Of all the sports, it had to be volleyball. We do softball, football, hockey, basketball, running, and weight training during gym, but I sprained my ankle in volleyball. One thing was sure: I wouldn’t tell anyone it was volleyball. I’d say it was soccer—or a mugging.
The injury happened quickly. I jumped to block a spike; I was concentrating on the ball, not on my legs. As I landed, I felt my right foot turn inward. I glanced down to see the sole of my sneaker head-on. There was pain, but it was a funny pain. I laughed and hopped around on one leg.
“Young man, are you injured?” Mr. Stanley asked. Mr. Stanley, my bald gym teacher, hadn’t spoken to me directly all term.
“Yup,” I replied, hobbling.
“Young man, you have to go to the nurse’s office. It’s right across the hall.”
“Okay.” I bounced out on my good leg.
“Young man,” Mr. Stanley said again, but this time he was talking to one of my volleyball teammates, a blond jock whose name I’ve forgotten. “Please help this young man to the nurse’s office.”
The jock held me up as I staggered out of the gym. “C’mon,” he encouraged, “you can do it.”
I had never actually seen the nurse’s office before (I stayed pretty healthy in high school). It looked just as I expected. White walls and informative posters:
“Oh, boy. What happened to you?” the nurse’s assistant asked. She was young, a student, possibly a junior like me.
“I fell in gym.” I tried to chuckle.
“Well, get up on this table, and I’ll get you some ice.” She motioned me with her chubby hands. I did as she said, removing my right shoe and sock. My ankle didn’t look too bad …
The assistant yelped. “Boy, is that swollen!” I looked at my left ankle for comparison; the right one was twice as big.
“Margie, come here!” the assistant called. A short African-American woman walked in with the harried, seen-it-all confidence of a high school nurse. She took one look at my foot, then at my face. “Well, honey, you sprained your ankle good.” She smiled.
“Are you sure it’s sprained? Maybe it’s just twisted.” I had this idea that twists were better than sprains. A twist you could walk off. A sprain put you in crutches.
“Sprained, honey, sprained good,” Margie said. “Look at that bird’s egg.” She pointed at the swelling.
“Is it broken?” I had never broken anything before.
“Probably not. You’ll have to have a doctor look at it.” She placed an ice pack against my foot. “Now, honey, what we need to do is call your parents.”
Margie tied the ice pack to my foot as her assistant entered with a wheelchair. “Hop in,” the assistant said, gesturing.
I did. I was grinning. I’d always wanted to ride in a wheelchair. The assistant wheeled me out of the room.
“I want to do it myself,” I protested. I grabbed hold of the wheels and propelled my chair over to the phone, where Margie was calling my dad.
“Hello, this is the Stuyvesant High School nurse’s office, calling about your son.” For some reason, she wouldn’t say my name. “Your son has been injured, and you need to come by to pick him up.” I found out later that since school nurses aren’t doctors, they’re not allowed to tell parents how their children have been hurt at school. All they can say is, “Your son/daughter has been injured.”
“He wants to talk to you,” Margie said, handing me the phone.
“Hey, Dad. I sprained my ankle in volleyball.”
Dad let out a long breath. I’d ruined his day. “Fine, I’m coming down to get you,” he said. We hung up.
“Well, honey, what you need to do now is get your stuff from your gym locker.” Margie grabbed my wheelchair handles and pushed me into the hall; I took it from there. It was weird—almost an out-of-body experience—to roll around Stuyvesant in a wheelchair. It put me very close to the ground and made me feel four or five years old. It reminded me of how big and snarling my peers were.
“What did you do to yourself, spaz?” someone from my Latin class asked as I rolled toward the elevator.
“Yo, man, you stole a wheelchair?” That was Owen. He’d caught a glimpse of the chair and got excited. “Whoa, awesome, who’d you jack it from? Man, this is so cool, what are you gonna do with it—oh, dude, you really hurt yourself!”
