Free Push Girl by Chelsie Hill, Jessica Love Page A

used all the force in my arms to push myself forward, and it worked, but it was slow going compared to the ease of the slick floor of the hospital and the tile of our entryway.
    “Thick carpet,” Dad said. “That’s going on the list, too. Sorry, kiddo.”
    “It’s fine,” I said. “Just give me—”
    “No problem,” Dad said. He came up behind me, dropped Logan into my lap, and pushed my chair into the room.
    I hadn’t been asking for help; I’d been asking him to give me a minute to do it on my own. But he was super quick to assume I needed his assistance. I was about to snap at him, tell him to leave me alone and let me do it, but we were in the office before I even had a chance.
    “Yeah,” he said. “That carpet is rough. Maybe we’ll get some of those plastic things they put under desk chairs. You know those plastic things?”
    He kept rambling on about the plastic things, but I was too distracted by the sight of my mom standing in the middle of my dad’s office, which was now my bedroom set up exactly as it had been upstairs. The office was smaller, and it was more rectangular instead of square, but aside from that, it was identical. Mom had even painted the walls the same bright pink and hung my dance posters in their same spots on the wall.
    My first reaction was a deep irritation that surged underneath my skin. She rifled through all my stuff without permission. She opened every drawer, touched every box, looked in every secret nook to get this room re-created exactly as it had been upstairs. Before getting in an accident that jacked up my spine and left me paralyzed, I would have said that this was my worst nightmare.
    But one look at Mom’s face told me to keep that irritation to myself. She didn’t look like herself at all. My tiny mom looked even smaller, curled into herself somehow. Shrunken. And even though her hair was styled and her face was made up, she still looked unkempt somehow. Worn down. Aged.
    So I bit my tongue and kept my irritation inside, under my skin. “Wow,” I said. That pretty much covered it.
    I rolled my chair over to Mom so I could hug her, but as I got close, she backed up a couple of paces. Turning toward my desk, her back to me, she said, “I tried to get everything exactly as it was. And don’t worry, I didn’t snoop or anything.” She opened the top to my computer, blinked absently at the screen, and shut it again. She was probably lying about the snooping, but just hearing her say it calmed my nerves.
    “I love it, Mom. Thank you.” Again, I pushed myself closer to her, and again, she moved away. This time toward the closet, where she opened the door and showed me where everything was, even though she’d taken care to put everything in the exact spot I’d chosen for it upstairs, only on a lower bar.
    I looked over at Dad to see if he noticed Mom scooting away from me, putting distance between us like my injury was contagious, but he had wandered out of the bedroom. He probably ran off to order a custom crane to lift me around the house.
    Mom explained where everything was in my room and told me things I needed to know to go back to school the next day, but she didn’t actually look at me, and every time I moved myself toward her, she shifted away.
    Eventually I gave up trying to break through to my mom. I sat still as she talked to me about my new bedroom, and I scratched Logan between his ears while he stretched himself out in my lap and licked my arm. It looked like my dog was the only one in this family who could manage to look at me.
    *   *   *
    I couldn’t sleep. Logan was cuddled up next to me, right in the crook of my arm, and I stared up at the ceiling in the dark, trying not to think too hard about how school was going to go the next day. Did people know I was coming back tomorrow? How would they act toward me?
    And what about Curt? He hadn’t replied to a single one of my calls or texts. Every time I thought about how he’d completely