I pull myself up on the edge of my bed. My head pounds, and I can’t help but make an awful noise. This makes Mom poke her head in my room.
“What are you doing, Jenna? You need pain meds?”
She means for the pain the dye caused. The headache, the body aches. The ache from cramping, which happens every time I have to do these tests.
“I need to go to school,” I say.
Mom makes a face. She marches into my room and puts her hand on my head. I want to throw her palm off my forehead, but she pulls it back. “No fever.”
“I can’t keep missing days.”
“Mrs. Wilson is getting your stuff for you. I’ll swing by and pick it up today if you like.”
I take a breath and sit up taller, a small feat that sends a shock of pain through my spine and blasts my head. “I feel like I’m forgetting something. You know that feeling?”
Mom looks at me like she wants to give me what I want. I shift forward, getting ready to stand, and wince at the pain.
Mom shakes her head. “Whatever you’re forgetting will wait.”
Maybe she’s right. Maybe it could wait, whatever it is.
Before I can argue, Dad bellows from the other side of the house, “Sharon? Where is my cell? I’ve got that meeting in an hour…”
“I’ll be right back.” Mom holds her finger in front of my face. “You stay here.”
The door closes partway, and I push myself to my feet. These tests are required to determine the next surgery or procedure that’s supposed to help me, but the irony—that they temporarily make things harder—isn’t lost on me.
The pain in my head is insane. It’s like my body is a bottle of seltzer that someone shook up and my head is the cap that’s holding off the eruption. Maybe Mom is right. After all, one of the reasons I switched to regular classes was to make my school life easier, so it would be okay when I missed days like this.
And yet, here I am working double time to get my sorry ass to school.
A knock on my door. “Jenna?”
“Yeah.”
Rena lets herself in my room. “You okay? You need anything?”
“I’m going to school.”
Rena makes a face. “You don’t look so good.”
“Thanks.” I push myself up and try to stand with my elbow crutches, but they scoot out from under me, and I buckle. Rena wraps my arms around her shoulder and holds me up.
“What’s so important at school? I’d give anything for a day in bed.”
“Everyone says that until…”
“Yeah. Sorry. That was pretty crappy of me.”
“You’re fine. I just need to get ready.”
Rena helps me limp forward.
I groan.
“Is this about the text I sent you?”
Then all of a sudden, the fog clears. The text. Rena sent me a text, and that’s why I want to go to school. But my memory still needs to be jogged. I make a weird noise that Rena interprets as the question I’m too ill to ask. What text?
“About Julian,” she says.
The ground shifts under me, and I stumble on my stupid rug. The one Mom says I shouldn’t have in my room because it’s the kind of thing I’ll trip on, but I insisted because I loved the fake white fur and how fluffy and puffy it looked. Glamorous. Annoyingly, Mom was right about this. I lean against Rena with all of my body weight, and she should be pissed but we both kind of laugh, because that’s what we do. When I’ve got my legs under me again, I move forward.
“Distract me,” I say, only my tongue is kind of bunched, because right now it’s acting like an anchor for the rest of my body. I’m aiming for mobility on top of stability. Coordinated movement is the name of the game. Most people don’t have to think of it every time they move something or stabilize something, but I do.
“Closet or bathroom?” Rena asks.
“Closet.”
She loops her arm under my armpit and braces me. “Julian’s back in town. Back in school. I saw him yesterday.”
A tiny bud of hope forms inside me. Then something replaces it. Annoyance. If I’d been at school yesterday I would have seen him, too.
We shuffle forward a few more steps. “Eric says the hockey team could really use him,” Rena adds.
Julian. My Julian, with everyone but me. Rena saw him. Eric, who is away at college and not even at our school anymore, knew he was coming and has already planned how Julian was going to save the season. And me? I was busy getting injected with dye and lit up like a Christmas tree.
We reach the opening to my closet. Rena balances me using her hip and throws the door open, jamming the switch to turn on the light.
I breathe out, hard.
“You okay?”
“Ish,” I say. One of our jokes.
My walk-in-closet houses three faux-fur jackets Rena insisted I needed this winter (one with a faux-fur-lined hood that she said was just delicious) and rows of Converse and ankle boots, because they add stability and also passed Rena’s cute-enough-to-wear test. But there are also skeletons in my closet—my abandoned mobility equipment. My closet is a graveyard of stuff too expensive to get rid of.
A state-of-the-art electric wheelchair is parked underneath my spring clothes as if it’s waiting for its turn to become useful again. My Hoyer lift, the contraption we had to use after surgeries, when I couldn’t get up by myself, hovers in the back. Its metal chains and swing-seat—made of ballistic material—loom large and frightening like a character from a Stephen King novel.
I glance at Rena. “I’m going to need my scooter, I think, but it’s not charged.”
“It might be. You know how on top of things Mom is about your stuff.” My stuff. The stuff that I used to love because it helped me go places and do things. Since finding out about the settlement this past summer, my mobility equipment has become just another reminder of the entire birth injury lie. But I am aware that if I’m going to go to school, it will only be with the help of one of these little lovelies. So be it.
My head pounds, a sign that I should probably just go back to bed. What does it matter if I see Julian today or any day after this? But there’s no reasoning with me when I set my mind on doing something. Dad used to say I got my hardheaded stubbornness from him, but he said it as a source of pride. Eric said it was my middle-child syndrome that made me so relentless. But I’m not sure either one of them would think my current drive to make it to school today is either cute or admirable.
Rena bends down and turns on the scooter. “It’s got a little life, but not enough for an entire day.”