I sat alone in my spot for about an hour, waiting for Nancy to come and get me. ‘She probably got carried away somewhere,’ I thought.
While I waited, I stared longingly at the bulge under my blanket. I wanted to touch the ball, but I was so afraid that I’d be caught by that little boy. Then he would tower over me and say, “how could you? How could you?” That was the worst part about taking it, the guilt that followed.
After moments of waiting, I heard voices in the bush. I realized that the little boy must’ve gotten a gang of people and they all had been looking for the ball for the past hour.
“It had to have landed over here!” I heard someone say.
“Hey, someone’s over there!” I heard someone else say.
I pretended to be asleep as the boys made their way over in my direction. I had in mind to throw the ball into the bushes before I got caught, but I’d worked so hard to keep it in the first place that I thought that would be a total waste.
With my eyes totally shut, I could tell that the boy hovering over me was as tall as I was. He shouted at me, but I pretended I was deaf because I wouldn’t change my story for anyone.
“I think he’s deaf,” another boy commented.
“Oh,” the boy shouting said. He took me by the shoulders and shook me violently, giving me no choice but to “wake up.”
To add to my act, I sat up slowly and rubbed my eyes sleepily. I pretended to look confused about those five strange boys that were standing in front of me.
“Can he read lips?” One boy asked another. I looked directly at him and nodded.
The tall boy crouched so that we were face to face. “Ya know,” he said, “I can’t stand a liar. You tell me that your lying now and it’ll help preserve your future.”
I fabricated another shocked look as I scribbled on my paper. “Lying about what?”
The tall boy read it and wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Ya know exactly what I’m talking about. Our basketball. Where is it? I send Jr. here to get it, but he didn’t come back so now he’s toast. You don’t want the same thing to happen to you, do you?” he sneered in my face, but I continued to look him straight in the eye.
“I don’t have it.” I wrote, “I told Jr. that already before.”
The tall boy took the paper out of my grasp and squinted at it. “Learn to write better,” he said, shaking his head at it. I was tempted to retort, but I kept my ground. I was better safe than sorry, but I ended up sorry anyway.
“So if we searched this area, we wouldn’t find it?” he asked me with a crooked grin on his face. I shook my head no confidently.
To my disbelief, my wheelchair wasn’t the first place they looked. Lucky for me that I didn’t put the ball in the bushes, because that’s where they looked first. I put on my best “I can’t believe you’d treat a person in a wheelchair this way” expression while they searched. The tall boy noticed it and I watched gleefully as he started to squirm.
“Anything in the bushes Frogman?” the tall boy asked another boy with a turned up nose.
“Nadda,” he said, pushing his thick glasses as high up onto his nose as he possibly could.
“Well then, let’s move out…wait a minute…we didn’t check the wheelchair.” Just when I thought I’d single-handedly outsmarted five people without really trying, everything was ruined for me. It was no use putting on an innocent expression because the ball was covered with my blanket and there was no way it could have landed like that.
The tall boy grabbed me by the shirt and hoisted me off the ground. He held his fist poised in front of my stomach and made one last smart-ass remark before whacking my guts into my throat.
I was lucky that he had decided to punch me in that area. Anywhere higher and he would have hit my Groshang catheter. Then I would’ve bled to death before anyone found me.
As I lay helplessly on the ground, watching the boys take off with my ball, I felt a new, superhuman power surge through my body. It was so painful to walk, but I didn’t feel my out-of-place hip make contact with my left leg. I trudged after them, determined to get the ball back.
After ten minutes of walking, I finally caught up with them. I was hoping I could surprise them by jumping them, but that plan failed miserably. They were all taking a rest when I caught up.
“Well look what the cat dragged in.” The tall boy grinned. The rest of the group snickered.
“Give it back.” I scribbled onto the paper. I held it towards them but nobody took it. Enraged, I threw it to the ground.
“Nuh uh we ain’t reading it, we wanna here you say it. Say what you wanna say liar. Deaf people sound funny when they talk don’t they boys?” They nodded their heads simultaneously. “And maybe we wanna hear some of that. After all, we haven’t had a good laugh in a while.”
His statement infuriated me. He didn’t know that he wasn’t exactly insulting me, but how could a little prick like that make that type of comment about something that couldn’t be helped. As I sank lower and lower on the ranks of society, I began to realize the injustices that lurked everywhere I was. They were all things I knew somehow were meant for me to see.
I leaned forward in rage and stuck out my bad leg for balance. The pain was almost unbearable as I struggled to regain my balance. I failed at that and landed at the feet of Frogman.
Their laughter hung around my head as I struggled to get up. I placed my hands by my ears and attempted to push myself up from a push up position. About halfway up my elbow gave in and I ended up with a mouthful of dirt. I coughed and sputtered on top of their laughter. It reminded me of grade school, except that the pain was different. And this time perhaps there was more at stake.
“How about this? You say somethan, then we’ll help you up. Come on, it’s a pretty damn good deal,” Frogman suggested, and was complemented by the low snickering of his buddies.
