Bryan awoke far too early, from the irreverent screeching beside his bed. His eyes whipped open. He scanned around the room for the cat which was surely being strangled to death. Nedra threw one arm out from the covers and with a solid whack, the screeching was snoozed.

Bryan groaned. It was the first day of school. He never enjoyed mornings, especially when they meant school. Although college might be different, he didn’t know yet. He did at least get to choose most of his classes. With eager dread welling inside, he knew sleeping was no longer an option.

“Ned,” he whispered loudly. “Hey, Ned!”

Nedra started. “Wh-what?”

“I need to get up for school.”

“Mm-kay.”

Bryan waited a few moments. When he heard Nedra’s soft snore, he rolled his eyes and tried again. “Nedra!”

She shot up like a rocket. “I’m up,” she said, her eyes still closed. She yawned and stretched before finally getting out of bed.

Bryan’s mind raced with questions while Nedra bathed and shaved him. He was so lost in thought that he bit her thumb as she fed him cereal from a bowl.

“Ouch!”

“Sorry!”

“Just eat the Cheerios, not me.”

“Sorry, I guess I’m a little preoccupied.”

“I noticed. Anything you want to talk about?”

“No. I’m just wondering what today will be like.”

“Only one way to find out.” She offered him an encouraging smile. “Well,” she said, glancing at the clock above the stove, “this is it.”

Bryan looked at the clock and then the front door. No going back now.

“You’ve got everything you should need in your backpack. I’ll see you back here this afternoon.” Nedra made sure his bag was secured to the back of his chair and then walked behind Bryan to the front door.

“Have a good day.” He kissed Nedra goodbye and drove out the door. She smiled back and waved, still clad in her pajamas, before closing the door behind him. Bryan knew she was probably headed back to bed.

He drove around the side of the building to the parking lot where a red GMC van sat waiting for him. The disabled student services center at the university hired a man to pick up the students in wheelchairs and transport them to school. As Bryan approached, the gentleman hopped out and lowered the large, metal lift.

“Mornin’,” he boomed in a cheerful voice.

Bryan carefully drove onto the lift and the man raised it slowly, shutting the doors tightly behind him. The van didn’t have a raised roof, so Bryan’s tall head almost brushed against the ceiling.

Once they arrived on campus and Bryan was lowered safely to the ground, he moved swiftly down the sidewalk in the direction of the engineering building. His first physics class would be a good test to see if this was really what he wanted to do with his life. As Bryan got closer to the campus, he watched everything in constant motion around him. Students buzzed in and out of buildings, moving swiftly about him as they tried to find the right building and the right classroom. Bikes and skateboards whizzed past, almost cutting him off a few times. Some students lay in the grass, talking with friends. Others walked with determination and focus, marching their feet as if in a drill line. Bryan chuckled as he watched one kid, his nose so deep in a book that he tripped over a lip in the sidewalk and almost biffed it completely.

Most of the students moved out of Bryan’s way as he drove through campus. Some stared, while others stared but pretended not to. Bryan was used to having many eyes follow him wherever he went. It was human nature to be curious. He just wished people would stop pretending he wasn’t there.

As he neared his first destination, Bryan charged forward, pushing the highest gear on his wheelchair so he could make it to the top of the ramp. Bryan’s tires spun and he popped a wheelie, going up onto his two back tires. The momentum in which he zoomed forward, combined with the incline of the ramp, caused Bryan to tip backward. His chair came crashing down. Bryan’s arm and shoulder slammed into the sharp concrete, his face skidding along the gravel.

The loud campus around him went deathly silent. Several students rushed to his aid.

“Are you okay?”

“What happened?”

“Do you need help?”

“Do we need to call someone?”

What the kids weren’t expecting to hear was the laughter that broke forth from Bryan’s mouth. “Well, that was stupid,” he chuckled.

A couple of the students who rushed forward started to smile. No one dared join in his laughter.

“Can you help lift me back up?” Bryan asked the gathering group.

Several of the biggest guys moved forward and tried to lift the chair, not realizing how heavy it was. “We need some more help,” one of them shouted. Two more guys and one girl came forward and tried to fit in around the base of Bryan’s wheelchair. They counted and all lifted together, following Bryan’s instructions. He bounced back into place, his head throbbing slightly from the fall.

“Do you need a push?” a petite, blonde girl asked.

“No, thank you,” Bryan said. “I just need to use a lower gear next time.”

