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To true love, and to my true love.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: All this stuff really happened. Certain names and other identifying characteristics have been changed, and some chronology altered.
PROLOGUE
The Not-So-Distant Past
When I was twenty-five years old, it came to my attention that I had never had a girlfriend. At the time, I was actually under the impression that I was in a relationship, so as you can imagine, this bit of news came as something of a shock.
I answered the call outside on the sidewalk . You always remember exactly where you were when you found out your girlfriend has a boyfriend who isn’t you.
It was my friend Dan. “Listen, no one else wanted to be the one to tell you this.…”
“All right.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Okay…”
“Charlotte-has-a-boyfriend.” He blurted it out as one continuous word.
“Right. I mean, I know. I’m her boyfriend.”
There was a pause.
“Right?” I asked.
“It’s not you.”
“Oh” was all I managed.
I half expected him to follow up It’s not you with It’s me—that being the official phrase of breakup talks—but it wasn’t him, either. It was some random tool bag she met at her college.
I ended the conversation as quickly as I could. Then I stood there on the sidewalk, as if I was in one of those time-lapse shots in a movie, cars and people whizzing by on all sides of me. How could she do this to me? Why didn’t she at least have the courtesy to call and tell me herself?
In retrospect, we had never actually defined the relationship. She had never actually said she was my girlfriend. I had just sort of, you know, assumed she was. As it turned out, my assumption was completely, totally, painfully wrong.
I had always wondered how it would feel to have a girlfriend—to know that a certain girl liked me and that I liked her, too. But every time I tried to date a girl, something would go wrong. And now there I was, twenty-five years old, and I had still never had a girlfriend.
Maybe the problem was with me, the package. Maybe girls just weren’t attracted to me. Maybe I wasn’t funny enough or confident enough. Or maybe it was that I looked different from everyone else.1 Maybe girls didn’t want to be seen holding hands with me in public, didn’t want to bring a person who looked like me home to meet their parents.
Something had to be wrong with me, though, even if I didn’t know what it was. But I wanted to know. I had to know.
So after my call with Dan, feeling so fed up with my years of searching and failing to find a girlfriend, I decided to conduct a scientific investigation. See, I have always been pretty good at things like math and science, the realms of rational, linear analysis.
I figured, as I stood there on the sidewalk, that I could put my analytical skills to work on my problems with girls. I would go back in time and examine the events of my failed relationships through the lens of graphs and charts. I would then hypothesize and investigate, tracking down the girls I had tried to date and asking them, straight up: What went wrong? Why didn’t you like me? Why did you reject me?
I would compare their answers to my hypotheses and, ultimately, draw a conclusion about the reason no one ever wanted to be my girlfriend. If it was something I could change, like an annoying habit or mannerism, I would change it. If it was some permanent physical characteristic or unalterable aspect of my personality, well, at least I would finally know the truth. And maybe the truth, as they say, would set me free.
SARAH STEVENS
BACKGROUND
Chapter 1
Sarah Stevens would pick truth. I knew she would.
I mean, yeah, sure, there was an outside chance she would pick dare. But since the dares on this particular day were limited by (A) the confines of a fifteen-passenger van and (B) the moral authority of its driver, there wasn’t a lot of point to picking dare.
Now, generally when you play truth or dare in eighth grade, all the dares end up being some sort of expedition to explore the anatomy of the opposite gender. I dare you to put your hand here or your lips there. But not so much when you’re with your church youth group, and not so much when your youth group pastor, Joe Slater, is driving, and it just so happens that he recently took the youth group to a weekend-long seminar called “I Kissed Dating Good-bye,” where you learned that you should save physical exploration, including all forms of putting your hand here or your lips there, for marriage.
So in this particular church-van environment, picking dare was pointless. If you did, you would end up with something lame, gross, and improvised, like eating a leftover fast-food squeeze packet of mayonnaise or whatever.
Tony had picked truth, and then he was asked who he liked, which turned out to be some girl from his Christian school who most of us didn’t know. It was kind of a letdown, but now his turn was over, and he had picked Sarah Stevens.
“Sarah, truth or dare?”
As long as she picked truth, I knew with complete certainty what he would ask her. Tony had my back.
“Truth.”
Tony looked at me. We shared a slight nod. We knew what was about to go down. This was it. The Big Moment. Our chance to see if our theories were correct, if Sarah Stevens liked me the way I liked her. If she had been talking with her best friend about me the way I had been talking with Tony about her.
“Do you like Josh?” Tony asked.
Check.
Obviously, I couldn’t ask her myself, even in a game of truth or dare, because that would be awkward. But I knew Tony would do it for me. I mean, he stuck with me even when I had cancer. And that’s about as serious a test a friendship can face.
We had grown up two doors away from each other, Tony and me. I’d always been homeschooled and he’d always gone to Christian school, so I would spend my days waiting until he got home, when he could come outside and build forts with me.
