Unbroken: 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens Page 8

  “It feels like it,” she said. This felt like the culmination of the last four months, like maybe this had happened because she couldn’t leave her home, but now that she had, nothing was going right. Like this was every moment she’d ever failed everyone she loved, but bigger, and more important, and more real. She shivered. “What if I can’t?”

  “Try again. Try another way.”

  She looked back at the screen. “Okay.”

  He gripped her fingers tighter. “Good. Get going.”

  “I need my hands, Ros.”

  He dropped them, a faint flush crawling up his cheeks. “Yeah. I guess that would help.”

  She almost smiled and turned back to her computer. She opened up the interweb connection, thinking about what Ros had said. There were a ton of packets of information being sent by the interwebs. She didn’t want to shut down military communications, but she could stop resident-to-resident interwebs and reduce the strain on the system. She took a deep breath and cut those lines. They turned red on her screen, one by one, and then the capacity of the system moved from yellow to green again.

  She pushed the upload back out to the towers. This time, the progress bar ticked steadily. Five percent. Ten percent. Fifteen. Twenty.

  “What if—” she began to say.

  Ros wrapped his hand over her mouth. “Shhh. Don’t you dare jinx this.”

  They watched together as it crept to thirty-five percent, and then paused. Lizzie held her breath. Then it jumped to fifty. Fifty-five, then seventy-five. Eighty. Ninety-five.

  “One hundred,” she whispered into Ros’s palm as he said it aloud.

  He dropped his hand from her mouth just as she heard a loud hum outside and then a series of cheers. She spun her chair slowly, looking up at Ros. “We did it.”

  He grinned. “You did it. Look at you.”

  “I couldn’t have gotten here without you,” she pointed out. “That was your one thing. And it was no less significant than mine.”

  His eyes lit up, pleased. “Good. What’s next?”

  The pressure swelled in her chest like a balloon filled with water. She gripped the arms of her chair and then took a deep breath. She was sitting in the control room in front of the computer where she had just restored the protective shield to her city, to the capital of her beloved planet. She’d met a stranger, and she’d left her home, and she’d solved a problem. She didn’t need to fight the war. She just needed to solve the next problem in front of her.

  “I need to find my siblings,” she said slowly.

  Ros offered her his hand, and she accepted it, letting him pull her to her feet. He settled the helmet over her head and met her eyes with a steady gaze and a firm set to his mouth. Determination, she realized, and she suspected she looked the same way. “Ready?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Found Objects

  WILLIAM ALEXANDER

  I’M HOME, STRETCHED out on the sofa and savoring post-show melancholy. My phone makes a happy noise. I know that the text is yours before I look at the screen. My phone only ever sings out when it hears from you.

  Still here? you ask.

  Nope, I type back. Home. Resting up. Still at strike?

  The rest of the cast and crew is currently wiping the world clean of everything we’ve built together: dismantling the set, taking down the lights, and coiling endless miles of electrical cables. Everyone is there but me. I need to recharge, though, especially if I’m going to join you all at the cast party later. Everybody knows this. No one complains. But it still seems like a big deal to be the only exception. Even Bobbie is at strike right now, and we know to keep Bobbie at least ten feet away from power tools at all times.

  Yes, you send back. Still at strike. But there’s weirdness …

  That gets me up and pacing back and forth across the living room. What kind?

  You don’t answer right away.

  My cane makes steady thumps against the carpet. The house is quiet otherwise. It doesn’t shift or settle to accommodate anyone else’s weight. Both Mom and Dad are at my sister’s place right now, enjoying their new status as grandparents and trying to be useful so Louisa can recharge her own batteries. I’m the only one here. I’m waiting for you.

  Your kind of weirdness, you finally answer. Your voice. I can hear your lines from the show. But you’re not here.

  I type FUCK several times. Then I erase them all. It still feels cathartic to have put down a series of unsent, unspoken fucks. Sharp consonants haunt the screen where those fucks used to be.

