Even though I kept dreaming about that damn wave, I didn’t really remember the actual event. The only memory I had was of the paddle out, the drop, the monster pitching over me and then nothing. Truly nothing at all. How the hell did I end up out of the water? How did I survive? In the morning I’d pop a few more of those pills and watch helplessly as my mom or my dad got me ready. Then my dad would drive me to school in the used van he had bought, the one with the lift. He’d had to sell the Subaru he loved so he could buy it. I felt kind of guilty about that.
One night, after downing a few more of the pills than I should have, I had a nice little buzz going, like the one that got me through morning classes at school. I didn’t want to go to sleep. I made the mistake of calling Olivia.
I think she’d been smoking weed. She had the dreamy-sounding voice that used to seem so sexy to me. But I heard someone cough in the background. She wasn’t alone.
“Nick,” she said. “I was just thinking of you. So cool that you called.”
“I just wanted to hear your voice,” I said like a fool. “I miss you.” As soon as the words were out, I knew this was bad. Bad and getting worse. I heard how weak and pitiful I sounded.
“I miss you too,” she said. I knew she was lying. And there was that cough again.
“I miss us,” I continued. “I miss doing things with you.” This was all true, but as soon as I’d said it, I knew it wasn’t like we’d had this great romantic thing going. To be honest, I think we had fallen in together because we looked oh so cool as a pair. Mr. and Ms. Universe—or, at least, the high-school version. Truth is, I think we used each other. We liked the way kids looked at us when we were together. The perfect couple. Beauty and the Buff—that would be me. Now it would be more like Beauty and the Beast.
“They say I’m improving,” I continued. “I should be good as new in no time.” Nobody at the hospital or anywhere else had said anything like this. But I hadn’t given up hope.
“I can’t forgive myself for walking out on you after the accident,” she said.
There was that word again. But I wanted to believe her. So this was good, right?
“Maybe we can hang out together again sometime. Sometime soon.” I was pushing it. Better to leave it alone.
The pause. The damn silence of the awkward pause. Me wondering if she’d accidentally dropped her cell. Or if she was still there. Then the cough again. It was the cough of someone who’d had too big a toke of weed. Someone—some guy—was there with her. “Sure,” she finally said. “Let me think about it and figure something out.”
“Great,” I said half-heartedly, knowing it would never happen, knowing it was just a way to end the conversation. “See ya in school.”
“See ya.”
Boom. Dumb idea calling Olivia. The girl had moved on. Who could blame her? But I was pissed. Frustrated and pissed in a way I can’t fully explain. I tossed my phone in the trash can by my bed.
And then I spit on it.
Chapter Five
Days rolled by. And I do mean rolled. Hell, I couldn’t walk. So I rolled. I started doing upper-body exercises with some coaching from Ahmad. I hadn’t fully lost my arms—my paddling arms. That was the good news. I’d always been a good paddler with strong arms that could catch any wave I wanted. I’d weakened during the first few weeks of recovery, but now I was getting my arms back and could feel my muscles tightening under the skin.
I think girls noticed the arms. Or, at least, I believed they did. I wore tight short-sleeve shirts to show off my biceps. Pretty low-life, right? All I needed was a pack of smokes rolled up in one sleeve. A couple of the guys complimented me, but it sounded pretty false. Rowan and Pool, comrades from my football days, started walking with me between classes. Rowan wanted to know about the wave. I didn’t want to talk about it. Pool wanted to know if I could still “do it” in my current condition. I didn’t want to think about sex. I didn’t want to think about all the things I might never do from now on. I told them both to go to hell.
Worse were the kids who felt sorry for me and tried to be nice to me, holding open classroom doors, trying to help me with my locker or, worst of the worst, offering to carry my books. Screw them all.
Then, on one particularly dismal day when I’d had serious problems with my chair and had needed to ask for help from a teacher to deal with my catheter, I was at my locker and accidentally dumped my chemistry, math and history textbooks on the floor. It was the end of the day on Friday, and the halls were emptying. Everyone was running out the door to catch buses or hop in cars to chase off to the coffee shop or get into some kind of righteous trouble. Me, I’d be hanging back, waiting for the Accessibus to make its way here. Better for everyone to be gone anyway, so they didn’t stare at me while the frigging hydraulic lift raised my chair and me up onto the bus.
I was thinking dark thoughts as I stared down at my books splayed on the shiny concrete floor. I was thinking how good it would feel to just kick the suckers as hard as I could, like in the old days when I could punt a football downfield and through the goalposts like the glory boy I was.
Then who shows up but Keira.
Keira, the ultimate twenty-first-century goth girl. Keira who used to give me dirty looks when Olivia and I walked down the hall like we owned the place. Keira of the stud-heavy ears, pierced nose and tongue, and clothes bought secondhand on Mars.
She stopped and just stood there, staring down at me. (Oh, did I say how much I hate everyone, and I mean everyone, staring down at me now that I am in the chair?) “You need some help, Nick?” she said, trying to sound polite.
“Not from you, girl freak,” I answered.
She blinked and scrunched up her lips, making the pin in her chin stick out a little. “Really?” she said, her voice a half octave higher.
