A Heart to Heal

“Nah, they’re cambered. Gives you stability and agility. You can turn fast on these. Try it.”

Max watched as Simon, JJ and Heather made circles in their chairs. Slow, careful circles. Max growled and came up behind JJ to give her a hefty shove. She shot forward, yelping, and then managed to turn herself around in a respectably quick U-turn. “Cut that out, Max!”

“Quit being snails, the lot of you. These things are made for speed. Use ’em!” He angled up next to Simon, who looked as if someone needed to give him permission to keep breathing. “Race ya.”

“Huh?”

“First one to the end of the gym and back gets ice cream.”

Simon just looked at him. Who’d been keeping this poor kid under glass? Max chose to ignore the uncertainty written on the boy’s face and pretend his silence was a bargaining tactic.

“Okay, then, two ice creams and you get a three-second lead,” he conceded. Max allowed himself a sly wink at the guidance counselor. “Ms. Browning said she’d buy.”

“I never...”

Simon started pushing on his wheels. Max whooped. “One...two...three!”

* * *

A sweaty, crazy hour later, Heather had fed every dollar bill and coin she had into the school vending machine as she, Max, JJ and Simon sat on the school’s front steps eating ice cream.

“There’s a whole basketball league,” Max explained to Simon. “And hockey. I’ve even seen a ski team.” She watched Max look Simon up and down. “You’re kinda skinny for the hockey thing, but I saw the way you shot today. Wouldn’t take long for you to hold your own pretty nicely on the court.”

“You outshot me,” JJ offered, licking chocolate off her fingers.

“I’ve always had a chair.” Simon said it as if it was a weak excuse. The embarrassed tone in his voice burrowed into Heather’s heart and made her want to send Jason Kikowitz to Mars.

A red van pulled up, and Heather saw Brian Williams wave his hand out the driver’s side window.

“My dad’s here,” Simon said, tossing his last wrapper into the trash bin and angling toward the wheelchair ramp. At the top of the incline, he paused. “Thanks, Mr. Jones. That was fun.”

“Max,” Max corrected, making a funny face. “Nobody calls me Mr. Jones. Want to go sailing next week?”

Heather watched Simon’s response. His eyes lit up for a moment, then darkened a bit as he heard the door click open and the whrrr of the lift extending out of his parents’ van. “I don’t think my folks would go for it.” Simon’s lack of optimism stung. Heather knew that despite his spot on the Gordon Falls Volunteer Fire Department—or maybe because of it—Simon’s dad was a highly protective father. She’d had a highly protective dad herself—she’d had her own share of medical challenges in high school—but even she had reservations about how far Brian Williams went to keep his son away from any kind of risk.

Max had caught the boy’s disappointment. He waved at the van. “They’ll say yes. Can I come meet them?”

“Um...maybe next time,” Simon said, quickly darting down the ramp.

“Hey, slow down there, Speedy!” Simon’s dad called as the lift platform rattled onto the ground. “Watch that crack there or your wheel might get stuck. You’ve got to take your time on ramps, remember?”

Heather heard Max mutter a few unkind words under his breath. JJ got to her feet. “Speaking of speed, my shift starts in half an hour and I’ve got to run home first.” She gave Heather a hug, then pecked her brother on the cheek and snatched up the sweatshirt she’d been sitting on. “Dinner still on for next Thursday?”

“You bet,” Max said, still staring as Simon was swallowed up by the van’s mechanism. His irritation jutted out in all directions, sharp and prickly. “Does he know how much he’s holding Simon back?” Max nearly growled. “Have you talked to him about it?”

“Hey,” she said. “Cut the dad a little slack here, will you?”

“You know what half of Simon’s problem is?” Max jutted a finger at the van as it pulled away. “That. I was trying to figure out what made Simon such a walking ball of shy and I just got my answer.”

Heather swallowed her own frustration. People were shy for lots of reasons, not just fatherly protectiveness. “So after two hours with the boy, you’ve got him all figured out? Is that it?”

