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conversations with gritted teeth. Not only did they interrupt my new favorite hobby, but they drove my mind into alleyways where I didn’t wish to go. “Hi, hottie,” Hartley often answered his phone. Or, “hi baby.” It was hard to say which term of endearment bothered me more. Because nobody had ever called me by either one.
    The truth was that my blazing attraction to Hartley made me start to measure out the distance between girls like Stacia and me. Before my accident, I’d always assumed that a passionate romance would eventually come my way. But listening to Hartley butter up his gorgeous girlfriend niggled at me. Was there a guy out there for me, who would refer to his wheelchair-bound girlfriend as a hottie?
    I really didn’t think there was.

    Part of the bargain I’d made with my parents was that I would continue physical therapy at Harkness. My new therapist was a sporty-looking woman in a Patriots cap. “Call me Pat,” she said, shaking my hand. “I spent the weekend with your file.”
    “Sorry,” I said. “That sounds like a dull read.”
    “Not at all,” she smiled. I noticed she had freckles everywhere. “Your trainers seem to have found you refreshing.”
    I laughed. “If ‘refreshing’ is a euphemism for ‘bitchy,’ then maybe I’d buy it.”
    She shook her head. “You’ve had a very challenging year, Corey. Everyone understands that. So let’s get started.”
    First, Pat stretched me. That’s how therapy always began — with the unsettling sensation of someone moving my body around as if I was a rag doll. Pat worked my legs around the hip joints, followed by knees and ankles. Before asking me to sit up, she hesitated. “Can I take a peek at your skin? Nobody will see.”
    I looked around. The therapy room door was shut, and there were no faces outside its window. “Just quickly,” I said.
    Pat lifted the back of my yoga pants and took a peek down the back of my underwear. The concern was that I would get pressure sores from sitting in my chair all day. “No problems there.”
    “I’m not high risk,” I said. “My parents asked you to check, didn’t they?”
    She smiled. “You can’t blame them for caring.”
    I could, actually.
    “If we can get you out of that chair,” Pat jerked her thumb toward the offending object, “then nobody will worry about it anymore. How many hours a day are you up on your sticks?”
    “A few,” I hedged. The truth was that I hadn’t figured out yet how to blend my crutches into my Harkness schedule. “I’m still working out how far apart all the buildings are.”
    “I see,” she said. “But if you’re going to participate in student life, we’ve got to get you climbing stairs. Otherwise, you should have picked a college built in the seventies. So let’s do some leg press.”
    I tried not to grumble too much. But a year ago, I used to put twice my body weight on the leg press. Now? Pat put on sixty pounds or so, and still I had to push on my quads with my hands to move the platform. A first-grader could do better.
    Really, what was even the point?
    But Pat was undeterred by my lousy performance. “Now we’ll work your core,” she insisted. “Good torso stability is crucial to helping you balance on crutches.” It was nothing I hadn’t heard before. Pat had learned her lines from the same script as the other therapists I’d seen. And I’d seen plenty.
    Unfortunately, nowhere in any script were the words for the things that really bothered me. Pat knew what to do when my hips wobbled in the middle of a plank exercise. But nobody had ever taught me how to handle the odd looks I got when people made eye contact with me in my wheelchair. Sometimes I saw looks of outright pity. Those seemed honest, if not helpful. And then there were the Big Smiles. There can’t be many people in the world who walk around grinning like maniacs at random strangers. But I got a lot of Big Smiles from people who thought that they owed it to me. It