“About what?”
“Being disabled.”
“I lost my legs. Now I have these.” He opens his kitbag and shows me two prosthetic limbs, skin-colored and sculpted to look real. Trainers are laced to the feet.
“Who do you blame?” I ask.
“Do I have to blame someone?”
“Most people do.”
“Why?”
“It helps them come to terms with things.”
“You mean it gives them an excuse?”
“Maybe.”
He shakes his head. “When I woke up in hospital and looked down at where my legs used to be, I went through that whole hard-nosed, why-me response. I denied it, grieved over it, screamed at the unfairness and wanted to crawl into a dark hole. I did for a while. I hated Aiden Foster. I hated Natasha McBain. I hated everybody who was able-bodied and walking around on two legs.”
“What changed?”
He shrugs. “Time passed. I stopped making excuses. Winners don’t make excuses. When I’m on a basketball court, or staring at a flight of stairs—I don’t make excuses. I find a way.”
Strapping on his legs, he tugs down his tracksuit pants then rubs a towel over his hair, drying the sweat. Theo has gone to get the car.
“If you see Mr. and Mrs. McBain—tell them I’m sorry for their loss. Tell them I didn’t blame Natasha.”
“What about your father?”
He glances at the double doors and smiles sadly. “Don’t judge him too harshly. He shattered his knees in a skydiving accident and the army pensioned him off. The pain doesn’t go away.”
“And your mum?”
“She left us years ago.”
“Did she leave him or you?”
“Does it make a difference?”
A car horn sounds from outside. Theo is waiting.
Balancing on his wheels, Callum spins his chair and rolls away, his shoulders flexing like a boxer throwing punches at a bag. He has to turn to move backwards through the swinging doors.
The woman at the front desk yells goodbye and a chorus of other voices wish him good luck. Callum grins and waves back, sitting up straight in his wheelchair—a man with useless legs trying to stand as tall as his dreams.
Once Tash got an idea in her head
she didn’t let it go. Running away was her new project. Her eyes would light up from the inside when she made plans, talking about how we’d live in London and hang out with celebs.
Getting more and more excited, she’d spin sentences together each beginning with “and then.”
“And then we’ll find somewhere to live, not a squat, but somewhere nice in Fulham maybe, or Notting Hill. And then we’ll get jobs. I could be an actress or a model. I don’t mind getting my kit off. Just the top half like Katie Price, you know. Glamour shots. Lots of girls do that. They make loads.”
“I think you’ve got to be eighteen to be a glamour model,” I said.
“I look like I’m eighteen. I’ve got my fake ID.”
“Some of those photographers can be real sleazebags.”
“You’ll come with me. We’ll look after each other.”
“Won’t they come looking for us if they see you on page three of the Sun?”
“They’ll have stopped looking for us by then. You can divorce your parents, you know. It’s, like, legal and everything. You just get a lawyer and he goes to court and asks a judge.
“We’ll get invited to all the cool clubs, no queuing, straight to the front of the line. And then we’ll buy our own place. I’m gonna have a circular bed and automatic blinds that go up and down and I’m going to be friends with David Beckham and David Tennant and that guy from the Arctic Monkeys whose name I can’t remember.”
Tash had only been to London a few times, but she always sounded like an expert. She knew exactly where she wanted to live and how much it would cost and where all the celebrities lived. She was an expert on Katie Price, having read all her books and the magazine articles.
Our English teacher Miss McCrudden said that if Tash had studied her schoolbooks the way she read magazines she could be a genius. She was getting straight As anyway, so she couldn’t really complain. I was the one who was dumber than a box of hair.
The only reason Lady Adolf was so nice to me is because Daddy organized for the school to get a cheap loan from his bank so they could build a new assembly hall. We had names for everyone at the school. The physics teacher Mr. Fielding we called Mr. Bean because he had this weird overbite and he drove a Mini. Miss Kane, the PE mistress, was called Miss Trunchbull because she used to be a javelin thrower. (If you haven’t read Matilda, you won’t know what that means.)