“Are you all—ha—I mean are you—hee—all right?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
But I wasn’t all right. I was watching my dreams of an impending make-out session vanish into thin air. And not only were my dreams vanishing, my nightmares were coming true: My disability was going to ruin my chances with Francesca.
I stood up and brushed off the grass clippings, telling myself things couldn’t possibly get worse.
And that’s when things got worse.
I looked down and discovered that the foot on my artificial leg was turned backward. Like, it was literally facing the opposite direction of my real foot. I glanced at Francesca. She wasn’t laughing anymore. The awkwardness level was off the charts, well beyond the scale of any normal measurement of social discomfort. But at least Francesca knew I had a prosthesis. You can’t imagine the horror on the faces of the other golfers as they stared at a leg apparently so severely fractured that the foot was now capable of rotating 180 degrees. The other golfers were undoubtedly whipping out their cell phones to call 911.
Hi, nine-one-one? I have a serious golfing injury to report.… A young man fell down and when he stood up his foot was turned backward.… I don’t know how it’s possible, either, but I’m telling you that’s how it looks from my angle.… Yes, a female companion… No, based on her body language right now, I’d assume they’ll never be more than just friends.…
It’s strange to walk in the direction opposite of where one of your feet is pointing. And I imagine it looks even stranger. Still, I managed to hobble over to a tree by the side of the fairway. I started kicking the tree with my artificial leg, trying to pop the foot back into place. When I was too out of breath to continue kicking, I paused to examine my progress. None. Zero. The foot was still facing backward. I needed more leverage. I began kicking again, spinning with full roundhouse kicks so my artificial foot struck the tree at eye level. At this point, I was sure the other golfers were looking at each other and saying, This guy has some serious anger management problems.
I looked down and saw that my foot was finally pointing in the same direction as the rest of my body. That was the good news. The bad news was that I had chopped down the tree. Not literally chopped it down the way loggers do with chain saws, like, Timberrrrrr! It was more like the way smaller trees look after a hurricane has come through and they’re bent parallel to the ground. So, yeah. Definitely left a big carbon footprint that day.
Francesca—who was, in retrospect, probably something of a conservationist—and a small group of similarly minded onlookers all just stood there, jaws hanging open in silence, as I walked over to my ball with both feet facing proudly forward and putted it in for a birdie. I pumped my fist and smiled like things were going great. Trying to keep up appearances. Keep the date alive. Even with this hole-in-two, though, I knew my chances with Francesca were ruined. The contortions on her face while I was destroying that young sapling had said it all: This is awkward.
On the way home, we listened to Ani again. This time I connected. With her anger. She is so deep, this Ani DiFranco, I thought. She sees the world for what it truly is. A cruel, dark place that chews up those who are different and spits them out again.
I pulled into Francesca’s driveway and parked my car in front of the garage. I didn’t bother to turn off the idling engine. This good-bye, I expected, would not last long.
“Thanks for coming,” I said, breaking the silence.
“I had fun,” she said. “We should hang out more this summer.”
I opened my mouth to say “see you later” or whatever I had planned to say before she spoke, but my voice caught when I recognized the tonality of her words. She actually sounded like she wanted to see me again.
“Okay, well, yeah, I’ll see you soon then.”
Chapter 13
It was a month into the summer, and I had been coming over to Francesca’s house once or twice a week to play pool in her basement. After I beat her,4 we’d sit on the porch swing in the backyard and talk. Or I’d take her to Jess’s Quick Lunch downtown. All of which is to say, by the time we went hiking we were pretty skilled at talking to each other, which was good since the drive to the trailhead was longer than I remembered—about two hours, or two and a half Ani DiFranco CDs.
Hiking down to the base of the falls is pretty easy because you’re doing just that. Hiking down. You park on Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park and then you descend for four miles of switchbacks, worrying the whole time about the moment when you will be sitting on that rock overlooking the waterfall and you will turn your head sideways and purse your lips and close your eyes and move in for the kill. But if you close your eyes first, how will you know where, exactly, to move? Maybe you move in first and then close your eyes? And when do you insert your tongue into her mouth?
The base of the falls was just how I remembered it from when I went there with my youth group in eighth grade, when I climbed on top of that rock and that guy told me to bring a girl back here someday: heavily wooded with trees and shrubbery and shadowed by a towering rock face, with a backyard-pool-sized swimming hole underneath. There was no one else there. It was like our own perfect, private oasis in the forest.
I had been hoping that Francesca would wear a bikini that day, but she was sporting a modest green-and-black one-piece.
Much more disappointing was that she wouldn’t swim in the pool underneath the falls.
“It’s too cold,” she said.
