Caterpillars Can't Swim Read online

  He’s not proud of being gay. He’s just plain terrified.

  I can’t imagine what it would feel like to think your dad could hate you and your mother could be hurt and disappointed in you because of who you are. Or who you want to be.

  People seriously suck sometimes.

  Gay pride.

  Disability pride.

  Maybe we should just have being-a-decent-human-being pride.

  Thirteen

  “So, are we still going or what?” Cody says, pulling himself up onto the side of the pool.

  I push my goggles up on my forehead and rub my shoulder. Once he realized I was back in my own chair and able to make it move, Cody decided it was time to get me into the pool. After my mom got the go-ahead from the doctor, Cody appointed himself my private swim tutor, so whenever he isn’t busy, he’s making me work. He’s not as bitchy as Steve, but he definitely pushes me just as hard in his own way. I’m starting to think he has a career as a swim coach in his future. He has this way of getting me to keep pushing without making it seem like he’s doing anything at all. He just calmly says things like, “Guess you don’t really need to be on the fall team. You can always wait until winter,” which of course makes me want to prove him wrong every time, even though I know that he’s just playing mind games.

  “What are you talking about?” I didn’t hear him talking about anything. I’m concentrating on trying to remember how to swim.

  “Comic Con. This summer. Us. Remember? We talked about it? Like a million times?”

  “I know we’ve talked about Comic Con a million times, but I don’t remember actually deciding to go to one. When is it and where is it?”

  “It’s in July and it’s in Bainesville. You know this! We talked about this last fall and decided that it will never be closer to us, so we’re going to go. I can’t believe you forgot! I already have my costume ready. Man, save some loser kid’s life and you forget all about the important shit.” He shakes his head hard enough to spray me.

  “He’s not some loser kid, Cody.”

  “No, he’s just some whack job who tried to off himself a few weeks ago and could do it again but this time finish what he started.” He rubs the water out of his eyes and looks at me.

  “In the first place, you don’t know anything about what he was or wasn’t trying to do and in the second place, it’s more than a few weeks now and he’s doing fine.” Whatever that means.

  “Still don’t know why you spend so much time with the guy. He’s not exactly your type.” He grins when he says the last word, wiggling his eyebrows up and down like a dirty-minded clown.

  “You’re just hilarious. He’s a friend, Cody. Like you.”

  “He’s nothing like me. I’m an original and much cooler than him or any of your other so-called friends. You can stop procrastinating now and get moving. We’ll make our Comic Con plans later when you’re thinking straight. Get it? Thinking straight?” He laughs at his own stupid joke as he shoves me off the side of the pool without warning, making me swallow a nice mouthful of chlorine as I head down. I come up sputtering and choking.

  “Screw off, Cody!” I shout at him between coughing fits.

  “Happy to!” he shouts back and takes off down the pool, strong and fast and making me feel like shit because I’m so ridiculously slow still. This sucks on so many levels I can’t even dive down to find them.

  I take a couple of seconds to get my breathing under control as I rotate my shoulder a few times. It’s moving without creaking these days even though it’s throbbing like crazy, but I’m not going to tell Cody that and listen to him laugh. I take off down the pool after him, trying to focus on my form instead of the discomfort.

  “That was actually better. Pissing you off seems to work. I’ll have to remember that,” Cody says to me as I struggle out of the water and roll onto the deck. I lie on my back, panting up at the ceiling.

  “Remind me to drown you next time we come here,” I say to him when I catch enough breath to talk.

  “Sure. If you can catch me, you can give it your best shot. You ready to go again?” He jumps up and looks down at me with a big shit-eating smile on his face.

  I stare up at him and shake my head. He shakes his hair so that the water splashes down into my eyes.

  “Am I annoying you yet?”

  “You’ve been annoying me since the day we met. And you can piss me off all you want, I’m not getting back in there until I feel like it.”

  “Wimp!” He runs to the edge of the pool and throws himself in, sprinting to the other end before I can even get myself sitting up.

  Cody’s right about one thing. He is an original. I remember the day I met him. Grade five. We had just moved to the new house, and I had to switch schools. I was not happy about it. I didn’t want to get used to a new school. I didn’t want to try to figure out how to navigate a new set of hallways and find out whether I could use the bathrooms or not. I didn’t want to have to get a new set of teachers used to me. Most of all, I didn’t want to have to get a new set of kids used to me. I’d been at my other school since kindergarten, and the kids there had basically grown up with me. No one stared at my chair or at me when I shifted out of it to sit down on the floor. I had friends there who hung with me at recess even though I couldn’t join the soccer games or go up into the field to make fun of the girls.

  My parents had to take me to the new school before I started so that the teachers could figure out how to make sure everything was going to work for me there. I had to practice wheeling up and down the aisles in my classroom so that they were sure the desks were far enough apart. We had to talk about what to do in a fire drill to make sure I got out okay. We had to figure out the doors and make sure I could get in and out on my own. At least this school wasn’t built before the last century so it had an accessible bathroom, but I still had to practice to make sure I could get in through the door on my own so we would know if I would need what the teacher there called a “helper.”

