Push Girl (11 page)

Was Jenny Roy making a truce with me? Was I not even worthy of her disgust and disdain now that I was disabled?

I knew I should have been relieved that the person who never missed a chance to stab me in the front completely passed over an opportunity to be the first to make an issue about me being in a wheelchair. But instead of relief, it was a choking sadness that filled my throat.

I was actually upset that Jenny Roy didn’t toss a snarky comment my way, because that meant that I was Different now. And everyone was going to treat me that way.

“Well, here you are,” Amanda said as we came to a stop in front of my first-period English class. We’d crossed the entire campus, and I didn’t even realize it. “And I’m all the way across campus for AP Physics, so I’ll see you later. You’ll rock this.” She leaned over, hugged me, and darted off into the sea of students in the hallway before I could say good-bye.

I watched her dark braids bob out into the crowd, and I turned to Jack and shuddered. “Do I have to?”

“According to the State of California, yeah, you do,” Jack said, patting me sympathetically on my arm.

“Don’t leave,” I blurted out as he walked off to his own first period. He stopped in his tracks and turned slowly back to face me. “Stay with me, Jack. Please. Change your class schedule.” I’d tried to sound light, like I was totally joking, but my dread at facing this class alone, at being Different without anyone to help me deal, had totally crept out in my voice.

“I wish I could,” he said, his mouth turning up in a sad smile. “I really do. But you’ll be fine. I promise. And text me if you need anything, okay? One of the privileges of being a Student Government officer is that teachers believe me when I say there’s some kind of school emergency and I need to leave in the middle of class. I’ll come find you, wherever you are.”

He turned to walk, but at the last second he turned back and, like Amanda, leaned over and hugged me. But his hug was tighter and longer and I didn’t want to let him go. I didn’t want to be alone.

I watched him walk away until he, too, was absorbed by the crowd, and then I gave myself a quick mental pep talk and wheeled into English class, where I was faced with Obstacle of the Day Number Two. Where do I sit? My assigned seat had been directly in the center of the classroom. But with over thirty students and desks packed into this small room, there was no way I could maneuver through this maze. And even if I could get through to my assigned seat, it’s not like I could get myself into the desk with its attached chair.

Well, this was awkward.

And to add to the fun, the tardy bell rang just as I was entering the classroom. Which meant the room quickly filled up with students. Students who hadn’t seen me since before my accident and had no idea I was going to be back in school today.

Of course, everyone stared as I wheeled to the front of the classroom to ask my teacher, Mr. David, what I was supposed to do. Mr. David had been my least favorite teacher since the first day of school, which was too bad, because I usually liked English. But he established almost immediately that he had no idea how to talk to any of us like we were normal people, and not a day had gone by in class that he hadn’t seemed to go out of his way to say something insensitive and insulting to at least one person in class. In the few weeks we’d spent together before my accident, he’d made a comment about how girls just pretend to enjoy sports to impress guys; said gay people could do whatever they wanted, he just didn’t want to hear about it; and referred to Kristina Lin as “Oriental.”

He was pretty much a walking, talking insult to everyone who wasn’t straight, white, male, and ignorant, and no one could understand how he still had a job. I was so not looking forward to his reaction to my wheelchair.

His back was to me as he scribbled the agenda on the whiteboard, and the longer I had to wait, the more I could feel eyes drilling holes in the back of my head. I could even hear my name, and whispers of some version of “Did you know Kara was coming back today?” I was half-tempted to turn myself around and yell,
Hey, everyone! Get a good look!
But right as I was considering it, hands actually on my wheels, Mr. David finished what he was doing and turned around.

“Oh, good morning, Kara! It’s great to see you back!” I watched his eyes. They traveled down from my face to my legs and lingered there a few moments longer than was polite. His mouth pulled down in a little frown as he seemed to consider my chair, and he drew his eyes back up again and tilted his head to the side. Ah, the sympathetic head tilt Ana had warned me about. I wondered if this was going to be the way everyone looked at me now. “I don’t know if you got the makeup work I sent you so you could stay caught up—”

“I got it,” I said. “But I haven’t had much of a chance to work on it yet. Things have been a little crazy.”

