Disaster does have a tendency to teach a person a few things.
Before blowing my hands off, I was the kind of kid who always kept his eyes averted, looking to avoid trouble. This meant that trouble had no problem finding me at all and I spent more than one morning getting tripped in the halls, more than one lunch period locked in a locker because someone had shoved me there, more than one afternoon gym class in which someone gave me a decidedly unpleasant wedgie.
Of course, I’m a lot bigger than I was back then, have grown a lot in the past year. Hey, if I’d known blowing off my hands would somehow coincide with my transforming from Wimpy Guy into Strong Guy, maybe I’d have mixed up that chemical cocktail and blown them off sooner.
“Very carefully,” I answer Jessup. “Very carefully.”
Aurora
“My dad says that new guy, the one with the hooks, insisted on being in a regular gym class,” Celia Wentworth says, redoing her ponytail and giving her head a little toss so that the red hair bounces like soft copper under the fluorescent lights of the locker room. I don’t like to be critical, but I don’t think I’ve ever quite seen a girl get so much mileage out of a ponytail before, the way she’s always tossing that thing around.
It turns out that Celia Wentworth’s dad is the vice principal.
“And guess which regular gym class got lucky?” she continues.
As I change into my gym shorts, I can tell she’s expecting me to agree with her, that this is somehow the end of the world. But I say nothing.
“Well,” she sighs, “at least we have Jessup in our class. I think Jessup’s cute. Don’t you think Jessup’s cute?”
“Definitely,” Deanie agrees with her, nodding like a bobblehead.
Again, I say nothing.
But inside I am thinking that if Deanie is obsessed with doing and saying whatever it takes to be liked by everybody who is anybody, then Celia is obsessed with doing and saying whatever it takes to be liked by just one person: Jessup Tristan.
Lucius
You have to wonder about a gym teacher who thinks volleyball is the ideal sport for the first day of gym class. And you really have to wonder about a gym teacher who thinks having teams be girls against the guys is some kind of wonderful and novel idea. I have a particular gripe with this, since it lands me on a team with Jessup, Steve, Gary, and two other guys. Across the net from us are Aurora, Celia, Deanie, and three other girls. There’s another twelve kids playing a game at a second net set up crosswise on the other half of the basketball court.
Before class started, the gym teacher, Mrs. Finch, pulled me aside and tried to convince me that playing volleyball with the others might not be such a good idea for me. She thought it might be beyond my abilities or that maybe I’d get hurt. So I pulled out the words “discrimination” and “lawsuit” and the phrase “my civil rights are being violated here,” and before you know it, I was in the game.
I briefly consider becoming a lawyer when I grow up. I think I have the basics down pat here.
I have to admit, playing volleyball the first day of gym class and being on an all-boys team isn’t all bad: it means I can keep an eye on Aurora on the other side of the net. She looks so pretty in her gym clothes, the pale green and white making her hair look that much darker, making her eyes stand out that much more.
Even though Jessup complains that it’s sexist, Mrs. Finch lets the girls serve first.
I’m paying too much attention to how Aurora looks as she goes up on her toes, tossing the ball up in the air with one hand and then elongating her whole body to serve it with the other, to notice much of anything else. Which is okay, because the ball doesn’t come to me anyway. I’m in the back row and nowhere near close to it as it comes down in the center on our side of the net. Good thing, because while I might not care about what most people think, I’d feel like an idiot if during the first play of the game Aurora saw me take the ball in the head because I wasn’t paying sufficient attention.
Eye on the prize: sometimes it is a challenge.
The game progresses and it doesn’t take long before I notice something odd about this game: no one is hitting the ball to me. Not the other side, not any of my teammates. I doubt it was intentional on Aurora’s part when she served—I just can’t see her doing that—but when none of the other girls hits the ball in my direction, no matter what position the rotation of play puts me in, I remember Mrs. Finch huddling with the girls before the game started. Call me paranoid, but I become convinced Mrs. Finch warned them not to hit the ball anywhere near me. She was probably worried, didn’t want a student getting injured on her watch.
Apparently now Mrs. Finch has become concerned about other kinds of lawsuits.
It makes me angry.
But then Aurora is serving again, Mrs. Finch is at the other end of the court supervising the other game, and this time the ball is coming straight at me. It’s mine. My feet leave the ground as I reach to bang the ball back with the side of my prosthetic arm—it’s amazing how powerful these things can be.
Before I can make contact, though, I feel a body slam into me, hard, from the left, sending me crashing to the ground. I look up just in time to see Jessup fly across my field of vision as he steals my play. He hits the ball with so much force right down the center, none of the girls on the other side even has a chance of returning it.
“What was that all about?” I demand from my position on the floor.
“Sorry, dude.” He shrugs, like No harm, no foul. “I was just trying to do you a favor.”
“Well, don’t,” I say.
I really hate, have always hated, to have anyone call me dude.
“Sorry, dude,” he says again, like he means it. Then he surprises me by reaching out a hand to help me up.
Not thinking—I still forget sometimes that I don’t have hands anymore, particularly when I’m dreaming at night, such wonderful dreams—I raise my hook to take it.
