The Year We Fell Down (5 page)

“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
.

Chapter Five:
Drunk Giraffe on Stilts

—
Corey

September quickly became October, and life was good. I stayed on top of my course-work, and I learned to navigate the campus with increasing ease. Dana was in the throes of the singing group rush process. Her audition song was
Hey There, Delilah
, and with all her practicing, I had started to hear that song in my sleep.

I didn’t have much of my own social life yet, but that was probably going to take some time. Hands down, my favorite Friday and Saturday nights so far had been spent playing RealStix with Hartley. As hockey season got going, Hartley’s friends were increasingly unavailable. They were either at practice, or headed to parties in corners of the campus Hartley didn’t wish to climb to. On those nights, he would flop onto the couch next to me for a few games of hockey. Sometimes we put on a movie afterward.

“You know, you depend too much on your team captain,” Hartley said one night, when I was losing.

I wasn’t about to tell him, but the reason I was losing that night had very little to do with my center, and everything to do with the fact that Hartley was not wearing a shirt. I’d spent the last half hour trying not to drool over Hartley’s six-pack.

He cracked open a bottle of beer and offered it to me, but I waved it away. “Digby is good, but there are other players on the ice.”

“But Digby is dreamy,” I said, setting down my controller. And it was true — even the digitized version of the Puffins’ captain made my heart go pitter-patter. He was
almost
the hottest hockey player I could name. The hottest one was sitting beside me on the sofa.

Hartley snorted into his beer. “Seriously?” He laughed, which meant I got to see more of his smile. “Callahan, I thought you were a real fan. I didn’t realize you were a puck bunny.”

That made me gasp. “And
I
didn’t realize you were an asshole.”

He held up two hands defensively, one of them still clutching his beer. “Whoa, just a little joke.”

I bit my lip, trying to dial back my irritation. Puck bunny was a derogatory term for women who liked hockey players much more than they liked hockey. Nobody had ever called me that before. The happiest moments of my life had been spent
on
the rink.

Hartley eased his broken leg onto the table and cocked his head, like a golden retriever. “I hit a nerve? I’m sorry.”

Reaching across the sofa, I took the beer out of his hand and stole a swig. “I guess I should start painting my face and yelling at the refs. Since I’m such a big
fan
.”

I stretched the bottle back in his direction, but he didn’t take it back. He just looked at me so intently that I wondered if he could hear my thoughts. “Callahan,” he said slowly. “Are you a hockey
player
?”

For a minute, we just blinked at each other. I’d always
been
a player — since I was five years old. And now, at best, I was just a fan. And that really stung.

Swallowing hard, I answered the question. “I was a player. Before, you know… Before I gave it up.” I felt a prickle behind my eyes. But I was not going to cry in front of Hartley. I took a deep breath in through my nose.

He licked his lips. “You told me your father was a high-school coach.”

“He was
my
high-school coach.”

“No shit?” Hartley cracked open a new beer without ever breaking eye contact. “What position do you play?”

Did
I play. Past tense.

“Center, of course.” I knew what he was really asking. “Captain. All state. Recruited by colleges.” It was so hard to tell him this — to show him exactly what I’d lost. Most people didn’t want to hear it. They would change the subject, and ask if I’d considered taking up knitting, or chess.

But Hartley only reached over, clinking his beer bottle against the one that I still held. “You know, I knew I liked you, Callahan,” he said. At that, my battle against tears became even tougher. But I took a long pull off the beer in my hand and fought them off. There was another moment of silence before Hartley broke it. “So…I guess this means I should teach you how to flip the screen perspective, so you can always see where your defensemen are. Slide over here.”

Happy to have that conversation over with, I scooted closer to him on the sofa. Hartley wrapped his arm around me in order to hold the controller in front of my body where I could see it. “If you push these two buttons at the same time,” he said, depressing them with his thumbs, and looking up at the screen, “it toggles between the player’s view and the coach’s.” I was tucked snugly against him, where I could feel his breath on my ear when he spoke.

“Right,” I breathed. The heat of his bare chest at my back was incredibly distracting. “That’s…useful,” I stammered.

As he showed me a couple more maneuvers, I inhaled the clean scent of his soap, and admired the sculpted forearms reaching around to encircle mine. There should be poetry written about those arms. Hartley explained something about body-checking, but I didn’t quite catch it. Every time he said “body” all I could think about was his.

“Okay?” he finished, as I struggled to take in oxygen. “Now when I beat you, you won’t be able to claim ignorance.” Giving my short ponytail a gentle yank, he withdrew his embrace.

With flushed cheeks, I scooted quickly back to my own end of the couch. “Come on, then,” I said, mustering up a few brain cells. “I’m ready to mow you down.”

“We’ll just see about that,” he chuckled.

The next Friday night, I bumped into Hartley as we were both coming in the front door of McHerrin. “RealStix later?” I asked.
Please?

He shook his head. “The hockey team doesn’t start their play season for another week, so Bridger’s having a party. You should come — there are only six stairs. I made him count them for me. Can you do six stairs?”

I considered the question. “I can do them, as long as I don’t mind looking like a drunk giraffe on stilts. Only less graceful.”

He grinned. “That’s me on a good day. I’m going over at eight, and I’ll knock on your door. Bring Dana, and anyone else you feel like.” He went into his room.

“Do you want to go to Bridger’s party tonight?” I asked Dana when she finally came home.

“I would, but I can’t,” she said. “There are two rush parties. Will you help me choose an outfit?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling even better about my decision not to rush a singing group. If you had to sing well
and
dress well, I was not a good candidate.

We chose a slinky purple sweater for Dana, over jet-black jeans. She looked pretty, but it didn’t look like she was trying too hard. “But what are you wearing?” she asked me.

I only shrugged, glancing down at my Harkness T-shirt. “It’s a kegger in Bridger’s room. Who would dress up for that?”

Dana rolled her eyes at me. “Come on, Corey. The jeans are okay, but you need a cuter top.” She strode into my room and began opening dresser drawers. “How does this one fit you?”

“Well, it’s pink.”

“I can see that. Put it on.”

Humoring her, I threw my Harkness tee on the bed and grabbed the top that Dana held out.

—
Hartley

When I opened the door to the girls’ common room, I could hear voices from behind Corey’s half-open bedroom door.

“There. Can I go now?” Corey asked.