He let out a laugh that was too quick and too loud. “Fair enough,” he said. “Well, we’re in the middle of reading
Pride and Prejudice
. Did you get a copy from the library? I have a copy you can borrow right now if you need one, and you’ll…”

He kept talking, but I hadn’t even cracked the book, so listening to him was pointless. Especially because the bell to start class rang, and, just like on my journey from the parking lot, I could feel every eye in the room on me.

“Where do I sit?” I cut him off. I didn’t care about what chapter of the book we were on; I’d be lost anyway. I just wanted to know where I could go to get away from all these eyeballs and pretend to melt into the floor.

“You can take your normal seat,” he said. “I didn’t give it away while you were gone.” He laughed at this little joke of his, and he didn’t seem to understand why I wasn’t laughing along with him. Or moving from my spot.

“Uh, Mr. David.” It was Sarah Donovan, the girl sitting closest to Mr. David’s desk. “How is she supposed to get over to her desk? There’s not enough room.”

“Yeah,” said Baker, the guy next to Sarah. “And wouldn’t it be easier to have her pull up to a table instead of trying to move into a desk?”

On one hand, I was grateful to Sarah and Baker for speaking up in my behalf so I didn’t have to snark at Mr. David on my own. But on the other hand, who were they to speak for me? I didn’t ask for their help, and they weren’t my friends. They didn’t visit me in the hospital. They didn’t send a card. Who were they to try to jump in now? Especially when I was perfectly capable of giving Mr. David attitude on my own. It’s not like my mouth was paralyzed.

I decided to ignore them, and I kept on staring at awful Mr. David, who was now clearly regretting his dumb joke and shifting from foot to foot.

“Uh. Good morning, everyone,” he said to the entire class. “Get out your
Pride and Prejudice
books and spend a little time reading chapter ten silently. I’m going to get Kara caught up on what she missed while she was gone.”

Baker snorted as he leaned over to pull his book out of his bag, and I couldn’t help but smile.

“Okay, Kara,” Mr. David said, in a loud whisper. “We’re going to need to find you somewhere to sit since you aren’t going to be able to sit at your normal desk anymore.” I bristled at the word “normal” without even thinking about why. “Where can we put you?”

We both looked helplessly around the classroom, where, of course, everyone was staring at us instead of reading, but there wasn’t even a table or anything in the back I could roll up to and disappear behind.

“I’m going to have to call up to the office and see if they have an extra table they can set up as a desk for you. For now, why don’t you use my desk instead?”

“You want me to sit at your desk?”

He looked uncomfortable at his own suggestion, but it really was the only thing we could do for right now, aside from balancing all my folders and books on my lap and just staying in the middle of the aisle. So, while everyone watched instead of reading Austen, I wheeled myself to the very front of the class and unpacked my things right there on Mr. David’s teacher desk. Right in the perfect spot for absolutely everyone in class to gape at me from behind their books until the bell rang.

The rest of class was torture, especially with Mr. David frequently forgetting I was sitting at his desk and trying several times to sit down or get something and then turning around all awkwardly. Finally the bell rang, after what seemed like an entire school year, and I could make my escape.

On my way out of class, a couple of people walked up to me and said hi and that it was good to see me and that they were glad I was doing better after the accident and blah blah blah. I watched their faces the same way I watched Mr. David’s. They avoided eye contact too much, their gaze traveled down to my legs, where it lingered as their minds tried to make sense of what they were looking at, then—
bam!
—the sympathetic head tilt. I could hardly even pay attention to them when they were speaking to me because all I wanted to do was leave. Escape the conversation, go home, pretend I had never met these people. Their sympathy was smothering. Suffocating. I wanted none of it.

Ana sure was right about that damn head tilt, but she didn’t mention how mortifying it was to be stared at like one of those starving children infomercials. I could almost see the thought bubble above everyone’s head.
Poor Kara, she’s ruined forever. But thank God it wasn’t me.

