Push Girl (23 page)

I smiled at him, not entirely sure what some tire guy had to do with any of this.

Mr. Taylor smiled back, and cleared his throat. “Kara, I was so moved by your video. My wife was involved in a car accident about fifteen years ago now, and she also suffered a spinal cord injury and has been in a wheelchair ever since.” His voice broke, but he kept talking. “I think it’s great what you’re doing here at your school, and I wanted to make a donation to your club on behalf of Taylor’s Tires.”

He lifted the big piece of paper he was holding, which turned out to be one of those huge checks. A huge check for one thousand dollars, made out to the Walk and Roll Foundation.

One thousand dollars.

What was my life right now? Who, in real life, actually got a giant check? No one. That wasn’t a real thing that happened to real people. Especially giant checks from strangers, who handed you huge donations out of the blue.

But nothing that had happened to me in the past few months felt like a real thing that happened to real people. Maybe once you went through some crazy stuff, the universe rewarded you with things that were more amazing than you could have ever imagined. I mean, I’d entered the video contest on a whim, thinking the club could really use five hundred dollars. Now the contest hadn’t even started, and we were being handed twice that because I’d put myself out there and shared my story.

Dierdre shifted back in front of Mr. Taylor. “In fact, we’ve had viewers contacting the station all morning, Kara, asking us how to get in touch with you to donate to your cause.” She turned and faced Vinny and the camera directly. “Viewers, if you’ve been moved by Kara’s story and would like to donate to the Pacific Coastal High School’s chapter of the Walk and Roll Foundation and Kara’s campaign to increase drunk- and distracted-driving awareness among local teens, please visit the link on your screen.”

Dierdre Duncan wrapped up her broadcast, but I was too stunned to pay attention. Not only did I have this big check for a thousand freaking dollars handed to me by a man I’d never met, but I now had random people who watched the news calling in and demanding to know where they could find me to give me money. Unbelievable.

I found Jack’s face in the crowd. He was standing next to Amanda, who was getting all this on camera, and he was beaming at me. “What is happening?” I mouthed across the sea of people who had gathered.

He laughed. “Just go with it,” he mouthed back.

Dierdre Duncan thanked me and shook my hand, and before I could register what was happening, the crowd descended upon me. Person after person, student, teacher, random I’d never seen before, all in my face, telling me how awesome this all was, asking to join Walk and Roll, and telling me how excited they were for everything I was doing.

Finally, I was face-to-face with Mr. Taylor. He ran his hand over his balding head.

“Thanks for everything, Kara.” Mr. Taylor stuck out his hand, and I shook it. “My wife was a dancer, too, before her accident. Seeing your video really made her smile. You truly are an inspiration.”

And the way he said it didn’t make me bristle. It didn’t make me feel like I was some Other that every able-bodied person was tossing pity toward.

I felt like I really was doing something positive. Like I really was inspiring people. Not through what I was no longer able to do, but because of what I was doing now.

Maybe I was an inspiration after all. Not because I managed to get up and show my face in public every day in a wheelchair, making everyone else feel better about their lives, but because I was taking my experiences and using them to make things better for other people. I wasn’t going to let this bad thing that happened define me, and I had no intention of ever giving up on the things I wanted.

If that was what it meant to be an inspiration, I was totally okay with that.

CHAPTER 22

I’d missed driving. It always calmed me down and cleared my head, and just pushing myself really fast in my wheelchair never seemed to have the same effect.

Not like this.

Today, with the window rolled down, the rush of fresh air blew my hair in whips across my face. It was sunny and clear, though, one of those perfect California winter days in early December, and the sun warmed the skin on my arm through the open car window.

The road stretched out in front of me, and I was behind the wheel again. I felt free.

I was on my way to pick up Jack and Amanda, so I could take them out for a drive for a change. But I took the long way to their neighborhood, remembering the feeling of driving, how it made me calm, centered me, and helped me think.

Right after Homecoming, Mom got a part-time job at the dance studio, replacing Susan the receptionist, who spent more time at Starbucks than behind the front desk anyway. Mom loved her new job, where she felt like she was part of something, and where she was free to Dance Mom as much as she wanted to all over the girls there. Plus, Mom working even a few days a week was doing wonders for my parents’ relationship. The fighting hadn’t ended, it probably never would, but they were going to marriage counseling weekly, stopping their fights in the middle and reminding each other of whatever psychobabble their therapist Dr. Patel had gone over with them the week before, and Logan wasn’t hiding under my bed nearly so much as he used to.

