Golden's Rule. C. E. Edmonson

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СКАЧАТЬ at that point, and Coach Stover ran across the court. She yanked down my kneepad and started squeezing my knee and my ankle. “Does this hurt? Does this?”

      But there wasn’t any pain. My leg wasn’t even numb, like when you sit with your leg tucked under you for too long. No, what I mostly felt was embarrassed. I mean, omigosh, I’m the star of the team and I can’t even stand on my own two feet. Puh-leeeze. I just sat there on the floor—I mean, where was I going to go?—and slowly died of embarrassment while waiting for the leg thing to pass. But it didn’t.

      That’s when Coach Stover made it ten times worse. She told Cynthia to get the wheelchair from under the stands, and I was wheeled down a corridor that seemed about ten miles long. All the way to the nurse’s room on the other side of the school. Past the lockers, the lunchroom, and the library. Fortunately, this was after classes were over and the only kids still at school were geeks from the physics club. But still, word would get out. The invincible Maddie laid low by some stupid sports injury.

      Talk about a hellooooooo moment. I mean, I had good grades and everything. But so what? Ninety-five percent of FDR’s students went on to college. Everybody had good grades. This was Montclair, New Jersey, where the average family in our community was considered upper middle-class. No, grades wouldn’t cut it for a five-foot-ten-inch girl in eighth grade. Basketball was my thing. I was hoping to parlay my skills into a scholarship some day, and my height was going to work to my advantage for once. I mean, the wheelchair didn’t even fit me, and I had to pull up my bad leg or it would’ve scraped the floor. I felt like a snail in a transparent shell. There was nowhere to hide—but that didn’t stop me from trying my best to hide how freaked out I was feeling inside.

      Nurse Cole was a tiny woman. Her shoulders were so pointy that she looked as if she forgot to take her uniform off the hanger when she put it on in the morning. She had little round eyes and her mouth was a lipless slash that turned down at the corners. Trust me on this: Nurse Cole didn’t like kids. When I came through the door in that wheelchair, she put her hands on her hips and shook her head in disgust. She was packing a thermos and a plastic container in a tote bag, ready to go home now that the basketball game was almost over.

      “My, my,” she said, “what have we here?”

      Like I was an insect that had crawled out from under the baseboards.

      “Maddie Bergamo,” I answered. I was using my polite voice, the one that says, I don’t like you any more than you like me, but I’m being civil so there’s nothing you can do about it.

      “And would you mind telling me what happened to you?”

      “I fell.”

      “Can you stand up?”

      “Uh-uh. Like, my right leg isn’t working.”

      Nurse Cole’s angry glare vanished and her eyes beat a hasty retreat. Okay, that made me nervous. It seemed to me that in Nurse Cole’s opinion, most kids who came to her office were slackers who just wanted to get out of school early. Her job was to send them back to class. But she wasn’t thinking that way now.

      “Are you in pain?”

      “No. I just can’t move it.”

      “And this just happened? Out of nowhere? You didn’t feel any weakness before today?” She was shooting questions at me like I shoot lay-ups at practice.

      “Yes, yes, and no.” I wasn’t trying for snotty, but I don’t think I succeeded. Talk about a reality check. The truth was that I’d been perfectly fine until the moment my leg stopped working. And all of these questions weren’t exactly putting my mind at ease.

      “All right, up on the table.” Nurse Cole helped me out of the wheelchair and onto an examining table, the kind with the roll of paper on one end. Not exactly chic or comfortable. Then she did exactly what Coach Stover did. She pressed my calf and my thigh, rotated my ankle, bent my knee, and rolled my hip. Everything worked fine and I could feel what she was doing, but my leg was a dead weight.

      But Nurse Cole wasn’t finished. She took my temperature and checked my blood pressure. She shined a light into my eyes and had me follow her finger as she waved it back and forth. Finally, she asked me a series of questions: name the school principal, the day of the week, the month of the year. Although I couldn’t see how any of it was related to my leg, I played along.

      “Tuttleman, Tuesday, and March,” I answered without hesitation, which I guess was reassuring, because at least she didn’t summon the paramedics. Good thing I don’t freeze on pop quizzes.

      “I’ll have to call one of your parents to pick you up,” she finally said.

      “My mom’s at work, and my dad’s in Greece.”

      Nurse Cole’s lips curled and turned into an exasperated frown. I was annoying her, which I figured was a good sign. She was back to her normal, kid-hating self.

      “I didn’t ask that, Maddie. But never mind. Your mother’s work number will be on file in the principal’s office and I’ll need to consult with him anyway. Make sure you don’t go anywhere.”

      As if I was going to get up and sprint out the door. Only that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I was one of

      those latchkey children who learn to take care of themselves. I know it’s not fashionable—the school’s Alphas would laugh in my face—but I took a lot of pride in being responsible. I picked up after myself, and I’d become a halfway decent cook. Most nights, when we didn’t order in, I made dinner. In fact, I planned to put cooking on my résumé when I applied to college. Just in case basketball, and good grades, and a killer SAT score weren’t enough. So, helpless-child-who-can’t-stand-on-her-own-two-feet was not part of my self-image. Ken the Karate Kid might be proud of the way he overcame his disability, but my dream was a basketball scholarship. I needed to run. And for that, I needed my leg to wake up.

      Thankfully, the Bengali Rose showed up for support a few minutes after Nurse Cole left for the principal’s office. She asked if I was all right, but when I described what was happening to me, she changed the subject to a scarf she’d picked up for “next to nothing” over the weekend. That was her idea of a diversion tactic to get my mind off my leg. True, I was looking for something to distract me from my lifeless limb, but did it have to be something so hideous?

      The scarf didn’t have a label and it was major-league ugly—small purple and black checks with scarlet fringes— but she was sure it was a Hermes.

      “I practically stole it,” she announced. “Congratulations,” I answered, stopping short of asking if she could break back into the scene of the crime and return it to the bargain bin where it belongs. “Do you mind telling me who won the game?”

      “We did, but it was close. The team kinda fell apart when you…when you left.”

      The Bengali Rose was a short, pretty girl with big black eyes, a pouty mouth, a pointy little chin…and obviously a huge phobia of nurses’ offices. She looked more bugged out about being there than I was.

      And to tell you the truth, she was dressed more for an art gallery opening than she was for Nurse Cole’s office. She was wearing a long blue sweater that fell to her hips, a patterned skirt that dropped to her ankles, and button-up shoes that must have been like a hundred years old. Bizarre, to say the least. But there was plenty of room for girls СКАЧАТЬ