by Chelsie Hill
I crinkled my eyebrows. “About what?”
He blew air out of his pursed lips, and I felt like I could actually see the wheels turning in his head as he tried to figure out how to tell me whatever it was he was going to say.
“Just spit it out, Jack.”
He made eye contact again and raised one side of his mouth into a tentative half smile. “You’re still on the ballot for Homecoming Queen.”
In the seconds before the words came out of his mouth, my mind sped through the different possibilities of what he might have to tell me. Out of everything that flashed through my mind, from terrible news about his parents to him coming out of the closet or something else totally out of left field, this was not something I even considered.
I blinked at him. “What?”
“I figured you didn’t know,” he mumbled. He cleared his throat and shifted painfully in his seat, like he was sitting on a knife. “In Student Government yesterday, we were reading through all of the nominations from each club to see who still needed to turn in a name, and I saw you were still listed there for water polo.” He searched my face for a reaction, but I don’t know what he saw there. My mind was racing.
“I guess I just assumed…,” I assumed that since Curt broke up with me and publicly humiliated me that he didn’t want me representing his team. I figured that no one wanted a Homecoming Queen in a wheelchair. I guessed that since no one at school could actually look me in the eye that they would’ve taken my name off the ballot the second they heard about my accident.
I guess not.
“Do you think they forgot, or…?” I trailed off because I didn’t even mean to say it out loud.
Jack shrugged. “I guess they wanted to leave you on there. Although after the way those guys treated you…” I couldn’t help but notice a sharp edge in his voice when he said that, and I knew that by “those guys” he meant Curt. “Anyway, I wanted to let you know because I wasn’t sure if that’s something you want or not.”
“Thanks for telling me.” I chewed on the tip of my thumb and stared off into the distance. “Of course I don’t want that. Everyone would probably think it’s some kind of joke or something. They all stare at me enough as it is. I don’t need to give them more of a reason.”
“People are only staring because they’re curious, Kara. And they feel bad for you.”
“I’m sick of people feeling bad for me.” I grabbed a napkin from the table and started shredding it to pieces.
Jack leaned across the table and lowered his voice to almost a whisper. “They feel bad for you because they know how easily it could’ve been them. You shattered their ‘it won’t happen to me’ illusion. That blows their minds, so they stare. But once they get through their head that this is how it is now, they’ll stop staring. Things will go back to normal.”
“For them,” I said, anger creeping into my voice. “But not for me. I’ll never walk again. I’ll never dance again. I’ll be in this chair while they forget about what happened and go back to thinking that it won’t happen to them. Which it won’t. But it did happen to me.” Hot tears pricked up in my eyes, and I bit down hard to keep them from falling. I hadn’t admitted this to anyone. I’d barely admitted it to myself.
I watched Jack’s face register what I’d said and the tears gathering in my eyes. His eyes crinkled and the sides of his mouth turned down. He moved his hand from the back of my chair to my knee, and he squeezed it. I couldn’t feel it, obviously, but I watched him do it, and it wasn’t lost on me that he was the first person besides the doctors to actually touch my legs. Everyone else avoided them like they had actually been chopped off my body and I was wheeling myself around on my chair with bloody stumps.
“I wish I could make things go back to the way they were for you, Kara. I really do.” His voice caught and he moved his hand quickly from my leg. “So does Amanda.” He cleared his throat and stood up. “You know we’re here for you. Both of us. For whatever you need.”
“I know. Thank you.”
“I really do think you should go through with it, though. The Homecoming thing. I think it would help you feel like yourself again.”
I shook my head. “That’s not who I was before the accident, anyway.”
“Yeah. But I know you feel like everyone is looking at you. This way they would be looking at you on your own terms, you know? They’re looking because you want them to look.”
He had a point. If people were going to stare, it might as well be because I put myself out there. But still, ugh. No.
“And I need to come up with a ridiculous fund-raiser. There’s no way I’m doing that.” There was a fund-raising element to our Homecoming that allegedly started out as a way to make the whole thing more than just a popularity contest. It was split up fifty–fifty: half of the queen selection was done through voting for the candidate, and half was done through voting by donating spare change to your favorite fund-raiser and seeing which raised the most money. But the fund-raisers had all morphed into silly, frivolous things, and it became an unspoken contest between all the queen nominees to come up with the most ridiculous project. A few years ago, someone raised money to pay for the principal to buy some more fashionable clothes, and last year the girl who won raised money to buy a star and name it after our school mascot.
And it wasn’t just that. I was sure water polo didn’t want me, and after the way Curt and all those guys treated me, I wanted nothing to do with them.
“Listen, it’s your decision,” Jack said. “But I think you putting yourself out there will be a reminder for people. They can’t forget it could happen to them if you keep reminding them, you know? So, will you think about it?”
He was right—I couldn’t change what had happened to me, but maybe I could be a reality check for other people. Plus, part of me didn’t want to give up on that crazy dream of being Homecoming Queen, and another part of me didn’t want Curt to think he could treat me the way he did and get away with it.