She just stood up to her ankles and watched while I jumped off a low ledge into the water, trying to splash her with irresistible fun vibes. But she didn’t budge. She just smiled and said something about how this all looked like a movie, which made me realize that if this were really a movie, my character would be expected to grab her around the waist and pull her into the water. She would shriek and scream in protest, but deep down she would love it. Then we’d splash each other and giggle like schoolchildren, and she’d start trying to dunk me, and then I would fake like I had drowned by breathing through a straw made out of bamboo, and she’d freak out and start crying and her wrists would hang limp while she flapped her hands, and then I’d pop out of the water and surprise her and she’d laugh and then we’d kiss. And maybe that’s what she was hoping would happen. After all, why else would she strip down to her swimsuit and stand at the edge of the water like that? I started to swim toward her so I could pull her in, but while I did so I made the mistake of thinking. Then I stopped and treaded water. I couldn’t do it. There was simply too much risk. Risk that she’d be annoyed by the cold water. Risk that she would find me grabbing her around the waist inappropriate. Risk that my balance, standing with one leg on the slick rocks, wouldn’t be stable enough to topple her. Risk that it would be awkward. Risk that she didn’t like me. I shook my head, wishing I were in a movie instead of in my brain.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
I climbed out of the water and picked up my crutches. I thought about putting my shirt back on but decided to keep it off in the hope she would be impressed by what I imagined were the chiseled muscles of my sixteen-year-old chest. This, I would soon discover, was a massive tactical error. But not for the reasons you probably think.
“Come on, I want to show you something.”
We walked in our swimsuits and bare feet up the steep, rooted path. At the top, we came to the rock, and again I hesitated—not about kissing her, but about simply sitting down. What if I sat down and she didn’t sit beside me? I looked at her. I looked at the rock. No, couldn’t do it. Too big a risk. So I just stood there surveying the stupid trees below and thinking how stupid it was that I couldn’t even bring myself to take the risk of sitting on a stupid rock and what was wrong with my stupid brain, until suddenly she sat down on the rock and looked up at me like I was supposed to join her. I smiled and bit my lower lip.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
I set my crutches dow
n and then sat beside her, beads of water rolling down my back. Phase one was complete.
But I wasn’t sure how to initiate phase two, the kiss. Maybe I could do so by telling the story of how I first came here three years ago, how ever since then I had thought this would be a perfect place for, you know, a first kiss?
“I came to this rock a few years ago. I’ve always wanted to come back.” Upon its telling, I realized the story was both shorter and less effective than I had hoped.
“It’s a beautiful view,” she offered.
“Yeah.”
We were silent for a while, listening to the roar of the waterfall. It was the good kind of silent, though. She breathed in slowly through her nose, taking in the scene. And then she said, thoughtfully, “It smells like pot up here.”
I had absolutely no clue what pot smelled like.
“Yeah,” I said, sniffing. “It totally does.”
Then we were quiet again.
I decided to try another tactic for initiating phase two, the Deep Conversation.
“Let me ask you something,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Why do you think adults give up on their dreams?”
“Um, I don’t know.”
“But you know what I’m saying, right? It’s like everyone our age wants to change the world or be famous or something, right?”
She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”
“But most adults don’t do any of those things. They just live sort of normal lives. But it’s like, they’re okay with that. It doesn’t bother them.”
“I never really thought about it that way.”
“Why do you think that is?”
She was quiet for a little bit. “I don’t know. I guess people just get busy.”
“I guess so.”
“What do you think?” she asked.
I didn’t know. But I wanted to know. I wanted my life to count. I wanted my dreams to come true. “Yeah, you’re probably right. People get busy.”
She nodded.
I looked out at the treetops and continued speaking with all the heady profundity that comes with knowing so much and understanding so deeply how the world works. “They get busy with being married and having children and house payments. And then they’re old and they missed out on their dreams.”
“That’s probably it.”
“Good thing we’re still young.”
“Yeah.”
“And that we figured that out.”
“Yeah.”
We were both watching the water zip off the edge just below us. You could taste the mist coming off the falls.
“I want to change the world,” I blurted out.
“You do?”
“Yeah. And I’m going to do it, too.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. But I’m going to.”
She looked right in my eyes.
“I believe you,” she said, seriously.
We held each other’s gaze. Neither of us said anything. Neither of us moved. Neither of us even blinked. I moved my head forward exactly one centimeter. She squinted slightly, questioningly.
This is it, I thought. It’s going to happen. My first kiss. Right now.
That’s when it hit me: I was wearing a swimsuit. No underwear. No shirt. If I got, you know, excited, which seemed all but certain during my first kiss, it would be about as subtle as a circus tent going up on your next-door neighbor’s front lawn. And what would she think? Would she be grossed out and go home and call her friends and tell them about it? Would it be a story that followed me through the halls of my high school until graduation?
“Well, it’s getting kind of late,” I said, glancing up at the dimming afternoon sky.
Her body jumped involuntarily, as if startled.
“Oh. I guess you’re… right.”
As we hiked all the way back up to the car, I told her about my dream to become a Paralympic ski racer someday. I had learned to ski right after I lost my leg as a kid, and while I was still on chemotherapy I met a former coach of the US Paralympic Team, who told me I had “great potential.” Ever since then, ever since that day, I had wanted to race in the Paralympics. I asked her what her dreams were, and she said she didn’t have any. I told her she should get some.5
“I guess you’re right,” said Francesca.
