—Corey—
There was a knock on our door the following week, as Dana and I dug into our course reading. “It’s open,” I called.
The wooden door swung in to reveal Hartley and his crutches. “Evening,” he said. “Is everybody working hard? I can come back another time.”
Dana snapped her book shut. “I have an audition in a half-hour. What’s up?”
“I have a strange and selfish request.”
“That sounds interesting,” Dana said. “If not promising.”
“You’re a smart girl, Dana.” He flashed his dimple, and I felt myself slip a little further under his spell. That smile could melt glass. “See, I have a QuirkBox. But no TV. Bridger and I were a good team — but the TV was his.”
“QuirkBox is a game console?” I asked.
He nodded. “Anyway, if you ever want to play, I would hook it up in here. It only takes a second.”
“Well, go ahead,” I said. “Give it a shot.”
“You’re the best,” he said, a look of joy on his face. “I’ll be right back.”
The door fell closed, and we heard the sound of Hartley thumping back across the hall.
“Big fan of gaming?” Dana asked me.
“No,” I grinned. “However…”
She laughed. “I think we should call him ‘Hart-throb’ from now on. I’d better get ready for this audition.” She went into her room to have a fashion crisis.
“Video games aren’t really my thing. I’ll just watch,” I told Hartley as he hooked it up. From the couch, I had a nice view of his backside.
“Suit yourself.” A minute later, the game lit the big screen, and a team of incredibly realistic hockey players in Bruins jerseys took the ice.
I leaned forward in spite of myself. “That’s Anton Khodobin! You can see their faces?”
Hartley chuckled. “Yeah, but I know it’s not your thing.” Balancing on his crutches in front of the TV, he held the controller in his hands. At the sound of the buzzer, there was a face-off, which Hartley’s player won. His team was skating against the Islanders, and Hartley passed the puck from his center to his left wing.
A tense moment followed, when the Islanders’ defenseman got his stick on the puck. But Hartley snatched it back with a grunt of satisfaction. He skated forward, lining up a shot. The goalie lunged, but before I could see what happened, Hartley moved his shoulders into my line of sight, and the screen disappeared behind his body. Without thinking, I pushed off the sofa to move around him.
And I fell.
In the split second before I hit the floor, I realized my mistake. It still happened once in awhile, and only when I was very distracted. I would actually forget that I could no longer stand unassisted, and hurl myself to the ground.
I went down with a thump, my arm making an exaggerated smack onto our makeshift coffee table.
Hartley’s head whipped around. “Shit, are you okay?”
“Sure,” I said, my face getting hot. “Just, um, clumsy.” I rubbed my arm where it had hit the table. “Look out,” I said, nodding toward the screen. The Islanders had stolen the puck and were breaking for Hartley’s goal. When he looked away from me, I quickly hoisted my butt back onto the couch.
He paused the game, and then turned around again, studying me.
I looked down at my hands.
“Heads up,” Hartley said. And when I looked back at him, he tossed me the controller, which I caught. “What team do you want to be?” He gave me a huge smile, just the kind that made me feel all squishy inside.
“Pittsburgh,” I answered, without hesitation.
“Good pick, Callahan,” he said, grabbing the other controller and pulling up a menu on the screen. “This will only take a second to set up. And then you will learn from the master.”
There were many things I would have liked to learn from “the master.” But that night, I settled for a video game called RealStix.
The next time Hartley came over to play hockey, I was ready for him.
“Do you remember how to do this?” Hartley asked, handing me a controller.
“I think so.”
This time, we sat side by side on the sofa, with Hartley’s cast balanced on the coffee table. He pressed “play,” and our two players stared one another down for the face-off. The digital ref dropped the puck between us, and I hooked it with my stick. Then, after passing to my wing, I skated toward the goal.
Hartley’s goalie came into view. I angled towards him, the puck aiming toward the right hand corner of the net. On the screen, Hartley’s guy inched over to cover that side. I faked to the left, and the goalie swerved right on cue. I slammed the puck right again and sent it into the goal.
Then I giggled as the fake crowd went wild.
“What the fuck, Callahan?” Hartley paused the game. “You deked my goalie?” Slowly, his surprised face evolved into a wicked grin. “Hold on, girl. You practiced, didn’t you!”
I fought against my own smile. “Wouldn’t you, if you were me?”
“Jesus Christ, you’re going to pay for this…” Then, with some kind of ninja speed, he leaned over and grabbed my arm, raising it up. Before I even knew what was happening, he had his fingers under my armpit, tickling me.
