—Corey—
By the time the leaves finished turning yellow and red, midterms were almost over. I’d aced my Spanish test, and limped through calculus. Economics was my favorite class now, since Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays always found me seated in the gimp section with Hartley. And after class it was off to our lunch in Commons.
The only dark spot in every week was Physical Therapy.
“How are we doing on the stairs these days?” Pat asked, as she always did.
“Fine. Slow.” For some reason, P.T. turned me into someone who spoke only in monosyllables.
“Let’s practice,” she said.
“Yes, let’s,” I deadpanned.
Pat led me out into a stairwell that I’d never seen before. “Okay, have at it,” she said. “Let’s see your technique.”
One at a time, I placed my crutches onto the first step, and then hopped my feet up to meet them. Then I did it all again. And again. But when I was seven steps up, I turned to look at Pat.
That was a mistake.
I could see exactly how easy it would be to trip, and fall down those seven concrete steps. I had a vision of my body bouncing over their edges. Falling backwards. It was the very thing that terrified me.
I was suddenly stranded there, in the middle of the flight of stairs. I was afraid to keep going up, and I couldn’t turn around to go back down.
Then Pat stood behind me. “I’m spotting you,” she said, her hand on my shoulder blade. “Just a few more.”
Sweating, I sucked it up. After each step she touched my back, so I’d know she was still there. When I made it to the landing, we stopped.
Pat tapped her chin, making thoughtful faces while I panted. “I know that you were taught to use two crutches,” she said. “But I think you might do better with one, plus the railing.” She guided me over to the handrail, and took my right crutch away.
The second span of steps was easier, because I had a death grip on the banister.
“We’ll take the elevator back down,” Pat announced when I’d made it to the top. She gave me back my crutch, and pressed the button.
Grim and perspiring, I followed her back into the therapy room. She had me sit down on the mat and remove my braces. “You know, Corey…”
I hated when people began a sentence that way. It almost always led to nagging.
“…The more we can get you walking, the better you’ll feel. You haven’t plateaued yet. I know walking feels ungainly to you, but there are some great things we can do to make your stride more natural.”
“Like what?” My straight-legged “stride” could hardly be less natural.
“There are new braces which bend when you want them to and lock when you need it. I think you’re a really good candidate. But the manufacturer requires that you to commit to eight more months of therapy on them.”
“If a brace needs eight months of therapy to work, how good could it be?”
Pat smiled the smile of someone who was trying to be patient. “I think they’re miraculous. But you have to train your trunk, torso and glutes to help you. Think about it. In the meantime, let’s work on crawling.”
I gave Pat a weary look, because crawling was one of the more exhausting things we did.
“Hands down on the mat, please,” she said.
With a barely cooperative sigh, I turned over, placing my hands on the mat. Then I curved my back like a cat, pulling with my weak quads into something resembling all fours. Pat adjusted my uncooperative legs behind me.
“Let’s go,” she said. “There’s only eight minutes left, anyway.”
I stepped one of my hands forward on the mat.
“This is easier if you move the hand and the opposing leg together,” she said. “Let me show you.” Pat got onto her hands and knees too, demonstrating the proper way to unweight the leg that I wish to move.
The door to the therapy room swung open, and a voice said. “Oh goody. Women on all fours.”
“Mister Hartley,” Pat’s voice was frosty. “That is not an appropriate way to speak to me or my patient.”
“Don’t worry, Pat,” Hartley said. “You get to punish me for the next hour, and Callahan will get her chance to punish me over RealStix later.”
“Damn straight,” I said, sitting my butt down on my useless lower legs, which is a total no-no, for circulatory reasons. At the rehab center, they used to have a fit if I sat on my feet even for a second.
“Let’s go, Corey,” Pat said. “I need you to do the length of the mat.”
But I hesitated. I really did not want Hartley to watch me crawl like a drunk, my butt swaying in the air. I met Pat’s eye and gave the tiniest shake of my head.
Pat studied me for a second. Then she called out, “Hartley, I need a favor. Could you please go down to the front desk and collect my mail? I’m expecting something. And there’s still a few more minutes until we start.”
“O-kay…” he said slowly. “Is there anything else I can get you while I’m out? Coffee? Dry cleaning?”
“That will be all,” Pat said.
When he walked out, I lifted my ass in the air and prepared to crawl. “Thank you,” I said in a low voice.
“Not a problem,” she sighed.
“So, Corey,” Dana said, putting on a jacket. “Did you hear about the Screw Your Roommate Dance next week?”
Hartley was setting up our hockey game, but we hadn’t started playing yet. “Those are always fun,” he said. “I set Bridger up last year. I handcuffed him to a tree in the courtyard, and gave his date the key.”
“Sounds…interesting,” I said. “Do you want to go, Dana?” Although, since she’d brought it up, I could assume the answer was yes.
