LIFE HAPPENS NEXT
Terry Trueman
Dedication
For Donna
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Works
Credits
Copyright
Back Ads
About the Publisher
1
Night before last my dad tried to kill me. At least, I’m pretty sure that was his plan. For weeks and months I’d been worrying about it. I guess Dad had his reasons, but he didn’t do it. Obviously. Lucky me, huh? Sorry, sarcasm is one of the few weapons I possess.
I heard this thing once on a TV program about a guy who had a recurring dream that he was a butterfly. One day he woke up and couldn’t tell for sure if he was a butterfly dreaming he was a guy, or a guy dreaming he was a butterfly. Lately, when I first wake up, I have the feeling that maybe my dream life is better than my real life. Dreaming is my favorite part of each day, flying, soaring, feeling free because of all the amazing possibilities it offers. Yep, I’ve got reality—then everything else.
But here’s the screwiest part: most of these dreamy possibilities spin around an impossible fact, the fact that I’m in love with Ally Williamson.
Damn, that’s crazy. Maybe not so crazy for anybody else, but it sure is for me.
You see, I’m not exactly what you’d call red-hot, lover-boy material. At least not on the outside. Actually, I’m pretty smart and funny—on the inside.
Confused? Okay, let’s start with the facts. I’m Shawn McDaniel, and I have cerebral palsy. C.P. isn’t always severe, but in my case it’s about as bad as it can get. I am stuck in a wheelchair or on my bed 24/7. I wear diapers ’cause I can’t use the toilet. I drool a lot so I often have a big bath towel tied around my neck soaked with spit. Between my diaper and my drool, are you surprised that I’m not exactly a sweet-smelling chick magnet? Hell, my own dad can barely stand to look at me. I go to a special program for school, a program just for kids like me. I know a lot of people call us “The Retards’ Class”—nice, huh? My sister, Cindy, and brother, Paul, go to the same school, but my classes are totally separated. Separate but unequal.
Oh wait. There’s more. I make loud sounds instead of words, incredibly irritating noises that I can’t control. It’s like my brain sends an order saying, “All right, Shawn, it’s loud vocalizations time!” and a big fat “Ahhhhhhhh” jumps out of my mouth.
These vocalizations are as close as I ever get to communication with others, since I can’t control ANY of my muscles at all.
It kills me that nobody knows I’m smart inside this useless shell. The people who love me most in the world, along with everybody else who ever sees me, think I’m a veg. I’m trapped inside my body.
So you see how this stuff makes it more than a little crazy for me to be in love? Especially with the most beautiful girl in the history of drop-dead-gorgeous girldom. Ally Williamson is Cindy’s best friend, and while she knows I exist, that’s the extent of our “relationship.” In fact, the only time I get to see Ally is when my mom, Lindy, puts me in my regular spot in the family room, where Cindy and Ally usually hang out or watch TV. At these moments, I imagine Ally close to me. And lots of times my mind wanders into a daydream or fantasy. These are almost as good as my nighttime dreams, where Ally and I are walking on a deserted beach hand in hand, or running into the surf and diving into the blue waves or … never mind. The truth is that dreams and fantasies never last. Something like the breeze pressing against the windowpane, or some idiot on TV saying, “Love conquers all,”—something always snaps me out of it and back to reality.
“Love conquers all”?
Yeah, right. Maybe not quite all, huh?
I’ve been in love with Ally Williamson from the first second I ever saw her. Love at first sight. Well, maybe not the exact first second but pretty freakin’ close to it. One night she came to our house for a sleepover with my sister and I got to hang out with them. Okay, “hang out with them” is not quite accurate. I got to sit in my wheelchair, little more than a lump of human flesh and unacknowledged teenaged horniness, in the room next to where they were. But at that first meeting Ally greeted me, looking right into my eyes. She was warm and kind, which caught me off guard. Hardly anybody ever acts interested when they are introduced to me, probably because all I do is sit and drool back at them, but Ally spoke to me. Her voice was a little too loud, which was probably nervousness, but there was nothing phony in her tone or words. I mean it was like she didn’t even see my wheelchair or smell my ugly scent or judge me in any way. She was nice and, yep, totally gorgeous, so I admit that this combination of kindness and gorgeousness gave me the absolute, total, over-the-top, teenaged-love-junkie, mac-daddy-extreme hotz for her.
When I got put to bed later that night, I tossed and turned. I guess I should say that my brain tossed and turned me, thinking about Ally, her smile, eyes, lips, hair, her slender hands that cradled my face and brushed my cheek when she said good night. Okay, to be honest, I made up that last part.
But when I finally fell asleep, I had this wonderful dream, where we were kissing and cuddling. And in the dream, Ally looked me in the eyes and told me she loved me. I told her I loved her too, knowing somehow that this was true not just in my dream but in reality, also.
