QUOTE : I wished Adam weren’t jumping in for his turn.<br />Because watching Adam wakeboard was not relaxing. He wasn’t careful when wakeboarding. Or in general. He was the opposite of careful. His life was one big episode of <i>Jackass.</i> He would do anything on a dare, so the older boys dared him a lot. My role in this game was to run and tell their mom. If I’d been able to run faster when we were kids, I might have saved Adam from a broken arm, several cracked ribs, and a couple of snake bites.<br />Knowing this, it might not make a lot of sense that Mr. Vader let us wakeboard for the marina. But we’d come to wakeboarding only gradually. When we first started out, it was more like, <i>Look at the very young children on water skis! How adorable.</i> One time the local newspaper ran a photo of me and Adam waterskiing double, each of us holding up an American flag. It’s okay for you to gag now. I can take it. <br />But Mr. Vader was no fool. He understood things changed. After the second time Adam broke his collarbone, Mr. Vader put us under strict orders not to get hurt, because it was bad for business. Customers might not be so eager to buy a wakeboard and all the equipment if they witnessed our watery death. To enforce this rule, the punishment for bleeding in the boat was that we had to clean the boat. Adam cleaned the boat a lot last summer.