Hiking against gravity was significantly slower than hiking with it, as it turned out. The sun set and the trail turned dark under the canopy of a dense pine forest. Interesting, I thought, since we hadn’t walked through any dense pine forests on the way down.
“I think we lost the trail,” I said.
We examined the bed of pine needles under our feet. There was indeed no trail.
“This is like something out of a horror movie,” she said.
I recognized this as my cue to demonstrate bravery.
“Yeah, pretty freaky,” I agreed, not bravely at all.
Francesca and I wandered around the woods in the dark, trying to navigate by moonlight and the North Star, something I had learned how to do in Boy Scouts. By “learned” I don’t mean I could actually do it, but that I knew enough big words (“latitude,” “equator,” “compass,” “south by southwest,” etc.) to get the orienteering merit badge.6 So my only real strategy was to keep us walking in the same direction. As long as you go in a straight line, you’ll eventually run into the end of the national park, right?
I would later discover that as we wandered, Francesca’s dad was calling my house every hour. At one point Francesca’s dad said to my dad on the phone, “I just want you to know, even though I’m a little worried right now, there’s actually no young man I’d rather have my daughter out with than your son.”
Oh, great. Thanks. Just what every teenaged Ani DiFranco fan wants, a guy who has the enthusiastic endorsement of her father.
I’m not sure why parents always liked me when I was growing up. Maybe because I used big words and knew how to do math problems. Maybe they thought cancer made me mature for my age. Maybe because they thought I wouldn’t be able to try anything on their daughters since I had a physical disability. Whatever it was, it’s safe to say that if girls chose their boyfriends based on who their parents liked, I could’ve required resumes and head shots from girls before they would even be eligible for consideration. That’s how much the parents liked me. But parental approval doesn’t do much for you when you’re trying to date high school chicks. In fact, it makes it harder, because deep down every teenaged girl wants to bring home some biker dude with prison tattoos and a tendency to break anything that shatters (beer bottles, windshields, young girls’ hearts) just so her dad will flip out.
Eventually, Francesca and I stumbled out of the pine forest onto a road. There were no cars or people in sight.
“This really is just like a horror movie,” she said again.
Being that in my family we weren’t allowed to watch PG-13-rated movies until we were sixteen, and R-rated movies until we were adults and responsible for our own souls, I had never actually seen a horror movie.
“Yeah,” I said. “It totally is.”
We followed the pavement in a randomly chosen direction for thirty minutes and eventually found the parking lot, empty except for my car, which was sparkling in the moonlight thanks to a trip to the car wash that morning.
Chapter 14
About halfway through the summer, I ran into some guys I knew from school. They said they heard Francesca and I had been hanging out. I asked them where they had heard that. They said around. I took this as good news.
One day she called me and we had the following conversation.
“What are you doing this weekend?” she asked.
“Nothing. What are you doing?”
“You ever heard of Pat McGee?”
“I think so. A singer, right?” I said.
“Uh-huh. His band is having a concert up in DC.”
“Cool,” I said. “You going?”
“I reall
y want to, but my parents said I’m not allowed to drive to DC.”
“Bummer.”
“I know, huge bummer,” she said.
There was a pause. You will be tempted to think I am making up this next comment to amuse you. Alas, I am not. This is what I actually said.
“Driving in cities is one of the few things my parents let me do,” I said. “I’ve even driven to DC a few times.”
There was another pause, as if she was waiting for me to say something else. I filled in the silence with, “So… what are you going to do instead?”
“Nothing, I guess,” she said softly.
Sometimes I hear people say that if they could go back in time and relive their lives, they wouldn’t change a thing. Obviously, these people have never had a conversation like this one. If only I had a time machine so I could go back to my younger self, slap him in the face, take the phone, and say, I apologize for this loser’s utter stupidity! Hold on a second.
Then I would put my hand over the mouthpiece, turn to my sixteen-year-old-self, and say, Dude! She wants you to give her a ride to DC!
But as of this writing, time machines haven’t been invented yet. So this is how the conversation ended, in the timeline of past reality as it currently stands: My former self said he’d call her in the next day or two because “we need to hang out again in the near future,” and then he said good-bye and hung up.
Even though I missed the chance to take her to DC for the concert, we did keep hanging out. And over the next few weeks, whenever we were playing pool in her basement, I would think how much I wanted to kiss her. What I needed was the perfect date.
As far as I could tell, the main things girls were looking for in a potential boyfriend were romance and danger. Romance because they grew up wanting to live in a fairy tale, to have a handsome prince rescue them and all that. Danger because… Well, I’m not sure, but it seemed like girls always went for the bad boys, not the nice ones like me. So what I needed was an activity that combined these two pieces. What kind of date would have both romance and danger? One day it just popped into my head: a picnic on top of a skyscraper.
We Should Hang Out Sometime Page 6
