I could, actually.
“If we can get you out of that chair,” Pat jerked her thumb toward the offending object, “then nobody will worry about it anymore. How many hours a day are you up on your sticks?”
“A few,” I hedged. The truth was that I hadn’t figured out yet how to blend my crutches into my Harkness schedule. “I’m still working out how far apart all the buildings are.”
“I see,” she said. “But if you’re going to participate in student life, we’ve got to get you climbing stairs. Otherwise, you should have picked a college built in the seventies. So let’s do some leg press.”
I tried not to grumble too much. But a year ago, I used to put twice my body weight on the leg press. Now? Pat put on sixty pounds or so, and still I had to push on my quads with my hands to move the platform. A first-grader could do better.
Really, what was even the point?
But Pat was undeterred by my lousy performance. “Now we’ll work your core,” she insisted. “Good torso stability is crucial to helping you balance on crutches.” It was nothing I hadn’t heard before. Pat had learned her lines from the same script as the other therapists I’d seen. And I’d seen plenty.
Unfortunately, nowhere in any script were the words for the things that really bothered me. Pat knew what to do when my hips wobbled in the middle of a plank exercise. But nobody had ever taught me how to handle the odd looks I got when people made eye contact with me in my wheelchair. Sometimes I saw looks of outright pity. Those seemed honest, if not helpful. And then there were the Big Smiles. There can’t be many people in the world who walk around grinning like maniacs at random strangers. But I got a lot of Big Smiles from people who thought that they owed it to me. It was like a consolation prize. You don’t have much use of your legs, so have a Big Smile on me.
Of course, I never complained about these things out loud. It would only sound bitchy. But the last nine months had been humbling. The old me used to be offended when guys stared at my boobs. Now I only wished people would stare at my boobs. When they looked at me now, they only saw the chair.
“Four more crunches, Corey. Then you’ll be all set,” Pat said.
I looked up into Pat’s determined face and crunched. But we both knew I would never be all set.
Chapter Five: Drunk Giraffe on Stilts
— Corey
September quickly became October, and life was good. I stayed on top of my course-work, and I learned to navigate the campus with increasing ease. Dana was in the throes of the singing group rush process. Her audition song was Hey There, Delilah, and with all her practicing, I had started to hear that song in my sleep.
I didn’t have much of my own social life yet, but that was probably going to take some time. Hands down, my favorite Friday and Saturday nights so far had been spent playing RealStix with Hartley. As hockey season got going, Hartley’s friends were increasingly unavailable. They were either at practice, or headed to parties in corners of the campus Hartley didn’t wish to climb to. On those nights, he would flop onto the couch next to me for a few games of hockey. Sometimes we put on a movie afterward.
“You know, you depend too much on your team captain,” Hartley said one night, when I was losing.
I wasn’t about to tell him, but the reason I was losing that night had very little to do with my center, and everything to do with the fact that Hartley was not wearing a shirt. I’d spent the last half hour trying not to drool over Hartley’s six-pack.
He cracked open a bottle of beer and offered it to me, but I waved it away. “Digby is good, but there are other players on the ice.”
“But Digby is dreamy,” I said, setting down my controller. And it was true — even the digitized version of the Puffins’ captain made my heart go pitter-patter. He was almost the hottest hockey player I could name. The hottest one was sitting beside me on the sofa.
Hartley snorted into his beer. “Seriously?” He laughed, which meant I got to see more of his smile. “Callahan, I thought you were a real fan. I didn’t realize you were a puck bunny.”
That made me gasp. “And I didn’t realize you were an asshole.”
He held up two hands defensively, one of them still clutching his beer. “Whoa, just a little joke.”
I bit my lip, trying to dial back my irritation. Puck bunny was a derogatory term for women who liked hockey players much more than they liked hockey. Nobody had ever called me that before. The happiest moments of my life had been spent on the rink.
Hartley eased his broken leg onto the table and cocked his head, like a golden retriever. “I hit a nerve? I’m sorry.”