Push Girl (10 page)

“I have your backpack,” Jack said, and he opened the door. “Bye, Mrs. Moore.”

“Bye, Jack,” Mom said. “Bye, Kara. Have a great day.”

“Doubtful,” I mumbled as I pushed myself out of the house, down Dad’s rickety makeshift ramp, and down to the driveway.

Jack tossed my backpack in his trunk, and he stopped to look at me as I sat there next to his Civic. “Oh,” he said. He swung the passenger door open and, before I even knew what was happening, he leaned down to wrap his arms around my shoulders and under my legs, our foreheads bonking together.

“Ouch! Jack! What are you—?”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean…”

I thought he was backing up, but instead he moved his head to the other side and leaned over again, and this time as he reached around me, his hand grazed my boob. Then he yanked it back like he’d touched an open flame.

“Ack!” I screeched.

“Oh my God. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“What on God’s green earth are you doing?”

He straightened himself up and looked at me, his face red. “I was trying to lift you into the car.”

I didn’t mean to laugh so hard. I really didn’t. But the whole situation was so ridiculous, I couldn’t help it. When I could finally look at him with a straight face, I managed to say, “Do I look helpless? I can get in the car myself, you dork. You don’t have to do that.” Was my life now going to be filled with people trying to help me all the time?

Jack seemed honestly surprised. “You can?”

“God, just ask, okay? Now, out of the way. Let me show you how this is done.” Just as I had done on my way home from the hospital, I used my arms to lift myself up from the chair and plop myself down in the seat. “Voilà!”

Jack let out an impressed whistle.

“I’m not as helpless as I look,” I told him. “But you can go ahead and fold up my chair and toss it in the backseat if you want to feel useful.”

He looked from one side of my chair to the other, then sort of flipped himself over and looked at the bottom of it. “How do you—?”

“Right there,” I said, pointing at the lever he needed to grab to collapse it. It was a relief to be the one telling people how to use the chair instead of the other way around. “So, were you seriously planning on lifting me, Chicken Arms?”

“Look, I know I don’t play water polo or anything, but that doesn’t mean I’m totally useless when it comes to acts of brute strength.” He winked as he leaned over my chair and folded it up. “Playing Halo really works the ol’ biceps, you know?”

Jack stowed my collapsed chair in the back of his car with my bag, slammed the trunk, and hopped in the driver’s side of his car. “Off to get Amanda,” he said, backing out of my driveway. “I texted her before I left and she was still in pajamas, so hopefully she’s had ample time to get herself ready.”

We drove in silence for a minute or two with only the morning team on the radio as noise between us. Finally, I said, “Thank you.”

“Oh, it’s no problem,” he said. “You know your house isn’t out of the way or anything, so I might as well—”

“No, I mean … well, yeah, thanks for the ride. But thanks for being…” I couldn’t figure out exactly how to say what I wanted to say. Thanks for being there when I was in the hospital. Thanks for bringing me movies and trashy magazines and my favorite flowers. Thanks for collapsing my wheelchair like it’s no big deal. “Thanks for being normal.” I let out a long sigh. “I have a feeling I’m not going to be getting a lot of that today.”

“I doubt people will be as weird as you think they’re going to be.”

“Of course they are. Didn’t you see my mom?”

He gave an uncomfortable, humorless laugh. “I wasn’t going to say anything. I thought she was just being strange because I was there.”

“Nope. It’s because I was there. She’s been all distant and not herself ever since I got home from the hospital. And she’s my mother. If my own mom can’t be normal around me, how are all the randoms at school going to be?”

We pulled up in Amanda’s driveway, and she bounded out the front door, her long braids flapping behind her, and she jumped into the backseat of Jack’s car. “Good morning, friends! You ready for school, Kara?” Amanda had always been a morning person, and it used to piss me off because I could never muster this much enthusiasm before the clock hit double digits. Today, though, I welcomed her chirpiness as a distraction from my overwhelming dread.

“You need to settle down,” Jack said as he pulled the car back onto the street and headed toward school. “It’s school, not Disneyland.”

