Author's Note: Hey, I'm writing a story about my third favorite character, Joey. Yeah, my top three are Seto Kaiba, Yugi Mutou/Yami (they're tied), and Joey Wheeler. What a combo! Anyway, I'm happy to bring you Street Scars.

Disclaimer: Shouldn't they be called something like the "I dun owns?" I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh!

[.]=Narration done by Joey.

[My name is Joey Wheeler, in case you didn't already know that. I'm a street kid, a rough one. I'm a loner too. I don't have a gang, though I do have a group of friends, but they come into play later. What drove me to the streets? My dad's a drunk and my sister and mother have moved far away. The streets are home. They judge solely on how tough you are. Only the strongest survive. But once you prove you to be strong, they don't care who you are or what you've done. They care for you. They protect you. They don't condemn you. They sometimes fight you, but they always make up for it later. The streets are home. All you have to do is talk the talk, walk the walk, and be streetwise and cautious. For if you don't, the streets'll bite, and when they do, they bite hard.]

Joey Wheeler, an eight-year-old street kid stepped out of his apartment. It was a brisk spring morning, just right for, well, pretty much everything.

What was Joey good at? Anything that had to do with the streets. He knew the alleys and streets of Domino almost as well as the back of his hand. He was one of those loner street punks, no gang, no group of cronies, just him and his fists. He wore the baggy t-shirt and pants, along with the skateboarding shoes, for he was also a skateboarder, and a very good one at that. It was one of the only things he had to look forward to after school.

Joey put his trusty skateboard on the ground, stepped on top of it, and pushed off. He felt the familiar wind whip through his golden blond hair. His brown eyes were intent on the road in front of him.

He was one of the toughest kids out there. He was very streetwise, and he knew the street lingo. With no class or natural born grace, except in fights, or skateboarding, Joey seemed to be the perfect street kid. Every punk on the streets of Domino wanted to be like him. They knew that sometimes, he went days at a time without even going home. But there was a very good reason for that, considering that his home life was crud and his sister had been taken away from him just a year before.

He knew what he was going to do after school; he was going to go down to the skate park and board there. He knew that he would have some kind of competition, but he liked that. It seemed that everyday, people would come out just to the informal competition between the boarders, roller skaters, and bicyclers. This wasn't a kiddy park; this one was a serious park. Everyone competed against another just for fun. There were no prizes, no medals, just the satisfaction of calling yourself top dog.

Joey dug through the school day, all the while thinking about the skateboarding park near the apartment building he lived in.

"Class, it's art time," the teacher said cheerfully.

JOY, thought Joey sarcastically.

Art class wasn't one of his favorite subjects. It's not that he wasn't good at it, on the contrary, he wasn't half bad. But it was that it entailed walking all the way to the prefabs on near the playground. And if that wasn't bad enough, the teacher was MUCH too cheery for Joey's liking. She just went on and on and on, wasting his time to think about the routine he was going to do at the park that afternoon. Most of the time, he wished she would just drop dead. They sat down in their seats in the musty prefabs.

The prefabs always smelled like, well, Joey wasn't exactly sure what they smelled like. It didn't smell like his apartment, that was one good thing. Even though Joey had long since gotten used to the sickening smell of alcohol, sometimes he would come home and it would be strong enough to make him gag. But back to the prefabs. It smelled like, like new wood and dirty shoes. That was it. He drew a skateboard in class. The teacher remarked that it was all he ever seemed to draw. He just wanted to get out of there.

Finally, the bell rang and Joey set off from school on his skateboard, never suspecting that one of the things that would change his life forever was waiting just around the bend.