“Hartley!” I shrieked, shoving his hand away and clamping my arm against my side.
“You think you’re so sneaky.” He reached for my arm again, but it was a fake-out. I had an older brother, and I knew all the tricks. Even as he dove for my waist instead, I wrenched my elbow down, protecting myself. But Hartley only rose up on his good knee and dove for my vulnerable left side. I shrieked again when he pressed my shoulder against the sofa, his free hand finding two tickling places at once.
Above me, his brown eyes laughed. As I looked up into them, I felt a rush of warmth, and then something else too. His expression changed, growing more serious. It looked almost hungry.
A giggle died on my lips as our eyes locked.
“What is going on out here?” Dana came out of her room, fastening an earring.
Releasing me, Hartley tossed himself back onto his own side of the sofa and picked up his game controller.
And the moment was broken. Or maybe there was no moment, and I imagined the whole thing. As Dana smiled at us, I looked over at Hartley, but he looked the same as always. “Somebody got shelled,” I answered Dana to cover my own confusion, “and lost his cool.”
“Somebody needs to be taught a lesson,” Hartley argued, restarting the game.
“Bring it,” I said.
Dana put on a jacket. “Should I have called in a babysitter for you two? No fighting, okay?”
But we didn’t even answer her, because the game was back on. Hartley won the face-off this time, and I couldn’t get possession. But with a stroke of luck, my goalie evaded him, falling on the puck.
“Whew,” I said. “That was close.” I looked around for Dana, but she had already gone. “So, we’re still at one-zip, Pittsburgh’s lead.”
“Now you’re bragging?” Hartley asked. “I’m going to wipe that smile off your face.”
My fluttery little hope fairy put a word in then. I can think of a few ways to do that, she simpered.
RealStix Video Hockey became our thing together. The Bruins vs. Puffins rivalry grew into my favorite obsession. Sometimes we’d play a quick game before dinner on a weeknight. Dana would just shake her head and call us junkies. These games were fun, but we were often interrupted by phone calls for Hartley. He’d pause the game and answer, because at that hour of the day Stacia was just retiring to bed. “Sorry,” he said the first time it happened. “But I can’t call her back later. It’s eleven o’clock over there.”
“No problem.” Only, it was a problem. Because the phone calls were excruciating.
“Rome for the weekend? That sounds like fun,” Hartley would say. The indulgent tone he took with her sounded wrong on him. “I bet you’ll give your credit cards a workout. You’d better buy some extra luggage while you’re at it. You’ll never get all your designer booty home.”
I sat through these conversations with gritted teeth. Not only did they interrupt my new favorite hobby, but they drove my mind into alleyways where I didn’t wish to go. “Hi, hottie,” Hartley often answered his phone. Or, “hi baby.” It was hard to say which term of endearment bothered me more. Because nobody had ever called me by either one.
The truth was that my blazing attraction to Hartley made me start to measure out the distance between girls like Stacia and me. Before my accident, I’d always assumed that a passionate romance would eventually come my way. But listening to Hartley butter up his gorgeous girlfriend niggled at me. Was there a guy out there for me, who would refer to his wheelchair-bound girlfriend as a hottie?
I really didn’t think there was.
Part of the bargain I’d made with my parents was that I would continue physical therapy at Harkness. My new therapist was a sporty-looking woman in a Patriots cap. “Call me Pat,” she said, shaking my hand. “I spent the weekend with your file.”
“Sorry,” I said. “That sounds like a dull read.”
“Not at all,” she smiled. I noticed she had freckles everywhere. “Your trainers seem to have found you refreshing.”
I laughed. “If ‘refreshing’ is a euphemism for ‘bitchy,’ then maybe I’d buy it.”
She shook her head. “You’ve had a very challenging year, Corey. Everyone understands that. So let’s get started.”
First, Pat stretched me. That’s how therapy always began — with the unsettling sensation of someone moving my body around as if I was a rag doll. Pat worked my legs around the hip joints, followed by knees and ankles. Before asking me to sit up, she hesitated. “Can I take a peek at your skin? Nobody will see.”
I looked around. The therapy room door was shut, and there were no faces outside its window. “Just quickly,” I said.
Pat lifted the back of my yoga pants and took a peek down the back of my underwear. The concern was that I would get pressure sores from sitting in my chair all day. “No problems there.”
“I’m not high risk,” I said. “My parents asked you to check, didn’t they?”
She smiled. “You can’t blame them for caring.”
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.
