"I always just wanted to be a hairstylist," Thompson explains on the opening day of a shop she's running with her boyfriend, Ryan Wickman, on South Coast Highway in Oceanside, Calif.

The store is called Ghetto Skateboard Shop, and her co-owner boyfriend is the kid who taught her how to skate back when she was growing up in Mammoth, Calif. But Wickman just skates for fun now. Thompson is the sponsored, traveling, getting-paid-to-ride- a-skateboard half of the couple. This summer, she quit her job as a hairstylist to prepare for the upcoming "All Girl Skate Jam" in San Diego. It's the first and only all-girl pro tour.

Thompson and Wickman met when she was 15 and he was really into skateboarding. "Hardly any girls were skating that I knew of," she says. "I grew up in Mammoth, and I know I was the only girl skater there. It would have been better if there were more girls, 'cause it was a little odd. But it was fun, so I learned anyway."

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