But my plan at school was to blend in. Become invisible and hide myself from the sympathetic head tilt, not put myself right in the path of it.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “That’s all I can promise right now.”
“Kara, you can do this. You can do anything.” Jack looked at me like he actually believed this, and it made me feel the most normal I had in weeks.
I reached for his hand and squeezed his fingers. I opened my mouth to thank him. For his belief in me and his encouragement. For being so supportive and making me feel like myself. But I didn’t get a chance.
“Did you guys miss me?” Amanda bounded back across the food court, almost slamming into Jack. “The mushiest romance ever is about to start in twenty minutes, and my boss is happy to let us in free. Let’s go, team.”
But my mind was a million miles away from the movie. Instead, I was replaying my conversation with Jack over and over.
Could I do this?
Could Wheelchair Girl actually run for Homecoming Queen?
CHAPTER 13
On our way home from the mall, Amanda leaned from the backseat into the space between me and Jack. “Can you take me home first? I’m not feeling well. Too much popcorn, I think.”
“Sure,” Jack said. “I’ll drop you off real quick and then I’ll take Kara home.”
“Well, that’s dumb.” I twisted around to look at Amanda, who was clutching her stomach. “There’s no point in dropping you off and then making him take me home when you guys live right next door to each other.”
“I really don’t feel well, Kara,” she said, and I guess she did look a little green. “I’d rather be home, like, now. You don’t mind, right, Jack?”
Jack shook his head. “It’s not that far. I don’t mind.”
So, even though it made no sense, Jack dropped Amanda off, drove past his own house, and took me home.
“You should come in,” I said as he unloaded my chair from the back of his car. “Mom would love to see you.”
But Mom was too busy making dinner to say much more than hi when Jack walked behind me into the kitchen, and Dad was zoning out in front of the TV to a documentary about dogs who go to war while Logan snoozed in his lap.
“Uh.” I had no idea what to do with Jack now that he was in my house, but telling him to just leave seemed rude. “Want to hang out for a bit? You can see my new room. Although, spoiler alert, it looks exactly the same as the old one.”
Jack stared at me for a second with this strange look on his face, like I’d asked him if he would like to snuggle with my pet porcupine or something. “You want me to hang out? With you? At your house?”
He was right; it was a little unusual. We hadn’t hung out just the two of us since we broke up. But he was here, and we’d had a really fun day. Why not?
I shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, if you want to.”
He blinked at me a couple of times before shaking himself out of whatever daze he seemed to be in. “Of course I want to,” he said, smiling. “Lead the way.”
I yelled to my parents that we would be in my bedroom if they needed us, and I led him down the hallway to my new room.
Back when Jack used to come up to my bedroom all the time, back when we were together, my parents made a point to say, “Leave the door open!” anytime we headed up the stairs. I was a lot younger then, and Jack and I knew better than to make out in my house when they were home, so we were mostly doing homework or playing video games. But my parents would still walk by my room often, popping in with snacks for us or urgent questions that couldn’t wait another second.
And the only time Curt was allowed in my bedroom was when my parents weren’t home and didn’t know he was there, so “allowed” wasn’t exactly the right word.
But this time when Jack and I went into my room, my parents didn’t say a word.
“Close the door,” I said to Jack as soon as we were both in my new bedroom.
“Okay.” He eased the door shut behind him, and I could tell from his tone that he thought I was about to share some big, secret news with him when really I just wanted to see how my parents would react to having a boy in my room with the door closed.
Was it that clear to them that Jack and I weren’t going to do anything? It should have at least crossed their minds that I was going to be alone in a room with a guy I’d once rounded the bases with. Did they just assume I was damaged goods now and they didn’t think of me as a teenage girl who might be after a little action? It wasn’t that difficult to believe that Jack could still think about me that way.
Or maybe they were so busy trying to ignore each other that they were ignoring me, too.
I lifted myself out of my chair and plopped onto my bed, scooting and adjusting myself back against the line of pillows against the wall. Jack moved forward like he was going to help me, but he seemed to decide against it at the last second and instead pushed my chair up to the wall. After I was settled, he clicked through the playlists on my computer, finally selecting one and pressing Play, and he plopped down and arranged himself in the hot pink beanbag chair across from me.
As soon as the first few notes came out of the speakers, I recognized his song choice. This was the first song on a playlist of mellow songs he’d made for me back during freshman year. I didn’t have too much time to wonder what his music choice meant, or if it even had a meaning, because he started talking almost immediately, making plans for picking me up for school on Monday morning and talking about making posters or something for Student Government before first period. I knew I should pay attention, but my mind kept wandering to the song that was playing. He made this playlist for our first Homecoming Dance together, when we sneaked out of the dance early and he made me a picnic on the grass outside the Science classrooms. We listened to music and I taught him how to do a pirouette and we drank sparkling cider and kissed under the stars. It was one of my favorite memories of our time as boyfriend and girlfriend, and I hadn’t thought of it in months. I wondered if it was one of his favorite memories, too.
I snapped back into reality when Jack leaned forward on the beanbag chair, resting his arms on his knees. “What else can I do for you, Kara? What do you want?”
