Roll with It

by Jamie Sumner

  It’s way past lunchtime when we leave the hospital, and I haven’t eaten anything since a rushed bowl of oatmeal this morning, but my stomach feels sloshy and heavy, like I drank too much water.

  I don’t look at Grandpa as Mema walks him out to the Buick and Mom loads me into the van.

  When we pull onto Route 9, all I want to do is go home and crawl into bed . . . and wake up in Nashville. But instead of crossing the bridge that will take us back across the lake, we head toward town.

  “Where are we going?”

  “One more stop, baby, I promise, and then home.”

  I lean my head against the cold window. Maybe Grandpa has it right. It’d be nice to forget your life. It’s why I like to bake. When you’re doing something that takes all your brain power, the world kind of falls away and leaves you alone. You can be anyone anywhere when your mind is so full of an idea. Maybe that’s what Alzheimer’s is—a thing that fills your mind so full of a story that the real world can’t get in. Except that’s a scary thought if you don’t get to pick the plot.

  By the time we pull in to Food & Co., I can tell I’ve been in my chair too long. My legs ache and I can feel the seat rubbing a bruise into my tailbone.

  There’s a crisscrossing of yellow tape over the front window of the store. And the brick along the bottom is all toppled over. It looks like a crime scene. Which I guess it is.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “Damage control,” Mom mutters as the streetlights flicker on in the darkness of the gray afternoon.

  Ever since I got my first pink wheelchair at four and began to notice all the things I could and couldn’t reach, Food & Co. has been my favorite place. It’s like a crippled kid’s dream. Everything’s set out in barrels and low shelves and little round tables. Orange and pink and yellow taffy sits in a huge bucket by the register, and homemade sausage biscuits stay warm all day in their plastic wrap under the heat lamps. If you swing by the deli, you can always beg free samples of cheese, and the bakery will give you free fudge, without nuts, which everybody knows is the best. It’s like the original version of Cracker Barrel.

  Today we go straight to customer service, which is actually just a desk next to the stand where they sell stamps and boxes for mailing. Mr. Akers is there, as always. I know he’s a good bit younger than Grandpa, but his hair’s completely white and he wears glasses that take up half his face. He is the friendly owl you might meet in the forest. He smiles at us now, even though we’re related to the man who wrecked his window.

  “Well, Ellie Cowan, you are a vision!”

  “Hi, Mr. Akers.”

  He claps his hands and rubs them together like he’s warming them up, before holding one out to shake.

  “And how are you, Alice?”

  “How are you, Walter?”

  Mom does this, answers a question with a question, when she’s getting ready to make a point. I think it was part of her teacher training.

  “Well now, we, uh, had a bit of a run-in, as you well know. How’s Jonah? How’s his nose?”

  “That’s what I came to speak with you about.” Mom pulls him off to the side, around behind the stamp stand.

  Suddenly I’m starving. My stomach gurgles and I can feel it all the way down to my toes. I go searching for the sausage biscuits and grab a package of Hostess CupCakes on the way. The New York Times chefs wouldn’t approve, but I love how, if you’re real careful, you can pull the squiggle off the top in one long line.

  There’s a table near the meat counter, and it’s set up with a red checkered tablecloth and a vase of fake daisies. It’s a display for Miss Daisy’s Home Cookin’, a local catering company, which everybody knows is Daisy Alcott from down the street, whose husband died two years ago and so she needs something to do with her hands. I set my food down next to a case of pimento cheese. That’s the kind of place this is. You can just grab stuff and eat it in the middle of the store, and nobody thinks you’re stealing or tries to page your mom over the intercom.

  “You are very attractive.”

  I choke on a piece of sausage and look up to see a kid standing in front of me with his arms crossed over a white apron, and—is that blood on it?

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, ‘You are very attractive.’ At least”—he pauses and, I swear to you, looks me up and down—“your averages come out right.”

  He takes the chair opposite me. He’s got hair as black as Harry Potter’s, but with none of the charm. I look around to see if I’m being watched. This has to be a joke, right?

