Because I was hyperexcited about today’s big game, my mother gave me an extra Risperdal to calm me down. That makes six and a half pills, but they haven’t taken away an ounce of my energy.
My mom, my dad, and Jessie are sitting in the stands at the fifty-yard line, cheering for me. I can always hear Jessie’s voice because it’s high-pitched and loud. I can’t tell you what a huge day this is for our family, and for me, of course.
As the opposing quarterback calls his signals, I get into my three-point stance, my right hand balancing me on the ground.
I can feel this tremendous tension building in my legs. Suddenly, before the play starts, I make three rapid hops that take me into the neutral zone, considered a crime in high school football.
A horrified gasp rises from the crowd, but there are no penalty flags. Before the game, the referees were informed of my involuntary movements, and the league has made an exception for me.
The quarterback’s count goes on longer than usual — he seems nervous, running through his audibles twice.
This gives my left arm time to spasm, and it shoots out into the sacred no-man’s-land that separates the two teams. This movement has been startling the center opposite me all day. No matter how many times I’ve done it, he can’t get used to the idea. He’s pissed off when no flags are thrown.
I recover quickly from my arm thrust and plant my legs solidly on the ground. My body is like a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse.
When I hear the quarterback call hike, I ignite and explode off the line into the center before the guy can even get upright. My sudden impact knocks him backward, and as he fights for balance, he grabs my leg with one hand. But I’m already halfway past him and tear loose from his grip.
The quarterback sees me coming and tries to dodge out of the way, but he’s too late. I plant my helmet into his belly and lift him right off the ground. Both of us go crashing down, with everyone else piling on.
The refs’ whistles blow just as a gun goes off, marking the end of the game. The home-team crowd, my crowd, is hysterical with joy. They’ve just witnessed a huge upset, in more ways than one — this was a game of me against my life, and this time, I won.
I feel my teammates’ hands pulling me out of the pile of bodies and pounding me on the back. The crowd is standing and cheering wildly.
At first I can’t hear what they are saying. Then I realize they are chanting my name.
“Cory! Cory! Cory!”
I’m embarrassed. I’m not used to being a hero. There’s no other place in my life that this happens. Except in the old days, in Little League.
I head to the sidelines, hopping a few more times before I get there, and my coaches are actually hugging me. When I get a chance, I search the stands for my family. Dad’s arm is wrapped around my mom, and he’s beaming with pride and happiness. This is almost too much for me to stand, all this happiness and joy.
A short while later, the stadium is emptying out. As I walk to our car with my family, I can see how proud they all are of me. Jessie has been a star athlete in basketball, soccer, and lacrosse, but no one expected me to be back in sports after baseball ended. And they know that a day like this is about a lot more than football.
Now it’s just the four of us. My teammates are leaving with one another in groups of two and three, joking and bragging and reliving the best game of the year so far.
Now and then as they pass by, a few of them congratulate me, but they don’t stay around or invite me to come along.
Inside our car, I sit in silence with a curious mixture of emotions: a sense of pride but also an empty, achy feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s hard for me to understand how I can go from being a hero to being alone again, in just a couple of minutes.
“You’re one of the best players they’ve ever had here. You’re amazing, Cory, and they all know it,” my mother says with a hand on my cheek.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“I’m so proud of you, Cory,” Dad says. “That was one of the best days of my life.”
I don’t let them know what I’m really feeling right now. Why should I, when it will only make them as sad as I am?
“Yeah,” I say. “Me, too.”
Chapter 39
A WEEK LATER, the football team is called together to meet a new coach. I’m not really sure what happened, whether it was school politics or not. The new guy is one of those really strict types with lots of rules such as You smoke, you’re off the team and Anyone late for practice doesn’t play in the next game. No exceptions.
These are two particularly tough rules for me, since I smoke like a chimney and, with my body problems, I’m always late getting anywhere.
A few days before the biggest game of our season, our practice is moved from the stadium to the weight room. Because I’ve gotten to school late, I don’t know about the change until I get to the field and find it empty.
This makes me incredibly anxious because I know the new coach will be really pissed. My legs start to buckle under me, and the hopping spasms come one after another.
They get so bad that I can’t stand up for very long, and by the time I arrive at the weight room, I am literally crawling to the door. It’s never been this bad, not even close. But at least I’m finally here.
I manage to stumble into the weight room ten or fifteen minutes late, and the coach turns his anger on me in front of the rest of the guys.
“I told you I won’t stand for anyone coming to practice late. That goes for you, too.”
“I couldn’t help it.”
“I don’t want to hear your lame excuses. You’ll have to learn the hard way.”
The rest of the guys don’t like what’s happening. Anyone can see that I’m covered in sweat, but no one says anything in my defense. They’re too afraid of the coach. The practice session goes on without any further lectures, and I lift weights with everyone else. I figure everything is going to be all right. I hope so.