I stared at the tendrils of hair curling up under the edges of his beanie, and I wondered why he was being so nice and doing so many things for me. I broke up with him over a year ago, and he’d been trying so hard to stay in my life when I wanted nothing more than to move on. And now that I was broken, he was back in my life like he’d never left. Why? What was he getting out of this?
“I think you should go home.” It wasn’t what I’d meant to say, and I don’t even know where it came from. But once the words were out of my mouth, I was surprised by how true they were. I didn’t want him to feel like he had to be here. I didn’t want his pity. I was getting it from everyone else; I couldn’t handle it from him, too.
Jack recoiled like I’d slapped him. “Um, okay,” he said, lifting himself up from the beanbag chair. “I guess I’ll see you Monday morning, then.”
“Wait, Jack.” I reached out my hand in his direction as he walked to the door. My hand didn’t quite reach him, so I leaned over an inch or two so my fingers grazed his arm. “That’s not what I meant. I just mean, I don’t want you to—why are you doing this? Why are you spending so much time with me? And helping me? We’re not…”
I didn’t let myself say “we’re not together anymore,” which was what I was thinking. But I didn’t know what to say instead, so my words just trailed off into silence as he stared at the door of my bedroom.
“You know what I really want?” I said after a long moment. “I want to be able to dance again. I want to walk. I want my legs to work. That’s what I want.”
Jack sighed. He stepped back from the door and sat down next to me on the bed. “You will, Kara. I know you will.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do. Because you have always gotten everything you wanted. You’ve gotten things you didn’t even know you wanted. That’s just the kind of person you are.”
My nose crinkled. “Way to make me sound spoiled.”
“Not spoiled.” He smiled. “Charmed. There’s a difference.”
I snorted, and then I laughed because I totally didn’t mean to snort. “I think you have me confused with someone who is not paralyzed and in a wheelchair. Newsflash: There’s nothing charmed about my situation.”
“Isn’t there?” he said, tilting his head to the side. “You’d rather be dead?”
“No, but—”
He adjusted his beanie. “You need to turn your attitude around, okay? You could have died and you didn’t. You have a life you could have lost. That’s awesome.”
“But I lost the thing I love the most. I can’t dance anymore. I’m not—”
He put up his hand. “Stop it, okay? Stop talking about yourself like you’re ruined. You know, there’s a whole segment of people with spinal cord injuries who—”
This time I cut him off. “Why do you do that?”
“What?”
“The random facts. The trivia and the inspirational quotes and all that. You never used to do that before.”
He stared down at his hands, fingers spread out on his knees, and a little pink flushed his cheeks. After a too-long silence, he looked back at me and shrugged. “I missed you, okay? I know you moved on and had your Ken doll boyfriend, but I missed having you in my life and I wanted a way to be your friend again. I know it’s dumb, but it was all I could think of.”
His words sent a flutter through me. An unfamiliar flutter that started in my stomach and spread all the way to my fingers, warming me from the inside out.
“You looked up all that random crap just for an excuse to talk to me again?” It was so Jack to go to all the trouble of thinking up an elaborate excuse to text me when any other person would have been fine with “Hi!”
He laughed. “Hey, I learned a lot. It was very educational.”
“Well, you can stop it now, okay? We’re friends again, so you don’t have to think up cheesy things to say to me.”
“You don’t like the fun facts?”
I locked eyes with him. “They aren’t you, Jack.”
Memories of my relationship with Jack filled my mind. Jack and I holding hands as we walked into school together on our first day of freshman year. Jack and I throwing tennis balls for Logan at the dog park, challenging each other to quote movie trivia with each ball Logan brought back to us. Jack in the audience of every one of my dance recitals, always waiting for me after with flowers. That was Jack.
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re right. But it worked, didn’t it? We’re friends again.”
“I guess.”
“Well, as your friend, I feel it’s my duty to remind you that you aren’t ruined. You’re different. Kara 2.0. And maybe Kara 2.0 should try some things that Kara 1.0 would never have done.”
I knew when he said that, he was talking about Homecoming. Putting myself out there in front of the entire school, wheelchair and all. I don’t know why me running for Homecoming Queen was so important to him. It’s the kind of thing we would have laughed at back in the day. But maybe there was more to it than just Homecoming.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, chewing on the tip of my thumb. Before I could stop it, a huge yawn came out of nowhere, and I slapped my hand over my mouth in an effort to hide it.
“You’re tired,” he said, getting up from the bed and fighting back a yawn himself. “I should go home. But think about what I said earlier, okay?”
I rolled my eyes and smiled. “Thank you, Jack.”
“See you Monday.” He leaned forward, wrapping me up in a tight hug. And as he pulled back, he stopped and pressed a quick kiss onto my cheek.
It was an innocent kiss on the cheek from an old, good friend, but it left me stunned. And I felt it burning on my skin long after Jack had gone home.
* * *
Even though we’d talked about so much more, Jack saying “You’d rather be dead?” stayed in the back of my mind all night.