“Really. So piss off, girl freak.” I don’t know why I felt like I had to use that word again.
Instead of walking away, she smiled. “Nicky,” she said. (And no one ever calls me Nicky except my grandmother). “How refreshing. Finally someone around here who says what they really feel. And to my face, no less.” She stooped, picked up all three books and hugged them to her chest. But she didn’t hand them back to me. “So,” she said, “tell me what it’s like exactly in your own private freakdom. I’d really like to know.”
“Give me back my damn books,” I said, reaching out to her, one hand involuntarily curled into a fist.
“Not until you answer.”
I wasn’t about to play her game. I said nothing. I stared her down. She finally took the hint. She set the books down gently in my lap and then walked away.
When the bus dropped me off at my physio appointment at the hospital, I told Ahmad about Keira. “Explain this ‘freak’ thing to me,” he said. “I hear the expression but don’t always understand how people use it.”
“It’s a word to describe people who are different. People who don’t fit in or who try hard not to fit in.”
“And that’s bad?”
“Yeah.”
Chapter Six
I think Ahmad tried hard not to feel sorry for me. He’d been claiming I was making progress, but I couldn’t see it. I kept working on my arms and upper body. I was getting to the point where I could haul my near-useless body a few feet across the room with the help of the bars, but it wasn’t what you could call walking.
“These things take time,” Ahmad kept saying, patient as always and acting as always like I mattered. “You will get better and get stronger. I promise.” But he never actually said the words I wanted him to say: You will walk again.
I assumed his words were empty promises, bright, positive notions said to my face to give me hope. I didn’t really believe any of it. In fact, and here’s the kicker, I’m not sure I wanted to believe. I mean, this hope thing. Suppose I bought into it and it turned out to be bullshit like so much else in life? Then I’d be worse off. I was thinking acceptance was more the way to go. Acceptance and meds.
If school was daily torture, late nights sitting in my room—popping a few more pills than prescribed and playing a video game, watching a movie or just listening to music—were enough to make the world go away. And I was beginning to like that more and more.
Cold days were coming on. A little snow here and there. You think winter is a pain in the ass for you, just think about what it’s like when you can’t move your legs and you’re stuck in a motorized wheelchair. My dad was always harping on the fact that I was lucky we could afford this machine with its battery-powered motor so I could move around on my own. He was lousy at the cup-is-half-full philosophy, and he and I had grown apart a long time back, well before the accident. The man is all about business—he is a wholesaler of lawnmower parts.
My mother had quit her job after my accident. She had been a dental hygienist who made more money than my father—which really pissed him off sometimes. But she’d quit to take care of me. She could have gone back after I started school. But she didn’t.
So now lawn-mower man footed all the bills and did a fine job of complaining every time he opened another envelope that said he owed someone money. I’d asked both of them to help me figure out how I had made it ashore and into the ambulance. I wanted to know the story. I had even called the ambulance company and the hospital, hoping to fill in the gaps. But no one wanted to bother with me. The ambulance dispatcher told me that both the driver and the other paramedic on duty the day of the killer wave no longer worked for the company.
One bright, cold day in the school parking lot, as I had just gotten off the bus and was wobbling my way through the freezing slush in the parking lot, I saw this trash heap of a car pull in. Keira was behind the wheel. I saw the parking space she was aiming for right behind me, so I did a 180-degree turn right away and blocked it. I looked right at her through the windshield. She slammed on the brakes, scrunched up her face near the glass and gave me the finger.
I don’t know why, but it made me smile. A big, shit-eating smile. She slammed on her horn, and all the kids slopping around in the slushy parking lot looked at us. And for once I rather liked that. I really did.
When you’re center stage and liking it, there’s nothing you should do but savor the moment, let it linger.
So I lingered. There’s nothing quite like a guy in a wheelchair, motorized or not, just taking his time about budging when he’s in someone’s way.
And then the moment passed. Kids moved on, I toggled the controls and moved out of her way. She pulled in too far and bumped the front of the car into the wooden fencing. “Nice parking job,” I said loud enough for her to hear.
“Screw you,” she said, getting out and slamming the car door.
She looked like maybe she was having a bad morning as she stomped past me, her orange sneakers getting soaked in the dirty slush.
“Hey,” I said, “I’m sorry. I was just goofing around.”
“Great for you,” she said, almost out of earshot already.
“No,” I shouted. “I’m really sorry.”
She kept walking as the wind whipped up and a few stray flakes of snow came down.
“Really sorry,” I repeated at the top of my lungs.
She stopped, then started again toward the school, shaking her head. I figured I had been a bit of an ass about blocking the parking spot. I tried to wheel myself toward the school door but discovered I was now bogged down in the mess of snow and ice on the pavement. Great, I thought, now I’m stuck here for the day. And everyone in the school can watch me freeze to death, from the comfort of their warm classrooms.
It was then that Keira must have tuned in to my brain waves. Her hand was even on the school door when she suddenly pivoted and came stomping back toward me. I gave up on trying to get unstuck. I figured maybe she’d just tip me over and leave me there in the slush. That would look even better to my classmates.
She walked up to me and kicked the wheel of my chair.