The next weekend, I’m suited up to play and mentally ready. It’s an important game, and I know I can help the team. Right after the pregame pep talk, the new coach takes me aside.
“You’re benched,” he barks like a military drill instructor. “You were late to practice. I warned you.”
“That’s not fair,” I answer quietly, trying not to show him how angry I am. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“I said no exceptions, no excuses. Next time, maybe you’ll listen.”
I can see from his tough expression that there’s no possibility of a compromise. I’m doing everything I can not to explode. He’s taking away the one thing I have that makes me acceptable to the kids in high school. I can feel blood rushing around my body, heating up. I’m thinking what a dick he is. No feelings, no compassion, nothing in his eyes.
“How long do I have to stay out?” I ask.
“I’ll let you know. Don’t ask me about it again.”
This is the worst thing he could have said to me. Not knowing keeps me in a state of high anxiety that I can’t come down from.
He turns away, and it’s over — for him, anyway. The explosion I’ve been holding back has now become unavoidable. I tear my helmet off and smash it on the ground. Then I look up into the stands, where my parents are trying to figure out what’s going on.
“That’s it!” the coach yells back as he walks away. “You’re done for the whole game.”
I sit on the bench in a daze, watching the other team’s offense begin to dominate the game, running right up the center, where I would usually be to stop them. We’re getting killed. Every time a play ends, I wait for Coach to signal me into the game, and each time he doesn’t, I feel like I’m going crazy. I’m embarrassed and humiliated.
With the building tension and anger, my tics are also going wild, and when halftime comes and I still haven’t played, I’m hopping so often that I can hardly keep my balance leaving the field. The coach doesn’t seem to notice, or care.
The second half ends, an
d I haven’t been in for a single play. I stumble away from the stadium and, as it turns out, away from football forever.
The new leg tic is the worst I’ve ever had, and this time it doesn’t go away. By the following week, I can’t make it on the practice field without falling. What is happening to me now?
After that, my school seems to realize the new coach has made a mistake in my case. One of our neighbors with a kid on the team comes over to our house to tell us that the high school is willing to hire a special coach to help me get back on the team.
It doesn’t help what my legs are doing now. I’m stumbling and falling a lot. In the end, I would never play high school sports again.
Wheels
Chapter 40
EVEN THOUGH I know it’s coming, I’m still surprised when it arrives at our front door. It symbolizes a turning point in my life and is one of my greatest defeats. I hate the thought of it — a wheelchair!
Maybe this day would have come anyway, or maybe it’s a result of what happened with football. Since I stopped playing, the team has lost almost every game, and my stress seems to have permanently changed the frequency and intensity of my stumbling.
Even so, I think I still get around okay without help, so when the wheelchair is actually brought into the living room and becomes a reality, it makes me feel like someone has taken a giant scoop and hollowed out my insides. I force myself not to cry, but I’m barely holding the tears back.
“Just for a few days, until you don’t need it anymore,” my mother says to try to calm me down.
“I don’t need it now, Mom.”
“The school thinks you do. They’re afraid you might hurt yourself — or somebody else — because you’re falling so much.”
“That’s so unfair. Last week a kid pushed another kid down a flight of stairs, and nobody thought that was a big deal.”
“They suspended him for doing it.”
“Maybe they should make him go to school in a wheelchair. That would be fair, right?”
Of course, I end up using the wheelchair. I want to go to school like everyone else, and I won’t let anything stop me, even if it means using wheels instead of legs.
Once again I had thought things couldn’t get any worse. Guess I was wrong about that.
But in a few days, instead of feeling sorry for myself, I get an idea.
Chapter 41
RIGHT AFTER LUNCH PERIOD, two swinging doors in a high school corridor burst open faster than anyone is ready for, and when I come racing through them in my wheelchair, a bunch of kids scatter to the sides.
I keep pushing the wheels forward, gathering speed, and a kid who never paid me any attention before is suddenly behind me, pushing, too, making me go even faster.
Just in front of the doors at the far end of the corridor, I step down on the brake lever. The wheels lock and I come to a skidding stop so hard that I leave rubber skid marks.
By now most of the kids are totally into my fun diversion, the way they are whenever rules are broken. I turn the chair to face them again. I’m the center of the show, the man of the moment, in a different way from the old days. The class clown on wheels.
“Go, Cory,” one of the older kids starts chanting. A few more pick up the mantra and urge me on to greater deeds.
“Do it, Cory. Go ahead!” a girl who never seemed to notice me before shouts.
I’m feeling good. I’ve never gotten this much attention inside the school building. My wheelchair and I have become a source of amusement to the crowd. It’s exactly what I wanted.
“C’mon, Cory. One more time.”
“Yeah, let’s see it.”
“Go for it, Cory.”
Their cheers require action — and I’m not about to let them down. I jerk back hard on both wheels at the same time. The front of the chair lifts right off the ground. Balancing my weight, I pivot almost completely around in place before touching down again, like a figure skater spinning at the end of his program. Just about everyone’s cheering for me now. No one’s ever seen a wheelie like that.
