Falling Over Sideways

by Jordan Sonnenblick

“Again?” Ryder said. “Really? Again with the laughing? After all we’ve been through? How obnoxious are you?”

  I held up my hand like a STOP sign while I tried to catch my breath. “Wait,” I said. “I wasn’t laughing at you. I was just laughing because—never mind. But you totally have a shot.”

  His face lit up. I had never seen him look so sincerely happy before. “I do? For real?” Then he frowned. “You’d better not be setting me up. Because this wouldn’t be funny.”

  “Ryder, why do you think Regina sat at our lunch table all year when she didn’t know Roshni and totally hated me?”

  “Well, she doesn’t hate you anymore. And she only hated you because I—never mind.” He was blushing again.

  “It doesn’t matter. The point is, I have some inside info. Tell Regina how you feel.”

  Then Ryder grabbed me up in a huge bear hug that literally lifted my feet off the ground. When he put me down, he said, “Thank you.” It sounded oddly formal coming from him.

  I bowed and said, “You’re welcome. By the way, I already told Regina this, but if you happen to be in my lunch next year, you’re welcome to sit at my table. I’ll bring the Skittles.”

  As he turned to walk away, he asked, “Since when is it your table?”

  I smiled. There was the Ryder I knew.

  I was feeling daring on the last half day of my middle school career, so I wore fluorescent pink flip-flops, even though open-toed shoes are technically against our district dress code. All we were supposed to be doing all day was signing each other’s yearbooks, and everyone knew grades were already in, so I didn’t think the teachers were going to be cracking down too hard. Plus, I happen to love my fluorescent flops—they’re my go-to footwear for the dance studio, and I never get the chance to wear them at school.

  Leigh Monahan strutted in, late as usual, and her eyes immediately widened as they locked onto my feet. “I love your flip-flops, Claire!” she shouted from the doorway.

  For a moment, my mind raced: Was she trying to get me in trouble by drawing attention to my contraband footwear? Was she being sarcastic, as in the Great Boot Disaster? Or was there—gasp!—a chance she actually liked my shoes? And then I realized that Leigh Monahan’s opinion didn’t really have any power over me anymore.

  “Thanks,” I said, and smiled at her.

  She froze for a moment, then smiled back.

  One of the two random boys in front of me turned to the other and said, “Something just happened, right?”

  Roshni turned to me and rolled her eyes. “Boys!” she said. “They never know what’s going on. It’s amazing. Was your brother this dumb? I mean, not dumb dumb. I know he was smarter than you in middle school, but … wait, that came out wrong.”

  I put my hand on her knee. “Roshni,” I said. “Stop and think, then talk.” Ooh, that felt good, I thought.

  She took a deep breath. “What I’m trying to say is, the boys have to get smarter, don’t they?”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why do they have to get smarter?”

  “Well, like, look at Ryder. He learned how to talk to you. It only took him three years and a lockdown, but he finally got over his crush and—wait. I did not say that. I. Did. Not. Say. That.”

  “It’s all right. I knew about that, and it’s all over now.”

  “Okay. And then there’s Christopher. He learned how to connect with people.”

  I glanced over at Christopher, who was sitting in the far back corner of the classroom, rolling balls of glue, and then forming them into little armies on top of the radiator.

  “Well, sort of,” she said. But honestly, it was true. I thought about how Christopher had defended me during and after the Lockdown Incident. He had learned. In a lot of ways, he might have turned himself into the bravest kid I knew.

  “Plus, there’s another thing. I know it’s going to sound strange. In fact, I might be crazy. But I think the guys might not be, um … ”

  “What is it, Roshni?”

  Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I think the guys might not be drawing as many of their … uh … special pictures all over everything.”

  I smiled. “You think these guys are growing out of that? No, Roshni, I’m pretty sure you’re crazy.”

  Matthew’s hands were clenched around the steering wheel as if he was trying to choke it to death, and his face was chalk white. He was muttering something under his breath, too quietly for me to hear the words. We were on our way to our first Dads’ Dance rehearsal. I had thought I was going to be the nervous one, dancing with all the high school girls for the first time after being in the younger group all year, but Matthew was actually freaking out much more than I was.