“It doesn’t take a PhD in counseling to figure out they keep that kid under lock and key. He’s afraid of his own shadow, and somebody had to teach him that.”

“Aren’t you coming down awfully hard on someone you hardly even know?”

“Simon’s not sick. Okay, his legs don’t work so hot, but I get how that goes. He could be so much stronger than he is. He could be doing so much more.”

It needed saying. “He’s not you, Max. Not everyone needs to come at this full throttle.” When that just made him frown, Heather tried a different tack. “What were you like in high school?”

“A whole lot different than that. Even as a freshman.”

“I can imagine that.”

Max shook out the mane of shaggy dirty-blond hair that gave him such a rugged look. He was tanned and muscular—the furthest thing imaginable from Simon’s pale, thin features—with mischievous eyes and a smile Heather expected made girls swoon back in high school. She found his not-quite-yet-cleaned-up-bad-boy persona as infuriating as it was intriguing. Max Jones just didn’t add up the way he ought to, and she didn’t know what to do with that.

Max tossed an ice-cream wrapper into the trash bin with all the precision he’d shown on the basketball court. “Truth is,” he said, his voice losing the edge it had held a moment ago, “I was a lot closer to the Kikowitzes of the world than to geeky kids like Simon.” He shot Heather a guilty glance. “Let’s just say I’ve shoved my share of kids into lockers. And, okay, I’m not especially proud of it, but I think I’d rather be that than go through life like Simon.”

Heather tried to picture a teenage Max prowling the halls of GFHS, picking on kids and collecting detention slips. It didn’t take much imagination. “Football team? Motorcycles?”

He laughed, and Heather reminded herself how such charming smiles shouldn’t always be trusted. Sometimes those dashing ways covered some pretty devastating weaknesses. “No,” he corrected her. “Basketball and my dad’s old Thunderbird. Well, before I rolled it my junior year, that is.”

“You were a terror in high school.” She nodded over to the black car with flames and the HTWELZ2 license plate. “It boggles the mind.”

“Very funny. You have no idea how much work it takes to make a car like that look so cool. No way was I going to drive around in some suburban-housewife minivan.” He looked at her, hard. “I’m still the guy I was, and if people can’t take that it comes in a wheeled version now, it’s their problem.”

It was an admirable thought, but his words came with such a defiant edge that Heather wondered how many times a week Max chewed someone’s head off for an ill-phrased remark or just plain ignorance about life with a disability. Bitterness did that to some men. “Maybe that’s just it. Maybe Simon hasn’t figured out who he is yet. I had no idea who I was in high school—I just bumbled around most of the time trying to stay out of the sights of all those mean cheerleader types.” She borrowed Max’s measurement. “I suppose I’d say I was a lot closer to Simon than thugs like Kikowitz.”

“Thugs like me?” Again the disarming smile, the penitent hoodlum with his hand over his heart.

“I don’t know too many thugs who would round up a bunch of wheelchairs to play basketball with a geeky kid and two hapless ladies.” She was going to say girls, but hadn’t she chided Max for the label earlier?

“Don’t call my sister hapless. She was in the army, you know.” He wheeled a careless arc around the front walkway, ending up a foot or two closer to her than his earlier position. “So let me guess—4-H Club? Junior Librarians of America? Church choir?” He did not list them with any admiration—that was certain.

“Art, mostly. I kept to myself a lot. And not choir, but church youth group.”

“I knew it.” Max executed a spin while he rolled his head back. “One of those.”

“Hey, cut that out. I had a...good time in high school.” That was at least partially true. Some of high school had been great, but she’d learned her sophomore year what Simon already knew: high school wasn’t kind to sick or injured kids.

Max stopped his maneuvers. “No, you didn’t.”

Heather froze.

“Girls who had awesome times in high school do not come back as guidance counselors. You want to help people. And you want to help people because you don’t want anyone to go through what you did.”

“Where do you get off making assumptions like that?”

Max threw his hands in the air. “Hey, don’t get all up about it. Do you know how many physical therapists I’ve had since my accident? How many counselors and docs? Pretty soon it gets easy to recognize the type, that’s all.”