The Birth of Super Crip (4 page)

“Poor boy,” she said with a smile, pushing the key
guard down into the Velcro. “You good?”

“Yeah, thanks,” he said.

She smiled and playfully flicked him on the ear as
she headed back to her station. It was the perfect excuse for Red
to look back and watch her walk away.

Red took plenty of razzing about Alley from his
friends and his brother, but as he watched her walking away,
feeling like the only kid in school who noticed her short curly
blond hair, he really didn’t care what they said. He made sure his
eyes were on his screen before she sat down, and he focused on
typing in the corrections for the subroutine he had come up with
the night before, hoping they would finally get his project
working.

Making it to third period with little time to spare
before the bell, Red parked his power chair in the corner of the
classroom and walked over to his desk. He quickly opened his
copybook to the homework from the night before. He didn’t want to
give Mr. Donohue any excuses to hassle him.

“Is that the best handwriting you can offer?” Pete
asked from the seat behind him in his best imitation of Mr.
Donohue.

Red laughed. There was still enough chatter going on
around them that he turned to Pete. Looking down at Pete’s crutches
on the floor next to his desk, Red whispered, “Please be aware of
lying those in the aisle.”

Pete covered his mouth to stop himself from laughing
out loud. He was one of only a couple other students with
disabilities with whom Red had a class during the day, except for
resource room periods that replaced study halls for students in the
mainstreaming program and gym class. Over the years they had fought
as much as they’d gotten along, but being two of only a handful of
kids in the entire school with a physical disability kept a bond
between them. Surviving the first few weeks of Mr. Donohue’s
Algebra II class together had actually improved their
relationship.

“Why were you late?” Pete asked.

“I’m not late,” Red replied, ignoring Pete’s
reference to the fact that they both usually arrived well before
the bell. “I mean, I made it here before the teacher, didn’t
I?”

“So, you’re helping him with his passive-aggressive
protest against having to move his class to the first floor once a
day?”

“No, I’m passively and aggressively protesting the
fact that we were mainstreamed in eighth grade and they still don’t
have an elevator in A-wing of the high school for junior year.”

“You want an elevator in A-wing and B-wing?” Pete
quipped, making a face as if to suggest that was the most
outlandish thing he’d ever heard. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Or they could just connect both hallways upstairs,”
Red shot back. “It is 1992. I hear it’s being done.”

“Dude, the halls are only connected indoors on one
end of the building
down
-stairs,” Pete said. “You expect the
same luxury
up
-stairs. You damn disabled people just want
everything, don’t ya?”

They both smiled briefly at the ongoing joke.
“Seriously, why were you late?”

Red shrugged. “I was talking to Alley for a minute
near the end of class,” he said. “So I didn’t leave early enough
and the bell rang just as I got down the stairs to my wheelchair.
Everybody was already leaving class and it took forever to get
through the hallway.”

“I don’t see why they can’t move that class
downstairs,” Pete said.

“I heard some BS that the computers could get stolen
easier,” Red said. “I don’t know. I guess they look at it like
moving your science lab. Too hard.”

“Bonnie give you any crap?”

“Not really, but I think I made her late for her
third period of the day of doing nothing.”

“I thought Mr. Nicklaus had that covered.”

“Li’l Nicky?” Red asked sarcastically. “He’s busy
working on his doctorate this period.”

They couldn’t even muster a laugh at their own
sarcasm about the resource room staff. They had been worn down in
their first two years of dealing with the teacher and aide, who
often refused to perform the most basic duties of working in the
mainstreaming program. Smoothing out problems with regular
education teachers who balked at giving students with disabilities
extra time to do tests or in-class assignments, assisting students
with lunch, and helping them get materials from the library, were
just a few of the things Mr. Nicklaus and Bonnie had put back on
the students with the excuse that they “were in high school now”
and needed to do things on their own. As freshmen, Red and the
others arriving from middle school quickly learned that complaining
to their parents only made things worse.

The program was run by the county—not the school
district—which meant the staff reported to the principal of
Sunshine Lane. So, parental complaints to the high school
administration were met with empathy, followed by explanations that
there was nothing they could do. Phone calls to the Sunshine Lane
principal merely lead to him relaying the message to Mr. Nicklaus.
Even when the message came with a directive for Mr. Nicklaus to
make a change, it was generally ignored since his boss wasn’t in
the building to compel him to do things differently.

In fact, the order to do something about a particular
problem would generally make things worse. The entire class watched
as one of the most egregious examples of the staff’s disregard for
the students played out during Red’s freshman year. One of the
seniors almost flunked his final semester of English due to the
fact that he was struggling with the physical demands of doing
research for a required paper. He had muscular dystrophy, and
couldn’t independently get books off the shelves in the library.
When his father called to complain, saying his son needed more time
in the library than the two periods a week that Bonnie would help
him—even though the student had a daily resource room period in
which the aide wasn’t helping anyone else—the aide suddenly began
taking her lunch during the student’s period in the room. Mr.
Nicklaus refused to help the student in the library, claiming it
wasn’t his job as a teacher, and said that the aide could take
lunch whenever she wanted. The father had to help his son at their
local library in the evening so the student could complete his
paper on time.

Red’s mom was responsible for giving Mr. Nicklaus’
his nickname, “Li’l Nicky.” Last year, she had called him directly
to ask why Red couldn’t use the computer in the resource room more
often as he was struggling to keep up with his computer programming
course. When she repeated Red’s claim that the teacher often
monopolized the computer doing work for his graduate degree, she
was promptly hung up on. While she regretted blurting out that
“Li’l Nicky is just impossible to talk to” in front of her son, the
moniker stuck.

