In sophomore year, I was top in the county, one of the very best.
The school even made me a mug:
Johnny McCarthy: World’s Greatest Running Back.
There were so many times I saved our ***,
so many moments, four downs in, that I came through for them.
But then I my knee exploded in bone, and they all suddenly forgot.

I never really had to care before that; about anything, really.
Everything was given to me – friends and girlfriends and grades.
Especially grades; let me tell you, teachers are less sympathetic when you’re in a wheelchair.
And that’s what ****** me off most: when I felt most pathetic and most hurt, people cared the least.

My mom would kiss my forehead whenever she saw my eyes looking beyond the TV screen,
and she’d say something like “a leopard’s stuck with its stripes.”
Sometimes they wouldn’t make sense, but just hearing her sing proverbs with such confidence,
well, it was comforting have a self-proclaimed-sage living in the house.

As I rattled over the gravel walkways to the student parking lot, I would see the football fields,
see the guys practicing, laughing, and looking at everything but the sad *******.
It was then I learned that I hated football – well not football itself,
but what football meant in this west Pennsylvania town.
I hated how it was everything, and without it, I was nothing.
I was the overweight cheerleader to them, I was the equipment manager.
I was even worse than that to them, now.

I charged my wheelchair to our sixteen year old Dodge Caravan, and lifted myself in,
leaving the chair outside the driver’s side door.
I tore onto 270, and aimed myself north.
Driving on the stony stretch, between the strip-mined mountains and the blanket of pine,
I thought about what was left for me back in town.

I thought about my recently ex-girlfriend, who was like a butterfly,
in her ability to float from flower to flower, and **** as much life as she needed
before fluttering away to some other unlucky ****.

I thought of my high school English teacher,
the only one who pretended to care about me after I was drained of reputation.
He gave me a book, the Catcher of the Rye. I haven’t read it yet – it looks really long.
I want him to thing that I did, though, so I guess I’ll tell him what he wants to hear.

I thought about the half-black kid Christopher, who started up the anime club.
It was cosplay day, so we took his gym clothes and threw them in the toilet.
He had to run laps dressed like a samurai, and ended up ripping his kimono.
We all laughed, though I always wondered how hard he must’ve worked on it.

And I remembered my mother, with her free promotional shirts and forest green sweatpants.
I thought about her tiny piggy figurines in that case in the kitchen,
and how proud she is when the Hamburger Helper isn’t burned.
I imagined her kissing me on the forehead and saying:
“Home is a dangerous thing, and there is little knowledge where the heart is,”
or something like that.

I remembered every individual in that tiny high school, and how in my last week there,
I felt like I was choking on everyone’s endless spoken noise.
I pulled onto one of the camp sites at William’s Lake and collapsed out of the car.
I dragged my leg to the shivering shoal of the stagnant pool, and dipped my casted knee in the water.

I felt its bacteria swim in the wound, the exposed bone now pressed beneath my false flesh,
and infect me with a slow disease that felt like a long warming hug.
The water was shifting to a higher tide, and I lay there, feeling every knot of its slow ascent.
Its green-grey film floated at my chest, and I felt determined to let the algae find its way above my head.
As it creeped its oddly tepid sheet up and up my neck, I thought of telling off my ex-girlfriend,
and reading that book my teacher gave me,
and letting my mom know how much of an artist she is.
I twisted over, and pulled my extended leg back into my minivan.
The van smelled like the lakebed now,
like a great many microbes dying and re-birthing silently, in the cracks of the tan pleather carseat.