  “What are you saying, Matthew?” I asked.

  He swallowed. It occurred to me that he might faint and swerve us off the road to our doom. “Babes in leotards. Babes in leotards. Babes in leotards.”

  “Oh, gross,” I said.

  “What? It’s my chant of hope. I’m focusing on the positive.”

  “Oh, because dancing with me is so negative? Thanks.”

  “No, Claire. Like much of human existence, this isn’t about you. The negative is that I don’t know anything about dancing.”

  “So? You’ll learn. You’re always telling me how easy dancing is compared to your sports. Now’s your chance to prove it. Besides, you’re great at everything. Miss Nina will probably hire you by the end of the night. Then you can hang out with all the babes in leotards you want.”

  He didn’t say anything more for a few minutes, until we were stopped in the parking lot of the dance school. Then he turned to me, and I saw his face was all scrunched up like it only gets when he is really, seriously nervous. I had seen the look the day he went to ask out his first girl, and the night before he took the SATs. “I’m serious. What if I suck?”

  I suddenly understood how serious this really was for him, and how big a deal it was that he was doing it for me. The key to Matthew was that he always had to be in control. That was why he needed to be perfect at everything. I had heard my parents say that to each other a thousand times when they thought nobody could hear them. Now he had agreed to step into this completely different new situation where his baby sister knew more than he did.

  I sighed. “Okay, listen. You aren’t going to be good compared to the girls. But you’re an amazing athlete. Of course you’ll be better than a lot of the dads. Plus, everybody in the audience is really only looking at their own husband and daughter, or whatever, right?”

  He nodded, slightly.

  “Oh, and one other thing.”

  “What?”

  “Babes. In leotards! Now come on.”

  As soon as we stepped into the studio, Katherine and Alanna rushed over and kind of cocooned around me, which was really nice. The dads mingled with the other dads, the dancers stood around with each other, and Matthew stood there alone, looking like he wanted to die.

  But then, suddenly, one of the older girls went over and put an arm around his shoulders. Another followed, and soon, my brother had a little harem of groupies. It was disgusting. I edged closer with Katherine and Alanna so I could hear what was going on.

  A girl named Gabrielle said, “Matty, you have nothing to worry about! When they ask you to do a pirouette, you just have to go like this!” Then she stood on the tips of her toes and executed a flawless ballet turn.

  Another, named Amber, said, “And if Miss Nina calls for a calypso, you just have to make sure you get a lot of hip rotation before you jump, like this!” Then she did a really good spinning jazz leap.

  “Or,” a third girl, named Elizabeth, chimed in, “you might have to do some tap moves. Here’s a shuffle ball change. Everybody?”

  Suddenly, there were five girls tap-dancing all around my brother, all chanting, “Shuffle! Ball! Change!”

  He still looked like he was going to die, but now I couldn’t tell whether it was from fear or happiness. A moment later, when the girls all stopped dancing
and started laughing, he said, “Wait. I’m not really going to have to do all this stuff, am I?”

  And I realized: Even with the girls hanging all over him, he had still been mostly just worrying about messing up the dance.

  “No,” Elizabeth said. “My dad weighs two hundred and eighty pounds, and he’s been doing this for the past three years. Do you think he’d keep coming back if he had to do leaps and big spin moves? Don’t worry. All the dads have to do is, like, step and clap to the beat. You’ll be fine. Unless you have one of the solos. Your sister didn’t sign you up for a solo, did she?”

  Matthew looked over at me. I just smiled.

  Of course Matthew didn’t have a solo. His job was to stand on a fake surfboard and pretend he was trying not to fall off in the beginning when all the dads were onstage without the girls, to be my partner for a 1960s-type dance in the middle, and finally, to skip with me under a limbo bar at the end. By the end of the dress rehearsal, he was fine. Plus, the high school girls loved him. He was like their mascot.