“Nothing wrong with being high on life,” she said. “Right, Kara?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I mumbled. It wasn’t just that I was heading to school for my first time since the accident; it was that I was heading to school for the first time in almost a year without Curt. His absence left me feeling just as hollow inside as my spinal cord injury did.

“I had a feeling you were going to be a little down this morning.” She rummaged through her bag and pulled something out. “Here, this is for you.” She reached over the seat and dropped something into my lap. It was a small stuffed bear wearing a T-shirt with a picture of me and Amanda from fourth grade screened on the front. Amanda and I got the peach-colored bear, which we named Patrick after our favorite
SpongeBob
character, at a street fair in elementary school, and we passed it back and forth anytime one of us needed cheering up. I hadn’t seen Patrick in years, but the sight of him in my lap as I was so full of anxiety about going to school, well, it was just what I needed. I took one look at it and burst out laughing. Like, snorting, ugly, hysterical laughter. I hadn’t laughed that loud or that heartily in so long, I couldn’t even remember when. It was before the accident, that’s for sure. Before the chair. Before my legs. Nothing since I’d woken up in the hospital had made me laugh like this little bear.

It was a relief to laugh again. I’d wondered if it was going to happen, and I’d spent quite a few lonely nights in the hospital drowning in my feelings, convinced that nothing from that point on would ever make me happy again. How nice to be proved wrong so soon.

Unfortunately, my light mood slipped away as we pulled into the school parking lot. It had been almost a month since I was last here, and even though it was obviously the same school filled with the exact same people, it felt completely foreign. I knew how to get to all my classes, but would I be able to go my familiar route in my wheelchair? It never occurred to me if there were stairs or bumps or anything that would prevent me from following my usual path to and from classes. And the people I knew, those familiar faces … how would they act? Would they be normal, like Jack and Amanda? Would they be weird like my mom? Would they treat me like I was completely helpless like my dad? Would they ignore me? I wondered what would be worse—being treated differently or being treated like nothing had changed.

“Okay,” Jack said. “You ready for this?”

“No,” I said, handing Patrick back to Amanda. “Let’s do something else. I’m totally down to go back home and go to bed. Or we could make a blanket fort. That sounds pretty awesome right now.”

Amanda leaned forward over the seat. “I know you want to go hide right now. And I don’t blame you. But you are stronger than that.”

I bristled at Amanda saying I was strong, just as I had when Dad said it last night. I wasn’t being strong. I was just going to school. I needed to. My doctor’s note was expiring, and I was already a month behind. I had to graduate at the end of the year.

This wasn’t strength. It was necessity.

I didn’t say anything, though. She was taking the time to be here for me, and she had been since I woke up in the hospital, since before the accident, actually, even though I’d been keeping her at arm’s length. I couldn’t snap at one of the few people who was actually supporting me.

Instead I said, “Fine, let’s go.” Not for the first time, I wished I could just step out of the car and stomp off, but I had to wait for Jack to get my chair from the back of his car and lock it into place before I could lift myself out. All settled in, I grabbed my backpack from Jack’s outstretched hand and arranged it in my lap. I could have hung it from the back of my chair, but I liked having it in front of me, like a shield from the world, one I could hide behind.

This time it was Amanda who was impressed with my maneuvering. I’d have to remember to tell her about the awkward boob-grabbing incident later.

The three of us headed through the parking lot toward school. We passed through small groups of students lingering by their cars before class started, and I noticed eyes following me as I wheeled myself through the unevenly paved lot. I’d always been irritated by the loose gravel and bad paving job in the parking lot, but it had never been more than a general annoyance. Now that I was trying to wheel myself over the top of it, though, it was making my life downright miserable. My arm strength had improved significantly just in the past week or so of using my chair—I was getting some major biceps—but it still wasn’t all that great. I was a dancer, after all, and my strength was in my now-useless legs.

