—Corey—
“So how was the first day?” Dana asked when I arrived home that afternoon. She was perched on our window seat, painting her fingernails.
“Good,” I said. “I found all three of my classes on the first try. You?”
“Yeah! And I really like my history of art professor.”
“Is he hot?” I made a comical wiggle with my eyebrows.
“He is if you’re into seventy-five year olds.”
“Who says I’m not?” I did a wheelie in my chair, because there was really no furniture in my way. Dana’s desk was against one wall, her trunk shoved up next to it. Our room still echoed.
“Whoa! Isn’t that dangerous?” she asked.
“Nope.” I did it again, popping back onto two wheels and then spinning in a circle. “But it does make me dizzy.”
“Isn’t there such a thing as wheelchair basketball?” Dana asked, blowing on her nails.
“Probably,” I dodged. Given my sporty history, more than a dozen people had asked me the same question already. But before my accident, I’d never been interested in hoops. And I was doubly uninterested in some kind of adaptive bullshit. Why did people think that sounded like fun? Why must all gimps love basketball?
Dana capped her nail polish. “So…I’m going to the jam tonight. Do you want to come?”
“What’s a jam?”
“It’s a concert, a showcase for the a cappella singing groups. Are you going to rush?”
I shook my head. “I gave up choir in the eighth grade because it conflicted with hockey.”
“You don’t have to be crazy good,” Dana argued. “There are ten groups, and it’s social as much as musical.”
“Let’s go to the jam, then,” I said. “We’ll check it out.”
“Awesome! It’s right after dinner. I’ll find this auditorium…” She hopped up to dig a campus map out of her bag.
“Nice TV, ladies,” a sexy voice said from the open doorway.
I looked up to see Hartley leaning against our doorjamb. “Thanks,” I said, my heart rate kicking up a notch.
“What you really need is a sofa right here,” he pointed to the empty wall just inside the door. “They’re selling used ones on Fresh Court.”
“We saw them,” Dana said. “But we don’t know how to summon a furniture genie to carry it for us.”
Hartley scraped a hand along his gorgeous jaw. “I guess two gimps and a chick won’t cut it. I’ll work on it at dinner.” He looked at his watch. “…Which starts now. Takers?”
“Sure,” Dana said. “I haven’t been to the Beaumont dining hall yet.”
“So let’s go,” Hartley said, turning his crutches toward the outside door.
Dana and I followed Hartley out of McHerrin and down the street. Beaumont House, in all its Gothic glory, had big iron gates. Dana swept her ID in front of the reader and the gate clicked open. She held the door for Hartley and then for me.
The gimp parade was slow going, with Hartley on crutches, and me driving cautiously. The flagstone pathway was uneven, and I didn’t want to catch my wheels on one of the cracks and do a face plant. It was hard enough being The Girl in the Wheelchair. I didn’t need to be The Girl Who Ejected From Her Wheelchair.
We made our way through one small stone courtyard and into the larger one, which was on every official Harkness tour. My brother Damien had once complained about dodging tourists and their cameras when he was on the way to class. But if that was the price of living in an historic granite and marble castle, so be it.
On the far side of the courtyard, Hartley stopped our progress. “Shit,” he said, looking up at the building. “The dining hall is on the second floor. I forgot about the stairs.”
“You know, Beaumont dining hall isn’t on the accessible map,” I said. “I think I’ll try another dining hall.” Commons wasn’t open for dinner, but I’d already memorized which houses had first-floor dining rooms.
Hartley leaned over the handles of his crutches and shook his head. “I’m not climbing it, either. But…how does the food get up there? I bet they don’t carry it up the stairs.” He frowned up at the building. “I can’t believe I’ve eaten here for two years and never wondered about that.” He turned toward another gate leading out onto the street. “Dana, we’ll meet you inside. There must be a service entrance. This way, Callahan.”
My face pink, I followed Hartley out onto Pine Alley, which backed up to both Beaumont and Turner House.
“That will be it,” Hartley grinned. He limped toward a gray metal door with an intercom beside it. He pushed the button.
“Yeah!” came a voice.
He looked at me, his dimple showing. “Delivery!”
A moment later, the gray door slid open to reveal a dimly lit elevator carriage, which was not even full height. “Classy,” Hartley said. “Well, let’s do this.” There was a slight lip, which almost tripped him up. But he ducked inside, holding the door while I rolled myself backwards into the car. The door slid shut with a grinding sound that scared me. Was this going to become one of those moments — the kind you look back on later and wonder why you followed a hot guy into a shaky, unmarked elevator? But Hartley only chuckled as the car seemed to tremble around us. “I hope you have good lungs, in case we need to yell for help.”
The car rose so slowly that I didn’t relax until the door finally wheezed open. When we emerged into a brightly lit kitchen, a guy in a chef’s hat frowned at us, and several busy people in white aprons turned to stare. “Don’t tell me you lost our reservation?” Hartley scoffed, looking around. “This way, Callahan.” I followed him across a tile floor, around a glass-faced serving bay, and into the melee of students waiting with trays in hand.
“There you are!” Dana said, making room for us. “How’d you get up here?”
“In the service elevator,” Hartley said. “It worked like a charm. Dana, can you grab us one more tray?”
“Sure, take this one.” She darted off, returning with another tray and two more sets of cutlery.
The line snaked forward, and eventually we were up next. “Can you see over?” Hartley asked.
No, as usual. “What looks good?” I asked.
“Meatball sub. Fish looks a little scary.”
“Easy decision, then.”
“Two subs, please,” Hartley said.
“Can I help you guys carry anything?” Dana asked.
Hartley answered, “Callahan and I have a system.”
