CHAPTER 1 "
Lizzie stop! Stop Lizzie!” Those were the last words I heard before I did a cannonball off the diving board and slipped and split the back of my head open on the edge of the pool. I bled so much that the whole deep end turned pink. At least that’s what my best friend Trippy—short for Triple A—told me a week later when she came to see me in the hospital. Her real name is Ashley Anne Addington and she likes her nickname which by the way I thought up.
“I swear it Lizzie. Pink as a petunia. Here.”
Trippy is a major liar. She says she just exaggerates. If my whole body bled dry it wouldn’t turn the pool pink. The human body only contains ten pints of blood. And by the way I don’t like commas. They’re too curly all over the page so you’ll see I don’t use them very often.
She brought me a whole box of peanut brittle my favorite food. I wasn’t supposed to eat it because it gets stuck in my braces. But nothing like that mattered anymore. If I wanted ice cream for breakfast I could have it. That’s what made me cry but I never let anybody see me except a couple of times my mom. We both knew everything changed with that one cannonball off the bare board. They’d taken the old coconut matting off to replace it but they hadn’t put up a sign saying KEEP OFF.
I don’t remember the ambulance ride or anything much about the whole rest of the day. When I came to I was in the hospital in the I See You which stands for Intensive Care Unit and my legs didn’t work at all. I couldn’t even feel them.
That was two years ago. I miss the whole gang of us faculty brats who used to horse around the indoor pool. Most of all I missed Trippy but guess what? She just flew down to Florida to visit us. We live in a neat little cottage Mom bought this year once the lawsuit got settled. Trippy’s going to stay ten whole days over her winter break. Flying down here by herself the day after Christmas was her big present. For my big present I got this desk with extra-wide knee-holes I can roll my chair right into. That was all I needed to start writing my autobiography. Trippy read what I’ve written so far.
“You’ve got to put commas in, Lizzie. It’s too hard for the common everyday goon to read.”
Goons is what Trippy always called our gang of girls. In a friendly way, though. As in, “Come on, all you goons, let’s go!” But I agreed, so from here on you’ll see a few more curlies here and there.
Lots of kids in northern Wisconsin are good swimmers. The winters are so long and cold that the indoor pool is a major playground. Our whole gang of girls could swim in deep water by the time we were four. My mom, a professor of psychology, did laps three times a week. Our favorite thing in the world was doing cannonballs. We always raced to be first off. To jump the highest. To jump the farthest.
Trippy said I need to explain why we live here in Florida now. It’s so that I will always be warm. People with spinal cord injuries usually have trouble regulating their body temps, and you can count me in on that. While I was still in the hospital I went downstairs to the rehab clinic every day. The PTs—that stands for physical therapists—were like my older sisters. Like my older sisters would have been if I hadn’t been an only child. My mom is what they call a single mother. My father was a sperm from a sperm bank in California that specializes in sperm from very intelligent men. And that’s probably why I’m in the eighth grade, even though I’m only eleven and a half.
Anyway, the PTs were my cheerleaders egging me on. Every morning they got me out of bed and fitted me with braces. In the big treatment room I met kids who’d been in car crashes and fallen from ladders and off runaway horses. There we all were, trying to learn how to walk again. Or tie our shoes. Or fit the simplest pieces into a puzzle.
So what I figured out was it could have been a whole lot worse. My spinal cord wasn’t cut in two—
severed is the word doctors use. It was “shocked,” but nobody could say if I would ever get any feeling back in my dead legs.
Even though she had plenty of other things to do, Trippy came to watch lots of afternoons. “Don’t mind me, I’m just here to kibitz,” she’d say, and they’d let her hang around.
The PTs worked my arms and legs. They strapped me to machines with timers that beeped when I’d done enough arm pulls and leg presses, but I can’t really feel what my legs are doing, so I just pushed as hard as I could. Trippy was there, kneeling down by the leg machine. “Come on, you old goon you, you can do two more,” she’d yell. She’d make me so mad that I did.
The PTs gave me rewards of balloons and sticks of gum as if I were a three-year-old. When I took my first step hanging onto the parallel bars without one of them holding me up by the belt tied around my waist, they whistled and cheered. I was holding on for dear life.
“Look at you, you old goon you! Hip hip! Three cheers!” Trippy yelled.
I was glad Trippy was there to see. That was a good day. I’m supposed to get upright every day and use my quad canes to take five steps. But I still need the wheelchair to go beyond the front door or back porch.
Copyright © 2014 by Maxine Kumin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
