The steps were impressive, and the railing gleamed in the sun. We ran up the steps and, without even a split second to determine where I might end up, I placed my board with me atop it on the railing and began my descent. It was another cowabunga moment with adults aghast, pulling their hands off the railing as I slid south at the speed of infinity. I stayed focused, kept my wits about me, and was near the bottom when something went wrong. My board caught on metal, and I was launched into the air.
All of the arguments about safety helmets had fallen on my two deaf ears, of course, and some protective Styrofoam would have come in handy at the moment my skull made impact with the curb. A bus tire skidded to a stop a full twenty centimetres before crushing my skull, but my head had come down hard on that darned curb. I was delivered into unconsciousness and went someplace else while pedestrians tried to figure out what to do with my unconscious body. Ozzie began to cry. He thought he had killed me. He kept shouting, “It isn’t fair” for some reason, but I guess he thought I was a goner and that my life had been too short.
Someone would later explain that my brain had been bruised (along with my ego) and that it was a pretty serious concussion as far as concussions go. I did not die and then resurrect like a Jesus Christ of skateboarders or anything. But I did travel to someplace far from Stockton.
It was a beach, I can tell you that. And everything was shimmering (a word Mrs. Dalway says is overused). And there were two beautiful girls. (I’m sorry, but there were.) They were wonderful and sweet and they were surrounded by light. Everything was fuzzy in an extremely bright sort of way. I thought I recognized them both as my two all-time favourite babysitters, but I could not make out their faces very well. I just knew that I was someplace safe and happy. A young man with a surfboard walked up to me and held out something in his hand. I put out my own hand, palm upward, and he dropped into it twenty or so of those little shiny ball bearings used in skateboard wheels. He motioned up at the sky, and I seemed to understand that I was supposed to throw the ball bearings up, so I did.
The little steel balls flew to the sky and hovered there, each becoming a small, beautiful planet. Everyone on the beach applauded.
I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but it was like the first time in my life I felt truly appreciated. I felt loved. And I did not want to have to return to my old, ordinary self.
But I eventually returned anyway — to a blinding headache and a hospital room with a TV. The Simpsons was on, and Homer was trying to save the nuclear power plant from a meltdown.
And I remember my mother crying one time when she came into my room and thought I was asleep. I recall feeling her tears soak through my hospital gown. She said that she loved me very much and if I would only get well, she would promise to be a better mother. When I did start to get better, though, she didn’t show the same kind of affection. But both of my parents seemed relieved that I was back.
I recall one doctor, too; I think he was still in medical school, and he had kind of long blond hair and a really relaxed way of talking to me. He was a Star Trek fan too and used to quiz me about Klingons and Star Fleet regulations. I remember that. He played chess as well, but poorly. No sense of strategy at all, and he was easy to beat.
All the time I was in that hospital room, I never felt alone. I had my own room — my father saw to that, big spender that he was in those days. Doctors came and went. Orderlies, nurses. But there was something else as well, like a presence of some sort, like someone was watching over me, making sure I was okay, even when no one was in the room.
By the time I left the hospital, I had regained most of my memory, but it had holes in it. I couldn’t remember if I liked Coke or Pepsi better. I couldn’t remember which channel Star Trek was on. Or which drawer in the kitchen had the knives, forks, and spoons.
They said I suffered some short-term memory loss, which came in handy as an excuse for doing so poorly on a math test and French vocabulary quiz (both of which I had never studied for). My parents gave me only a short, incomprehensible lecture about how foolish I had been. They bought me things to make me feel better, but my father threw away my skateboard, which the ambulance driver had kindly returned to my house after the accident.
The doctor explained my lethargy as part of post-traumatic stress. “His accident,” he said, “has had as much of an emotional impact on him as if he had been in a war.” I did continue to have that image of the bus floating towards me the split second before I was knocked out. But that wasn’t what was bugging me. I really wanted to get back to that beach and those people on it. My old babysitters and the surf dude who handed me the tiny ball bearing planets.
Regular life just wasn’t going to work for me anymore.
CHAPTER FOUR
I accidentally started to pay attention to Mrs. Dalway, who was telling us she had once seen Mel Gibson acting in a live version of Macbeth, and I was wondering why he would want to do a thing like that. I had liked Mel Gibson in the movie Braveheart, and when I was thirteen, he had me thinking of taking up sword fighting as a lifelong career until it clicked in my still slightly bruised brain that there probably wasn’t much of a calling for sword fighting anymore.
Then Mrs. Dalway read a few more lines from the bard:
Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earthbound root? Sweet bodements! Good!
Such was my distraction that I had not been keeping an eye on Andrea, and when I looked over towards the computers she was gone.
What I did next was considered to be quite unusual in a high school English classroom. I began to cry. I really did.
I know. A sixteen-year-old boy crying in the middle of Shakespeare is a little weird — well, a lot weird. I mean, almost anyone at Stockton High could tell you I was not normal. Normal and me just didn’t go hand in hand. It wasn’t the first time I’d cried. I’d done it before. And it’s not just a sudden downpour of tears. It’s not like throwing up where it just suddenly happens when you eat some bad pizza.
My crying is attached to a very deep-seated emotional response to things. I can’t watch the news, for example. If bombs are dropping or if children are starving or even if the president of the United States is spreading hatred again with one of those speeches — well, I’ll start to blubber.
Mrs. Dalway thought I was so moved by her reading that it had unleashed the floods. She stopped mid-speech, looked my way, and seemed stunned. She had never moved a student to tears before.
“Are you all right?”
I blew my nose loudly. “I’m okay. Continue,” I said, droopy-faced and sodden.
The class was laughing by now. What else could they do? Many of them had seen me act oddly before, but I was still a reliable source of entertainment. Mrs. Dalway stumbled over her lines and finally gave up. “Are there any questions?” she asked. The old standby.
Tanya Webb, a girl whose beauty had held my attention for quite a long time, raised her hand. “Is any of this going to be on the exam?” This was the question she asked in every class.
Mrs. Dalway set her book down on her desk and just stared at Tanya. Then, in a bit of a fluster, she asked us to spend the rest of the class writing down our impressions of Macbeth as a person and what advice we would give him if he were our best friend. Eventually the bell rang and feet began shuffling out of the room.
I handed in a blank sheet of paper with my name on it. I was sorely afraid that this amazing girl, Andrea, real or imagined, had swept into my life for a brief encounter and then disappeared forever. I had not figured out who she was or even what she was, but I was certain she was the best thing that had happened to me in a long, long time.
“Simon, are you sure you are all right?” Mrs. Dalway asked.
I wasn’t all right. My world had collapsed around me like a bubble yet again and I