I never thought I’d see Marcus again. When I was seventeen, a drunk driver ran a red light and changed everything. Six months before prom, I went from arguing about curfew and trying on dresses with my friends to waking up in a hospital bed with doctors talking around me like I wasn’t in the room.
My legs were broken in three places. My spine was damaged. There were words like rehab and prognosis and maybe, that word especially, maybe, which is medical language for we don’t know yet and aren’t going to say so.
Before the accident, my life had been ordinary in the best possible way. I worried about grades. I worried about whether Danny Pearce had noticed me in fourth period.
I worried about whether my prom dress made me look like a tube of toothpaste, which was a genuine concern I had voiced to my best friend Rachel at least four times. I worried about the kind of things that feel enormous when you are seventeen and have no real concept yet of what enormous actually means. After the accident, I worried about being looked at.
There is a specific kind of visibility that comes with a wheelchair that nobody tells you about before you need to know it. You become simultaneously more visible and less seen. People look at the chair.
They look at your situation. They construct a version of you in their head before you say a single word, and that version is almost always smaller and sadder than the actual person sitting there. You watch it happen in real time, in the split second before someone’s expression settles into whatever shape they’ve decided is appropriate.
Pity, usually. Or that aggressive cheerfulness that is really just pity wearing a better outfit. I told my mother I wasn’t going to prom.
She appeared in my doorway holding the dress bag with both hands, which meant she had been standing outside deciding how to walk in. My mother was not a dramatic woman. She picked her moments carefully and spent them with precision.
“You deserve one night,” she said. “I deserve not to be stared at.”
“Then stare back.”
I opened my mouth to argue and she was already lifting the dress out of the bag, holding it up against the light like she was checking it for flaws, and the conversation was apparently over. She helped me into the dress.
She helped me into my chair. She drove me to the gym and walked me inside and found me a spot near the wall where I could see the room, and then she left, because she understood that being helped through the door was as far as her help could take me. The rest I had to do myself.
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