Then: the cancer.
I was nine. I had a 50 percent chance to live. I would go to the hospital for five days, then come home for two weeks, then go back to the hospital. When I was home, I had hardly any energy. I didn’t play outside. And I couldn’t build forts or ride bikes or do any of the things Tony and I used to do, before I got sick, and before my left leg had to be amputated from the hip down. But you know what? Tony didn’t care. He would sit inside with me and play computer games or board games or whatever it was that I had the energy to do. That long year of chemotherapy, that’s when I first learned that Tony had my back.
Everyone at Covenant Presbyterian Church did, really. Even Sarah Stevens, come to think of it. She had been one of fifty kids who bought “Covenant Kids for Joshua” T-shirts. And when I first started losing my hair to the chemotherapy, Sarah’s little brother, Jim, had been one of eighteen boys who gathered in my family’s backyard one afternoon and shaved their heads. That’s the thing about going to church. There’s a bunch of extra rules you have to follow—like about dating—but the upside is that if you get cancer, if your life falls apart, church people will shave their heads and buy T-shirts for you. They will do anything they can to help you.
; Sarah Stevens glanced at a couple of the girls in the van. They smiled, biting lower lips to suppress giggles. For a moment, I basked in the hope that this meant she was going to say yes.
“No,” she said, looking at Tony, not at me.
I felt a hot, tingly sensation spread over my skin as I slid down a few inches against the bench seat, wishing I could just melt directly into its crusty upholstery. Not only did Sarah Stevens not like me, but she had just said so in front of all fifteen passengers in this van. It was a one-two knockout punch of rejection plus humiliation.
I disengaged from the truth or dare game until its chatter was mere background noise. After you’ve been shut down in front of everyone, publicly declared to be uncrushworthy by Sarah Stevens, who cares about anything else? So what if someone is gagging on a squeeze packet of mayonnaise?
At the retreat center, I set a pair of crutches on the unfinished cement floor, beneath the bunk bed I was sharing with Tony. We were staying in a rustic cabin with twenty bunk beds and a single naked lightbulb operated by a hanging string of tiny metal balls. I navigated my way through the maze of bunks to Joe Slater, who was unrolling his sleeping bag on the plastic mattress of a bottom bunk. Joe was in his late twenties, with an intense gaze, a booming laugh, and a V-shaped athletic build, all of which perfectly matched both his name (Joe Slater!) and his job description (youth pastor!).
“Hey, Joe, what are we going to do next?”
For me, not knowing the activity schedule was like living in an environment where the weather could fluctuate by one hundred degrees at any moment: I never knew what to wear.
“We’re going to dinner,” he said. “In the dining hall.”
Dinner. Got it. Keep the prosthesis on.
Since my leg is amputated all the way up at my hip, my prosthesis includes three artificial joints: hip, knee, and ankle. Which makes the leg very heavy and cumbersome to wear.
There are a lot of amputees who run and play sports with their prostheses on. These tend to be the amputees who are popularized in the media and thus the sort who come to mind when the average person thinks of the word “amputee.” But most of these amputee-athletes are below-knee amputees, meaning their legs end somewhere between the ankle and the knee. If you are a below-knee amputee, particularly if you are missing only your foot, a prosthesis can allow you to run just as fast as an able-bodied person. Above-knee amputees, though, have a harder time, because they don’t have the muscles of the quadriceps to propel their knees forward. It is possible to run with an above-knee prosthesis, but it is difficult and certainly not as fast as running with a real human leg. Most difficult of all, though, is the hip-disarticulation level, which is what I am. For hip disartics, running on the prosthesis is not possible. The leg simply doesn’t swing through fast enough.
So for most types of athletic activities, I would take my leg off and either run with my crutches, or set my crutches down and hop. I was faster and more agile without the leg. But I was also more self-conscious, and with the crutches, I didn’t have my hands free to, say, carry a plate of food. Which is why I would wear my leg to the dining hall for dinner, and why I planned to wear it to all nonathletic social activities during the retreat.
After dinner, Joe got up and gave the rules for the weekend. The usual—no going into the other gender’s cabin, no talking after lights-out, no going off anywhere by yourself. Stuff like that. Then Joe told us to open our Bibles, and he gave a “talk,” which is youth-group-speak for a sermon. The usual—no getting distracted by worldly pursuits, no motives except to bring glory to God, no sexual or impure thoughts. Stuff like that.
He prayed and then announced that we were all meeting by the lake in ten minutes. Prosthesis still on, I walked over to Joe.
“What are we going to do next?” I asked.
Joe frowned, not wanting to ruin the surprise.
“By the lake?” I persisted.
“Don’t tell anyone… but it’s nighttime capture the flag.”
“Cool, thanks.”