The girl moved forward and held the door open for Bryan.

“Thanks,” he said. “And thank you all for your help,” Bryan called to the others who had lifted him before adding to no one in particular, “Shoot, I’m probably going to be late now.”

Bryan moved through the building quickly and found his classroom with no time to spare. As he pulled up to a desk, the professor called the class to attention.

“Can you take notes for me?” Bryan whispered to the boy seated beside him.

The kid glanced at Bryan, looking him up and down through thick glasses which seemed to take up most of his face. “Sure,” he mumbled.

Bryan took a deep breath and settled in, trying to focus on everything the professor said. All right, college. Ready or not, here I come.

***

As Bryan drove home that afternoon, his mind stung with information. He mentally checked off all the homework he had to complete before he came back to these classes, astounded at the amount expected of them. How was he supposed to get that much done in only a matter of days?

Bryan tapped on the door with his foot rest and was greeted by Nedra’s expectant face. “How was it?” she asked. Almost immediately Nedra’s face fell when she saw the raw scrapes on the side of his face. “What happened?”

“Oh yeah, I forgot about that.” Bryan chuckled as Nedra ran for a wet rag. “I pushed the wheelchair forward too hard when I needed to get up a ramp for class. It was really dumb. I completely biffed it and my chair tipped.”

Nedra gasped.

“I’m fine. Just a stupid mistake. There were plenty of people around to help. The most painful part of today was not my face. It was having to sit through my English class.” He blew out a huge sigh.

Nedra finished dabbing the dirt out of Bryan’s scrapes and reached for the zipper on his backpack. “Well, let’s look over it. Maybe I can help you.” Nedra lifted Bryan and positioned him in the large, overstuffed chair. His back sank into the soft, brown leather. Nedra reached a hand behind his chair and brought the table across his lap, and then laid his English book on it along with a sheet of plain white paper.

“What was your assignment?” Nedra asked, poising the sharp, yellow pencil just above his blank paper.

“We have to read the first five chapters of this book and then answer questions about what we read. It’s basically the same thing we did in high school, but I nearly failed high school English. I didn’t get it then, so I’m not sure how I’m supposed to understand it now.” Bryan frowned as he spoke, his forehead crinkling as he stared at the seemingly foreign words listed under chapter one.

“Oh, these aren’t too bad,” Nedra said, glancing over the questions.

“For you, maybe.”

“No, really, you can do this. I’ll show you.”

As Nedra talked him through the first question, Bryan only became more frustrated. “But that doesn’t make any sense!” he argued. “There’s too many metaphors. Why can’t an author just mean what they say?”

“The reason why doesn’t have to make sense. You just have to understand that this is what the author means!” Nedra said, the frustration rising in her own voice.

“But if I don’t understand the why, how am I going to figure out the what?”

Nedra shook her head. “You’re such an engineer. Most people just accept that these are the metaphors, and they stick with them.”

“I’m not most people. My brain doesn’t work that way. I need to understand how something works.”

Nedra took the eraser and wiped away the answer she had been trying to explain, smearing grey streaks across the page. “Fine. Then you tell me exactly what to write, and I’ll just be your scribe.”

Bryan talked through the question out loud, explaining to Nedra exactly how he wanted it written. She began to write again, but couldn’t bite her tongue when he started to give a wrong answer.

“No, that’s not how you do it,” Nedra said.

“That’s not my answer,” Bryan argued.

“But your answer is wrong.”

“I thought you were just going to be my scribe. No more teaching,” Bryan said through gritted teeth.

“What am I going to do? Just let you get it wrong?”

“It’s my mistake to make!”

Nedra huffed and got to her feet. “Maybe we need to hire you a tutor.”

“Yes,” Bryan agreed. “For the sake of our marriage.”

***

After the first few weeks of school, Bryan got into a pretty good rhythm. Nedra got him dressed, shaved, and ready for school in the morning before returning to bed for a couple more hours of sleep. She then got herself ready, cleaned the apartment, went grocery shopping, or whatever other errands needed to happen, and went to work by 3:00 p.m. Bryan spent all day on campus, driving his wheelchair from one class to the next. He arrived home in the late afternoon, shortly after Nedra left for work. She got home from work between 11:00 p.m. and midnight, put Bryan to bed, and then they would do it all again the next day. It wasn’t an ideal situation for a couple of newlyweds, but Nedra’s shift gave her weekends off so they could spend their time together then.

