That is just impossible, I thought. I just can’t win.
“Now we’ll need to get you on a physical therapy schedule,” she said, chattering on about exercise, rehabilitation, and I don't know the rest because I just tuned her out. “You’ll start tomorrow,” she said. “But the doctor says you’re free to go home. For now.”
My parents lifted me out of the wheelchair and after fussing over me for like nine hours, finally closed the car door and climbed in the front seat. My dad pulled away from the curb of the hospital extra slowly, like he was afraid he’d hurt me and he kept asking, “You ok?” over and over.
“I’m fine,” I said with a loud sigh.
He looked at me real serious and said, “Tess we just want to prepare you. We’ve moved to a new house.”
I nodded, feeling really sleepy all of a sudden. “Whatever.”
“Things are a little different. But,” he glanced at Mom. “Your room is really big.”
“Great.” Let me just turn a few cartwheels right here and now.
I kept drifting in and out … catching bits and pieces of their conversation.
“She’s been through so much,” I heard Mom say once. When Dad didn’t answer, I heard her say “adjustment period” in a lower voice. All the sounds of the car and the music and my mom’s voice droning on and on merged together into one surreal, vanishing noise, and I was fast asleep.
When I awoke, we were sidling through a residential area that didn’t look at all familiar.
“We’re almost there, Honey.” Dad gently called from the front seat.
Great, I thought, annoyed that my nap had been interrupted. Then, for some strange reason, I started thinking about that song Dani and I were listening to just days before my birthday. It was some band that neither of us had ever heard of, but we liked the words and it had a catchy beat, so it stuck. The lyrics ran through my head like text across a screen:
String up the stars and steal the sky
Today is a dream, today is goodbye
Take it all with you, take every last sigh
String up the stars and steal the sky
Today is a dream, today is goodbye.
Every house in the neighborhood looked like a replay of the one before. I kept trying to lift my hand up to put the window down a little, but for some reason, it wasn’t working right. I got frustrated and mad and just sat there, counting the houses, trying to guess which one was ours. The street was empty except for a few stray cars, and all the tiny yards looked deserted with their perfect fences and trimmed lawns, their mailboxes standing in a line. It was a boring neighborhood. Ultra boring.
“They all look the same,” I said. “How am I going to remember which house is ours?” I said sarcastically.
Dad laughed. “Just memorize the house number.”
Well, there it was. The new house. And believe me, I was not excited about it. I just wanted to go back to my old house, my old bedroom. My parents explained how they’d decided to stay in Oakmont after the accident but had decided on a smaller, cheaper house that was closer to work and the hospital. Dad had turned down a job and stayed on as an adjunct at the University.
“Why did we have to move?” I asked. “I liked the old house.” Our old house was in the country and had a nice big yard. Here the houses were like two inches away from each other.
Dad cleared his throat quietly. “We just thought a little house closer to the hospital—and closer to work for me—would be better,” he sighed. “It was a tough decision, but it has made things … easier.”
My dad wheeled me in and down the narrow hallway to where my new room was. The floor was hardwood and covered in a beige carpet runner. It looked brand new, like no one had ever walked on it. When the wheelchair rolled across it, the boards creaked. I felt like the family ogre being taken to the belfry.
“It stinks,” I said, noticing the weird dusty smell like the inside of an old cardboard box.
“You’ll get used to it,” my Dad said, pushing me into the room, whirling me around in the center of the room, and finally pushing the wheelchair into a locking position. “We’ll just let you rest for a minute. Do you want to stay in your chair or lie on the bed?” He asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. My mom placed a sack full of books on my lap. “We'll be back in a little while.”
I yawned. I was incredibly tired. It had been a long night, a long day—a whole bunch of them, apparently. I was having trouble getting the fact that I was four years older, in the blink of an eye. I swear I could sleep for twenty hours. Maybe I’ll catch up to myself, I thought. And I laughed a little, out loud.
I looked around. My parents were right; the room was huge. It had a high ceiling, with like a thousand windows, and the sun was reflecting off the smooth, polished floor. I took a quick breath. Don’t get me wrong, I really missed my old room, but this one—it was well, pretty. In fact, it was the most beautiful room I had ever seen. Sort of made me feel like a princess, if I was into that sort of thing. I guess you could say it wasn’t really a place for an ogre. More like an enchanted tower. The doorknob gleamed in the sun like a crystal.
Don’t ask me why, but being in that room made me feel warm all of a sudden, like I was wrapped up in a sunbeam. Sort of dreamy, like a trance. All those windows and the light and that crazy doorknob. It was enough to make a girl swoon. But as warm and wonderful as it was, I didn’t trust it for a minute. Believe me, I know when a room is just trying to butter me up. And this one wasn’t getting anything past me. My old room was me. This one was a fantasy.
I sat there, in my chair, in the middle of the floor, gazing from corner to corner. Even though I had my doubts, I could get used to all this space. Or maybe not. What would I do with all of it? I gripped the arms of my wheelchair, wondering what would happen if I tried to get up. I lifted up one foot, then the other, then back and forth as fast as I could. Well, I could feel them. That was always good.
