Playing Hurt

Chelsea

air ball





As soon as I see the tires of his ATV collide with the dead tree, I try to scream his name, but all that comes out is a wheezy squeak.

He soars through the air, his body loose, his arms and legs flopping.

“Clint!” I try again, his body continuing to climb like the sky’s a ladder. But my voice is weak—far softer, even, than the muffled sounds of distant cars on the opposite side of the woods.

Needles of fear attack the skin on my arms. I reach for him—a ridiculous gesture. Like I could ever catch him from where I am, the length of a basketball court behind him, stuck deep in a thick, gooey patch of mud I could easily have avoided if I hadn’t been so set on getting ahead of him. My voice is caught in my throat, my arms useless. I’m powerless. And Clint, poor Clint, has just been launched like ammunition in a catapult.

His body crumples when he hits the gnarly roots of a nearby tree.

I finally find my scream as I climb from my ATV and race through the soft, muddy space between my four-wheeler and his.

“Clint,” I say, afraid to touch him. Afraid not to. His eyes stare at me, wild and frightened as I crouch beside him. “Clint,” I say again, panic filling my mouth with a bitter, metallic taste.

I put my hand under his arm, attempting to help him up. But he screams when I touch him.

“Is it your shoulder?” I ask when he struggles to sit up by himself. The left side of his body looks kind of deformed—twisted. Panting, I place my fingertips against his T-shirt, feel an out-of-place bump and muscles that spasm.

“Can you move it?”

He shakes his head and groans.

“I think you dislocated it,” I say.

I look up, finding only blue spaces of sky between leaves. The way the tree trunks surround us reminds me of my team, of the way they all stared down at me when I’d fallen. The woods take on the quiet echo of the gym during those last moments.

But I don’t have time for this—for remembering, for reliving that one awful thing that happened to me once.

“Come on,” I say, standing up. “You have to help me. We’ve got to get you out of here.” I put my hands on his waist, trying to hold him steady as he puts his feet beneath him.

“My ATV’s stuck in the mud,” I tell him, “so we’ll have to use yours.” I say it like I’m sure that it’ll start, that doubt’s a stranger here.

The two of us attempt to squeeze into the seat of his ATV, which is butted up against the fallen tree. I straddle him, bringing my legs around his body. But it’s hard for me to reach the handlebars, to see the front of the four-wheeler.

“You’ve got to start this thing for me,” I say, as my foot finds the brake.

Clint turns the key. I pray with more intensity than the most devout woman on the planet, biting my lower lip and squeezing my eyes shut as he presses the start button.

I could cry when the engine coughs.

Clint barks at me about how to put the ATV in reverse. When I finally get clear of the tree, I ask, “Which way back to Pike’s? Clint? It all looks the same to me.”

“Tracks,” he growls, but I know there’s no way I can drive, grip Clint’s unsteady body, and follow the Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs that would lead us straight back to Pike’s. I try desperately to think of an alternative.

At this point, Clint’s making more noise than the engine. He tries to grip the jiggling handlebars, but grimaces when he wraps his hands around it. As I squirm to settle my backside against the seat, I feel the cold metal circle press into my thigh—oh my God, thank you, thank, you, thank you. Clint’s compass.

My fingers buzz as I wiggle them into the pocket of his shorts. He leans to the side, letting me pull the compass out to check the direction. I remember him telling me the mushrooms were north of Pike’s.

South, my brain screams up at me. We need to head south.

I keep my legs around Clint’s body as I veer back toward the restaurant. Not knowing for sure where I’m heading, exactly, as I steer between the trees. I just trust the compass. As we head south, the compass is actually pointing toward me, the only person who can get us out of this mess.

We’re moving as fast as Clint can bear; as I suspected they would, the tracks fly past, disappear. I’ve lost them somewhere along the way. But the compass still points at me, so I try to tell myself we’ll be okay. But my throbbing, worried heart lets me know that I’m really not so sure.

Shops appear ahead, but I don’t see the old backboard looming over the patio behind Pike’s. Because it’s not Pike’s—damn it. I’ve screwed up. I’m in the wrong place.

