Roll with It: Chapters 5–8

Other than that, I did everything just like you wrote, including using the wildflower honey.
And so, I was wondering, since I respect you very much as a chef and like the idea of a dessert that is “both beautiful and rustic,” why did mine turn out so soggy?

The whole place might as well have shower curtains for doors, because you can hear every footstep, every cough…and every visit to the toilet. This is why it’s not a good idea to fight with people living in such close quarters.

“Thank you, guys!” I say, holding up my new spoke covers. They’re big black-and-white whorls that swirl like a hypnotist’s wheel. Mom snaps them on like hubcaps and sits back on her heels while I do a circle around the living room.

After a second of silence, he says, “Either my dementia’s acting up or I have never heard of such a thing in my life,” and then actually slaps his knee and winks.

When we get to her gate, which hangs crooked by one rusty hinge, she leans over to look at the new spoke guards.
“Cool hypno-wheels,” she says.

“I can walk a little. But I have to use a gait trainer—it’s kind of like Dane’s walker but a thousand times bigger.”

I think she knows what it’s like to want something different from everybody else. I think we’re kindreds in the way people can be even when they’ve just met.

But if I lean over, I can still spot the red buoys, like inflated balloons in a line on the water, that mark off the swimming hole.

It’s her advocate mode, the mom setting she developed from years of fighting for insurance to pay for things like new shoes to go over my braces and fighting school for extended time between classes and fighting teachers who thought CP was the same thing as a learning disability.

Advocate mode accomplishes a lot. But it also landed me with a bodysuit I had to wear under my clothes for three years to help me sit up straighter.

“Well, as you will come to see, we’re a small establishment here. There are only forty students in the sixth-grade class. One hundred fifty in the entire middle school.”

“I mean, who will be her aide? Who will be there for bathroom assistance, and what is your plan for physical education? Is the cafeteria handicapped accessible? Are all classrooms on the ground floor, or will Ellie need to take the elevator? Is there an elevator?”

“But,” Dr. Hirschman says, “the Alzheimer’s is progressing. Faster than we’d anticipated.”

“In regard to whether Mr. Cowan might need to be moved to a facility that can better meet his needs.”
A facility. I know what that means. It’s a fancy word for an old folks’ home.

She points a finger at him like he’s trying to call a bluff. “I meant it when I said ‘in sickness and in health.’ And I’ll know quitting time when I see it. This isn’t it.”

“Mr. Cowan is seventy years old and healthy. There’s a good chance he could live ten, twenty more years while his mind continues to deteriorate. Are you prepared for that?”

According to researchers, it’s often the most average, or symmetrical, faces that are most appealing.

I bet they hear “spectrum” here and think colors of the rainbow, not autism.

Look, Ellie, Mr. Akers was kind enough not to press charges against your grandfather, who was driving with a revoked license, and he also agreed to split the cost for repairs.

“Do not—” she says, and takes a breath and turns around to look at me, “ever call your grandfather crazy. He is sick and we are here to help him. And as for Bert, I think you should try to be a little more open-minded. Empathy and sympathy, Ellie. That’s what we all need. Empathy and sympathy.”

She drags the wheelchair up next to the bed and locks it in place. “You’re a tough girl. You can handle it.”
No, I’m not tough. I’m an invalid.

We kept to ourselves and did our thing and just assumed from day one that we were all up there on the weirdness scale.

So I try to roll back around by the door, but one wheel gets caught on the edge of a rug in the area with a sign that says READING NOOK.

If gym had been the last class of the day, it all might have been fine. I mean, still terrible, but bearable. But then I have Spanish, and then we have dismissal, and dismissal is worse than all the rest put together.

And so I sit hunched over in the cold while every single student files past me.

If they had stared or even laughed, it would have been better, because then Coralee could have said, “What are you looking at?” and Bert could have cited the temperature at which water becomes gas or something like that, and we’d at least have had something to do.

“But Rachel has got to go.” I say it loud and sassy, because Mema wants me to be brave, and maybe if I pretend to be, it’ll turn true.

I have been thinking about God lately and what it means to “live a life according to your convictions,” as my grandma’s pastor would say.

At lunch on Friday, Coralee tried to explain the sixth-grade groups to me, but she called them “tribes,” and at first I thought she meant Native American tribes. We are in Oklahoma, after all. But when I said, totally innocent, “Like Cherokee and Sioux?” she spit her Coke out onto the table and laughed until Bert told her that you could rupture your spleen that way.

If he lived back in Nashville, he’d probably have his own tribe of geeks just like him to calculate statistics and memorize all the former presidents of Lithuania. But in Eufaula he’s just about the only one. We had all these cliques back at home too, but our middle school was four hundred people.

I am lying on Coralee’s frilly white daybed and trying to stretch my toes.

It’s already one thousand degrees in the gym, and even though middle school sports are like Mommy and Me playtime compared to high school, there’s still a pretty good turnout.

And instead of sneakers, he’s wearing loafers with actual pennies in the tops.

“You two want anything from concessions? Soda? A Snickers?” I know Mom’s asking only because she’s looking for an excuse to get something herself. We hardly ever keep candy in the house.

“Y’all ready to salute our fine country?” Pause. “And then beat those Badgers into submission!”