An Excerpt from Ski Stooges
"Just watch!" Justin shouted. He took off down the hill, doing parallel turns so effortlessly that I was pretty much ready to break both his legs out of sheer jealousy. How can a kid who can’t even walk a straight line on the sidewalk be so good on a ski hill?
Justin turn to look over his shoulder at the rest of us. "See, Jay-Jay!" he yelled. "It’s eeeeea--"
Maybe it wasn’t so easy after all.
While my brother was busy bragging and getting ready to stick out his tongue, he wasn’t
watching where he was going. Right in front of him was the padded support pole for the quad
lift. He didn’t hit the pole straight on, but did bounce against the side of it and flip
around so that he was skiing backwards...until he fell down.
"Ooohhh. Aaaahhh. Oooohh, I’m broken. I’m hurt!" he cried.
Chantal muttered something, probably taking Justin seriously. but it was Fred who went to
rescue my brother.
"Let me handle it," he declared in a voice that was pure show-off. Fred set off down the
hill, looking something like a scarecrow on two-by-fours as he raced towards the place where
Justin lay ooohing and aaahing in the snow.
"I’m coming," Fred called ahead.
He wasn’t kidding. For a minute it looked like he would ski right into my brother and cause
him a really serious injury. But somehow Fred managed to make a turn at the last second and
miss my brother.
That was a good thing for Justin, but it wasn’t so good for Fred. He had clearly learned a
thing or two about skiing recently, but one thing he hadn’t figured out was how to stop.
"Waadahooee!" he cried as he went racing past my brother. A moment later he skied right off
the trail.
"Yaaaahh!" was the next thing we heard, along with that peculiar sound made by an out of
control skier bouncing against pine trees: kthumpwhapwhapkthump!
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