Crash and his best friend Mike Deluca make a sport of teasing Penn at every opportunity and Penn is so pure, so clueless (or so true to his Quaker principles) he acts as though he does not notice.
Penn is not entirely a wimp -- like Crash, he is a good runner. Crash tries to beat him whenever they run, because he hates to loose. But Crash begins to reevaluate his priorities when his grandfather Scooter has a stroke. Scooter came to live with the Coogans to help take care of Crash and his sister, and Crash relates to Scooter's tough old navy style. Crash is devastated when Scooter becomes sick, and wishes he could do something -- eventually, he realizes what that 'something' is. Crash learns that Penn is desperate to run in the Penn Relays, "the oldest, biggest, and best relay track meet in the world" that is held near where the boys live in Pennsylvania (Spinelli 143). Penn wants his great-grandfather, for whom he is named, to watch him run in the relays while he is still alive....
Crash learns that Penn actually comes from a very wealthy family and that his great-grandfather was once a former track star.
So Crash does the unthinkable -- he loses a race so Penn can run in the relays and his grandfather can see him before he dies. This shows how much Crash has changed over the course of the book. Crash was once hyper-competitive and thought that being second meant you were nothing. But by losing the race, Crash wins something much more -- he wins a true friend in the form of Penn, and abandons the cruelty he showed towards Penn, along with his friend Mike who egged him on. By the end of the book, Crash can not believe he went along with the terrible pranks Mike played on Penn, like soaking him with water until Penn became ill, and because Crash has become a nicer person, he ends the book by getting the girl of his dreams, Penn's friend and a fellow cheerleader.
Works Cited
Spinelli, Jerry. Crash. New York: Yearling, 1997.
