Roll with It
Page 14
I shrug and look up at Mom. Her sunglasses are pushed up into her hair, which is crazier looking than ever now that she’s growing it out again. Hutch follows us in the van with my chair and enough Gatorade and chips and watermelon to last us all summer.
It’s not even ten in the morning when we get to the lake, and we have it all to ourselves. Hutch puts me in my chair in the shade while everybody unloads. The sky is wavy with heat and I’m sticky with sweat. I lift my thighs up from where they’re suctioned to the chair.
It’s perfect.
“All right.” Mom kneels down in front of me and rubs a fifth coat of sunscreen onto my shoulders. “Are you sure about this?”
“Mom.”
“Ellie.”
“If you back out now, I will fire you. I will fire you as my mother.”
“Well, good luck to you, then,” she says, and starts to get up.
“Come on!”
I can see Coralee and Bert standing with their feet already in the water.
“Okay, okay. Just promise me you’ll be careful.”
“Okay, yes, I promise.”
She wheels me over the wet sand right up to the edge of the lake. Hutch is waiting there, and he bends down and tightens the straps on my life jacket and the floaties on my arms and legs.
“Ready, Ellie?” he says.
“Ready.”
And then he lifts me out of the chair and walks into the water.
The lake’s still cool this early in the summer, and my skin is so hot that the shock of it gives me goose bumps. Once we’re deep enough, he lowers me all the way in and I lie back with my arms out.
Coralee and Bert swim up to me on either side. Coralee’s hair is so bright in the sun, it looks white, and Bert is a pale ghost in the muddy water.
“Okay, you can let go now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Hutch, let go.”
After a second he does. And I let the water take me. My body floats weightless, each part as steady and strong as the rest.
I kick a little with my foot and practice moving one leg and then the other, until I am moving out farther from the shore.
I lift my head and see Mom standing with her hands on her hips.
I wave.
She waves back.
When I reach the buoys that separate the swimming area from the rest of the lake, I see they are orange and faded in the sun. I grab onto one, and Bert and Coralee each take another. A fish swims by and brushes up against my leg, and then it must reach Coralee, because she screams, and we’re all laughing, and the sun isn’t so hot now.
Mom and I are going over to Grandpa and Mema’s condo for supper. I’ve promised to bring dessert. They’re at Autumn Leaves now. There’s a fitness center and an indoor swimming pool and a community garden and poker night, and I think they might like it better than the trailer, which is okay because the trailer is ours now and they can still come visit all the time. And once Mom gets settled into her permanent teaching job at the high school, she promises a full renovation with a handicapped shower. The pie mailbox is already up.
After a few minutes I turn around and close my eyes and let go of the buoy and drift. Wherever you want to take me, I think as the waves pull me along.
I hear Coralee yelling, “Hey, wait for us!” but my ears are underwater and it comes to me gently.
I am floating.
Acknowledgments
To Reka Simonsen, my editor: Your enthusiasm for this project and your belief in Ellie’s voice proved it wasn’t all in my head—there really was magic here. You also managed to ferret out all the words I play on repeat. I will probably do it again, so this is both “Thank you” and “I’m sorry.”
And to my agent, Keely Boeving, who received the first emails and frantic texts about this project. Thank you for finding the giant potholes in the early drafts and helping me scoop some plot in there. You are my left brain. Also, thank you for being agent, editor, and friend. I am three times blessed.
Thank you also to my children, the little people who make me my most imaginative self. Charlie, you are a beam of sunlight. People want to curl up near you, me included. That wheelchair has never stopped you, and I can’t believe my luck that I get to be your mom. Jonas, if you want to be Jupiter when you grow up, go for it, buddy. And Cora, when you rule the world, please remember your mother, who never made you wear a bow and always let you read as late into the night as you wanted.
Jody, you get my Owen Meany THANK-YOU in all caps, because that’s how grateful I am to be married to you and to raise our crazy family together. I swear we will go to Greece one day.
I’d also like to thank Deb Perelman and Mary Berry, my very favorite chefs. You helped me bake my way through a great many internal and external crises. Because of you, my family is well fed and so is my psyche.
To KJ Dell’Antonia and Jess Lahey, brilliant writers and podcasters extraordinaire: Thank you for your wisdom and wit and everything in between on #amwriting. It’s the best podcast in the land.
And Kristin Tubb, thank you for liking the first pages of that other book enough to read this one. You have a kind and generous heart. Here’s to more coffee dates in our future.
Lastly, I want to acknowledge the children, one in seven, living with a disability. You are all forces to be reckoned with and wonderfully made. You are fighters, and I am honored to write this story for you.
About the Author
Photo courtesy of Bethany Rogers
Jamie Sumner’s work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications. She loves stories that celebrate the grit and beauty in all kids. She is also the mother to a son with cerebral palsy and lives with her family in Nashville, Tennessee. Visit her at jamie-sumner.com.
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Atheneum Books for Young Readers
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Jamie Sumner
Jacket illustration copyright © 2019 by Amy Marie Stadelmann
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sumner, Jamie, author.
Title: Roll with it / Jamie Sumner.
Description: First edition. | New York : Atheneum, [2019] | Summary: Twelve-year-old Ellie, who has cerebral palsy, finds her life transformed when she moves with her mother to small-town Oklahoma to help care for her grandfather, who has Alzheimer’s Disease.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018043168 | ISBN 9781534442559 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781534442573 (eBook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Family life—Oklahoma—Fiction. | Cerebral palsy—Fiction. | People with disabilities—Fiction. | Alzheimer’s disease—Fiction. | Moving, Household—Fiction. | O
klahoma—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.S8545 Rol 2019 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043168