  On the way home that night, I thanked Matthew for being my partner.

  “Hey,” he said. “Babes in leotards.” But I knew it was more than that.

  As soon as I got in the shower that night, I started crying. I didn’t mean to. I hadn’t felt it coming or anything. Just, all of a sudden, I was overwhelmed with sadness because Matthew and I were dancing together onstage, having fun, and my father’s place had disappeared.

  I mean, he was obviously still with us, at home, gaining muscle and strength. His reading was coming along, his mood swings were mostly gone, and his face wasn’t even as droopy as it had been. He had even started sleeping in his own bedroom upstairs again. His recovery was better than we could have hoped for. But still, I was the one girl up there without her dad. It seemed wrong.

  How was he going to feel, watching that from the audience?

  Plus, there were so many stairs in the theater. And it was hard for him to walk sideways, so getting into his seat would be tough. AND I knew he hated speaking with people in public since the stroke, because he was embarrassed about his pauses and the words he couldn’t remember.

  It seemed almost mean of me to make him go.

  When I was dry and dressed, I went into my parents’ room. They were both there, sitting up in bed. “Dad,” I said, “if you don’t want to come to my recital, I would understand. I mean, I love you, and of course I want you there, but I know how hard stairs are for you, and … ”

  Then I burst out sobbing again, and put my head in my hands.

  “Oh, Claire,” he said, “Piggy.” I looked through my fingers and saw that he was smiling. “I would … never … miss you dancing. If they have to wheel me in, I’ll be there. You are my beautiful … uh, queen girl. Princess! I always want to see my princess up there in the lights. I love you.”

  My mom stood up, put her arms around me, and said, “Sweetheart, don’t worry about anyone but yourself tomorrow. It’s your big day. I’ll get everyone where they need to be and they’ll all do what they have to do. All you need to do is show up and dance. Okay? We’ve got this for you.”

  I nodded into her shoulder. Then I stood up straight, wiped my eyes, and sniffled.

  “Tissue?” my dad asked, holding one out to me with an immensely pleased look on his face.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’ve been trying to think of that word for weeks!” he replied. “Tissue! Tissue!”

  I turned to go out and leave him with his victory, but then he asked me a question. “Hey, we’re kind of dying … to know: Is your brother actually any good at dancing?”

  “Sorry, Dad,” I said. “Mom already bought the tickets. You’ll just have to show up and see for yourselves.”

  I’m waiting in the wings, watching all of the fathers dancing onstage. Well, all of the fathers except mine.

  All of the other girls around me are whispering, pointing, giggling as their dads ham it up in the bright lights of the theater. There is booming surf music playing, and at the moment, half of the men are pretending to water-ski, while the rest are acting like lifeguards, throwing Frisbees around, hula-hooping, and even flying imaginary kites. It’s incredibly dorky, but also incredibly sweet. My eyes burn, and I step back into the shadows a bit. I don’t want anybody to see me tearing up, but it’s hard to be inconspicuous as I dab at my face with the corner of my ridiculous tiki-girl skirt.

  Alanna and Katherine notice, and drape their arms over my shoulders. This only makes the tears come faster. “I’m fine,” I whisper, a bit more harshly than I mean to. They both pull away and give me that look—the sympathetic-but-doubtful one that everybody has been giving whenever I claim to be okay.

  Alanna and Katherine let me go—or at least they do after I shrug their arms off my shoulders. And then Matthew comes out onstage carrying a ridiculous ten-foot-long, red-sequined fake surfboard. He’s decked out in loud orange surfer shorts with green palm trees all over them, plus a mismatched Hawaiian shirt, flip-flops, and huge black sunglasses.

  When he drops the board down on the stage and starts gyrating his hips, all the high school girls in the wings start to whistle and cheer. Finally, for the first time all day, I smile. Logically, I know that the first half of the program is already over, so I must have already performed several of my dances, but everything before this moment has been a blur to me. All I have thought about until now—all I have thought about all year—is the Dads’ Dance. Poor Dad. Poor Mom. Poor Matthew. Poor Me.