Now I am consumed by wanting to know her and to be known by her, to love and be loved. In the dream, I felt that I had to be known and loved by her—I had to be! When I woke up in the morning, I started to worry. How can that ever happen? The reality is there is no way I can ever tell Ally how I really feel. And it hurts because without being loved for who you really are, without being known by anybody, what does life even mean?
I’ve had cerebral palsy from birth, and never being “normal,” I’ve had to adjust to a lot of things that most people don’t even consider. If you think about the phrase “take it for granted” and then think about all the stuff normal people do all the time, it’s amazing: walking, talking, peeing, winking, sighing, crying, burping, farting, laughing, staring, grabbing, holding, kissing, blushing. Do normal people ever think of any of these things as amazing? I doubt it. Not having any control over any of my body’s parts, not being able to tell my hand, “pick up that cup,” or tell my eyes, “blink, yeah that was fun, now let’s blink again,” makes normal things seem pretty awesome to me.
But I’ve gotten used to not being able to do all those things that normal people do all the time. What I’m never going to be able to get used to is dreaming about Ally Williamson, kissing her in my dreams (I love these dreams), loving her, and then waking up and realizing it will never be real, that these dreams will never come true.
So now you get that my body doesn’t work. But my brain sure does. I’m almost fifteen years old, and
since thinking is about all I can do, I’ve done a lot of it in my day. The only thing I can do to keep myself from getting depressed is just stay cool. I once heard my sister say to Paul, “No situation is so bad that having a bad attitude can’t make it worse.” I love that. My situation is pretty bad, but I’ve got my hopes and dreams and firm belief that life is a pretty great thing. And thinking about Ally, fantasizing that we might somehow be together someday, is more than enough of a reason for me to live.
So back to my dad and how he planned to kill me a couple nights ago. He actually thought he’d be doing me a favor, ending my miserable existence. But because Dad didn’t do it, I guess in one way I’m like everybody else now, just trying to figure out what’s gonna happen next. I’m keeping my spirits up and enjoying a mental make-out here and there (hey, it’s better than no make-out at all!), and focusing on the good things in life. Yeah, I’ve got C.P. but I know that there’s always bad and good things coming at us that we can’t even see, much less control. So how different am I from everyone else? Maybe not so much as it looks like.
2
Here’s how I spin things in my head—some cool things about being me:
1. I get a hot bath every day of my life and never have to lift a finger. The warm water gets squeezed over my body from the big sponge in my mom’s gentle, loving hands. And this bath is by far the most enjoyable physical sensation I ever feel.
2. I have a perfect auditory memory, remembering everything I ever hear, which is totally cool. This ability has turned our TVs (and we have four of them!) into the greatest learning devices in the universe. I mean, who needs real life when you’ve got 110 cable stations? And I remember every show, from Cesar Millan’s The Dog Whisperer to Little League baseball to the love life of squids to “The bark beetle lays its eggs” to everything in between. In other words, I’m damned smart!
3. Although I can’t tell anybody what kind of music I’d like to listen to, I love almost all the music that’s played around here (rap/hip-hop, R&B, Bach and Mozart, geezer R&R) so whatever’s on pretty much always makes me happy.
4. My brother, Paul, King Jock, Straight-A Student, Tough Guy Supreme, slips me bites of his deluxe bacon double cheeseburgers every chance he gets. Somehow Paul knows that I, too, think God invented this food to make up for the fact that all of us have to die someday.
5. My sister, Cindy, is a saint. She taught me to read by playing school with me when I was little, and to this day she never treats me bad—plus she has great taste in best friends, wink-wink-hubba-hubba!
6. Although Mom has a master’s degree in English and could be a college teacher or have some other higher-paying job, she works from home so she can take care of me. If Cindy is a saint, think about what that makes my mom.
7. I’ll never have to get a lousy part-time job like carrying people’s groceries to their cars in a supermarket parking lot or cleaning out toilets and mopping floors in some crummy restaurant.
8. In fact, I’ll never have to get any job, which I figure is a good thing since work is a four-letter word …
9. … so I’ll never have anybody bossing me around—I know this is partly a bad thing as I’ll never get to boss anybody else either, but I don’t think I’d like doing that anyway.
10. I have a kickass name. Shawn McDaniel is really cool sounding when compared to a name like Elmer Ulysses Fudpucker or Isaac P. Freeley.
11. I’m living in the most interesting time in all of history: medical science–wise, it is a miracle that a guy like me, with my so-called handicaps, could still even be alive.
Okay, let’s make this 12 items:
12. I am in love with Ally Williamson, the girl of my dreams, and while I’d love to find some way to make her fall in love with me too, at least I get to imagine that she’s mine all mine.
Ah, what the heck, just for good luck let’s make it 13. I didn’t even mention my dream life yet. Did I say dream life? Hey, Ally, here I come!
