway Ezra toward him.
They were both loners of a sort, but they reacted to the world in very different ways. Ezra shrunk away, hiding himself in the shadows. Griffin forced everyone to acknowledge him, tilting his head back and shouting I EXIST AND IT DOES NOT MATTER TO ME WHETHER YOU LIKE THAT OR NOT. Despite this, there was more they had in common than the things that made them different. Apparently skateboarding was one of those things.
“I used to,” Griffin said from where he sat on a concrete step, having invited himself along when he’d caught Ezra in the hall with a board under his arm. “It’s been a minute, ‘cause my uncle broke my board over the Summer trying to move a life-sized Bigfoot into the foyer of our house, but...” He stood, rolling his eyes and shrugging. “If you wanted to watch me try, there are worse things than bloody noses.”