I could hear my parents talking low in the kitchen, some dishes clanking around. I wondered how long it would be before they peeked back in. Probably like ten seconds, I thought. I tried to hear what they were saying, but I couldn’t make it out. It sounded important, like they were planning something. They were always planning something. Planning, debating, and discussing. Being an adult didn’t seem like much fun... just a series of decisions, which might be fine until you make the wrong one, and then what?
Here was my next thought: Decisions, by definition, are sort of permanent, and eternity is a long time to be wrong. Whoa. Where the heck did that come from? So not me. Baffling. I had to admit, though, that it made a little sense. It sort of fit with what was going on at the moment. At least it was a statement instead of a question. All the questions made me want to go to sleep. So many endless questions. There aren’t enough hours in the day to answer all of them. Sometimes I would just start answering myself in my head, and you know—usually, it was dead on. Made me wonder if a guardian angel was looking out for me, or, maybe I was just becoming an adult after all. Maybe adults went around all day with readily available answers popping into their heads. In that case, being an adult might not be half bad after all.
It was then that I noticed the boxes, lined up against the wall behind me. All my things. My long lost stuff. My parents had left them for me to unpack.
That night, I lay in my bed trying not to even look at the boxes. I was certainly in no hurry to unpack them. For one thing, I had no idea what was in them. It might as well have been someone else’s stuff. I had lost four years of my life. I was a different person now.
I curled up, pulled the quilt over my head until it got too stuffy to breathe, and then I just threw it off. If you want to know, I was thinking about crushing those boxes. I was just mad enough to do it, too. First of all, I was mad at my parents. Why couldn’t we just go back home? And second of all, I was mad at myse
lf. Why did I have to sleep for four freaking years anyway? Why couldn’t I just wake up?
Later that night, after my parents fussed over my every move during dinner and I finally had a minute to myself, I wheeled myself over to my bed and ran my hand over the quilt that was spread neatly over it. It was really thin and worn out. Suddenly, a vague memory of my Grandma Betty popped into my mind. Some lady with cold hands and blue hair. That’s all I remembered about her. I felt a shiver go through my body and pulled the quilt over my legs, inspecting the pattern. It was like this crazy maze of circles, sort of like a bunch of multi-colored coils all jumbled up. Most people would look at it and think it was just one big old ugly mess. But it could be sort of cool if you knew how to look at it. Sort of like my life, I thought. An ugly mess. I found a stray thread on the quilt and pulled on it. The fabric puckered up and the thread kept coming out, longer and longer, like when a magician pulls a scarf from his sleeve. Finally, it came loose and I took a long, deep breath.
Ok, I thought. I will only let myself be sad for a minute, and then it’s over. Done.
I tried to will myself not to cry, but it was useless. I pulled the quilt up over my head so no one would hear me. In the dark, I could see tiny points of light coming through the threadbare quilt. Like stars. If I moved my head slightly back and forth, they twinkled.
Mind Over Body
Brown-Middleton Rehabilitation Center is the last stop before the end of the earth. In fact, it sets right on the border of Hades. I was there. A normal person might have been excited to witness such a scientific anomaly, but not me. I just wanted to go back to bed. From the minute my parents pulled into the parking lot, I knew going inside that building was going to rank right up there with a root canal or meatloaf. For one thing, it was a big, arrogant building. Big and brown with a bunch of fancy flowers and plants all around and some guy dressed in gray from head to toe like he just got out of bed, standing there next to some big obnoxious plant with enormous leaves, smoking a cigarette. He was probably contemplating how he managed to complete three graduate degrees just to end up here. A blur of a man and a lady in white coats whizzed by, pushing an old man in a wheelchair who was complaining about his feet. Great, I thought. Just where I want to be: A place where they hook you up to things and try to make your body do things it can’t do.
I complained and complained, but they took me inside anyway. Within ten minutes there we were―my dad on the left side of me, my mom on the right, each holding my arms. In front of me were two bars, spaced about three feet apart, waist high. I could feel my legs, but they felt like two punching bags, dangling from my hips. My parents simultaneously tugged on my arms, and it took me a while to figure out that they wanted me to use the punching bags to do something productive. They wanted me to walk.
“Just take it slowly,” Dad said. “It’s ok.”
I shook my head. “I can’t feel my legs.” It wasn’t really true, but it sounded like the right thing to say.
“What do you mean you can’t feel your legs?” Mom blurted out, alarmed. “You can feel your legs. Nurse? Can she feel her legs?”
“Of course she can,” Dad answered. “Don’t be silly.” He looked at me. “You can feel your legs. Right, Honey?”
“I mean, they don’t work right,” I said. “They’re not numb or anything. I just feel like I can’t move them.”
The nurse came up and touched my arm. “That’s normal. Your muscles have been inactive for a long time. How about we try something else for now.” The nurse said. “Come have a seat over here.”
She wheeled me over me to a chair that had these two mechanical devices with straps sticking out from the bottom. “This is Arnie.”
