Parkour

Flashback: Run Before Walk

Maybe I should back up a little, so that you understand me a little better. My name is Jake Raine, and I am the last remaining member of my family.

A bunch of us were alive and present at my birth, but almost immediately the accidents and tragedies began. Car wrecks, robberies gone wrong, falling pianos, and hunting accidents devastated my family's numbers until it was just my parents and myself.

As you can imagine this left me with a depressing childhood, but there was no day more depressing than my 17th birthday, when my own parents died in an house fire. I had been out of town on a trip to the capital, but I received the news almost instantly.

It was a road trip with my parkour buddies, Kevin, Joe, Kat, and Mar. We were going to freerun across every major city in America. We had started in the NYC and had already hit the northern coastal cities. We were going by the Lincoln Memorial when I got a call. I put in my earbud, and said, "Jake Raine speaking."

The news that followed stopped me in my tracks.

As the one runner of the group who never ever stopped, this stopped everyone else. Even random tourists stopped to see what was wrong. I was comatose to the world. I was alone, the last Raine, the only one left.

A mix of emotions washed over me like a tsunami of raw feelings. I didn't know what to do. I was totally still for a few seconds, ignoring my friends, then I remembered my parents favorite saying, and last words to me.

"Run before walk."

As the words filled my head a tear rolled down my cheek. My friends were totally dumbfounded by this, a tear, from the stone, from Jake Raine.

As the tear fell from my cheek, I took off at a run, the hardest, most dangerous, fastest run of my life. I could feel my friends chasing me but they couldn't keep up. Soon I was totally alone in my run, with no real destination in mind. All I could think was run before walk.

I still have no idea today just how long or far I ran it what route I took, but I do know that I stopped at the old van that served as our ride across the country. Kevin, Joe, Kat, and Mar were already there, tired and sweaty from a day if running and trying to find me.

I stopped outside the van and knocked on the door. When I saw Mar peak her head up, looking vaguely like a zombie in her facemask, and her reaction that shattered the hardened substance, I knew that they hadn't expected to see me again.

I explained what had happened to the group as I climbed in the van, or tried to as Kat alternated between hugging me and strangling me. By the time what had happened was made clear, the only one spared if tears was myself.

There was no sleep that night despite the weariness we all felt.

Now as I lay on the floor of the Space Shack looking at the insanely beautiful girl glaring at me expectantly, all I could remember or think about was that day. And finally after two years of running and a crazy morning complete with the ghostly appearance of my entire family and a near death experience, I broke down and cried for my parents.

I couldn't respond to the mystery hottie's question. All I could do was whisper the words "run before walk."