Jessup sees what I’m offering and he takes a step backwards, raises his hands as though to ward off evil.
“Oops,” he says, “I forgot.” Then his eyes light up like he’s just thought of something great. “Hey!” he says, continuing in a soft voice meant just for me to hear. “I never can seem to remember your name. What was it again? Luke Wooly? Lucy Whales? So why don’t I just call you ‘Hooks’ from now on?” He nods to himself. “Yeah. It’s perfect: Hooks.”
Well, I think as I rise to my feet, no one could have seen that coming.
“I swear, Hooks,” he says, “I really was just trying to help the team make the play. You know, you really should be in the special needs gym class or something, maybe not even take gym at all. I mean, what were they thinking, putting you in here with normal people?”
“You’d be surprised what I can do with these hooks,” I tell him.
And it’s true. I can do some amazing things, such as shoot pool like nobody’s business. First thing my dad did when we moved into the new house: he bought a new table to replace the one we lost in the explosion. First thing I did when I was well enough: I taught myself how to play pool all over again. It’s amazing what a natural bridge hooks make.
But I don’t tell Jessup any of that. What does he care about what I have to say? Instead, I show him.
On the next play, it is finally, at last, my turn to serve.
I consider waiting for my second serve to do what I’m going to do, but then I decide: Nah. Why wait?
I bend my knees to get a good spring jump, then I toss with my left, but when I strike with my right I don’t even try to get it over the net. Instead, I use all my power to zero in on my real target: the unsuspecting back of Jessup, who’s standing right in front of me.
“Ow!” he cries, his back arching against the pain I’ve just inflicted.
“Oops,” I say when he turns to glare at me. “Sorry . . . dude.” I wave my hooks in the air innocently. “Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing with these things, you know?”
Violence: these days it really is all the rage.
Aurora
“God, can you believe that new guy?” Celia says when we’re back down in the locker room. “I couldn’t believe it when he spiked Jessup with the ball like that. It was totally on purpose.”
“I know,” Deanie agrees with her. “Personally, I think he’s crazy. I mean, why else would he even have hooks? Don’t they have much more modern prosthekits these days?”
I want to tell her that the proper word is prosthetics, but I don’t. And yes, I’m sure Lucius spiked Jessup on purpose. But I’m also equally sure that when Jessup crashed into Lucius earlier, it was no innocent accident. Still, what Deanie said has me curious now, and rather than going to study hall like I’m supposed to after gym, I go to the library instead to see if my dad can help me with a little research.
“Hey, princess,” my dad says when he sees me. “What can I do for you? Is this business or pleasure?”
This is the first time I’ve visited my dad in the library and I can tell from what he’s said at home that he’s settling in to his new job nicely. He’s said that the staff is mostly friendly and that none of the kids has given him any real trouble yet: no one engaging in extreme forms of PDA among the stacks, no one trying to break the security walls and access porn on the Internet, no one even talking too loudly. This makes me glad. The last few years have been so hard on him, so it’s a relief to see that at least one thing is turning out to be easy.
“I need some help with some research,” I answer his question.
“Ah, business then,” he says. He turns to his computer, fingers poised over the keys. “What’ll it be?”
“I want to learn about prosthetics. Specifically, I’d like to know if there’s a good reason someone would have a pair of hooks instead of those more advanced prosthetics you see on TV—you know, like on all those soldiers coming home from Iraq.”
My dad gives me a quick look, but then he turns his attention back to the keys and begins tapping away. I understand the look: this school may be way bigger than the last high school I went to, but you can’t miss the only double amputee, and you really can’t miss the only boy with two hooks for hands.
It takes my dad a couple of minutes, but then I see the “Ah-ha!” look he always gets on his face when he locates the answer to something he’s been curious about.
He turns the screen so it’s facing more toward me, but he’s a quicker reader than I am and he starts paraphrasing out loud.
“This article is about soldiers wounded in Iraq,” he says. “It focuses on this one double-arm amputee who uses what they call traditional metal hook prosthetics. It says he was told the myoelectric—battery-operated—hands would be the best thing for him. But he was disappointed. He says—get this!—that what the article refers to as ‘World War II–era technology’ is better, easier: they don’t fall off his arm like the other kind is prone to do, and the hooks are more supple and reliable. Oh, and look at this: it says that most single-arm amputees prefer not to use any device at all, because all the devices are too heavy—they don’t have the support of natural arms—but when a person is a double-arm amputee, he doesn’t really have a choice. Wow! This guy they’re talking about in the article can drive a car, shoot a rifle, handle a bayonet, and even teach martial arts with his hooks!”
“But if all that is true,” I say, “then why would anyone ever opt for those myoelectric ones you mentioned?”
“Cosmetics,” my dad says right away. “They look more like real hands. Most people, I guess, care what other people think. And maybe that’s why the soldiers we see on TV almost always have the prosthetics that look more like real hands even though hooks are more effective: because whoever picks what vets to show on TV wants the audience to see something that on the surface looks prettier than reality.”
