A screech ripped the night apart, and I turned over restlessly under my thin sheet. Dawn burned dimly through the curtains. Slippered feet padded into the room and stopped by the dresser. The alarm clock went silent.
"You ready?" said Aunt Sandy, her voice as soft as a shadow.
♫
The road that runs through Honaw is five miles long, which also happens to be the distance my family and I were from my aunt's house when our summer road trip ended. On street signs it is labeled Grand Avenue, but to the locals it is simply the Road. It starts up in the mountains by the copper mine, abandoned in the seventies and un-abandoned in the oh-tens. I say 'starts' because everything goes with gravity, and that's just what the Road does, winding down and down through the woods into the town's center, where its straightens out for a drag strip of fast-food joints and bars. To call this stretch the heart of Honaw would be unfair to anything able to pump blood. For its last two miles the Road gets back to snaking through pine trees and the occasional stumpy cousin of a Redwood, until finally it reaches the schools, all three of them sitting in a row, and terminates in front of Honaw High.
♫
I kept my neck locked and my head straight as Sandy pulled away, knowing she was watching me in the rearview mirror, not wanting her to see me watch her back. A new-car smelling wind teased across the school's front lawn. There's a lot of grass. I grew up in the desert east of Los Angeles and that was the first thought out of my dust-fed brain: there's a lot of grass.
Honaw High was a matchstick model blown up into life-sized proportions, everything timber, ramps and stairs everywhere. Across the lawn stood the front office and library, windows peeking in at shelves of books. Between the buildings I could make out an open, concrete space lined with benches and tables. Above that towered the gymnasium, a thirty-foot grizzly bear mouth roaring on its front wall. The bear looked in pain to me, its brown eyes staring in rather than out, lost in some deep unimaginable agony.
I wondered where the football field was.
I dug my untrimmed fingernails into my thighs.
The library doors opened and a boy emerged, hunched under a bulging backpack. He marched to a pothole in the center of the lawn, dropped his butt into the dirt, and pulled out a fat paperback book. His head was shaggy. His shirt was bright orange, his shorts dark blue. He could not have been less inconspicuous.
More kids were arriving from the bus loop and student parking lot. Someone walked right into the boy, knocked him down onto his back, and gave a drawling, "Sorrrrrrrry."
The boy picked himself up, laughing like he was a part of the joke, like he was in on it, then he settled back into his pothole and re-opened his book.
I glanced down at the diamond ring on my middle finger.
Inconspicuous, I thought. Real inconspicuous.
Leaning forward in my wheelchair, I pushed myself down the path toward day one of Junior Year.
♫
Back in my hometown, I'd ignore the morning school bell. I'd linger down in the parking lot against my beat-to-shit Corolla until the last possible second, Brittany's hands deep in my front pockets, my hands deep in her back pockets, both our tongues deep in . . . you can guess. Six minutes after the seven-minute bell there'd come the warning bell, the get-your-ass-into-gear bell, and I'd steal another slow kiss from the girl, give her butt a squeeze for it to remember me by, and then, only then, would I make my relaxed way to period one: "Sorry, Mr. So and So, I got tied up."
What's that you ask? Was Brittany a cheerleader?
Of course she was.
A late entrance was the last thing I wanted to make on my first day at Honaw High. What I wanted was to slip into class before anyone else, park in the very back, and not move a finger until the room was empty again. So I set off on my ride and was soon rolling through the outdoor lunch space where all the other kids had begun to gather. Most of them were dressed in short sleeves and summer tans even though it was cool out—especially there, beneath the shadow of the gymnasium. I paused behind a trashcan that was almost my height and fished my schedule out of my pocket. Sandy had come to Open House in my place during August and signed me up for classes, "just in case," meaning, just in case you're up to it, and was I up to it? Down for it? I don't know. But I was there.
At 7:30 AM, I had physics with Mr. Bertrand in F-1.
The schedule was gibberish without a map, but fortunately I had one of those too. Somewhere. After a minute of digging around in my backpack, I found and unfolded a glossy sheet of paper, like something out of an amusement park. The picture looked alien to me, upside down no matter which way I turned it, and suddenly I wanted to rip the thing to shreds, to pull the hair out of my head and scream, so I set the map on my legs and closed my eyes and breathed in and out until the blood stopped throbbing inside my ears.
The breezy morning became, for one second, a gusty morning.
I opened my eyes as the map skirted off through the air and landed at the feet of a pretty girl in a prettier skirt. She bent to pick it up, glanced over in my direction, and I grabbed the wheels and started pumping, my breath rock hard in my chest. When I finally stopped, I was in a passageway between two buildings, facing a ramp and a set of stairs. Panting, I read the marker on a nearby door.
C-3.
I pushed up the ramp with weak and trembly arms, and a little while later arrived at a row of portables labeled D-1 through D-6. Further on its own cluster stood the E's, which meant the F's had to be close. The school bell pealed. I kept pushing. My heart was throwing a tantrum about all this strange and unexpected movement, and my throat burned the way it used to after a long hard run. I reached the end of the E's and found myself before a fence staring through to deep green woods. The edge of the map.
No F's in sight.
I turned myself around by pulling on one wheel (a trick I was still getting the hang of) and began to retrace my path. Must have missed them, I thought, must have, must have. Honaw High was coming alive, yawning awake after the long sleep of summer. Kids flooded the grounds. Doors banged open and shut. Conversations swarmed around me, above me. I craned my neck to look above all the moving heads, where, where, where.
The bell rang again.
Bit by bit the school became quiet.
When the proctor walked over to me and saw the look on my face, she said, "You poor thing, are you lost?"
I choked, unable to speak.