When he looked away, Dana gave me a meaningful eyebrow twist. I bit back a grin.
When we had our food, Hartley pointed a crutch toward a half-filled table in the middle of the room. “Over there, ladies.”
As we approached the table, a guy with dark red hair waved. “Hartley! Christ, look at you.”
“You always know just what to say, Bridge.”
The redhead got up and came around the table to see Hartley’s enormous cast. “That is serious, dude. I’m so fucking sorry.”
Hartley waved a hand, like he didn’t want to hear it. I recognized that reaction, because I’d felt that way, too. Sometimes even the nicest things that people say only remind you of all that’s gone wrong. “Get rid of one of these chairs for Callahan, would you?” Hartley said.
Bridger dismissed one of the heavy wooden chairs with a flick of one finger. He was another hunky athlete, with a broad chest and bulky, freckled biceps emerging from the sleeves of his Harkness Hockey T-shirt. Bridger was almost as attractive as Hartley, and had a friendly warmth that I appreciated. When Hartley introduced us as his neighbors, he grinned. “I traded Hartley to you two. We were supposed to be roommates. Come to think of it, I might have pushed him off that wall so I could have a single.”
“Nice,” Hartley said. “Can you do us a favor after dinner? These ladies need to buy a sofa on Old Campus. It’s only about a fifty-yard trip, no stairs. And you can see my fancy handicapped pad.”
“Alright. What are you doing tonight, anyway?”
Hartley shook his head. “It’s not up to me. Stacia leaves in the morning.”
“I see.” Bridger’s eyebrows went up. “Go easy on that leg, dude. Save the tricky positions for next time.” When Hartley threw his balled up napkin at his head, Bridger only laughed. “Did they give you any good painkillers?”
“Yeah, but they made me puke, so I left them at home. It’s plain old Advil for me, and I take them by the fistful.”
Another guy sat down with us, a preppy blond with a country club haircut. “The leg hurts that much?” he asked.
“Everything hurts,” Hartley said. “…My good leg, from working so hard, my hip, from swinging the cast through. My armpits.”
“Your crutch handles are set too low,” I said, wiping my mouth on my napkin.
“Really?” Hartley perked up.
“Really. Move them up a notch, and never lean on the underarm supports. Trust me.”
He pointed a french fry at me. “You are a very useful neighbor, Callahan.”
I shook my head. “If there was a game show for physical therapy trivia, I could win big.”
The preppy guy gave me a weird look. But I was used to those. So instead of feeling bad about it, I finished my meatball sub. It was delicious.
After dinner, Dana and I paid forty dollars for a used couch in a shade of not-too-ugly blue. Bridger and the preppy, whom they called Fairfax, carried it into our room.
“Thank you, thank you!” Dana said, dancing in front of them to open up our room. The accessible door was so wide that they didn’t even have to tip the sofa to carry it in.
“Nice room,” Bridger said, setting down his end of the sofa. “Let’s see yours, Hartley.”
With both our doors blocked open, I heard Hartley’s friends exclaim over his single across the hall. He didn’t have a common room like ours, but I’d noticed that his room was also generously sized. “Christ, a double bed? Nice.”
“Just in time for your girlfriend to leave the country,” Fairfax snickered. “Where is she, anyway?”
Hartley’s voice answered. “The mall? A salon? Somewhere expensive. Whatever. Who wants a beer before she gets back?”
After admiring our new furniture, and dragging Dana’s trunk over to be our coffee table, we made our way across campus to the singing group jam. Inside the auditorium, we were handed a program on a half-sheet of paper. There were ten groups listed, each one singing two songs. “They have to hand this out,” Dana explained as we parked ourselves in the designated handicapped spot, where my chair wouldn’t stick out into the aisle. “So that the rushes can remember who sang what.”
The groups all had cute names, like the Harkness Harmonics, and the Tony Tones. When the lights dimmed, the first group walked onstage — twelve guys in matching T-shirts and khaki shorts. I checked the program. They were the Minstrel Marauders.
“A cappella is kind of nerdy,” Dana leaned over to say. “But in a good way.”
After a few minutes, I was inclined to agree with her. One guy on the far end held up a pitch pipe and blew a single note. His eleven friends hummed a chord. And then the leader stashed his pitch pipe, raising both hands. When he brought them down again, the group launched into a rendition of “Up the Ladder to the Roof” in four-part harmony. And somehow they made a song that was on the radio when my parents were little sound cool. I’d always thought that athletes were my type. But I had to admit that a dozen men rocking out to an up-tempo love song was pretty appealing.
“They’re great,” I whispered.
Dana nodded. “They’re supposed to be the best men’s group.”
The next bunch were the Mixed Masters, a coed chorus. They looked like they were having an awful lot of fun, but they lacked the perfection of the Marauders.
“Next…” Dana whispered. But the following group — Something Special — made her squeeze my wrist. “This is my ‘reach’ group,” she said.
The women made a perfect semicircle on stage. They linked arms, and then began to sing a lovely, haunting version of “Desperado” by the Eagles.
When it was over, the applause was furious. “Wow,” I said. “They rock.”
“I know,” Dana sighed. “But did you notice how blond they are? I wonder if that’s a coincidence. Maybe you should audition, Corey. Your have almost the right coloring.”
“No way,” I said automatically, putting a hand up to my sun-streaked hair.
I wondered why Dana didn’t hear the flaw in her own logic. If Something Special cared so much about appearances, imagine what a wheelchair or crutches would do to the pretty line of smiling faces? Did Dana honestly think that any of the attractive groups onstage would look right with me parked in the center of them?
The jam was fun to watch, but I knew where I stood. So to speak.
