Free Laughing at My Nightmare by Shane Burcaw

horrified, yet slightly amused. Tim had thrown up in the pool, and was continuing to throw up all over himself as the counselors made a huge deal out of getting him out of the water. This was all too perfect. The vomit started spreading around the pool and everyone was disgusted beyond belief. The camp officials had to cancel swimming for the rest of the day, which upset everyone.
    Real smooth, Tim.
    Today, I feel pretty awful for hating Tim so much. He was just being himself, and I was too insecure to deal with it. However, this incident in the pool left me with the belief that I was never going to get along with other people in wheelchairs.
    Luckily for me, the counselors at the camp soon realized I was slightly different from most of the other kids. We joked around and talked about things that I doubt they discussed with the other campers. On the last night of camp, the counselors let me stay up all night with them, just chilling and eating pizza while the other kids slept. For my 13-year-old mind, that was a pretty awesome experience, and it taught me that I had the ability and social skills to make genuine friends in a situation where they could have just been “pretend nice” to me because I was in a wheelchair.

chapter 17
    the dance
    Because camp took place the summer before sixth grade, it probably served as a confidence booster when interacting with new people like the hot girl who sat next to me that you read about earlier. As the school year progressed and spring approached, the infamous sixth grade dance became the hot topic of discussion. By this point I had settled in with a group of friends who teetered on the border of the “popular” crowd and the not-quite-as-popular-but-still-sociable-and-genuinely-funny crowd. One of those friends was my cousin Rebecca. Becca is my dad’s brother’s daughter, and even though we are the same age and only live a few blocks from each other, we didn’t see one another very often until middle school. She went to a different elementary school and was involved in sports because she was about 900 feet tall by the age of ten. Her parents were divorced, so our families only saw each other several times a year. We got together for holidays and occasionally on birthdays, but for whatever reason, Becca and I kept our distance at these family gatherings. Maybe she was afraid of my wheelchair, or perhaps I smelled bad. Whatever the reason, we just didn’t interact when our families got together. In fifth grade, I couldn’t tell you much more than Becca’s name, age, and that she was good at basketball. Then we had some classes together in sixth grade and discovered that we both found incredible pleasure in making fun of each other.

    Becca and me. Apparently all Burcaws got the “extremely good-looking” gene.
    Becca didn’t give two shits that I was in a wheelchair unless she could somehow use my disability to further insult me. Making fun of one another was the crux of our beautiful relationship. I asked her to close her mouth during lunch because her teeth made me gag. She asked if I needed my diaper changed in front of pretty girls. If you were to listen to a conversation between Becca and me, you might get the sense that we hated each other, but we understood that the constant insults hurled back on forth were not meant to be serious.
    “Becca, can you get my laptop out of my book bag?”
    “Can you stop being helpless and get it yourself?” she said.
    “Can you brush your teeth for once?”
    “Can you even brush your own teeth?”
    As the sixth grade dance grew closer, all of my friends started to get very excited. For the few weeks leading up to the dance, our lunchtime conversations went like this:
    “Did you hear that Ben asked Laura to the dance?”
    “Did she say yes?”
    “I don’t know. Laura was supposedly going with Chase, but then they got in a fight because he told Kaity that she was hot.”
    “Oh my God! Seriously?”
    “Who are you guys going