  “Uh, so am I attractive or average?”

  He blinks at me and then blinks again, and it’s like the computer’s spinning wheel—like he’s uploading information and I am just going to have to wait it out. I crumple my trash and start to look for an easy exit.

  “Both. According to researchers, it’s often the most average, or symmetrical, faces that are most appealing.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I act all put out, but I kind of get that. People like ordinary—even numbers, even teeth, average height and intelligence. But in my experience, nobody would call a girl in a wheelchair attractive unless he was messing with her.

  He’s still blinking at me. That is blood on his apron. His name tag says BERT. I wonder if he works here or if he just snuck in to butcher something. A scene flashes back from The People Under the Stairs and I shiver.

  “All right, then. Well, I think I hear my mom. Catch you later.”

  He just stands and holds out an arm that says, After you, miss.

  I can feel his eyes on me when I leave.

  “There you are!” Mom is standing at the front holding a ginormous bag of groceries. I pull the food wrappers from my pocket, and she rolls her eyes but hands me some cash. I run them through self-checkout and think how weird it is to hear the same automated voice from the Publix at home say “Please take your receipt” here at Food & Co.

  “Where were you?” Mom asks as I follow her out to the car.

  “Getting verbally harassed.”

  “What?”

  “Relax. I’m kidding. Sort of. I think. It was just a really creepy kid. Or employee. Whatever. He had a name tag like he works here.”

  “Was he around your age?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Was his name Robert?”

  “No. Oh wait. Yes? His name tag said ‘Bert.’ Why are you laughing?”

  Mom doesn’t say anything until we get to the van.

  “Well, it looks like you just met your fellow carpooler. That’s Bert Akers, Mr. Akers’s son. He’ll be riding to school with you and Coralee too.”

  “No. No. No, no, no, no.”

  After she stops laughing, I make her explain. Apparently, Mr. Akers has about a million kids. But I guess Bert is the youngest and everybody else is grown and gone. So Mr. and Mrs. Akers live over in Royal Oaks now too, and Mom, because she is a crazy person, offered to give him a ride so he wouldn’t have to take the bus.

  If your name is Robert, why in the world would you go by Bert? Why not Rob or Bob or Bobby, even? Unless you’re one thousand years old or on Sesame Street, it proves you are beyond bizarre. These are all the things I do not say to Mom as we cross back over the bridge on Route 9.

  What I do ask is the obvious. “Why can’t he just ride the bus like everybody else? He’s got two good legs.”

  “I think he’s been having a rough time on the bus with some kids from school.”

  I think about our strange conversation and the blinking thing. I can totally see this. He’s probably on the spectrum. But I bet he’s never been tested. I bet they hear “spectrum” here and think colors of the rainbow, not autism. And the bus is probably where all the bullying happens. It makes sense; there’s only one adult and a busload of un-seat-belted kids, and that adult is supposed to keep both eyes on the road. That bullying never really happened to me, though. Everybody who rode the short bus was in it together. We had to save our strength for the schoo
l day.

  “I still don’t get it.”

  Mom brakes a little too hard.

  “Look, Ellie, Mr. Akers was kind enough not to press charges against your grandfather, who was driving with a revoked license, and he also agreed to split the cost for repairs. Taking Bert to school is the least we can do.”

  I see how Mom is trying to place Band-Aids over all the broken people. It’s what she does. But today, after the school visit and the hospital visit, I just can’t handle it. We have enough pieces to put together in our own lives without adding more.

  “Oh, I get it. You’re going to fix all the crazy people now, right?”

  Mom pulls the car over so fast, the seat belt cuts into my shoulder.

  “Do not—” she says, and takes a breath and turns around to look at me, “ever call your grandfather crazy. He is sick and we are here to help him. And as for Bert, I think you should try to be a little more open-minded. Empathy and sympathy, Ellie. That’s what we all need. Empathy and sympathy.”

  “Fine.” I point to the road. “Can we go now?” I don’t want the lecture. I just want to get out of here and forget this day ever happened.