She shrugged. “I think it sounds like fun. Don’t you? What’s your type, Corey? Do you have a type?”
Hartley handed me a game controller. “There’s only one man for Callahan, and he’s pretty unavailable.”
At that, my heart took off galloping like a pony, and I actually tasted bile in my mouth. Because I was sure that Hartley knew how I felt about him, and that he was about to say it out loud.
“The Pittsburgh Puffins probably have a game that night,” Hartley continued, “otherwise, I’m sure the captain would fly up if you asked.”
My heart rate began to descend back into the normal range.
Dana giggled. “The captain of the Pittsburgh Puffins, huh? Now I have to Google him.” She leaned over my laptop computer where it sat on the trunk, tapping on the keyboard. “Ooh!” she said. “I see. Wow.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, while Hartley snorted.
“Hey, Corey?” Dana said. “You’re getting a Skype call. It’s Damien. Should I answer?”
“Sure, thanks.”
Dana handed me the laptop, and my brother’s face materialized on the screen. “Hi shorty,” he said. “What’s shaking?”
“Not much. I’m just hanging out. Are you still at work?” I could see office furniture behind him.
“Yup, it’s a glamorous life.” My brother was working as a paralegal for a year before he went to law school.
Beside me, Hartley plopped down on the sofa, a bottle of tequila in one hand, a cocktail shaker in the other. “Whoa! It’s Callahan! How are you, man?”
“Dude. Why would you be in my sister’s room, and not at practice?”
“Well, Captain, the reason would be the giant fucking cast on my leg. These days I can only play hockey on a screen, and your sister has the sweet TV. This is how we party in the gimp ghetto.” Hartley looked down at the other supplies he’d brought. “Fuck. I forgot the limes. Be right back.” He grabbed his crutches and stood up, ambling toward my door.
Damien waited a moment before crossing his arms and hooking his eyebrows. “Please tell me you’re not seeing him.”
This made me laugh. “I’m not seeing him. But — God, Damien — why do you care?”
“He’s not who I would pick for you.”
Well I’m not who he picked, so it looks like you don’t need to worry. “That’s funny, Damien. Who would you pick for me?”
“Nobody, of course. You’re my little sister.”
“I see.”
“Please stay away from the entire hockey team. They’re pigs.”
“I think you just called yourself a pig.”
My brother’s smile was wide. “I just call ‘em like I see ‘em.”
“I have a video game to win here, bro. I’ll talk to you later.”
Damien frowned. “Don’t let Hartley get you drunk.”
“Really? You’d lecture me about drinking? Ease up, okay? Or I’ll tell Mom what really happened to that bottle of cooking sherry that went missing when you were in tenth grade.”
He grinned. “Later, shorty.”
I won our first game. Afterwards, instead of rubbing Hartley’s face in it, I told him that I needed a little advice.
“Yes, you should trade your goalie to another team. He’s weak.” Hartley was squeezing lime juice into a cocktail shaker. I watched him pour the tequila in, and then add a dollop of honey. He had been told to stop icing his knee, so the plan was to use up the rest of the bag of ice Bridger had brought him on margaritas.
“No, seriously. It’s about the Screw Your Roommate dance. Dana wants me to set her up. But since I live under a rock, I don’t know who to call.”
He shook up our cocktails. “What’s her type?”
“I’m not sure. She’s not really into sports. I could see her with a theater nerd, or a musician.”
“Then you might be asking the wrong guy for help.” He uncapped the shaker and strained the results into two dining hall glasses. “I wish I’d thought to snag some salt. Cheers.” He handed me a glass.
I took a sip. “You know, I thought the honey was a strange choice. But it’s quite good.”
“Stick with me, babe.”
If only I could.
“Tell me this,” Hartley said, bending his knee a few degrees, and grimacing. “If Dana asks me for advice about who to set you up with for Screw Your Roommate, what should I tell her? There are a couple of frosh on the hockey team who would like to go. I don’t know their game schedule, though.”
I shook my head. “I’m not going.”
“You don’t want to be screwed?”
I felt my face heat. “Gosh, I wonder if that joke has ever been made before?”
“It’s a tough crowd here for a Friday night,” Hartley grinned. “Look, it’s really kind of fun, and a low pressure way to meet people. No offense, Callahan, but you’re not exactly getting out there.”
I nearly choked on my drink. “Hartley, if I wanted someone to nag me about meeting people, I could always call my mother.”
“I’m not nagging you, I just don’t understand. I know why I’m sitting here on a Friday night, popping Advil on the couch. My leg is sore and my girlfriend is overseas. I’m on, like, the injured reserve list.”
I took a very large gulp of my drink, the lime shimmering on my tongue. “The injured reserve list is a good analogy. I think I’m still on it. It’s a dance, Hartley. Why would I go?”
He swirled his drink in his glass. “Okay, so maybe it’s not your best event.”