I don’t realize it, but as I start to do another one, an adult is racing to the scene. He watches me start to spin. It’s someone from the school staff whom I don’t know very well. He comes at me so fast that he has to jump to the side to avoid getting cut down by my spinning legs, which stick out from the chair’s footrests.
This is way too much for the assembled students, who roar with laughter as a symbol of school discipline is almost knocked down on his rear end. But in a second, the man’s angry look sweeps the room and chills the mood.
“Get to your classes,” he snaps through his mustache. “Show’s over.”
All the students head off, and suddenly it’s just me and him, and he is breathing hard. “That,” he says, “will never happen again.”
The next week, my mom drops me off at school the old-fashioned way — on foot. I hop a few times on the way to third period, but I don’t fall once. The wheelchair is sitting at home in the garage, just in case. But for now that particular symbol of defeat has been eliminated.
Even though the school was furious with me that day in the hallway, I think everyone understood that fooling around with the wheelchair was my way of downplaying my physical problems and was not about being reckless or disrespectful.
So why am I walking again and not cruising? I guess the school figured I was more of a danger to myself and the other kids in the wheelchair than I was out of it.
But letting me walk again came with a condition: I wasn’t going to be allowed to walk alone. The school was searching for a personal aide to accompany me at all times, wherever I went. But the search was going to be difficult. The job didn’t pay well and wasn’t much fun.
The other catch was finding somebody who could deal with me.
Me and My Shadow
Chapter 42
IT’S STRANGE GOING to all my classes with a shadow. My shadow’s name is Terry. I thought having an aide was going to be humiliating. Now I think of Terry as my best friend in high school.
In addition to helping me get around without hurting anyone, Terry takes notes in my classes. This is especially useful, since I can’t write at the speed my teachers talk and my handwriting is like hieroglyphics, anyway. I have poor fine motor skills, or something like that. Is there anything about me that works right?
Terry also explains my problems to teachers or substitutes whenever they forget and think that my tics are a reason for discipline. He’s supposed to fix any social problems that may come up, too, like kids making fun of me, but that might be asking too much of anybody.
Terry is kind of a strange guy, and it makes me wonder why all the people who end up in my life are so unusual. He’s around forty, with a potbelly and a head that’s about two sizes too small for his body. He doesn’t like to talk much either. There’s something sad about Terry, too. I sometimes wonder how good his life can be when, at his age, he’s a nursemaid to a high school kid. I think about what dreams he must have that aren’t coming true. I wonder if he ever goes into a rage.
Even so, Terry and I hit it off. He’s someone to talk to when I get lonely or upset. He’s sympathetic to my problems and stands up for me when somebody gives me a hard time.
But all that starts to change a few weeks into the job. For whatever reason, there’s a distance growing between us. He’s begun to lose patience with my tics. A few days ago when I started to drum on my desk, he yelled at me to stop. He totally lost it. Terry should have known better. He did know better.
Today he’s angry with me all the time, and I don’t understand why. And then it gets really out of control. By fifth period, I’m desperate for a cigarette — partly because Terry is getting on my case. I get excused to secretly have one. Sometimes Terry comes with me, even though he doesn’t smoke, but today he stays behind in the classroom.
I leave by a side door. I’m supposed to walk far away from the building so the other kids can’t see me smoke. The school
can’t officially allow me to have a cigarette on the property, but they mostly look the other way. Twice, teachers who didn’t know my situation reported me.
Today I’m a little lazy and figure it doesn’t really matter where I smoke, so I go only as far as the gym and take out my pack of Merits. I light one up and suck in a hefty amount of carbon poisons.
Before I can exhale, I hear a voice yelling, “That’s it, you’re busted.”
It’s Terry! He jumps out of the shadows of the gym, pointing a finger in my face like it’s a gun. He has a triumphant grin, as if he’s just uncovered a plot to overthrow the government. It looks like he’s having a good time, so I assume he’s joking around and take another puff. He keeps shouting that I’ve broken school rules, and I start laughing, but in a moment I can see I’ve seriously misjudged the situation.
“You think it’s funny? You think this is a big joke? I’m taking you to the principal’s office.”
I can’t believe that Terry means it, but when I don’t move, he grabs the cigarette out of my hand and throws it away.
“What are you doing? You know I have to smoke. You’re my aide.”
“Just shut up,” he snaps back, and actually shoves me toward the main office.
I don’t understand why this is happening, why Terry of all people would be doing this to me. I feel betrayed and confused.
I thought Terry was my friend. I thought I could trust him.
After the principal listens to Terry’s story, he looks up my record, which already includes the other smoking incidents, and he tells me I’m suspended for four days, starting Monday.
“They all know about my smoking,” I try to explain. “They understand that I have to smoke.”
“Who lets you?” the principal wants to know.
I don’t want to give him the names of my teachers. “Nobody actually said I could smoke. It’s just that they let me.”