Bryan rolled into class early one morning, slid up to one of the desks, and waited patiently for more students to arrive. English had never been his strong suit, but he was actually excited for class today. His professor saw him ride in and approached his desk.

“I really enjoyed your paper, Bryan,” she said softly. With a slender hand, she dropped the white sheet on his desk, face up. She gave his shoulder a slight squeeze before going back to her large desk. Bryan glanced down at the paper, his eyes rushing to see the big, red ‘A’ written across the top. Bryan beamed, his eyes moistening a little. He coughed to cover the emotion building up in his throat. He had never gotten an ‘A’ in English before.

When the classroom filled with students, the professor finished returning their assignments and then spoke from the front. “I enjoyed reading all of your papers, but one in particular was completely filled with raw emotion. You don’t have to be a master of words to succeed in English, but if you can draw your audience in with emotion, then they will be able to overlook any writing flaws. So, Bryan Carroll?”

Bryan snapped his head up in attention. She smiled at him warmly. “Would you mind reading your paper aloud for the class, please?”

Bryan felt heat rising from the back of his neck as he slowly pushed his chair to the front of the classroom. He cleared his throat. The professor ran back to his desk and grabbed the paper for him. She held it up as he read aloud.

“It was on a hot June day that my life was drastically changed. I chose to make a dive this day, a dive I will never forget.

“The pond was about a mile and a half up a rocky side canyon. It was surrounded on three sides by steep cliffs. Here we chose to cliff dive. The cliffs we were diving from were about twenty-five feet high. The deepest part, about fifteen feet, was under these cliffs where the river flowed into the pond. There were several people jumping from them and soon it was my turn. I stood looking over the edge, trying to get set. The water had calmed from previous jumps and lay there glassy, enticing. It was now time for my jump. I took a deep breath and I was off into space.

“I flew through the air under perfect control and entered like a knife, slicing through the water, barely splashing. Once in the water, I allowed my muscles to relax. It was as if everything was in slow motion, yet I was still moving quickly through the water. I could see the bottom coming too fast, but it was as if it were happening to someone else and I could do nothing to stop it. My hands hit and my arms buckled. Then my head hit! It seemed like such a gentle tap, but suddenly I couldn’t move a thing.

“Somehow I managed to get so I was floating with my head towards the surface. I could see the light of the surface but I could not seem to get there. I was so close to the one thing that I needed to live, but it was if it were there to tease me. I knew that by no power of my own could I reach that blessed air. A minute passed; I began to wonder how much longer I would last. I was totally helpless as I looked toward the light above, hoping that someone would come for me before it was too late. After what seemed to be a millennium, a hand appeared and pulled me to the surface. I did not know my rescuer as he brought me carefully to shore.

“He and others placed me on a piece of plywood, immobilized my head, and propped my feet on a log overhanging the water. It was about six o’clock when they sent for help, help that was over seventeen miles of rough water away. As I lay there, I began wondering how badly I was hurt and how they were going to get me out. The time grew long; night descended. I lay awake most of that time wondering what my life would be like now. Would I be paralyzed? Would I be able to have children? As the sun rose, I realized that there had been a lean-to built to shade me. By the time help arrived, eighteen hours had passed. I felt as if a weight had been lifted when I heard that the helicopter had arrived. I had been living with the fear that I would have to be rafted out over that treacherous river. Carefully they carried me down the mountain to the helicopter. The litter was supported by six men, stabilized from above by a man with a rope, and my I.V. was held by another. My mouth was parched and the wet sock they let me suck on did little to relieve my thirst. Finally, after two hours, the sun beating upon us unmercifully, we reached the helicopter. Quickly I was loaded aboard and flown to the medical aide that would mean my survival.

“After I reached the hospital at Page, Arizona, and was tested and examined, the young doctor caring for me told me that my neck was indeed broken and that I probably would be paralyzed. Thus ended the most beautiful dive of my life. I still remember that dive vividly: a high, arching swan dive, entering the water cleanly as a hot knife through butter. A perfect dive…that ended in tragedy.”

His professor sniffed as she lowered the pages. Bryan glanced around shyly. Several girls in the class were wiping away tears while many of the other students were staring at him, their mouths hanging slightly open. Bryan quickly lowered his gaze and drove the chair back over to his desk. He could still feel several pairs of eyes burning into his back, but he tried to ignore them.