"Here." She took the handles of my wheelchair. "What room are you looking for?"
♫
The F's were a late addition to the school like myself, and had been given the old parking lot behind the A's and B's. Which I would have known had the wind not been such a sticky-fingered sonofabitch. The proctor pushed me up the ramp to Mr. Bertrand's portable, let go of the wheelchair, opened the door, propped the door with her foot, waved inside cheerfully and then motioned for me to come.
I came. Reluctantly.
Turned heads, wide eyes. There were twenty sets of those eyes all together, including the teacher's, and I swear not one of them blinked.
"This is Joel," said the proctor. "Joel . . . what did you say your last name was?"
I hadn't said.
"Harper," I mumbled.
"Harker?"
"Harper."
"Oh. Harper." The proctor fought a visible urge to cover her mouth. "Oh."
Whispers traveled through the room. I hunkered down in my wheelchair, sweat popping out on my back. They knew. All of them knew.
Mr. Bertrand cleared his throat. "Glad to have you, Joel. You can sit over here."
He pointed to an open space in the front of the class.
♫
I always liked physics. The laws behind it. Especially the one that says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That law is a lesson in football. It means each tackle is a transaction paid both ways.
It means giving a hit is the same as taking a hit.
♫
My legs ache. They shouldn't, the doctors say. But they do, they ache all the time, and when school let out it felt like there were bulldozers running laps up and down my thighs and shins. I pushed along, my head cramped with hours of chalky blackboards and droning teachers and sitting hunched behind handicap desks. Awkward things, handicap desks. They stand up high for your wheels to slide beneath them and leave you feeling like a kid eating at a grownup table.
The Bear Den, Honaw's pet name for the gymnasium, had this alley running alongside it. On one side, a chain link fence guarded the tennis and basketball courts. On the other was a wall. Not the same wall where the school mascot was painted (that wall faced the street, so everybody in town could gaze up on the beast) but still I could feel its presence. A shadow above me. A set of jaws hooked with teeth. A tortured, endless roar.
How did I end up there, in that alley, in the first place?
I can't say for sure, except that it seemed out of the way and out of the way was where I felt most right. Except that there are different types of gravity, and not all of them pull you down. Some pull you where you are meant to be.
Near the end of the alley I rolled past a break in the fence and caught a glimpse of bright orange from the corner of my eye. A voice floated up, light, mocking.
"Hey Nip, where'd you get that shirt? You steal it off a carrot?"
The voice came attached to a name. Billy Rascoe. For an instant I was back in Algebra One, staring at the kid who had strolled in a minute after the bell just in time to raise his hand for roll call. Tall, slender frame. Scabbed knuckles. A smile that reached ear to ear, all humor and no warmth.
"You're supposed to eat your vegetables, Nip. Not wear them."
Twenty yards down at the bottom of a steep ramp, Billy Rascoe stood with his back to me. He was leaning over the boy I had seen reading that morning on the front field, one thick forearm holding shut the door of what I would later find out was the band room.
"Why don't you give it over?"
Nip laughed a high cracky laugh. "My shirt?"
"Yeah, your shirt. You don't want people thinking you're a thief, do you?"
"This was my brother's shirt."
"So you steal from family then?"
"He gave it to me."
"Did he?"
"Yeah."
"He give you his vagina, too? Or is that little pussy between your legs all yours?"
Nip shrank down the door. His bag lay open at his feet, books spilled into nearby patch of grass.
"You going to give it like I said? Or make me take it?"
Nip said something too low to hear. Billy responded, lower, then took Nip's shirt with one hand and began to lift it up.
I had turned myself toward the ramp without realizing. The air felt loose around me, not one thing but many things, tiny and buzzing. The hairs on my arms and neck prickled. A drumbeat pounded inside my legs.
Pain, it said.
Hurt.
Pain.
I pushed my chair forward an inch, flirting with the edge of the ramp, my hands tight on the wheels. Gravity, real gravity, pulled at my arms. The breeze stirred around me like the breath of something huge. I let go.
My wheelchair started to roll.
Billy tugged Nip's shirt up around his head. I came down the ramp, building speed, amassing momentum, my body leaned forward in the chair, my butt lifted off the seat. Faster. The cymbal-clash of my heart. Faster. The wind on my cheeks. Faster. My big black wheels chewed up the concrete and spit out kinetic energy, directed energy, and as the ground flattened out and Billy turned toward the sound of me coming, I howled, "HERE I AM," bouncing and hopping, and then I struck him dead on, one hundred and sixty pounds of poised muscle and bone, wham.
The world cycled colors: red, white, football-field green.
I pushed up from the grass, blood drooling from my mouth. Billy Rascoe's legs were twisted beneath me. I dragged my body up his body until I reached his wide-eyed, blank face. "That's how you make varsity," I said.
Nip had pulled his orange shirt back down over his head. He stared at me. "You did that on purpose."
I nodded.
"Why?"
"Because he was asking for it."
Nip fumbled for his things. Before disappearing into the band room, he twisted and said, "We were just playing. He's my friend."
So much for a thank you. I rolled off of Billy onto my back. Dark spots swirled in the sky. I waited for the adult that Nip would be bringing, but the door stayed shut. After a few minutes the static stopped playing in my head and I wormed over to the wheelchair. It had flipped onto its side. Using my arms I rocked it upright, braced it back against the wall, and climbed shakily onto the seat.
My phone was ringing. I answered it.
"Are you coming?" said Aunt Sandy. "I'm waiting out front."
I looked down at Billy in the grass and wondered how bad he was hurt, if he needed help. I turned my wheelchair the other way. "Yeah, I'm coming."
____ ____
Author's Note:
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