by Rob J. Quinn
If it puts me to sleep, I’ll take it, he thought. His eyes closed and he could finally feel himself drifting off. I should have pushed the pain in the ass a lot harder.
Red’s eyes shot open. I should have pushed him harder? The thought echoed as if it had come from someone else.
His eyes searched for the glow from the clock to orient himself in the darkness. It was gone. The clock had been turned toward the wall. And he was still hugging his sheets, having never relinquished their warmth.
Chapter 6
Reaching the top step as the morning announcements began, Red felt Bonnie let go of his arm after he was stable on the floor of the entrance to the second floor hallway. He took his folder for Computer Programming II from her and double-checked his pocket to make sure he had the key to his wheelchair. The fact that it came with a key was, in Red’s mind, the only good part about having a scooter-style chair versus a regular power chair. He thanked Bonnie, glancing down the stairwell as he did every morning to confirm that he’d parked his wheelchair under the stairs and hadn’t left anything on it.
“Need anything?” Bonnie asked.
“An elevator for A-wing?” Red joked. “It would make life so much easier for both of us.”
Bonnie laughed and said, “Tell me about it.” She had a tone that always seemed to suggest she was inconvenienced by having to help the students with disabilities. Red resisted the urge to finally tell her about it as she headed back down the stairs to sit in the resource room and read the paper during second period. It was the same thing she did during first period before homeroom. Red got to watch that during his first resource room period of the day, except on Tuesdays, when he had speech therapy.
She wasn’t his favorite person in the world. But now that he was finally learning how to deal with the moody teacher’s aide from the resource room, Red didn’t think she was that bad. Saying please and thank you for absolutely everything she did, and forcing himself to include her in things like gripes about having to walk up the stairs every morning—as if it really affected her as much as anyone—made the day go much smoother. Besides, he had to admit that getting assistance from Bonnie was better than dealing with Mr. Nicklaus, the resource room teacher.
The bell ending homeroom went off, but the computer lab was just across from the doorway of the stairwell landing, so Red knew he had plenty of time to beat the crowd as he walked into the hall. Alley seemed to come out of nowhere as he reached the door with her on his heels.
“Hey Red,” she said, opening the door and letting him walk in first. “Make it up okay?”
“Yep,” Red said, smiling at the question she had asked about once a week since they’d started talking in Computers I during their sophomore year.
An exaggerated “Yep” came from the hallway, and they both looked back to see Chuck walking past the door, his eyes straight ahead as if he hadn’t said anything. Red tensed up, gripping his folder so tightly that he bent the edge he was holding. He stopped briefly, feeling his head swirl, but was able to continue walking as Alley closed the door behind her.
“Not exactly my biggest fan since I turned him down for a date to the freshman dance,” she said, shaking her head and walking to her computer station to put down her book bag. “You’d think he’d get over it by junior year.”
“I usually only have to deal with him right after lunch,” Red said, reaching his station, happy to sit and rest his legs. He tried to blink away the dots that flashed past his eyes.
“Are you okay?” Mrs. Jenkins asked, getting up from her desk with her tea cup in her hand.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess by Wednesday walking up the steps wears me out a little. It’s nice to have homeroom right before class this year so I can get here easier.”
Mrs. Jenkins stopped to chat with Alley for a minute before she left the room to get a fresh cup of tea. Red heard her ask if Alley was okay helping him get settled.
“Oh, I guess I’ll help the li’l pest,” Alley joked after the teacher had disappeared into the hallway.
Mrs. Jenkins had asked her to help Red get on and off the computer the previous year, when they both started in Computers I. At first Red resisted, not wanting to draw extra attention to himself. But Alley was always very casual about it, and he had to admit that her help getting the key guard on and off, inserting the floppy disk into the drive, and pulling drafts of his programs from the printer saved him at least five minutes each class.
“You know you love all the brownie points you get helping me,” he teased back.
She stuck her tongue out at him, wiggling her hips to accentuate the playful childishness of her response, and grabbed the key guard off the top of the cabinet. “How far are you on this project?” she asked as other kids started to file into the room.
“I think I figured out the subroutine last night, so if it actually works when I type it in, I think I can get it in on time,” he said.
“Well, you’re probably doing better than I am on this one,” she said. “I just started on that part.”
“Well, if this year is anything like last year it won’t be long before I’ll have to spend at least one study hall a day on a computer just to not fall too far behind,” he said. “It takes me forever just to type everything in.”