“That all you got?” I asked.
“Smart-ass.” She wasn’t smiling.
“I said I’m sorry. I saw you coming. I thought you might just run me over and put me out of my misery.” It was meant to be a joke.
She now looked concerned, dead serious. “You don’t really mean that, do you?”
“No,” I said. “Although it probably would play out a whole lot better than me sitting here like a beached whale, spinning my wheels in ice water.”
“You’re stuck?”
“Yes.”
She yanked at the handles on the back of the chair. “Damn, this thing’s heavy.”
“And I forgot to put my winter tires on,” I said. “Woe is me.”
She wrenched my chair forward. “There.” And I was free.
I looked up to focus on her as snowflakes landed on my face. I could feel them hitting my cheeks and landing on my eyelashes. I could see that Keira really looked a mess. Her hair was all crazy tangled, and she had on just a light jacket. Her sneakers were soaked through, and her tight jeans were wet almost to her knees from struggling to get me unstuck. No one else had bothered to come to assist.
And then she did something really unexpected. She brushed the snow out of my face with a gentle swish of her hand.
“I didn’t know you drove,” I said, wanting to say something, anything, to break the awkward silence that followed.
“I drive. But I don’t have a license. I was late. My mom said I could take the car—I couldn’t afford to be late again. I’m already in deep shit here. Always have been, as far back as I can remember.”
“How is it?”
“How’s what?”
“Being in deep shit?”
“You wouldn’t know, I guess.”
“Well, once upon a time in a fairy tale, no. I didn’t know. Now. Well, you can probably figure it out.”
“C’mon,” she said. “Why don’t you cut class and sit in the cafeteria with me? Once I check in with homeroom, they won’t even notice. I’ll find some hot water and make us some instant coffee.”
“It sounds like a date,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said sarcastically, guiding me across the parking lot as my wheels spit more icy water onto her pant legs. “I just love first dates.”
Chapter Seven
I’d skipped a lot of classes even before I became wheelchair man, and no one had given me much of a hard time. Now no teacher said anything if I skipped their class. You can get a fair bit of mileage out of pity, if you work it right.
Keira got hot water from the caf lady and brought back two disposable cups. I watched as she scooped some dark-brown crystals into the two cups from a baggie in her backpack. After she had stirred the liquid in both cups with a pencil, she held the baggie up. “Mr. Vincenzo tried to bust me for this,” she said with a smile of satisfaction on her face.
“The principal tried to bust you for instant coffee?”
She continued to smile. The girl was kind of cute really. I’d never noticed.
“I was putting it into my locker. My backup stash of Maxwell House. He grabbed it and asked what it was. And I wouldn’t tell him.”
Of course. Just like her not to tell him it was coffee.
“When he said he’d send it to the cops to have it analyzed, I laughed so hard I nearly peed myself.”
“I’m sorry to say I know exactly what that’s like. He really thought it was some kind of drug?”
“I guess so. Chocolate cocaine, maybe, or something worse. He phoned my mom, and she gave him a really hard time, but she didn’t tell him it was freeze-dried coffee either. The funny thing is, I never heard a word from Mr. Vincenzo again. I guess the police had a good laugh at his expense and that was that. Still, I have to watch out for him. He has my number, and he’s not gonna start any fan club on my behalf.” She waved what was left in the little baggie in the air for a monitor or a teacher to see.
The bell rang for second period, and I expected Keira to get up and run to her next class. She didn’t. “Should
n’t we go?” I said.
She held up her cup. “I’m not finished.”
“But you’ll be in trouble, right?”
“Hey, I’m always in trouble.” She pointed to the part-time cafeteria monitors and added, “I bet right now one of them is thinking, I want to go harass the girl talking to the gimp in a wheelchair.”
“Is that what I am? A gimp?”
She gave me a stern look. “I didn’t mean it in a nasty way. It’s a label. Sometimes you have to work with what they sling at you. Work with it to your advantage.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do,” she said. “I definitely do. But you’re right. I should move my ass. Gotta quiz in modern history that I need to fail. Can I call you if I get bored sometime?”
That threw me off. “Yeah, I guess. But only when you’re bored.”
“Touché. That’s French for a good comeback. Give me your phone.”
I gave her my phone, and she looked up my number. She didn’t write it down. Maybe this was just a sick joke.
And then she was gone, and I was alone at my table with a really bad cup of cold instant coffee. No sugar, no milk. Just cold, black instant coffee. I sucked it back like I was downing a shot of something wicked.
Chapter Eight
Ahmad was always so patient, so professional, but he generally held back his own opinions and didn’t offer up any personal information about himself. So he surprised me when he said to me one day after school, “My mother wants me to invite you to our house for Sunday dinner.”
“Your mother?” I asked.
“Yes. I’m not really supposed to have informal interactions with my clients. But she says you are different.”
“You live with your mother?” This struck me as weird. I guessed Ahmad to be at least in his late twenties.
“Yes. My family has stayed together, at least some of us, since we arrived.” He seemed a little annoyed at my question. “So I live with my mother and little sister. She’s about your age but goes to school over at West High.”
The Ledge Page 2