The rest of the day was about the same. Some teachers had tables in their rooms, or had heard I was coming back and was in a wheelchair and thought,
Hey, maybe I need a new desk space,
and they were prepared. I did have the awkward “sit at my desk for now” again in math, but luckily that was a class I had with Jack, and he sat right in front of Ms. Wiles’s desk, so he spent the whole period entertaining me with stupid faces whenever we made eye contact.

I was going to try to keep track of how many times I got “the look” from people, but I stopped counting when I realized that I was getting it from everyone.

CHAPTER 10

The school day really crawls by when you’re on display, and by the time lunch rolled around, it felt like I’d lived a thousand miserable lives. Jack and Amanda ambushed me when I was leaving my fourth-period class and all the staring eyeballs behind, and while I should have been surprised to see the two of them waiting for me, I really wasn’t. Jack usually had lunch in the activities room with the other Student Government officers and Amanda typically worked through lunch in the media studio, but today they volunteered to have lunch with me anywhere I wanted to go. My choice.

“Don’t worry about me, you guys,” I said. “I don’t want you changing your normal lunch plans to accommodate me.” I didn’t mention that I was totally lunch-less now that I was also Curt-less. My last school year had been spent in Curt’s orbit, so I wouldn’t even know where to venture for lunch on my own.

“It’s really no problem,” Amanda said. “The media studio is so dark. A little light will do me some good.”

I appreciated their efforts, I really did. But I’d been drowning in a sea of pity all day; I didn’t want their pity hangout, too.

But, more than that, I needed to take this opportunity to find Curt.

I tried not to show it after the first couple of days in the hospital, but Curt’s lack of contact had me confused and upset. He was my boyfriend for almost an entire year. I went to his water polo games. He picked me up from dance practice. I taught his little sister how to pirouette and what stretches would make her kicks go higher.

This complete silence from him gutted me almost as much as the accident had. And it was so unlike him, too. Curt was a lot of things, but I never thought he was a dick.

Since he still wasn’t answering my calls or my texts, I needed to see him face-to-face and find out what was up. Why he was ignoring me like this when I needed him the most. He probably heard I was back at school, and he’d done an excellent job of making himself scarce so far. But he was always over by the pool at lunch, and he couldn’t move the whole water polo team from their usual spot just to ignore me. Plus, he knew I hated confrontation. He was probably banking on me not wanting to talk to him in front of an audience.

What he didn’t realize was that it wasn’t just the feeling in my legs the accident took from me. It also killed any anxiety I had about having this conversation in public. YOLO, and all that.

I smiled and waved good-bye to Jack and Amanda, who looked genuinely concerned about me, and I wheeled myself way over to the pool area.

Sure enough, there was Curt. Laughing and smiling with his friends, drinking a Gatorade. Not dead in a ditch, like I’d told myself he might be when he didn’t answer my texts. Not mysteriously out of the country, like I’d tried to convince myself was the reason he didn’t call back. My denial over his absence had been so powerful that I honestly convinced myself there must be something horrifically wrong with him, which had to be the only reason for him to straight up ignore me. But, nope. He was right here where I knew he would be, healthy and normal.

Which meant the only reason he didn’t answer my calls or my texts was because he didn’t want to.

So here I was, rolling along in my wheelchair, my life completely upside down, while he was standing in his same lunch spot and laughing with his buddies. Un-freaking-believable.

Ideally, I would’ve liked to hide out for a second and come up with a plan of attack before saying something to him, since it really helped me to have a script in my head before I had “a talk” with someone. I’d had all day to figure this out, but between trying to get settled in all my classes and trying to avoid all the stares, I never really got any further in my mental conversation than,
Dude, what the hell?
And, given my current state as school novelty, I couldn’t really hide out anywhere and get my thoughts together.

I was going to have to just go in and do this thing.

Without letting myself think about it too much, I pushed myself over to Curt and his friends, who were gathered into a loose clump in their usual spot by the pool. As I approached them, I felt a quick flash of relief that I was in the chair and not walking. I didn’t have to worry about my legs shaking with nerves.