“Poor boy,” she said with a smile, pushing the key guard down into the Velcro. “You good?”
“Yeah, thanks,” he said.
She smiled and playfully flicked him on the ear as she headed back to her station. It was the perfect excuse for Red to look back and watch her walk away.
Red took plenty of razzing about Alley from his friends and his brother, but as he watched her walking away, feeling like the only kid in school who noticed her short curly blond hair, he really didn’t care what they said. He made sure his eyes were on his screen before she sat down, and he focused on typing in the corrections for the subroutine he had come up with the night before, hoping they would finally get his project working.
Making it to third period with little time to spare before the bell, Red parked his power chair in the corner of the classroom and walked over to his desk. He quickly opened his copybook to the homework from the night before. He didn’t want to give Mr. Donohue any excuses to hassle him.
“Is that the best handwriting you can offer?” Pete asked from the seat behind him in his best imitation of Mr. Donohue.
Red laughed. There was still enough chatter going on around them that he turned to Pete. Looking down at Pete’s crutches on the floor next to his desk, Red whispered, “Please be aware of lying those in the aisle.”
Pete covered his mouth to stop himself from laughing out loud. He was one of only a couple other students with disabilities with whom Red had a class during the day, except for resource room periods that replaced study halls for students in the mainstreaming program and gym class. Over the years they had fought as much as they’d gotten along, but being two of only a handful of kids in the entire school with a physical disability kept a bond between them. Surviving the first few weeks of Mr. Donohue’s Algebra II class together had actually improved their relationship.
“Why were you late?” Pete asked.
“I’m not late,” Red replied, ignoring Pete’s reference to the fact that they both usually arrived well before the bell. “I mean, I made it here before the teacher, didn’t I?”
“So, you’re helping him with his passive-aggressive protest against having to move his class to the first floor once a day?”
“No, I’m passively and aggressively protesting the fact that we were mainstreamed in eighth grade and they still don’t have an elevator in A-wing of the high school for junior year.”
“You want an elevator in A-wing and B-wing?” Pete quipped, making a face as if to suggest that was the most outlandish thing he’d ever heard. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Or they could just connect both hallways upstairs,” Red shot back. “It is 1992. I hear it’s being done.”
�
��Dude, the halls are only connected indoors on one end of the building down-stairs,” Pete said. “You expect the same luxury up-stairs. You damn disabled people just want everything, don’t ya?”
They both smiled briefly at the ongoing joke. “Seriously, why were you late?”
Red shrugged. “I was talking to Alley for a minute near the end of class,” he said. “So I didn’t leave early enough and the bell rang just as I got down the stairs to my wheelchair. Everybody was already leaving class and it took forever to get through the hallway.”
“I don’t see why they can’t move that class downstairs,” Pete said.
“I heard some BS that the computers could get stolen easier,” Red said. “I don’t know. I guess they look at it like moving your science lab. Too hard.”
“Bonnie give you any crap?”
“Not really, but I think I made her late for her third period of the day of doing nothing.”
“I thought Mr. Nicklaus had that covered.”
“Li’l Nicky?” Red asked sarcastically. “He’s busy working on his doctorate this period.”
They couldn’t even muster a laugh at their own sarcasm about the resource room staff. They had been worn down in their first two years of dealing with the teacher and aide, who often refused to perform the most basic duties of working in the mainstreaming program. Smoothing out problems with regular education teachers who balked at giving students with disabilities extra time to do tests or in-class assignments, assisting students with lunch, and helping them get materials from the library, were just a few of the things Mr. Nicklaus and Bonnie had put back on the students with the excuse that they “were in high school now” and needed to do things on their own. As freshmen, Red and the others arriving from middle school quickly learned that complaining to their parents only made things worse.
The program was run by the county—not the school district—which meant the staff reported to the principal of Sunshine Lane. So, parental complaints to the high school administration were met with empathy, followed by explanations that there was nothing they could do. Phone calls to the Sunshine Lane principal merely lead to him relaying the message to Mr. Nicklaus. Even when the message came with a directive for Mr. Nicklaus to make a change, it was generally ignored since his boss wasn’t in the building to compel him to do things differently.