  She sighs but pulls back into the lane. I can see her knuckles white on the wheel, like she could crack the thing in two. I think about Grandpa clapping his hands over the little “walking Ellie” at the hospital. I think about what it means to be attractive and how I will never be.

  Empathy and sympathy. I’m just fresh out.

  7

  False Start

  “I am never going back.”

  “Honey, you have to tell me what happened.”

  Mom is sitting next to me in our bedroom. I’ve pulled myself onto the bed, but I’m too tired to drag the quilt over me. It’s yellow and covered in girls in bonnets. From this angle, it looks like they’re little Pac-Mans about to attack my legs—my skinny, stupid, useless legs.

  “Please. I can’t make it better if I don’t know.”

  Mom smooths the hair back from my forehead and pulls the cuffs of my jeans down where they were bunched up around my ankles.

  “Stop fussing!”

  “Well, start talking.”

  I turn away from her and face the window. There’s a squirrel staring in. He’s holding half a walnut and freezes like he’s been caught stealing. I watch him put it in his teeth and scamper away. I stay quiet and slow my breathing so Mom thinks I’m sleeping. Finally I feel the bed shift when she gets up and leaves.

  I’m just starting to doze off for real when the door slides open again.

  “Come on, get up now. We’re going out to the porch.”

  “No, Mema, it’s too cold.”

  She drags the wheelchair up next to the bed and locks it in place. “You’re a tough girl. You can handle it.”

  No, I’m not tough. I’m an invalid. In-valid. I want to say it, but I know she won’t listen. There are certain statements Mema refuses to hear.

  Ten minutes later we are out on the porch wrapped in a blanket and holding hot chocolate that is already only lukewarm. The garden looks shriveled and sad, like it’ll never grow another living thing again.

  “All right, your mama’s in there walking a hole in my carpet because you won’t talk to her. Now, it has been a million years and a lifetime ago since I was in middle school, but I remember the feel of it. Those days stick to you like mud. Talking about it is the only way you’re gonna come clean again.”

  I look into my mug. She says she gets it, but Mema is a force of nature. I’m not strong like that. How am I supposed to make her understand?

  “I promise, Ellie. You talk to me and I’ll take as much of it away as I can and we’ll leave it behind us. You hear me?”

  I look at her. Her small, round eyes are as blue as the early morning. She pulls me in so my head’s up against her shoulder and her braid hangs down between us. I want to tug on it like I used to when I was little. Talking’s not going to make it better, though. I want a time machine. But I tell her anyway.

  Eight hours earlier . . .

  Coralee’s next to me in the van. We actually see the bus stop at the entrance to Royal Oaks right as we turn off Alcoa onto the main road, and I make Mom wait until it’s out of sight before we pick up Bert. The last thing we need is to be the handicapped van that tails the bus to school.

  Bert’s sitting on his front steps. His trailer is bigger than ours and Coralee’s put together, and it has a porch that wraps all the way around. I guess this is the rich end of the road. He gets up and, I kid you not, throws a man purse over his shoulder.

  “Nice purse,” Coralee says when we make him get in the front seat.

  “It’s a satchel, as you can see from the flap by which it closes. Purses traditionally have a zip or clasp. Morning, Ms. Cowan.”

  He would have been right at home on the short bus. We kept to ourselves and did our thing and just assumed from day one that we were all up there on the weirdness scale. But here, oh man. What does a place like Eufaula do with a Bert? Or, more to the point, what does a Bert do with a place like this?

  “Bert’s parents just moved into Royal Oaks in the fall, same time as me,” Coralee says, leaning forward so the glitter from the heart on her sweatshirt sparkles. “Right, Bert?”

  “That is correct.” If it’s not a purse, he sure hugs it like one.

  “Bert has twelve brothers and sisters. The twins just graduated high school last year.”

  “Lucky number thirteen,” I say.

  “Thirteen is conventionally unlucky,” he says, and that’s the end of the small talk.