“You think? And you’d set me up with an athlete? He would say you had a sick sense of humor.”
Hartley put his elbow on the back of the couch and turned so that he could see me better. “You think athletes only like other athletes? Some of the women I’ve dated think that putting on makeup counts as a physical activity.”
Of course he was right, but that didn’t mean I felt very dateable. Nothing about me was the same as it used to be. My hair was the wrong length, my legs were beginning to thin out from too much time in the chair. Just because Hartley didn’t see all that was wrong didn’t mean I couldn’t.
After my accident, a well-meaning therapist had given me some literature about body image after spinal cord injury. The pamphlet was full of perky suggestions for “learning to love the ‘new you.’” But my heart was full of dark questions that weren’t answered anywhere on those shiny pages.
Meanwhile, my margarita was disappearing rapidly. “The old me would have loved to be set up with a hockey player,” I told him. “But I don’t look the same as I used to. I don’t feel the same.” Also, I’m in love with you. But that’s a separate problem. “Maybe it will just take a while longer.”
“You’re still trying to get your feet under you.” Hartley’s brown eyes were soft. “I hope you don’t mind a little gallows humor.”
“I adore gallows humor.”
“See? You’re fun, Callahan. It really isn’t all that complicated.”
“Everything about it is complicated, okay?” The tequila was starting to get to me. “Everything. I don’t even know what I’m still capable of.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Never mind.” I picked up my game controller, but Hartley took it out of my hands.
“Callahan, do you mean sex?”
I shrugged, miserable. “I can’t talk about it with you.”
“Well, who can you talk about it with? Because that sounds like a pretty big fucking problem.”
“So to speak.”
“Seriously. When I told my friends that my leg was broken in two places, everybody said, well, at least your dick isn’t broken. So life can’t be all that bad.”
I tried not to aspirate my margarita. “And that’s the difference between how guys and girls speak to one another.”
He ran a finger around the rim of his glass. “When you say you’re not sure what you’re capable of, do you mean…”
“Hartley, really. Not an easy topic for me.”
“More tequila, then.” He reached over to refill my glass. “Okay, so, if a guy is paralyzed, that means he can’t get it up anymore, right? Stacia made me watch Downton Abbey.”
I let out a bark of laughter. “Something like that. But it depends where the injury occurred, and what sort of injury it was. Some guys in wheelchairs do fine. But some of them can raise the flag, only they can’t feel it anymore.”
His eyes widened with true horror. “Shit.”
“Exactly.”
“So, for a woman…”
I shook my head. “Next topic, please.”
“I guess a woman could always do it. But if she couldn’t feel it, then she might not want to.”
I stared up at the ceiling, hoping he would let it go.
He took a sip of his drink. “Callahan, one thing you might not know about me is that I don’t embarrass.”
“Well, I do,” I said.
But he didn’t listen. “Now, a guy who wasn’t sure if it still worked would just start slapping things around, like, the minute he got home from the hospital,” Hartley said. “Actually, before that. He would be yanking on it the first time he was alone in the hospital bathroom. And the mystery would be solved.”
Now he was starting to piss me off. “Honestly, you have no idea.”
“Then tell me, Callahan. If I have no idea.” He pinned me with his gaze, and then we were having one of our stare downs. I’m a fierce competitor, of course, but it was impossible to win against Hartley. It was impossible to win if you’re me, anyway. Because staring into Hartley’s chocolaty eyes always took me apart, reminding me just how much I wanted to climb inside his gaze and never come back out.
I looked down into my drink and tried to explain. “Okay, your paralyzed boy? For a long time he won’t be able to tell what works and what doesn’t, because a spinal injury shocks your entire system. He can’t feel anything below his ribcage for a while, and it’s terrifying. Then the doctors start arguing about what he’ll get back, and scaring the shit out of his parents.”
When I looked up again, Hartley regarded me with a quiet, liquid gaze.
Though I wished it wouldn’t, my throat began to feel hot and tight. “And your poster boy? He has a catheter up his weenie, okay? And he doesn’t even know — probably for weeks — if he can poop like a normal person.” I gulped my drink as an excuse to look away. “It takes a long time for everything to settle back down and start working again. And even then, your boy might be psyched out about the whole thing. Even a committed horn dog might take a vacation from jerking off. If only to preserve his own sanity.”
Hartley’s expression softened. “That really sucks for our hypothetical friend.”
“Hypothetically, yes.”
There was a silence for a minute, but it was not an uncomfortable one. My shoulders began to relax again. I’d never told Dana any of the gory details about spinal cord injury, because I didn’t want her to think pitying thoughts about me. But something about Hartley always loosened my tongue. Hopefully I wouldn’t regret it later.
We sipped our drinks for a little while longer, until eventually he set my game controller on my knee. “Let’s find out if your goalie’s reflexes are still sharp after two margaritas.”
“Yes, let’s,” I agreed.