  Is this one of those things? you ask. Like the puppets? Your brother still talks about the puppet show we staged for his fifth birthday—and how all the puppets kept right on puppeting after the performance.

  Maybe, I say. Probably. Yes. Clear everyone out, ok? Save the rest of strike for tomorrow.

  Ms. Samatar will be irate, you point out.

  Blame me. Just get them to the cast party. See you there.

  I pace my way through another long pause. You’ve probably cut the music and shouted out for everyone’s attention. You always play awful music at strike. And while driving. I love that you don’t ever apologize for loving such awfulness, and I suspect hidden depths in that poppy, bouncy, vacuous noise just by association with you.

  You’re probably managing an upbeat evacuation right at this moment, making everyone else happy to ditch the work and go celebrate early. I picture this happening. I try to avoid thinking about things that might be happening instead, right now, during this same stretch of silent time.

  The pause ends.

  Ok, you say. On our way out. Need help dealing with this thing?

  First I type NO. Then I soften it to Nope. I’ll be fine.

  Ok, you say again, and that is the end of the conversation.

  My knee-jerk, all-caps, unsent overreaction also haunts my screen, so I turn it off. Then I switch it back on to talk to my grandfather.

  The call doesn’t go through. The battery lacks the proper kind of juice. So I hold my breath, hold the phone, and squeeze it for a full minute while cane thumps keep time. Then I try again.

  He picks up after the third ring.

  “Abuelito?”

  “What’s wrong?” he asks, voice scratched up from several decades of cigarillos. “You only ever call me when something’s wrong.”

  “Untrue.”

  “Perfectly true. So what is it? Tell me.”

  I tell him. “We finished up a show tonight. But I might have played my part too well.”

  “Curb that arrogance,” he says. “Not a virtue.”

  “Clear-eyed honesty is a virtue, though,” I insist. “And my character is still there. Seems to be taking shape onstage and running lines without me.”

  Abuelito sighs his scratchy sigh. “Maybe you really shouldn’t be in theater.”

  “Because I’m kinda good at it?”

  “Exactly. You could take up music instead.”

  Music had been his thing. “How is that safer? You started a student riot with just your voice and a guitar.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” He sounds wistfully proud of his riot. “Maybe that needed starting. Maybe it was good trouble to be in. I’m not so sure about the trouble you make, however. Or the trouble you wake. What is it this time? Which part did you play?”

  I hesitate. He hears me hesitate. “Richard.”

  “The second?” he asks optimistically.

  “Nope. The third.”

  “Ay.” He sighs, huffs, and puffs. “What an uplifting choice for the high school drama club.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ve had a rough year. ‘Woe to that land that’s governed by a child.’”

  “And they cast you as a crippled villain? Will they make the only Jewish kid in school play Shylock next?”

  He’s not wrong, but I don’t want to hear it. “Calling you up for advice, viejo. Not critique.”

  “Don’t die. Can’t really recommend the experience.”


  “Thanks.”

  “De nada. It’s nothing, offered freely from nothingness. Now go deal with that Richard you’ve set loose. Call me afterward to tell me how it went.”

  “Sure.”

  “And send me another picture of your sister’s new kid.”

  “That takes a pretty strong connection, but I’ll try.”

  “Do what you can.”

  “See you, Abuelito.”

  “Not too soon, I hope.”

  The screen goes dark. He’s gone.

  In the old rites we spilled blood to chat with ancestors. Odysseus killed some sheep on the outskirts of Hades so his mom could drink the life they shed and remember how to talk to him.

  Pain works, too.

  But I don’t want to tell you that.

  I almost told you after the musical, when we spent hours uprooting those cardboard trees. I’d poured a little too much of myself into those painted roots, just to keep the trees from falling over, and that worked far too well.

  “You. Are so. Literal,” you spat at me while we hammered floorboards back into place.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Stop saying that you’re sorry. You might suddenly transform into the board game. I hate that game.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” I said.