Still, though, I force the ATV on, gunning the engine to climb a small incline, then to weave between two businesses and careen onto a street.

The place we’ve ended up is dusty and sparse, the kind of place where dogs nose the edges of buildings and men in overalls linger in doorways, and afternoons take on the quiet pace of an antique store.

My hair hangs over my face—I pant, sending strands scattering across my cheekbones. I toss my head, clearing the hair from my eyes, but there’s really nothing to see here. I glance both ways down the dusty street. Just pine trees and a red building ahead—a café of some kind, with a few wooden picnic tables set up outside.

“Where are we?” I try to ask Clint. “Which way is Pike’s?”

All that comes out of him is a guttural yawp.

I rev the engine and speed down the street toward the café. Because surely someone around here has a phone that actually works. Or a car. At this point, I’d go for two sticks we could rub together to start a fire to send out smoke signals. A few diners glance up at the sound of the approaching ATV. Their eyes turn into enormous zeros. Benches scrape. Feet scamper.

I hear my name.

“Shut up, Clint,” I bark, because I think he’s the one screaming at me.

“Stop, stop! Chelsea! Stop.”

My ATV lurches on toward the outdoor seating area, while screams of frightened diners dance in the air and their arms flap like birds’ wings as they flee to safety.

“Chelsea!” the cry comes again. “Chelsea. Stop.”

When I turn, I see a familiar head of pepper-gray hair on top of a pair of broad, ex-jock shoulders.

“What’re you doing?” Dad asks, frowning at me.

“I’m—getting him help. He really hurt his shoulder,” I say.

Dad’s face whitens as he looks at Clint writhing in the seat.

In that moment, there’s no last game. There’s no year of strained silences or glares over a dinner table. There’s no resentment or guilt. Right then, there’s really no me and Dad. There’s just Clint and his twisted shoulder, which is making a gruesome bulge against the back of his shirt. There’s a growl and the way Clint keeps writhing in pain. There’s only a person we need to help. Dad nods once, understanding.

“Turn that thing off,” Dad says. “Wait there.” He jogs away.

When I kill the engine, I notice the horrified faces of everybody who was eating just a minute before. They keep staring, paralyzed, as the White Sugar SUV screeches to a stop in front of the café. Dad jumps out to help me guide Clint into the back seat.

And it should be déjà vu. It should—because the GPS leads us straight to the hospital. And we’re in an emergency room again, and we’re running down hallways filled with gurneys and scrubs and faces that try so hard to appear calm that they look completely fake.

Last time, when I was the one on that gurney, when it was my hip in the X-ray, white lines on black paper glowing through the brutal hospital light, I thought I’d crumble beneath the weight of my fear.

This time, though, when they point, saying dislocated, as if this is some big revelation and not a diagnosis in slow motion, I’m solid. I’m sure.

And it’s me that’s holding Clint’s good hand while his parents wait in the hall. It’s me that’s telling him just a little longer when he washes a painkiller down with lukewarm hospital water.

And it’s me that says don’t watch when the ER doctor starts to tug on his bad arm, twisting and pulling, trying to figure out how to feed it back into place. I’m the one that says focus here, pointing at my eyes while the twisting goes on. I’m the one who supports Clint while he screams like they’re doing surgery on him without anesthetic. I’m the one who holds him up. And something in me kicks in—I’m not afraid. At all. No hesitation. No wondering what I’m truly capable of. I know I can handle it—for him.

Funny thing about fear, I guess, is that if you just look away from it, toward something else—like dark eyes in a beautiful face, a lock of black hair hanging over a sweaty forehead—you realize you’ve turned a full hundred-and-eighty degrees away from fear.

You’re staring straight into your own strength.

I am, anyway. As I help Clint, I’m staring into my own strength.





Clint

game-ending injury





The pain in my shoulder is so bad, I actually wish for a chainsaw. I wouldn’t think twice about cutting the whole rotten thing off, pruning myself as if I were an old oak tree.

I’m woozy and lightheaded. My thoughts come in crazy explosions instead of straight lines. Everything’s popping up at me—that ravine and the turned-over Mazda, and how wrong the ice felt afterward when I tried to play. And working all the time, like I could somehow get too busy to feel bad, to be as devastated as I really was.