  I hate helpers. I know by definition that they’re just trying to help but in my experience they fall into two categories: volunteer helpers, who are obnoxiously nice about the whole thing because they think they’re doing something special, and forced helpers, who would rather do anything else than push some crippled kid around. Either way, it’s usually awkward. I’d rather figure it out on my own or have someone who is actually a friend help me when I need it.

  Cody was a forced helper. It was the very first day of school and I was sitting in the classroom waiting for a black hole to open up and swallow me so I didn’t have to feel any more stares burning into my back from the kids in my new class. For some reason, my teacher felt that having a practice fire drill on the first day of school would be a wonderful idea. She had decided in our interview the week before that one student would be “assigned” the terribly exciting job of making sure I got out of the classroom safely.

  She was explaining all the fire safety rules and the proper behavior that she expected from her class and all that crap. Everyone was pretending to listen except this one kid. He was staring out the window, making hand gestures at someone outside. He was so into his sign language conversation that he actually jumped up out of his seat and went over to the window.

  “Cody McNeely! Sit down right now!”

  The kid doesn’t even slow down. He keeps sending hand signals out the window for at least another thirty seconds while smoke starts coming out of the teacher’s ears. Maybe that fire drill won’t be a practice after all.

  “Cody!” She screams it, and he finally stops and turns around. He has a big grin on his face. He looks straight at me and winks.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Smithson,” he says in a super sweet, totally sarcastic voice.

  “Miss Smithson, as you well know. Cody, I think you can be Ryan’s helper for fire drills.” She nods as if she’s done something good.
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  It’s always nice to be used as a punishment for someone else on the first day of school.

  Cody just laughs and sits down.

  “Cool,” he says, as he salutes. I’m not sure if the salute is for me or Miss Smithson. It doesn’t matter. The whole class is trying not to giggle. They’re also probably taking note of the fact that they’d better behave or they’ll be stuck helping the kid in the chair.

  “Okay, the fire signal has started. Let’s move!” Miss Smithson sings out, and everyone gets up and lines up. Cody comes over to me and starts trying to push my chair.

  “Shit man, you’re heavier than you look!” he says.

  I reach over and release the brakes. The chair shoots forward, because he’s still pushing full force, and I smash into the wall. The footrests take most of the impact, but I can still feel the jarring all the way up to my head.

  “Oops. Screwed that one up!” Cody says cheerfully. He manages to get me spun away from the wall and out the door. The rest of the class is out of sight by the time we manage to even get into the hallway.

  “Fast little buggers, aren’t they? If this was real we’d be both be roasting by now! Guess we’d better get moving!” He starts running down the hall, pushing me from side to side until I start to feel my breakfast trying to make an appearance in my mouth. He gets me to the door and shoves me out onto the front step. There’s a small ramp there, but he either doesn’t see it or chooses to ignore it because he just bumps me down the three cement steps onto the parking lot. My teeth smash together and I’m pretty sure I can taste blood as I try to bite my tongue in half.

  “Almost there!” he shouts as he takes off again, aiming for the rest of the class, who are lined up neatly on the other side of the yard, watching us coming at them. I’m pretty sure the blood is dripping down my face by now. I know the sweat is.

  Cody finally stops moving when we arrive at the end of the line.

  “Ta-dah!” he says, as Miss Smithson covers her face with her hands and all the kids start to laugh.

  The good thing about it is they aren’t laughing at me. They’re laughing at Cody. I was just along for the ride. Literally.

  I sit there for a second with my wet face and sore teeth, watching Cody take a few bows and then I start to laugh too. I laugh until a few tears and some snot join the mess on my face. Miss Smithson shakes her head.

  “Oh, I’m Cody by the way,” Cody says to me, which seems like the funniest thing anyone has ever said to me in the history of everything and makes me laugh even harder.

  And that was it. We’ve been friends since that moment.

  Cody doesn’t seem to really care that I’m in a chair. He’s never asked me if my legs hurt or are paralyzed or any of the other questions I’m used to being asked by kids. He never cuts me any slack in swim practice. He bugs me just as much as he does everyone else. He makes fun of me when I try to talk to girls and laughs at my hair on pretty much a daily basis. He calls me a bunch of names that I don’t like to repeat and tries to get me to do his homework. He doesn’t talk to me about personal stuff. I have trouble imagining him having any personal stuff. And I never talk to him about anything that I wouldn’t want repeated to anyone who happened to be walking by. Cody isn’t exactly the world’s expert on keeping secrets, which I found out the one time I made the mistake of telling him that I thought a girl in our class was cute.

  “Are you seriously still lying there?” Cody has swum back to my end of the pool and is leaning with both elbows out of the water on the edge looking at me.

  “I am seriously still lying here. Very seriously,” I answer…seriously.

  “Well, you are seriously lazy and even more seriously out of shape. And now the word seriously is starting to sound seriously stupid because we’ve said it too many times. Seriously.”

  “Will you shut up if I get in the frigging water?”

  “I will if you’re serious.”