I hit my first major snag when I got to the front of the fenced-in parking lot. The lot had a large chain-link fence all the way around it to keep students from wandering off campus. The only way I’ve ever known to get from the lot to campus was through a small opening in the gate right by the front; all the students filed through this one opening before and after school. I’m not sure if I realized it first or if Jack did, but we both stopped in our tracks, him walking and me pushing, while Amanda kept right on walking through the gate. When she realized we weren’t behind her, she turned around and looked at us. “What?”

I watched Jack look at her like she was a complete idiot, and I turned back to her to see realization cross her face. “Oh, no,” she said, her face falling. “You don’t fit.”

Sure enough, my chair was too wide to fit through the narrow opening in the gate. The three of us searched around for another way to exit the parking lot aside from the entrance that we drove into from the street, and we didn’t see anything. Unbelievable. I’d made it all the way to school, and now I was trapped in the parking lot.

“Do I seriously have to go all the way around? Are you kidding me?” My voice was shrill, and I knew I sounded whiny, like a little kid who was being told to go to sleep when everyone else got to stay up, but seriously? I couldn’t fit through the gate everyone walked through? I’d have to wheel myself back across this bumpy asphalt only to have to come all the way around on the sidewalk? That was ridiculous.

“Oh, look,” said Jack, pointing about fifty feet down from where we were lurking. “There’s an opening right there.”

“Is it locked?” Amanda asked.

“Let me go check,” Jack said, and he jogged off.

I looked up at Amanda. “The bell is going to ring soon. Don’t stand around with me. Just go to class.”

She smiled back at me. “Don’t be silly.”

“It’s open,” Jack called, waving us over toward the opening. I wheeled over to the gate he was holding open. “A secret door. Who knew?”

A group of people on the other side of the parking gate had stopped to watch me figure out how to get through, like I was some kind of circus act performing for their entertainment. “What are they looking at?” I mumbled.

“Don’t worry about them,” Amanda whispered back. “They’re just curious.”

I wanted to say about a hundred different things, but I knew Amanda wouldn’t understand. She didn’t know how it felt to have the most basic conveniences taken away. She didn’t know how it felt to have people stare at you for just trying to get to class.

Once I was out of the parking lot, I was back on sidewalk that was much easier to maneuver over than the bumpy asphalt. But a smooth surface didn’t mean a smooth journey to class. Now eyes followed me all the way to first period, coming at me from every direction. People looking. People talking. Jack and Amanda talked up a storm as they walked on either side of me, but I couldn’t listen to them when I could feel everyone I pushed past, people I didn’t even know, had never spoken to before, staring at me. I figured my accident had become news at school, so freshmen, new students, people who’d never seen me before probably knew who I was now. But these stares. They made me feel like a zoo animal on a campus where I used to blend right in.

I tried to focus on what Jack and Amanda were saying, but it was almost impossible while trying to do two other things at once. One, avoiding all the staring eyeballs as I wheeled down the walkways, and two, keeping on high alert for Curt. I knew he usually hung out around the pool before school, since he had morning water polo practice. As we went by the pool, I slowed down so I was behind Jack and Amanda, and I scoured the area. I didn’t see him at all, but I didn’t see any of the water polo guys, either, so maybe they were still in the locker room or something.

Of course, though, because this morning had to be as annoying and difficult as possible, I did see Jenny Roy.

She was typing furiously on her phone as she walked out toward the parking lot while Jack, Amanda, and I headed in toward school. Knowing Jenny, she was probably planning to ditch first period and plot evil schemes with the devil himself over mochas at Starbucks or something. As soon as I caught sight of her, I felt my posture fall. Without even meaning to, I curled myself back into my chair as much as I could while still moving myself forward. But trying to slip by unseen was pointless. One thing that had been made clear to me already was that there was no way to make myself invisible.

It took only a few moments for her to notice me, and as she slipped her phone in the back pocket of her shorts, our eyes met. I braced myself for an eye roll or a snarky comment, but I got nothing.

Well, it wasn’t nothing. Her eyes passed over me, from head to chair, and something flickered across her face.

Pity,
I thought. It looked like she felt sorry for me.

Then, right as we crossed paths, she brought up the side of her mouth in an attempt at a half smile and she shrugged and just kept on walking. No stink eye. No comment. Nothing.