“Arnie?”
“It’s actually an acronym, RNE, which stands for Rehabilitative Nucleonic Exerciser. Arnie works miracles,” she said, staring at me through her thick glasses. “Arnie can turn back the clock on your injuries.”
Dad chuckled. “Arnie. I like that. So what does it do?”
“Restores body capabilities in a matter of weeks.” She punched some buttons. “But it’s not so much what the machine does as what the patient does. Let me show you.”
“Now put your legs here,” she instructed, strapping them in while pushing a bunch more buttons.
I felt a little tickle in my ear, so I shook my head.
“Try not to move,” the nurse said. “It will affect the results.”
“Ok,” I said, stiffening up. “What do I do now?”
The tickle came back in both ears and my legs started to shake. “I’m sorry,” I said. Then, I felt weird tingles all up and down my legs, like they were being massaged by tiny fingers.
“You’re doing great. Those are electrical impulses,” the nurse said. “They revive your muscular growth.”
I had treatments twice a week for three weeks, and even though my legs seemed to get better each time, rehab was still not on my list of favorite things to do. I mean, three weeks of the stuff was enough to make a person want to pack her bags and move to Siberia. Seriously boring, seriously annoying. Finally, it was over and they took us in for something called an exit interview, which didn’t sound like anything I wanted to be a part of, but I didn’t have a choice in the matter. We sat down and listened to some doctor guy with a really bad comb-over tell me what my life was going to be like for the next few years.
First he told me I had done “remarkably well, considering the circumstances,” which sort of made me feel good. That is until he started talking about my brain being physically thirteen years old and my body being seventeen, and how it might make for some “social concerns.” That’s enough to freak a person out. Because remember, I was already a freak, the tallest string bean in school. I wish I could have forgotten that instead of all the other stuff, I thought. Was I going to be the only seventeen-year-old in the seventh grade? I started sweating.
Then he said something that I will never forget: “Her level of cognition sort of defies science.” I was starting to like this guy after all. Then he said the word “gifted” and I sort of blanked out from shock. At the end of the interview, he read—or, rather, said—the verdict. I was seventeen. They couldn’t explain it, but physically and mentally I was seventeen. And smart enough to go back to school only one grade below normal. I was going to tenth grade. By that time, I was reeling, dizzy, and my stomach was a flock of frightened birds on a scatter.
Then Dad said, “I don't doubt it. Tess has always been advanced. She could count to 100 when she was three years old.”
“Still, the brain is a complicated organ—” the doctor warned. “While cognitively one may be advanced, there may be partial lapses in other areas …”
“You mean memory lapses?” My Dad wagered. “Do you mean she could have amnesia?”
“Well, not technically speaking. For all intents and purposes, Tess will remember who she is, how to do most of the things she knew how to do. But she might not remember if she’s read a certain book or been to a certain place in the past.”
“So Disneyworld will be an adventure all over again?” Dad suggested.
The doctor nodded. “Something like that.”
By the end of July, I was walking by myself and had completed an online academic catch-up class. All those hours in Hades I complained about? They had paid off, though I’d never admit it to my parents. They had gotten me a computer, which was amazing considering they had never been that extravagant in the gift department. But since they wanted me to be up to speed by the time school started in September, they forked out the big bucks. I was feeling pretty good, but honestly, I don’t know which scared me more… the idea of going back to the seventh grade or the idea of skipping to tenth. Either way, it was going to be a wild ride.
Orientation
About a month before the official first day, I climbed the stairs to my new scho
ol, lugging my backpack which kept slipping off my shoulder. With the installation of some new technology system, the entire student body was required to register and attend an orientation class. Just outside the door, I turned and looked back at my mom, who was watching me like a patrolman from the car at the curb. She looked relieved when I waved at her. Inside the door, I discovered a line of about ten or twelve students, and I immediately wanted to turn around and run. I didn’t really know why until I realized that I walked in expecting to see Dani or some other friends from sixth grade. Even though I recognized a few people, there were a whole lot of new faces. And I was essentially invisible. I saw a few people sort of staring at me like they might recognize me, but then they’d just turn away and start talking amongst themselves. It was like no one knew me. Clearly I was not prepared.
A recording that sounded like the vehicle navigation system in my parents’ van came across a speaker system, giving everyone instructions. Please proceed in an orderly fashion through each station, turn off all cell phones, pagers, and other electronic equipment, have paperwork completed and ready to present in the lobby, blah, blah, blah. I swallowed, feeling already dis-oriented. This was not a good sign.
A girl came in behind me. My heart jumped. She looked just like Kelly Crawford from gym class, four years ago. I glanced back quickly. Blond hair—check. Medium height—check. Tan—check. Despite the circumstances, I was feeling friendly, so I turned around to say hello, but the girl was busy texting on her phone and didn’t even look up. I wondered why she had her phone out, since Navigation Lady had just given strict instructions. Thinking she might have missed the instructions, I almost said something, but then changed my mind. She’d probably just ignore me or roll her eyes and go on typing. I turned back around.
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