8 Juvenile crime Before you read Have you ever done anything risky for fun? Take five minutes to describe your experience in writing. Put your text in an envelope and give it to your teacher. Your teacher will give you back your letter, unopened, after you have read and discussed the following text. Reading: Paranoid Park – Part 1 Read the extract from Blake Nelson’s young adult novel Paranoid Park. While reading, try to find out as much as you can about Alex, the narrator (= storyteller). Take notes. This is the story of Alex, a 16-year-old from Portland, Oregon. Alex is from one of the city’s better neighbourhoods, but feels attracted to the rough downtown skater scene. Dear … , I’m here at my uncle Tommy’s beach house. It’s about nine o’clock at night. I’m upstairs, by myself. I’ve got my pen, my spiral notebook … I don’t know how to start. I don’t even know if I can do this. But I will try. It can’t make anything worse … outside it’s raining and dark. All right. Just went downstairs and made some hot chocolate. Dude, chill out and write something. That’s me talking to myself. I just have to start at the beginning, take it easy, take it slow … Paranoid Park. That’s where it started. Paranoid Park is a skatepark in downtown Portland. It’s under the Eastside Bridge, down by the old warehouses. It’s an underground “street” park, which means there are no rules, nobody owns it, and you don’t have to pay to skate. A lot of the best skaters come there and it’s also kind of a street-kid hangout. There’s all these stories, like how a skinhead was killed there once. That’s why they call it Paranoid Park. My first connection to Paranoid was through Jared Fitch. He’s a pretty insane senior, but one of the best skaters at our school. Last summer we skated every day. I wasn’t on Jared’s level yet, but I was learning. He liked being the teacher and showing me stuff. During the last week of summer, Jared said we should check out Paranoid Park. I had heard of it, but I had thought it was out of my league. But when I said I didn’t think I was ready, Jared laughed and said something like, “Nobody’s ever ready for Paranoid Park.” So we went. I was nervous, but I was also kinda excited. Skating Paranoid. That was something you could tell people about. We drove over the Eastside Bridge. The park itself was actually smaller than I expected, and also kind of trashed. There were old beer cans around, and garbage, and graffiti. But there was something mysterious about it. There weren’t many people – a couple of guys were skating, a dozen or so more stood along the wall to our right. I had seen hard-core skater guys here and there downtown. But I had never seen them all in one place. The centre of the true skate universe. A few weeks later: Alex is already tired of the new school year, tired of his parents’ constant fighting, and tired of Jennifer, a girl who likes him. To get away from it all, he wants to go back to Paranoid Park with Jared. But Jared wants to spend the night with a girl. Angry, Alex decides to go alone. At Paranoid Park that night, he runs into a rough-looking skater clique and hangs out with them for a while. Then one of them, Scratch, has an idea. 1 2 Fact file Juvenile crime in the US • 35% of all crimes committed by juveniles in the US fall under the category of personal assault (e.g. sexual assault, injury, murder). Property damage (e.g. arson, theft) accounts for 29% of all under-18 crimes. • Girls are responsible for 40% of all juvenile crimes in the US. F 5 10 15 20 25 30 100 Crime and suspense Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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