  As Mom is lowering me down from the lift next to the front doors of the school (she doesn’t even try for the handicapped spots), she says, “Now, they don’t have an official aide for you yet, but Rachel in the front office will do until Mrs. Rutherford can find someone permanent.”

  “Mom, I don’t need an aide.” I whisper it because Coralee is waiting for me with her backpack slung over her arm, which is a purse in leopard print. Bert has already wandered off.

  “Ellie, you had an aide back home. Lauren helped you get from class to class and in the restroom only when you needed her. I’ve instructed Rachel to do the same.”

  “But I don’t get as tired now. I’m stronger than I was. Please don’t make some old lady follow me around!”

  Mom is zipping my lunch into my backpack and ignoring me. “Rachel isn’t some old lady, honey. She’s Evelyn’s niece.”

  “You have got to be kidding.”

  “I am not.” She hangs my backpack on the back of my chair. “And you will be fine, because you’re right, you’re stronger than you were, inside and out,” she says, and kisses me.

  “All right, all right, stop with the mushy. I’m going,” I grumble.

  None of the other kids look our way, but they shift so me and Coralee are a bubble of aloneness in the crowd.

  I look back once, even though I wasn’t going to, right before we move through the doors. Mom’s still there, cupping her hands together like she’s praying.

  Coralee is in A group, so she has a different homeroom. I end up having to say good-bye to her halfway down the hall. She blows me a kiss and straightens my backpack like Mom did.

  “Be good, honey-baby-child,” she sings, and walks away backward, right as Rachel puts a hand on my wheel. Her face is powdered so white she looks like a ghost, except for the peach lipstick, which is also on her teeth. I remember Evelyn at church. It must be genetic.

  “Ready for your big first day?” She is not a big person and she’s not standing too close or anything, but something about her makes me want to shrink down in my chair like a turtle. She smells like that really strong perfume at the department store—the one they’re always spraying in the air and trying to give away in free samples.

  “Thanks. I got it from here.”

  “Okay, Lily. Now, if you need me, I’ll be in the front office. And if you need to use the bathroom,” she whispers, “just get a pass fro
m your teacher and come find me.”

  Never, never, never, I think as I roll into homeroom.

  Homeroom with Mrs. Tilly is crowded. I mentally graph the room and immediately see that the desks are too close together for me to fit through. They are in four rows of five, and bookshelves fill up every single wall.

  I start to breathe a little fast and clamp my mouth shut so nobody can tell.

  Mrs. Tilly isn’t here yet, but almost every student is. And everyone freezes. I’m wearing jeans and a green sweater, the most basic thing I could find, but suddenly I feel naked.

  I don’t know what to do. Normally, I use my wheelchair with my tray on it as my desk, and the teachers leave a blank spot open for me in with all the other desks.

  I wheel forward toward the front, near the teacher’s desk, and try to scoot along the far wall. There are backpacks in the way. Everybody pretends not to notice and nobody moves them. So I try to roll back around by the door, but one wheel gets caught on the edge of a rug in the area with a sign that says READING NOOK.

  I want to cry.

  I will not cry.

  Now I’m sweating. Where is the teacher?

  People start moving again, getting out books, sending last texts (probably about me), but nobody helps.

  I’m reversing out the door when I hear it.

  “Ellie! Back here.” Bert is waving from the last row. And then he’s standing and kicking backpacks out of the way like soccer balls, while three girls in front of him shout, “Don’t touch my stuff!”

  Once the path is clear, I follow him back with my head down. The bell rings, and Mrs. Tilly walks in ten seconds late in a wave of flowy skirts and scarves. She is, unsurprisingly, also my English teacher.

  “Sorry! Sorry! Late, late, late. New Year’s resolution already broken. Well, there’s always next year. Ha, ha!” She pauses, take a big swig of coffee, and then holds her hands out. “Lily! I see you’ve made it! You go by Ellie, right?” The girls in front of Bert laugh into their hands. “Let’s see if we can’t do a little rearranging, shall we?”