  “I am seriously going to roll on your head and hold you under until you turn blue.”

  “Yeah, well you’d have to get off your fat ass and catch me first. So bring it.” He pushes himself off, backwards into the water, backstroking his way across the pool. I roll over and up onto my knees, moving as quickly as I can over to the edge and launch in after him, laughing a little as I try to catch up.

  I think my swim grin is coming back.

  Fourteen

  “Gargoyles who come to life at night and wreak revenge on high school assholes?” Jack laughs.

  “Well, it sounds better inside my head. And will be even better once I get it written down properly. I hope.” Now that I’m saying it out loud, my formerly awesome graphic novel story line is sounding relatively lame.

  “So, have you started it yet?” Jack’s trying to seem interested but is obviously wondering why the hell I’m babbling about story ideas.

  Mostly I was running out of things to talk about, and I’m just trying to keep the conversation on topics inside my comfort zone.

  “Just barely. I can write pretty well now that my shoulder has healed enough that I can use both hands. But I can’t draw worth shit.”

  “I can draw pretty well. I get decent marks in art even though it drives me nuts having to do what the art teacher says instead of my own thing.”

  “I noticed some sketches you drew in your math book. You actually draw really well.”

  “Thanks, but that wasn’t exactly my best stuff.”

  “Well, it looked good to me. I thought maybe you’d be interested in helping me with my novel.”

  “That kind of drawing isn’t exactly my favorite thing to do, but I guess I could try. I’m just not sure how good I’d be.” He doesn’t sound very enthusiastic.

  “I think you’d be great, but if you’re really not into it, that’s fine. It was just an idea. What is your favorite thing to do?” Jack doesn’t answer for so long that I start to get that uncomfortable feeling again, the one where I’m afraid he’s going to start talking about personal things. He has been avoiding talking about any of the crap going on in his life recently. I’ve been kind of relieved, hoping that maybe he’s sharing with someone else…someone who can respond with some kind of intelligence.

  “You don’t have to tell me if it’s private or whatever,” I say to him when the silence starts to stretch out and his eyes start to get darker.

  “No. It’s not a big deal. It’s just something else that I can’t do.”

  “Oh. Well, I probably can’t actually write a graphic novel that anyone will give a shit about either.”

  “I don’t know. Your story sounds bizarre enough to work.”

  “Thanks. I think.” He smiles for a quick second and his eyes start to come back to normal.

  “I guess I’ll tell you. It’s really no big thing. It’s just that I have always really wanted to be a singer. I even took lessons for a while when I was younger, until my dad said they were a stupid waste of time and too expensive…even though we had enough money for him to make me play soccer, which I hated. Anyway, I’ve always dreamt of being on a big stage, with cool costumes and lots of crazy makeup that I could actually wear without anyone thinking it’s weird.” He looks embarrassed.

  “If you want to be a singer, why not go for it?”

  “I’m pretty sure my parents want me to get a real job…right here where I can help out at home. When my dad left, he told me I had to take care of my mom.” His eyes close and he puts his head back against a tree. We’re sitting down by the river. Jack likes to go there for reasons that I don’t really want to think about. I’m able to get over the bridge on my own steam again and then he helps push me the rest of the way over the rougher ground to the grass and trees at the top of the hill. We can sit and look at the exact spot where all the drama happened without being in the way of anyone trying to use the bridge. He never talks about it when we’re h
ere but the thought of it is always hovering in the back of my mind, buzzing around like a fly that needs to be swatted. I’m always slightly afraid that he’ll suddenly start running and end up back in the water before I can do anything about it.

  “Well, maybe you should enter one of those singing shows and win lots of money so you can be a singer, impress your parents, and get the hell out of town all at the same time.”

  “Sure. And maybe in this alternate happy universe of yours, I can admit I’m gay too, and no one at school will kick the shit out of me, and we’ll all live happily ever after.”

  His eyes are still closed. His whole face looks closed. We’re definitely heading into the danger zone.

  “Anyway, it’s getting late and my mom will be complaining that I haven’t done my homework if I don’t get moving.” It’s lame, but I can’t think of anything else. My stomach is starting to dance around a bit, and I really think we need to get away from here.

  He sits there completely still for just long enough that the dancing turns to buzzing, as if the flies have migrated from my head to my gut.

  “Yeah, okay. I guess I should check in with my mom, too.” He finally opens his eyes as he gets up to help me move over the grass until I’m on pavement and can wheel myself easily across the bridge. He slips back into silence as I mentally kick myself for starting him down into his black hole again.

  I guess mentally is the only way I can kick myself. Ha-ha.

  Shut up, Ryan.

  I should say something to him. I don’t want him going off by himself feeling upset. But I don’t know what to say. This sucks.

  “Um, so, do you want to come to Comic Con with me this summer?”

  He looks at me as if I just asked him to go for a swim in the river.

  “What?”

  “Comic Con. It’s like a big festival thing where everyone dresses up and semi-famous people sign autographs…”

  “I know what it is. I have a TV and a computer. I’m just not sure why you’re asking me.”