  We uprooted two more trees before you asked, “How does it work, then?”

  I wanted to tell you.

  “Just something that runs in my family,” I said instead. “My grandpa could sing and make the solid world listen to him. And I’ve got a cousin who dances. She changes the TV channel just by stamping her foot.” All of that is true, but I only told it to you to deflect attention away from me.

  “Neat,” you said. Then you put on awful music while we finished with the cardboard deforestation.

  I should have told you then. I almost told you right after your favorite aunt’s funeral, when I offered to mess with your phone. We were standing in the parking lot. You shook your head hard and left little snot trails on my shoulder. I don’t usually get to feel stronger than you, but right at that moment I did.

  “No,” you said, several times. “Don’t call her. She’s out of pain. At least now she’s out of pain.”

  That’s such a weird phrase. Out of pain. Like pain is a place. One you can visit. And your only consolation, the single glimpse of silver lining you could find, was the fact that your beloved aunt Rebecca wasn’t like me anymore. Better dead than in pain. But I live here, in this place. And I don’t know how to tell you that. I don’t want you to squirm, or take my hand and say that it’s tragic. I don’t want you to roll your eyes as though I’m playing a macho game of one-upmanship: My pain can beat up everyone else’s adolescent pain, so I’ll just be over here in the corner, savoring the depths of my stoic suffering and shedding no more than a single tear while I listen to every single cover of “Hurt” and “Hallelujah” on repeat. No, you can’t help me. Don’t try to help me. Please try to help me.

  That is not where I live. That is not what this means. But I still don’t know how to tell you what it does mean.

  You’ve probably ushered everyone out of the building by now. I hope so. I don’t want to see them when I get there. I don’t want to see you. Not yet. Because you’ll offer to help. And I won’t know how to handle that.

  I lock up the house. It’s cold outside. Puddles and slush piles have refrozen.

  The long walk to school takes me through that intersection, the one where the other driver sneezed and the fickle gods of automobiles smote me down. But the other driver also died, so it’s hard to stay mad at him. I drop a coin on that spot, just like always. The last couple of coins are still there, frozen underneath a clear sheet of ice.

  Thomas Kail High School looks unconscious, blinds drawn and big classroom windows dark. The front doors are locked. I don’t have a key. I don’t need a key. One squeeze and the latch clicks open.

  Fluorescent lights flicker in the hallway with sleepy malevolence. I hear a rasping, ringing sound, like someone is scraping the edge of a bell down the length of an old slate chalkboard. The only other sounds are the steady thumps of my cane and the crunch of sidewalk ice stuck between the treads of my right shoe.

  Always strange to see this hallway empty. It isn’t haunted. It doesn’t seem to remember the crowds of bustling students, even though we filled up the place earlier today.

  The Football Triplets accosted me this morning, right on this spot. They came down the center of the hallway in an ambling clump of matching team jackets and equally identical, entitled haircuts. I moved aside. They paused instead of passing me by.

  “Pimping cane,” James said. He tried and failed to put a little gangster into the word.

  Fuck that nonsense, I did not say. Fuck the machismo you’re using to hide the clear discomfort that I cause you by existing. Fuck your need to channel that discomfort back in my direction. I am not here to make you feel better about the fact that I am here.

  Instead, I took a bow. Added a small flourish and gave the floor a punctuating tap with the cane tip. We’re theater kids. We know how to spin attention into something useful—even unwelcome and uncomfortable attention. My unsaid fucks still haunted my courtesy.

  “Is that thing stylish, or medical?” Josh asked.

  “Both,” I told him, squeezing the chrome-plated derby handle of my very stylish cane.

  They laughed. I laughed. We all laughed together.

  “Got a sword hidden in there?” Jeff asked.

  Yes, I thought.

  “I wish,” I said, and shrugged as though I’d just dropped character to share a moment of candor between friendly acquaintances. Then I smiled and made my way around them. They took up a lot of hallway, and a lot of oxygen. Their attention always made it hard to breathe.