“Wish the idiot would graduate and move on already,”
Pete said.

“Tell me about it.”

“Why’d you have to talk to Alley? Because you
luv
her?”

“Oh, it’s so funny every time,” Red said, slapping
his knee to accentuate his sarcasm. “We’re both having trouble with
the same subroutine, so we were just trying to figure it out
together for a minute at the end of class.”

“And you
luv
her,” Pete continued to tease as
the final bell rang.

Seeing Mr. Donohue walk into the room, Red only
offered a fake look of amusement as he turned to face the front of
the class. He flipped through a couple pages of his copybook to a
blank one as Mr. Donohue was already writing on the board.

“Let’s see how we’re doing so far,” the teacher said,
writing the last of four equations.

Going to work, Red started with the second equation
because he knew how to do it right away. He saw Mr. Donohue begin
to roam across the front row of desks. Red worked as fast as he
could while trying to write clearly. There was no doubt in his mind
that Mr. Donohue would stop at his desk. He could already feel
himself getting nervous. All of his teachers knew Red needed extra
time on tests and in-class assignments because he couldn’t write as
fast as other students, but somehow Mr. Donohue always made a point
of questioning why he wasn’t done work that his classmates had
completed. Mr. Donohue reached him as he was finishing the second
problem.

“Let’s see,” the teacher said. Red moved his hands
and Mr. Donohue spun the copy book toward himself to examine Red’s
work. He slowly ran his finger down the solution Red had just
completed. “Where’s the first one?”

“I started with the second one,” Red said,
nervousness beginning to make his speech more difficult to
understand than usual. “I knew how to do it right away.”

“What about number three?”

Red felt a touch of perspiration on his forehead. “I
didn’t get to that one yet,” he said, struggling to get each word
out.

“Number four?” Mr. Donohue asked, turning the page of
the copybook as if the other equations might be on the next
page.

Red felt like he was sweating through his shirt. “I
didn’t get to it yet,” he managed to respond, even as his head
swirled so much he wondered if this was what it meant to feel
faint. He saw spots in front of his eyes.

Mr. Donohue exhaled loudly as he quickly flipped
through one more page, then walked away.

Red looked down at his copybook and closed his eyes,
hoping they would clear. Pete poked him from behind, no doubt to
offer support by mocking Mr. Donohue, but Red just shook his
head.

Finally, he felt the swirling in his head start to
calm. A deep breath came to him. Red looked at Mr. Donohue as he
returned to the blackboard and started walking the class through
the first equation. He’s such a prick, Red thought. Does he think
I’m stupid? I don’t know he does this crap on purpose?

Chapter 7

Waiting for the sixth period bell, Red was happy to
have made it to his final class of the day. He’d be in the resource
room for seventh period, which he typically used to catch up on his
computer programming course except on Fridays, when he had gym
class.

At lunch, he and Pete had joked about Mr. Donohue,
but that had only kept fresh in his mind how much he hated the guy.
And Andre had raised his anxiety further by teasing him about
taking on Chuck again after lunch. Red told the lunch monitor he
had to use the bathroom so he could leave the cafeteria even
earlier than usual, and he avoided Chuck altogether.

That worked for a day, Red thought. But he wasn’t
going to be able to avoid Chuck for the next two years until they
graduated. Not that I want to, he thought. I’m not afraid of him.
But he knew Chuck was pretty pissed. According to Andre, one of his
buddies said Chuck was already hearing about getting knocked down
by Red from his teammates on the football team. Red certainly
didn’t know if he could do it again if Chuck decided he needed to
give him some payback.

I’m still not sure how I did it the first time, he
thought. He’d been spinning the events from yesterday and last
night around in his mind most of the day. His mom made a face when
he asked if she had checked on him after he went to bed as if she
hadn’t done it in years. She even teased him about what she always
called his “silly habit” of turning the clock around when he
couldn’t sleep. Apparently, nobody had any trouble sleeping or was
up late enough to have been doing anything that would have made
noise downstairs in the early morning hours either. He was at least
relieved that the rush to get going in the morning had allowed him
to ask the questions without anybody wondering too much about why
he was asking.

Unfortunately, that was the only relief he got. He
still didn’t have any answers. If Mom didn’t touch the clock, Red
wondered, how did it get turned? And how did I knock Chuck
down?

Mr. Francis walked past him as he entered the
classroom from the hall, and the subject drifted from his mind. Red
nodded as a way of saying hello when he made eye contact with Adam,
sitting a few rows in front of him. Adam had been designated to use
carbon paper under his notes in a couple classes that they shared
to give Red a copy to help him get everything.

“Hey,” Adam said. “You have everything from social
studies so far? We have our first test next Tuesday, I think.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Red said. “I keep forgetting to get
my textbook out of my locker to read that chapter he keeps telling
us to read for the test.”

“I know,” Adam said, putting his hand out in a
gesture of confusion. “He never refers to the book in class, just
lectures nonstop from his own notes, but that chapter is on the
test?”

Red nodded in agreement. They both turned their
attention to Tara, who hustled into the classroom as if she’d had
to sprint just to make it on time. It was the same every day. She
seemed to search through fifty things in her book bag before she
found something to take notes on. Finally, she looked back the two
seats and a row over to where Red sat. The room was arranged with
the desks to the right of the door and lab stations to the left,
which made Red feel like the entrance was in the middle of the
room. Three weeks earlier, on the first day of class, Red had sat
in the last row so he could easily park his power chair and get to
a desk.