Locked Wheels

Chapter 1

The aggressive beep of the alarm on my phone wakes me, piercing through the shroud of my dream and stirring me awake. I groan softly, pressing the heels of my palms gently against my eyes. I sit for a moment, bathe in the red, shrieking sound drilling into my ears for a tired moment. After a minute, I sigh and heave myself over to grope for my phone. My hand brushes against it and my polaroid camera off the nightstand, and I fumble to catch both before they fall and shatter on the hardwood floor. I put the camera beside me on the bed and slide my thumb across the screen of my phone, putting it on snooze for a few precious minutes. I close my eyes, rubbing the sleep from my face and sighing.

I sit up slowly. I pick up my phone again and squint at bright screen to see the time. 5:30. The sky is still pitch black out my window. The air in my room is motionless and cold. I ruffle a hand through my messy hair and stretch, reaching my arms to the ceiling and bending backwards to crack my back. I throw the blanket back and turn, pushing my legs to let them hang off the bed.

I take a slow breath. "Dirk!" I shout. "I'm up!" In another time I would've sat patiently and waited for him to drag himself out of his room to come and help me, but this was now. I'd started getting increasingly better at everything after a few months, and now it was almost easier to do it on my own. Plus, he almost never woke up at the same time as me anyway. I'd be sitting there for hours.

I drag my wheelchair closer to my bed and unfold it. I carefully lowered myself into it, readjusting my legs as I reach to grab my camera and nestle it in my lap. I unlock my wheels and roll myself to the bathroom, stopping by Dirk's room to bang my fist on the door. Carer or not, he's a helplessly heavy sleeper as well as the only one in the house who can drive. In the time it takes me to piss, brush my teeth, and wash my face, Dirk is just stumbling from his room, hair sticking out in every direction and mumbling to himself. His eyes are still closed as he gropes for the wall to shuffle to the bathroom.

"Hm." I raise my camera and slowly depress the shutter. Click.

Dirk jerks back at the flash and glares at me, his amber eyes flying open tiredly and burning into me weakly. He swats feebly at me as I grin, ripping off the negative the camera spits out and waving it in the air. "Stop. It's too early for that."

"Y'know, it doesn't reflect very well on you when the crippled kid can get ready faster than you," I call over my shoulder as I wheel back to my room.

Needless to say a lot has changed for Dirk and I since that accident. A hell of a lot can happen in 6 years. I'm no longer 11 years old, for one. At the well meaning suggestion of a warm therapist at a hospital I don't remember, I'm now obsessed with photography. It was just a hobby way back when but now I try to take pictures of whatever I can whenever I can, both as a means to piss off Dirk and to cement physically the things I care about. So that I don't get all dark and angry and fatalistic inside like I was back then. You understand. I'm a junior in high school now, steadily marching towards a future of uncertain independence. What else? Oh. My legs never got better. It turns out whatever hell God unleashed on me in that accident utterly destroyed the majority of the "walking and standing" related anatomy of my lower limbs. So, now I'm in a wheelchair. I have been for the past 6 years.

From the day they wheeled me out of the ICU and poured me into the used minivan Dirk had gotten for $2000, this was our life: extra wide door frames and handicapped parking tags and always looking out for where there are ramps and trying to strategize what to do where there aren't (Which, surprisingly, is a lot of goddamn buildings. What's up with you abled people and making everything with stairs? Do y'all have some kind of vendetta against people who can't walk?); the occasional drole jab at my legs or Dirk's arms or either of the fat pale scars littering both of our faces to make sure neither of us sank under the sheer pressure of everything again. Dirk's shoulder still sounded like a bag full of sticks being stepped on when he moved it and sent shooting pain up his neck about half the time he used it, and I haven't been able to feel anything less than someone stabbing me in the femur for about a sixth of my life. It was what it was. You get used to it.