  Well, at least Matthew—Matty—seems to be doing pretty well.

  The music changes, and I realize that’s my cue to run onstage and join my brother. “Nice moves,” I whisper as he puts his arms around me.

  “Did I do okay?” he asks.

  “Didn’t you hear the whistles?”

  “I wasn’t sure whether they were good whistles or bad whistles.” He’s actually looking sheepish about this. Well, at least my brother is humble while all the babes are cheering at him. I laugh.

  Then we turn, and for a moment I am facing directly into the wings. With a shock, I realize my mother is standing there, just offstage. “Matthew, Mom is here.”

  “Duh.”

  “No, I mean she’s in the wings. Right now. What if something happened to Dad? What if—”

  “Shhh. I’m counting steps. You’re going to mess me up. We’re almost done anyway, right?”

  We spin again.

  “Besides,” he says, “she’s holding flowers. I’m sure it’s fine.”

  “You’re probably right,” I say. But now my heart is pounding. I think through the rest of the number. There are something like seven dads with little solos, and then we’re done and I can run off to see what’s going on. That’s only, like, fifty seconds? Forty?

  But I can feel myself starting to panic. I am dancing on autopilot. This doesn’t make any sense, but suddenly my only thought is, Time is brain.

  And then it’s the end of the dance. The last verse of the song leads into the final chorus. The solos are going on at the front of the stage, where I can’t see them. Matthew and I are all the way in back. All the other girls are spinning around in their fathers’ arms, getting ready for the big dip move that will be the climax of the number. There are only eight beats left.

  Matthew spins me around so that I am facing away from him, and then gives me a gentle push in the small of my back. And—somehow—my father is there in front of me. The other girls and their dads must have known about this, because they have cleared a path between us. He steps toward me, slowly, with his cane in his strong left hand. Heel, toe, heel, toe. He’s wearing tap shoes. This is the last solo!

  I run to him with my arms outstretched. Just before I get there, my father drops his cane and holds out his hands. He clasps my right wrist with the good fingers of his left hand, and I reach down a bit to grab the still-weak fingers of his right. He smiles at me with his lopsided, oversize-kid grin.

  This is what love is, I think
. Daddy was strong for me so that I could learn to be. Then I was strong for him until he could relearn his own strength. Now, here we are, strong together.

  As the final chord of the song vibrates through me, my father speaks. I can’t hear his soft, breathy voice over the music and the swelling applause, but I can read his lips. He is saying this:

  “Claire, I catching you.”

  When I sat down to do research for this book, I immediately realized I would need the services of a pretty broad panel of experts if I hoped to wrap my head around the tremendous complexities of stroke physiology and treatment, as well as the short- and long-term effects of strokes on patients and their families. I was incredibly lucky that the following individuals all gave unstintingly of their time and expertise, with great grace and aplomb.

  Bil Rosen, BA, CEMSO, CTO, NRP, is a paramedic who literally wrote the manual on stroke response for emergency personnel. Lorettajo Kapinos, RN, BS, is an emergency-room nurse. Several parts of this novel, especially chapters five through eight, draw heavily on information that Bil and Lorettajo shared with me in interviews, and Bil also answered several follow-up questions via email months later.

  My fellow children’s author Lynn Plourde, who is a former speech-language therapist, raised several crucial questions about the time frame of stroke patients’ language recovery. This led me to call my cousin, Joshua S. Brodkin, MD, DABR, who talked me through some of the technical aspects of whether my book’s plot could work from a medical point of view. Every novelist should be sure to have an interventional radiologist in the family for just such an emergency.

  Another author, my friend Ashley Hope Pérez, swooped in and saved me at the last minute by reading the manuscript and giving me feedback on various characters’ development, as well as the overall flow of the plot. Ashley is a former public-school teacher, a top-notch young-adult novelist, and a university professor and researcher in the fields of world literature, Latin American literature, Latina/Latino literature, and narrative ethics. Being pals with an expert like her—who is willing to read and comment on a novel over the course of a single weekend—is a blessing.