“Yeah.”
“Man, I thought you just took the chair. You really hurt yourself? Did you break your leg?”
“No.”
Owen ran off to tell his friends I’d broken my leg. I got in the elevator—Stuyvesant’s elevators were reserved for teachers and disabled kids; I’d never been in one before. I rode up to the fifth floor and wheeled myself to the boys’ locker room.*
From here, things got cartoonish. As I entered the locker room, the door closed on my wheelchair, knocking me forward, smacking my bad foot into the cement wall. Deadening bolts of pain shot up my leg. The wheelchair was fairly old, and it had a huge turning radius; I couldn’t maneuver very well. So I banged my foot a couple more times before getting anywhere near my locker.
I wasn’t just in pain—I was scared, rolling around in a deserted locker room. All the guys were gone: the fat ones, the hairy ones, the ones bragging about girls. It was too silent.
I got out of the wheelchair and hopped the last ten feet to my locker. I opened my lock, grabbed my backpack and my Magic cards, and hauled them over to the wheelchair, where I sat down and put my stuff on my lap. Then I got out of the room as fast as possible (which wasn’t very fast), because the whole scene was beginning to remind me of Event Horizon.*
Outside, some girls were hanging out at their school lockers in the hall—the lockers near the guys’ changing room all belonged to attractive females. They glanced at me inquisitively before checking me off as someone they’d dismissed before. The wheelchair and a swollen, naked foot warranted second glances, but not thirds—and certainly not any help. I wheeled back to the nurse’s office.
I needed to fill out some official papers: How did I injure myself? Where on my body? Where in the building? The point of the paperwork, I figured, was to prove that the school was in no way responsible for my falling down and that all the professionals involved had treated me properly.
I asked Margie about her experiences as a high school nurse.
“Been here twelve years,” she told me.
“What’s the stupidest thing you ever saw?”
Her eyes lit up. “Oh, definitely, when this girl came in holding three teeth in her hand. She’d been sliding down an escalator handrail, see, and she flew off the end, right into a wall. So I tell her, ‘I need to call your father—what’s his number?’ And she says, ‘I dunno.’ She has no idea what her father’s number is, doesn’t even know where he works. I have to call some friend who calls the uncle who calls the father.”
“Good story.”
“Stupid girl. Really. They took her away, gave her some new teeth. I see her around sometimes.”
Eventually, a phone rang in the nurse’s office. My dad had arrived. I wheeled down to the chandelier-lit Stuyvesant lobby, kicked open the doors, and rolled across the sidewalk to the curb, where the family van awaited. Mom was in the front seat, looking distressed at my condition. Dad sat behind the wheel, wearing sunglasses against the glare.
“My goodness, honey, are you okay?” Mom leapt from the van and grabbed the back of my chair.
“Well, I’ve been stumbling around like an idiot for a while,” I said. “And I’ve been blown away by the support I’ve received from friends … and from my dear father.”
Dad was still sitting in the driver’s seat, with his hands on the wheel.
“Jim, you’re despicable,” Mom said. “Get out here and help your son.”
“Hmmmm? Oh, yes.” Dad smiled. He was just messing around. He got out of the van and helped me into the backseat. “How you doing, son?” he asked. “This injury might be good for you; it’ll give you a chance to take a load off.”
As I climbed into the van, I saw my math teacher, Mr. Pingeon, standing on the sidewalk taking a cigarette break. Apparently, he had no teachers’ lounge to smoke in. He waggled his finger at me, grinning. Everybody loves a wheelchair.
*For some reason, the gym was on the third floor but the locker room was on the fifth floor—ask the people who built my high school.
*Event Horizon is the scariest movie ever made. In it a ship travels through a black hole and comes back inherently evil. Sounds stupid, but when the ship starts killing people by depressurizing them, and Sam Neill is running around with his body all cut up, and Laurence Fishburne is on fire, and people are ripping their own eyes out, believe me, it’s not cool.