They said to get along with Eric Bevington-Watrous, too, but that was harder than the reading. And it was Eric who first noticed Drew’s problem with the food. He was smart; they were all so fucking smart.
“Having trouble with real food, aren’t you,” Eric taunted him. “Used to that Liver soysynth stuff, and real food rips at your gut. Why don’t you shit it out right here, you mannerless little vermin?”
“What’s your problem, you?” Drew said quietly. Eric had followed him to the enormous cottonwood by the creek, a place Drew liked to be alone. Now he stood, tensed, and started a slow turn to get the water at his back.
“You’re my problem, vermin,” Eric said. “You’re a parasite here. You don’t contribute, you don’t belong, you can’t read, you can’t even eat. You aren’t even clean. Why don’t you just take a walk into the ocean and let the waves wipe your ass!”
As Drew slowly turned, Eric did too. That was good: Eric might have twenty pounds and two years on him, but he didn’t know how to maneuver for fighting advantage. The sun appeared over Drew’s left shoulder. He kept turning.
He said, “I don’t see you contributing so fucking much, you. Your grandmom says you’re the biggest worry she got, her.”
Eric’s face turned purple. “You never talk about me with my own family!” he yelled, and charged forward.
Drew dropped to one knee, ready to leverage Eric over one shoulder and throw him into the creek. But just before Eric reached Drew, he leapt into the air, a controlled leap that brought instant sickening waves through Drew’s chest: he had made a bad mistake. Eric was trained; it was just a kind of training Drew hadn’t recognized. The toe of Eric’s boot caught Drew under the chin. Pain exploded through his jaw. His head whipped backward and he felt something snap in his spine. The force of the kick hurtled him backward, over the shallow embankment into the creek.
Everything went wet and red.
When he came to, he lay on a bed. Wires and needles ran from his body to machines that whirred and hummed. His head whirred and hummed, too. He tried to raise it from the pillow.
His neck wouldn’t move.
Instead, he turned it slowly to the side as far as it would go, a few inches. A bulky figure sat in a chair beside his bed: Jordan Watrous.
“Drew!” Jordan jumped up from his chair. “Nurse! He’s awake!”
There were a great many people in his room, then, most of them not in Drew’s careful catalog of compound-dwellers. He didn’t see Leisha. His head hurt, his neck hurt. “Leisha!”
“I’m here, Drew.” She came around to his head. Her hand was cool on his cheek.
“What happened…me?”
“You had a fight with Eric.”
He remembered. Looking at Leisha, he was astonished to see that there were tears in her eyes. Why was she crying? The answer came, slowly—she was crying over him. Drew. Him.
“I hurt.”
“I know you do, honey.”
“I can’t move my neck, me.”
Leisha and Jordan exchanged looks. She said, “It’s strapped down. There’s nothing wrong with your neck. But your legs—”
“Leisha—not yet,” Jordan begged, and Drew turned his head slowly, painfully, toward Jordan. He had never heard that kind of voice from a grown man. From his mom or his sisters, after Daddy whomped them good, but not from a grown man.
Something in his head whispered, this is important.
“Yes, now,” Leisha said steadily. “The truth is best, and Drew’s tough. Honey—something broke in your spine. We did a lot of repair work, but nerve tissue doesn’t regenerate…at least not in people like…the doctors did muscle augments, other things. I know you don’t understand what that means yet. What you can understand is that your neck is all right, or will be in a month or so. Your arms and body are all right. But your legs…” Leisha turned her head. The harsh overhead light made her tears shiny. “You won’t walk again, Drew. The rest of your body functions normally, but you won’t walk. You’ll have a powerchair, the best we can buy or build or invent, but…you won’t walk.”
Drew was silent. It was too enormous; he couldn’t take it all in. Then, abruptly, he could. Colors and shapes exploded in his mind.
He said fiercely, “Does this mean I can’t go to no school in September, me?”
Leisha looked startled. “Honey, it’s past September. But yes, of course you can still go to school, next term, if you want to. Of course you can.” She looked across the bed at Jordan, and her look held so much pain that Drew looked too.
Jordan looked burned. Drew knew what it was to look burned—he had seen it on men whose scooters, illegally modified, went up in flames and took part of them with it. He had seen it on a woman whose baby had drowned in the big river. He had seen it on his mom. It was a look not to get yourself any feelings about, because the feelings would hurt so bad you couldn’t help nobody. Not even yourself. And that look should mean some help for somebody, Drew had always thought, or how come people had to go through having it gnaw at their faces?
He said, “Mr. Watrous, sir—” he had learned that word, they liked it here “—it warn’t Eric’s fault. I started it.”
Jordan’s face changed. First the look went away, then it came back, then it hardened into something else, and then it came back again, worse than before.
Leisha said, “We know that’s not true. Eric told us what happened.”
Drew thought about that; maybe it was true. He didn’t understand Eric all the way through, him, he’d already known that. And if things had been backside-to, so that Drew had been the one to make it so Eric couldn’t walk…
Couldn’t walk.
“Honey, don’t,” Leisha said, and now she was begging, too. “I know it seems terrible, but it isn’t the end of the world. You can still go to school, learn to ‘be somebody’ the way you said…Be brave, Drew. I know you are brave.”
Well, he was. He was a brave kid, him, everybody always said that, even in stinking Montronce. He was Drew Arlen, who was going to own Sanctuary someday. And he would never, ever, ever look as burned as Mr. Watrous did now. Not Drew Arlen, him.
He said to Leisha, “Will the powerchair be the kind that can float three inches above the floor and go down stairs?”
“It will be the kind that can fly to the moon if you want it to!”
Drew smiled. He made himself smile. He saw something now, sitting clean in front of him, like a big shimmery bubble he didn’t know how he’d missed before. It was big and warm and shining, and he not only saw it, he felt the bubble in every little bone in his body. Mr. Watrous said brokenly, “Drew, nothing can make this up to you, but we’ll do everything we can, everything…”
And they would. That was the bubble. Drew hadn’t had words for it before—he somehow never had words till somebody gave them to him—but that was the bubble. Right there. He didn’t have to run errands for the old lady anymore or learn the manners they shoved at him or even eat the real food. He would go on doing these things because some of them he wanted to learn and some of them he liked. But he didn’t have to. They would do anything for him, now. They would have to. Now and for the rest of his life.