Whip It Read Online Free Page A

and dialing away. I can feel the whole store watching our little drama, rooting for me. I want to tell them to keep their expectations low.
    Brooke gets Earl on the phone and completely blindsides him with her propagandistic spin. Classic Brooke.
    “Hi, sugar, it’s me. Would you mind telling your sixteen-year-old daughter why it is inappropriate for Christians such as ourselves to buy one-hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar shoes from people who support drug dealers?” Brooke asks in her tone that tells my father “you’re either with Brooke or against Brooke.” And Earl never wants to be against Brooke. Ever. She hands me the phone and smugly mouths “good luck.”
    “Dad, it is so not even like that—”
    “Girl, what do you need with a-hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar shoes?” he interrupts.
    “I’m helping pay, and that is so not the point!” I counter.
    “Is to me.” He sighs. “Look, I don’t have time to play referee. I gotta Mexican family in the middle of purchasing a full living room suite. You know those people pay cash. I gotta close this deal, so whatever your mom decides is fine by me.” He hangs up.
    And just like that, this day has officially become a major suck-a-thon.
    On the drive home, I refuse to sit up front with my oppressor. I hang in the backseat, furiously plotting all the ways I could commit suicide and really break her heart. I imagine my funeral: the music, the casket, the flowers (all white calla lilies). And then it occurs to me that if I die my mother will get her ultimate wish. She’ll get to dress me. And that thought just pisses me off even more. I vow to stay alive in protest.
    I look down and discover that I’m still holding one of many band flyers I grabbed before leaving Atomic City, advertisements for concerts I’ll never get to attend. At least I can use them to decorate my room.
    A lime-green flyer catches my eye—a fab picture of a tough girl in ’70s-style roller skates, fishnet tights, and a shredded miniskirt (a fashion statement I fully support). The ad is not for a band, but for a Roller Derby league. It reads:
Skirts, Skates, & Scrapes!
ALL THE OLD-SCHOOL SKILLS
WITH A NEW PUNK-ROCK ATTITUDE

Come See
THE LONE STAR DERBY GIRLS
AUSTIN’S ALL-GIRL ROLLER DERBY LEAGUE

THE HOLY ROLLERS VS. THE FIGHT CREW
HALFTIME CONCERT BY THE CHIMNEY SWEEPS

This ain’t no cheerleading clinic, y ’all!
     
    Okay, I’m not exactly sure what this whole Roller Derby thing even is, but some inner alarm goes off inside me, and I know I have to check it out.
    I glance at my mom in the front seat, blithely singing along to her bad CD as she drives closer and closer to Bodeen, taking me farther and farther from my soul-mate city.
    And I think, Fuck you and your Céline Dion Muzak. The sun is quickly setting on the days when I need your permission to leave Bodeen. From now on, I’ll go to Austin if I feel like it. Just try and stop me!

Hell on Wheels
     
     
     
     
    M ajor development on the transportation front—Pash’s parents gave her a car on the first day of school (proof they’re a thousand times cooler than Brooke & Earl).
    Thanks to the Pashmobile, I can now retire from school bus–riding hell. Yes, to all you freshmen in the back row who think armpit farts are the height of hilarity, to the quartet of Corbi wannabes applying gobs of cheap, stinky perfume, to the hicks who serenade me each morning with your country-music-inspired gangsta rap (a crime against humanity, trust me), and, yes, even to Mortimor—you bus-driving fool, you, with your mismatched polyester socks and government-issued hearing aids—I bid you all adieu. (Thank God. I thought this day would never come.)
    Seriously, I had the single freakiest bus route in the history of freaky bus routes. And not freaky good, just freaky freaky. I know technically we are “all God’s children,” but one look at the people on my bus and you couldn’t help but conclude God has some seriously f’ed-up