  AP Biology happened right after that. You skipped class, so you missed Mr. Fitz’s lecture on maladaptive traits.

  It was fun.

  “Let’s talk about chronic pain,” he said, first thing. Three drops of coffee got stuck in his mustache after he took a sip.

  Oh good, I thought. Let’s.

  “Pain exists because it’s useful for bodies to know when something is wrong. That has a clear survival benefit, right? But pain can also overreact. Fingernail injuries aren’t life-threatening, but they hurt badly enough. That doesn’t seem very adaptive, does it? And what are we to make of chronic pain, idiopathic pain? Idiopathy is Latin for ‘we feel like idiots because we have no idea what’s wrong with you.’”

  Some laughed. I didn’t. I’ve heard that joke from doctors before.

  Mr. Fitz wrote idiopathic on the board in bright scarlet marker. “This kind of persistent discomfort has no apparent physiological source. If it began with an injury, it might remain long after the injury has completely healed. What do we make of that? How can permanent suffering be a survival trait?”

  Donna squirmed at her desk, right next to mine. “Maybe it isn’t,” she said. “Who can live like that? I wouldn’t want to live like that.”

  I quietly channeled a little idiopathic sensation and shaped it into something small, flat, and sharp between my fingertips. A guitar pick. I’ve never been able to play more than three chords and half-truths, but the pick made me think of Abuelito and all of the fucks he wouldn’t give. Then I used the sharp edge of that pain pick to dig grooves into the edge of my desk.

  The rest of the class continued to discuss maladaptive traits while I tuned out, breathed slow, and generated a small pile of sawdust. No one noticed. I felt simultaneously scrutinized and ignored.

  That’s what you missed in biology today.

  That metallic, scraping, ringing sound is getting louder now. I can hear it on the other side of the auditorium doors, which are locked. You must have locked up after ushering cast and crew safely away. Good. This feels like coordinated teamwork between us, even at a distance. It feels like a complex scene change that unfolds exactly as it should.

  I p
our a little idiopathic sensation directly into the doorknob. Tumblers tumble and I go through.

  Just to be clear, chronic pain is not required for doing that sort of thing. My cousin Dolores could have danced it open. Abuelito would have unlocked this door with a song. I’ve heard him sing hanging laundry off the line by filling up their empty limbs with his voice and making them dance right along with Dolores.

  I do things a little differently, though.

  That rasping noise fills up the whole space with its steady rhythm, but I don’t see its source yet. The bare bulb of the ghost light burns center stage. I smell friction-scorched sawdust. Half the set has been dismantled and sorted into piles of salvage and scrap. The rest is still un-struck, but it doesn’t look so very different from those dismantled piles. Ms. Samatar called all the raw material found objects—art made out of repurposed recycling—and said that it symbolized the brief and terrible reign of King Richard III. He broke everything to rule over the pieces.

  The whole set still looks like a clubhouse built by the sorts of boys who crave zombified excuses to shoot everyone else in the head. Zombies aren’t coming, though. Trust me. I talk to the dead on the regular. Some might drink up blood and pain, if both are freely offered. Others do not wish us well. But none of them hunger for our brains.

  I approach the stage by moving slowly down the house-left aisle. Then I see him.

  King Richard has used found objects to sculpt himself into something human shaped and approximately eight feet tall. Most of him seems to be made out of costumes wrapped around a wooden frame.

  The self-made man stands just offstage. He sharpens one of our dull prop swords against a length of pipe. It makes that rasping, ringing noise, over and over and over again.

  I feel instantly territorial, as though the king were trespassing here. This place is ours. Yours and mine. This is where we work, and where we play. It is only by our gracious permission that other sorts of events and assemblies are even permitted to happen here, because we keep it running. This stage will yearn for us long after we both graduate. It will remember us. But it doesn’t need to remember King Richard. Not this well.

  He isn’t really trespassing, I guess. He was born here, right here where I made him.