That meant leg off, using crutches, so I would be able to run. Of course, even with my crutches, I wasn’t an especially useful teammate in capture the flag—I couldn’t really hold the flag and move at the same time. But at least on the crutches I could run around to make it look like I was participating. The participation would be fake, but what did that matter when the alternative was wearing, you know, a fake leg? That’s what it means to be an amputee: You’re always putting on a show.
Down by the lake, we divided into teams, counting off by ones and twos. I tried to shift in line so I could be on the same team as Sarah Stevens. It worked. Not that I was going to talk to her or anything, not after her bombshell during truth or dare, but for some reason it seemed important that we be on the same team, working together to capture the same flag.
Chapter 2
On Saturday morning, after a pancake breakfast, I did not have to ask Joe what we were going to do next because he announced it to the group: hiking at Shenandoah National Park. It was going to be an all-day trip, and we should wear our bathing suits under our hiking clothes.
When we loaded into vans for the drive to the hiking trail, something totally insane happened: Sarah Stevens sat beside me. We were so close that one of her two legs and my one leg were—almost—touching. And it’s not like she had to sit beside me. There had been other vans. There had been other rows with available seats in this van. She chose to sit beside me. Which made me wonder—what if she liked me after all? Maybe she was lying yesterday in truth or dare?
I thought about this as I walked along the hiking trail. It really did seem like she liked me. Not only had she sat beside me in the van, but sometimes when I looked at her, like this morning at breakfast or last night during Joe’s talk, she was already looking at me and then we would both look away from each other.
The trail eventually led to a waterfall. It was a for-real one, too, like what you’d see on a postcard, about one hundred feet of vertical drop. While the rest of the group was splashing around in the foamy pool underneath, I climbed by myself up a trail so steep you had to grab on to exposed tree roots to keep from slipping. It was tricky because I’d have to let go of my forearm crutch handle for a second, allowing the cuff of the crutch to dangle from my wrist, while I grabbed at the root and pulled myself up like on a chin-up bar. At the top, there was a rock the size of a small car that jutted out over the falls. Sitting on it was a guy and a girl, midtwenties, with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders, sharing what appeared to be some kind of homemade cigarette.
“Hey, kid,” the guy said to me.
“Hey,” I said.
“This place is legit, huh?”
“Very legitimate, yes.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“You got a girlfriend?”
I thought about Sarah Stevens.
“No.”
The guy took a drag on the cigarette.
“Let me give you a tip. Once you get yourself a girlfriend,” he said, nodding his chin toward the girl he was intertwined with, “bring her right here. Sit on this rock.”
He winked at me as if I should understand. I didn’t, but nodded anyway.
“Trust me,” he said. “You’ll be glad you did.”
“Cool. Thanks.”
When we got back to the retreat center that afternoon, I found Joe Slater.
“What are we gonna do next?” I said.
“Showers. Then dinner.”
“What about after that?”
Joe looked away for a second, squinting into the woods.
“Listen, Josh, sometimes it’s best to just go with the flow. To have some faith that God will take care of things. Every moment of your life doesn’t need to be planned out in advance. Sometimes the best moments are the spontaneous ones you don’t plan for. You get what I’m saying?”
His words were true in the way most things printed on greeting cards are true. But I wasn’t as
king him about the schedule because I had a problem with spontaneity. I was asking because I needed to know whether or not to wear my leg. Only, I didn’t want to tell Joe, because doing so would violate my Rules of Being an Amputee.
I had developed these rules during the three years since I’d lost my leg. It wasn’t like I sat down one day and said, “What are some good rules I can write for myself?” Instead, they had taken root and sprouted without conscious attention, like weeds in my mind. And they grew in the exact opposite direction of how it feels to be an amputee. They were a correction—or maybe an overcorrection.
These were my rules:
1. Never be a burden.
2. Never be different.
As Joe and I stood there by the vans in the gravel parking area, wearing T-shirts and semiwet bathing suits, towels draped over our shoulders, I considered telling him the reason I always wanted to know the schedule: I needed to decide whether to wear my leg or not. But doing so would violate both of my rules. It would make me a burden, because if he knew I was making a decision about whether or not to wear a prosthesis based on each activity he planned, it might affect the way he planned the schedule. Instead of thinking, Would this be a fun activity for the students? he’d be thinking, I wonder if Josh will want to wear his prosthesis for this game? Or maybe he will already be on his crutches at this point in the day, which would mean we should play this other game instead. And obviously, telling him would violate rule number two as well, because it would identify me as different. I mean, no one else in the youth group was fluctuating their limb count depending on the activity.
And yes, I get that I was very different from everyone else. I was visually different, conspicuously different, obviously different. All you had to do was look at me. I was missing a leg. Either I was using crutches and there was no leg there at all or I was wearing one that didn’t look quite right and caused me to limp.
We Should Hang Out Sometime Page 1