3
Last night I had another dream about Ally. I was flying; soaring is more like it. I do this a lot in dreams and also when I have seizures. That’s when my spirit escapes my body and I’m no longer trapped, not limited, not so isolated. That’s why I don’t mind my seizures, even though I know, from hearing my family talk, that when I’m having one it looks like I’m being tortured to death. When you live in a body with zero control, escaping it, even if it’s when you’re asleep or having a grand mal seizure, is great.
When I have a seizure, I am released from the crippling constraints of my useless body. Time and space have no control over me. Neither does gravity or any other “real” things like walls, fences, concrete, wood, asphalt, steel bars. Nothing can keep me from going where I want to go or hold me back at all. But sometimes during seizures, and like in this dream, I don’t choose a destination. It’s more like a destination chooses me.
In my dream last night, I was coasting over Puget Sound, its dark water shimmering in bright moonlight, sea birds flying by my side, their black eyes staring into my eyes. After a while I shot up toward the stars. Then I swooped down and could see the lights of people’s houses and streetlamps. I spotted my house and dived back.
Now it was daylight. I saw Ally sitting in our living room. She looked up and saw me. I paused, still floating outside the window. She smiled at me. And she spoke without words, her thoughts coming through loud and clear: “Shawn, I love you.”
Suddenly I was standing up tall and strong on my own two feet. And Ally came running out of the house, all slow motion, jiggling in just the right places and smiling wide. She was unbelievably happy and beautiful.
“I’m ready to go!” she said. I turned around and there was a gorgeous red Corvette waiting for us in the driveway. We settled into the leather bucket seats and Ally puckered her lips and threw me a kiss. That kiss floated through space toward my cheek and I power-shifted the ’vette, banging it hard from second into third, like a hotrod king in a video game, like a NASCAR wild man defying death. My engine screamed, Ally purred, and I …
… woke up. Lying in my crib with a wet diaper and a deep longing to be back in my dream—back where Ally and I were together. If I could have squeezed my eyes tight to make it happen, I’d have done it in a heartbeat—but I can’t control my eyelids any more than I can control any part of my body.
So what I love about dreams and seizures is that I’m in control in my travels and my spirit is free. I mean how could I not have mixed emotions about returning to my body? I know I should be thankful for still being alive and all, but I always feel sad that my travels and adventures are over. This morning it was hard to wake up and realize that Ally doesn’t love me. My only choice was to launch into a daydream to avoid the reality of my growing diaper rash.
Like most boys, my best daydreams are R-rated—R for restricted audience, no one under 17 allowed. In this morning’s daydream, I went to Ally’s house or what I thought her house might look like. I have no idea how I knew where it was, but in daydreams you just know stuff. Somehow I knew where her room was too. I peeked in and saw her single bed already made, her closet door ajar, filled with tops and jeans, flannels and hoodies and jackets, her shoes stacked on a shoe rack.
I heard a shower running and couldn’t resist moving toward the bathroom at the end of the hallway. Light shone from below the closed bathroom door with a tiny bit of steam. I felt the warmth of the room, the moist air even before I got to the door and paused.
I knew for sure that it was Ally showering. From outside I could feel her presence. Then it was like Ally could also tell I was there. “Come join me, Shawn. After all, we’re in love, aren’t we?”
I’ve never actually had a shower in my life. Like I mentioned before, my mom bathes me, but I can’t be left alone for even a second in a bathtub, because if I had a seizure or even just fell over, I’d drown. But in the daydream we were in the shower together, and it seemed as though Ally and I had been like this many times before. It was completely na
tural. Like I said, this dream is R-rated, so I won’t go into all the details. We were just two people in the shower together and the girl was really, really hot, so you do the math.
The downside was leaving my daydream. I wanted to stay where I had been, longed to keep feeling the warm water and Ally’s touch lingering … sigh … and you wonder why I like dreams so much?
4
Dreaming is one thing. Reality is something else. Like every Monday through Friday morning, I’m at school. And like most every other day, I’ve just made a mess in my diaper. You might think I’d get used to this since I’ve never used a toilet in my life, but I hate it. It’s not like I have any choice in the matter. I know when I need to go, either number one or number two, and I wish I could just say, “Excuse me please, I need to use the bathroom.” But I can’t. I can’t say anything. I can’t tap my foot, or make my eyes blink, or wiggle my pinky as a signal to get me to the john. I can’t push a button on a communication board or make myself say “Ahhhhhh” as a signal. I can’t do anything except, well, just let it happen and wait for someone to check me out or to notice the smell and say, “Shawn needs changing.”
I don’t feel humiliation, exactly, or embarrassment since there’s nothing I can do to change the situation, but I always feel sad and sorry for whoever it is who changes me. And at school that job usually goes to the teacher’s aide, William.
Life Happens Next Page 1