In fact, the order to do something about a particular problem would generally make things worse. The entire class watched as one of the most egregious examples of the staff’s disregard for the students played out during Red’s freshman year. One of the seniors almost flunked his final semester of English due to the fact that he was struggling with the physical demands of doing research for a required paper. He had muscular dystrophy, and couldn’t independently get books off the shelves in the library. When his father called to complain, saying his son needed more time in the library than the two periods a week that Bonnie would help him—even though the student had a daily resource room period in which the aide wasn’t helping anyone else—the aide suddenly began taking her lunch during the student’s period in the room. Mr. Nicklaus refused to help the student in the library, claiming it wasn’t his job as a teacher, and said that the aide could take lunch whenever she wanted. The father had to help his son at their local library in the evening so the student could complete his paper on time.
Red’s mom was responsible for giving Mr. Nicklaus’ his nickname, “Li’l Nicky.” Last year, she had called him directly to ask why Red couldn’t use the computer in the resource room more often as he was struggling to keep up with his computer programming course. When she repeated Red’s claim that the teacher often monopolized the computer doing work for his graduate degree, she was promptly hung up on. While she regretted blurting out that “Li’l Nicky is just impossible to talk to” in front of her son, the moniker stuck.
“Wish the idiot would graduate and move on already,” Pete said.
“Tell me about it.”
“Why’d you have to talk to Alley? Because you luv her?”
“Oh, it’s so funny every time,” Red said, slapping his knee to accentuate his sarcasm. “We’re both having trouble with the same subroutine, so we were just trying to figure it out together for a minute at the end of class.”
“And you luv her,” Pete continued to tease as the final bell rang.
Seeing Mr. Donohue walk into the room, Red only offered a fake look of amusement as he turned to face the front of the class. He flipped through a couple pages of his copybook to a blank one as Mr. Donohue was already writing on the board.
“Let’s see how we’re doing so far,” the teacher said, writing the last of four equations.
Going to work, Red started with the second equation because he knew how to do it right away. He saw Mr. Donohue begin to roam across the front row of desks. Red worked as fast as he could while trying to write clearly. There was no doubt in his mind that Mr. Donohue would stop at his desk. He could already feel himself getting nervous. All of his teachers knew Red needed extra time on tests and in-class assignments because he couldn’t write as fast as other students, but somehow Mr. Donohue always made a point of questioning why he wasn’t done work that his classmates had completed. Mr. Donohue reached him as he was finishing the second problem.
“Let’s see,” the teacher said. Red moved his hands and Mr. Donohue spun the copy book toward himself to examine Red’s work. He slowly ran his finger down the solution Red had just completed. “Where’s the first one?”
“I started with the second one,” Red said, nervousness beginning to make his speech more difficult to understand than usual. “I knew how to do it right away.”
“What about number three?”
Red felt a touch of perspiration on his forehead. “I didn’t get to that one yet,” he said, struggling to get each word out.
“Number four?” Mr. Donohue asked, turning the page of the copybook as if the other equations might be on the next page.
Red felt like he was sweating through his shirt. “I didn’t get to it yet,” he managed to respond, even as his head swirled so much he wondered if this was what it meant to feel faint. He saw spots in front of his eyes.
Mr. Donohue exhaled loudly as he quickly flipped through one more page, then walked away.
Red looked down at his copybook and closed his eyes, hoping they would clear. Pete poked him from behind, no doubt to offer support by mocking Mr. Donohue, but Red just shook his head.
Finally, he felt the swirling in his head start to calm. A deep breath came to him. Red looked at Mr. Donohue as he returned to the blackboard and started walking the class through the first equation. He’s such a prick, Red thought. Does he think I’m stupid? I don’t know he does this crap on purpose?
Chapter 7
Waiting for the sixth period bell, Red was happy to have made it to his final class of the day. He’d be in the resource room for seventh period, which he typically used to catch up on his computer programming course except on Fridays, when he had gym class.
At lunch, he and Pete had joked about Mr. Donohue, but that had only kept fresh in his mind how much he hated the guy. And Andre had raised his anxiety further by teasing him about taking on Chuck again after lunch. Red told the lunch monitor he had to use the bathroom so he could leave the cafeteria even earlier than usual, and he avoided Chuck altogether.
That worked for a day, Red thought. But he wasn’t going to be able to avoid Chuck for the next two years until they graduated. Not that I want to, he thought. I’m not afraid of him. But he knew Chuck was pretty pissed. According to Andre, one of his buddies said Chuck was already hearing about getting knocked down by Red from his teammates on the football team. Red certainly didn’t know if he could do it again if Chuck decided he needed to give him some payback.