And the funeral, and how I thought that burying my feelings would be just as easy as shoveling some dirt over a gap in the earth. Didn’t work, though—it hurt anyway. Hurt just as bad as my out-of-place arm.

And here I am, all over again, in the middle of another accident, but this time, a woman’s arms surround me. She’s not the source of the pain, she’s the one who’s holding me up while the pain racks me.

When the bones finally click, the worst of the searing ache subsides. I still hurt, but the relief is enough that I collapse into Chelsea. Even then, when I act like a complete mess, she lets me fall apart for a while.





Chelsea

horse





I’m alone on the patio at Pike’s, watching the lightning bugs dance in the grass. Gene is in the distance somewhere, hunting down the ATV I’ve left stuck in the mud. Clint’s at home with Cecilia, getting an extra helping of mothering. Dad’s inside, manning the cash register for Gene until someone on the waitstaff can shake away the peaceful dust of a day off and drive to the restaurant. Above, the sunset is so deep red, it’s almost purple—but that’s how the sky always acts after forcing you to live through a frightening storm. Offers something extra beautiful to look at.

The beer I’ve stolen is cool, pleasantly bitter on the back of my tongue. Every once in a while I put the bottle against my hot face.

Then the drums start kicking inside the building, life beating on as it always does no matter how much you’d just like the clocks to stop long enough for you to catch your breath.

I drain the bottle, straighten my back, and aim at a metal trash container on the edge of the patio. “Shoots and—” I say, doing a horrible imitation of Fred Richards. Launch the bottle. It soars straight into the container, thuds and crashes against the bottom.

“Scores,” I whisper, just as the back door opens behind me. Dad steps outside, staring down at me.

I glance into the tall grass, where the lightning bugs now look like miniature orange basketballs bouncing up from the green stalks.

Before I even realize exactly what I’m doing, I’m on my feet. I’m hurrying across the patio. I’m fishing that old basketball from the weeds. Dad’s eyes widen when he sees the ball in my hands.

“I’m lucky you decided to eat at that café today,” I say, dribbling.

“You would’ve figured it out,” Dad says. “You don’t need me. Never did.”

I flinch, bristling automatically against his words. He sounds like he’s feeling sorry for himself. I don’t really know what else to do, so I start to dribble angrily against the cracked patio.

“Sure didn’t need somebody pushing you so hard from the sidelines,” Dad adds.

A cold ripple travels the length of my entire body; my anger cools. “You didn’t. You—cheered. That was all.”

“I pushed,” he says, guilt washing over his face.

I squeeze the basketball, shaking my head, shocked. Was Brandon right about me being too hard on Dad? Have I been misinterpreting everything? Is Dad angry at himself?

“I was the one who worked too hard,” I say. “I was the one who pushed. It was my fault. It was always my fault. Right? I’m the one who blew it.”

Dad shakes his head. “I should have known. Brandon said he did—even that night at the hospital, the night of the accident, he said he knew you were hurt. That he should have said something. That he shouldn’t have let you play. All I could ever think was, if Brandon knew, why didn’t I?”

“It was my hip. Mine. I was the one who should have known.”

“I still feel bad about it.”

“Yeah. Well. Me too.”

We stare at each other. Just stare. The sun keeps sinking; bugs keep swarming in the grass; the drums keep beating on through the walls of Pike’s. In the distance, I think I can hear the ATV revving to life. Gene will be showing up before too much longer.

“Come on,” I tell Dad, bouncing the ball his way. “Horse. Rusty as I am, I’ll bet my first semester’s tuition I can still kick your butt.”

Dad dribbles, takes a shot. The ball bounces off the rim; he catches it and passes it to me.

Feet firmly planted, heart stomping, ears ringing with the echo of the cheering crowd in the Fair Grove High gym, I raise my arms and take the first set shot since my last game. The ball bounces off the backboard and dances on the rim a few seconds before deciding to fall through.

“Still got it, Keyes,” Dad says.

“I’m still better than you, anyway,” I tease.

He’s smiling as he goes for a lay-up.