One thing my parents didn’t fight about at all was Mom truly surprising me by using some of her new income from the studio to supplement the insurance money from the accident and help buy me a new car. She threw herself into finding the perfect car for me, and she scoured the Internet to find me a car equipped with hand controls for paraplegic drivers and finally settled on a small SUV. It looked like a normal car, even though it wasn’t anywhere near as cute as my Prius was, but I was able to accelerate and brake from a lever I squeezed with my hand. I could drive without using my legs at all.

Sure, I had to learn how to drive it, which was like having my learner’s permit all over again, and it was super bizarre and counterintuitive at first, using my hands instead of my feet. But since I couldn’t feel my feet anyway, I didn’t have the same impulses to hit the brakes as I once did. And, yeah, I had to take the dumb test all over in my new car, but it was worth it to be back on the road again.

I honked as I pulled up in Jack’s driveway, but Jack and Amanda must have been waiting for me, because they rushed out the front door before I’d even moved my hand off the horn. They swung the doors to my car open, and Jack sat next to me in the front while Amanda crawled into the backseat, next to my folded-up wheelchair.

“How does it feel?” Jack asked after kissing me hello.

Smiling, I backed out of the driveway and turned onto the street. “Even better than I remember.”

“So, where are we heading?” Amanda leaned back in the backseat. The wind from the open windows blew her braids into her face from all sides.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I’m open to suggestions. The world is our oyster.”

Jack leaned across the center console and whispered in my ear. “I don’t care what we do, as long as we can ditch Amanda later. I love her and all, but I have some plans that involve getting you alone.”

Heat rushed to my cheeks, setting my face on fire. Jack never stopped talking to me or about me like I belonged on the pages of
Maxim,
and I’m not gonna lie, I absolutely loved it.

“You do wonders for my ego,” I said, smiling.

“Well, you do wonders for my—”

“So, when are we going to plan that Walk and Roll movie night we’ve been talking about?” Amanda broke in from the backseat. “Baker has been really excited about getting this new programming off the ground. How about next Friday?”

“Can’t,” I said, trying to focus on the conversation instead of Jack’s hand burning a hole through my shoulder. “Mom and I are driving up the coast to visit colleges next weekend, and we have a lot of research to do to make up for lost time. We want to check out all the schools I applied to.”

“Okay, fine,” Amanda said, looking at the calendar on her phone. “What about the weekend after that?”

“That’s my first performance! And you said you’d come watch me dance, remember?”

After the video went viral, I started talking pretty frequently to Mr. Taylor’s wife, Lorin. It turned out Lorin was active in the local wheelchair community, which I didn’t even realize was a thing outside of the Internet. Lurking on my message boards was awesome, but once I started doing some research, I was amazed at how wonderful it felt to be surrounded with people in real life going through the same things as I was.

A night out to dinner with Lorin led to my most amazing discovery ever—a local wheelchair dance team: a group of both dancers in wheelchairs and able-bodied dancers who performed at schools and expos and conventions across the state. Mom and I spent hours that night watching videos of all their performances online, surprised and thrilled to find out that they were actually really talented dancers. The next morning I’d arranged to meet with them for an audition, and a week later I was rehearsing with the team and talking about teaming up with Walk and Roll. Adding a dance team to the Walk and Roll programming was going to make our foundation that much more awesome.

And I was dancing again. Even in a wheelchair, I was dancing.

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Amanda said. “But you’ll need to figure out some time in your calendar for the movie night, Miss Popular. You have so much going on.”

She was right. Only a few months after my accident, after losing the use of my legs and thinking my life was over, my calendar was already packed again with the things I loved. Dancing. Driving. Friends. It didn’t always seem like it would, but life had a way of coming together in ways I couldn’t even anticipate. So, maybe walking again wouldn’t be so impossible for me after all. But even if I never walked again, I was absolutely confident that my future was full of possibilities that I couldn’t even imagine.

“We’ll figure something out,” I said to her, smiling at the open road ahead of me. “Everything works out the way it’s supposed to.”

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

CHELSIE HILL, one of the stars of the Sundance Channel series
Push Girls
, was a high school senior when she was driven home by a friend who had been drinking. Their SUV veered off the road and crashed into a tree, snapping Chelsie’s back and paralyzing her from the waist down. She and her father went on to establish a nonprofit foundation, The Walk and Roll Foundation, to aid people with spinal cord injuries.

JESSICA LOVE is a high school teacher in California.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

PUSH GIRL.
Copyright © 2014 by Sundance TV LLC. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.stmartins.com

Cover design by Kerri Resnick

Cover photograph © Dale Berman

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-1-250-04591-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4668-4605-0 (e-book)

e-ISBN 9781466846050

First Edition: June 2014