I didn’t want that to be an option, but I was so desperate, that I had to consider it. While they waited for an answer, Frogman kicked some dirt in my face and bowed at the applause from his friends. I groaned and attempted to roll over so that I wouldn’t have to choke on the dust. When I tried to do this, I could feel my pelvic bone shift under my weight. My eyes rolled up into my head automatically from the velocity of the pain.
“Ew oh my gosh look his hip!” one of the smaller boys exclaimed, stepping back a bit and pointing at me.
“Holy shit! Let’s get outta here, I’m not taking responsibility for that!” the tall boy exclaimed, getting off the log he’d planted his fat ass on.
I saw the danger in it for me if they left, so I used my only option. “Wait!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, which wasn’t very loud. It came out scratchy and flat, but it worked.
The tall boy returned, his expression apologetic. “Look, we’d love to help you, but uh, we don’t want to get in trouble. You know how it is. There’s not much we can do anyway…” He turned to leave, but I wouldn’t let him. I grabbed his ankle and forced him to wait as I scribbled a message.
When I was done, I placed the notebook at his feet and waited for him to pick it up. He read the message and started to shake, and in the process of shaking, he nearly dropped it on my head. All it said was, “Help me.”
Because he looked like he was going to run off again, I elaborated on the message a bit. This time I wrote, “Help me, I’ll testify for you if it comes to it.” He read the message with a look of satisfaction on his face and I knew that he would finally help me.
“How can I help?” he asked. I thought about that for a while. I had no idea how my hips had gotten so far out of place, and there was nothing anyone could do about it until I got back to Louie’s. If I asked the boy to bring me my wheelchair, at least then I would be mobile.
He brought the chair back and helped me on to it in a hurry. Somehow he reminded me of a club scout. A really big club scout.
After I was satisfied and I saw the pleading look in the boy’s eyes, I let him go. It was no use keeping a stray dog captive; it was just going to misbehave eventually anyway.
He took off jogging but midway out of my sight he turned around. I realized that he had the ball in his hands and he was holding it out to me.
“Here,” he said, “you wanted it so badly in the first place, I guess now you can have it.” I wanted to refuse, but I couldn’t resist that damn ball. He turned and left when he saw that I was satisfied. I was left alone to struggle out of the bush.
After a stressful hour of trying to find an exit to the thing, I made it out and I could see the park bench where Nancy had been sitting. Yes, I said HAD been sitting. She was gone now, and night was starting to fall. There were no little kids left that I could ask for help and no parents to tell me to “get lost!” I could see people there all right, but I wouldn’t approach them. They looked much too busy drinking whatever it was they were drinking and smoking whatever it was that they were smoking. Jeez, it was my world too, but I didn’t feel like I belonged.
At that point I was becoming desperate for help and I attempted rather unsuccessfully to wheel over to them. Before I could even move close enough so that they could see me, my heart began to race and this terrible pain flooded my body. I put my hand to my heart and cried out in agony, hoping that someone would come and rescue me. Black dots blurred my vision and when they were done multiplying, I blacked out.
When I came to, I found myself back in my old bed…at Louie’s of course. I wasn’t exactly joyous about it, but at least it wasn’t a real hospital. Habitually, I wriggled my fingers and was overjoyed when they moved. Then I remembered I could move them before and I sat up.
The large black screen of the TV greeted me when I looked its way. I started thinking that it would be much more entertaining if it had video games attached.
Getting bored, I had in mind to use the call button. But I knew that wouldn’t be a good idea, so I entertained myself the way I also did when I was bored. When I was bored at Louie’s, I’d pick all the strands of hair off of my pillow, one by one and put them in the trash. There were usually plenty, enough to keep me busy for a few hours.
I turned to my pillow and gasped in surprise. Half of my hair laid there, golden and shiny. I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t mine as I threw it in the garbage can. I told myself that if I pulled on my hair now, nothing would come out.
When I was done, I accidentally ran my hands through my hair. After I retracted it, the hand was holding an even larger clump of hair. I gasped and threw it in the garbage can, all the while trying to regain my composure.
Then I got a brilliant idea. Sure I would lose more hair that way, but then again I wouldn’t be picking it off of my pillow for the next few centuries. I knelt over the garbage can, focused my head so that my hair was directly above it. Then I began to rub it vigorously, faster and faster. After a few minutes of that, I had to stop because my hair just wouldn’t stop falling. When I looked at it, it looked like I was trapped in a giant snow globe, and my hair was the snow. After you shook it up, it fell in buckets, and then it gradually decreased. But there was always something stuck on the top that fell down when it wanted to.
There was hair everywhere. Hair on my clothes, my hands, around the garbage can…everywhere. I made this little animal noise when I saw it; it was sort of a mixture between a grunt and a shriek. The hair was frustrating me and there was nothing I could do to get rid of it.
In my frustration, I whipped off my shirt and attempted to shake off the hair. With all of that vigorous shaking, more hair fell out and tickled my chest. I batted it blindly and cried out a little bit every time I hit myself too hard. Then Louie walked in.
Chapter 30
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