My dad removes his glasses, rubs his eyes. He spends so much time in front of a computer, he often gets eye strain and head aches.
“I suppose there could be other reasons too, individual case by individual case,” he says, putting his glasses back on. “Like what?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Like insurance. I’ll bet the more advanced prosthetics would be a lot more expensive, and if coverage wasn’t good, or if a person had no medical insurance at all, a person might choose a less expensive option. Then, too, I’d imagine if a person was young when he got injured, he’d outgrow the more advanced prosthetics more quickly. Boys grow a lot between the ages of, say, fourteen and adult. Lower arms and mechanical hands that look fine size-wise on a boy would start looking disproportionate more quickly than hooks as the boy ages into a man. So again, hooks would be a cheaper option because of that.” His face has a thoughtful expression. “And there could be other reasons a person would make that choice.”
“Such as?”
He shrugs. “I suppose there could be reasons that would be impossible for other people to know.”
It’s a lot to think about.
“Thanks, Daddy,” I say.
“Is there anything else I can help you with? Is there anything else you’d like to know? You know,” he says, gesturing at the computer, with a smile, “I really am pretty good with this thing.”
Yes, there is something else I would like to know, badly.
I’m dying to know more about what really happened to Lucius.
How hard would it be for my dad to find out? After all, I’ve heard the other kids say they remember seeing something about it in the city newspaper. So it can’t have been that long ago; it can’t have been that far away. In the space of a few minutes, with a few keystrokes, my dad can probably get the whole story. What would that story reveal?
And yet, I can’t bring myself to ask him to do that. It feels as though I’d be invading Lucius’s privacy somehow.
“No, thanks.” I shake my head hard, as though trying to convince myself. “That’s it for today.”
Out in the hallway, right outside the library door, Jessup is leaning against the wall.
“Hey,” he says. He hooks a finger at the library door. “What were you talking about with that weird guy?”
“You mean the librarian?” I say.
He nods.
“That ‘weird guy’ happens to be my father,” I say hotly.
“Oops.” He smiles, doesn’t really look embarrassed. “Sorry. I guess I just think that all teachers, or people who have jobs that make them seem like teachers, are kind of weird.”
“It must make life a lot simpler,” I say, “to make generalizations about whole groups of people when you know nothing about the individual.”
I move to walk past him, but he springs in front of me, blocking my way.
“So, um.” He does this thing where he snaps both sets of fingers, then takes the thumb-side fist of one hand and slaps it against the other hand’s open palm. He does it again. “Walk you to your next class?”
“You’re kidding, right?” I say.
He just raises his eyebrows, looking genuinely surprised, like he expected me to say yes.
“Um, no,” I say, finally succeeding in snaking around him.
It’s then I see Celia waiting halfway down the hall. I think she’s waiting for me, but then I hear her call out, “Jessup? You coming?”
Even though Jessup can be a jerk, causing me to keep reminding myself of what my mom said about being nice to everybody, he’s still a part of the group that I’ve been . . . absorbed into here, for lack of a better way to put it. So when lunchtime rolls around, even though I could do with a little less time around Jessup, I still sit at the table he’s at because that’s where Celia and Deanie and Steve and Gary are. Plus, each day they yell for me to come sit with them. The things they talk about don’t tend to interest me much, mostly just gossip about other people. Mostly, I just keep quiet when they do this.
It’s when I’m going up to dump the rest of the stuff left on my orange tray into the trash basket that I run into Lucius.
I’ve noticed t
hat Lucius always eats by himself.
When he doesn’t say anything, when he just dumps the stuff off his own tray and starts to turn away, I say softly, “Hey, Lucius.”
You can almost hear the snap as he turns sharply to look at me. Immediately, I realize he’s surprised that I know his real name.
He coughs, then: “Aurora.” He says it like a statement. And suddenly I’m surprised that he knows my name.
“I was just wondering,” I say, “are you okay? I mean, that was a pretty big fall you took in gym class this morning. It must have hurt.”
This is the most I’ve ever said to him. Who am I kidding? All we’ve ever said to each other before was “Hey.” Did I say too much?
I realize I must have said too much, because his eyes darken with . . . something.
“I’m fine.” He practically growls the words. “I’m fine.”
Then he’s walking away from me, raising a hook to punch open one of the cafeteria doors.
I look back at the table where I’ve been sitting, catch Jessup looking at me. There’s a split second before he realizes I’m looking back at him, and in that split second before he plasters a smile on his face, I see him looking at me with something in his eyes that I don’t have a name for.
I just know I don’t like it.
Lucius
Two weeks have passed and, so far, I have survived.
I spend my Saturday morning doing laundry. This is something I do whenever I have free time now. My mom, seeing how frequently I make trips to the basement laundry room, has offered to do this for me. I think she worries that I’m turning into an obsessive-compulsive, or that maybe I’m down here trying to transform the washing machine into a bomb. But I don’t let her do my laundry. I say she has enough of her own work to do. My obsessions are my own. I want my stiff jeans to fade, get softer. I may not care, generally speaking, what others think, but my stiff jeans make me feel like a dork. Vanity, thy name is sometimes Lucius.
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