“I can imagine that.”
Max shook out the mane of shaggy dirty-blond hair that gave him such a rugged look. He was tanned and muscular—the furthest thing imaginable from Simon’s pale, thin features—with mischievous eyes and a smile Heather expected made girls swoon back in high school. She found his not-quite-yet-cleaned-up-bad-boy persona as infuriating as it was intriguing. Max Jones just didn’t add up the way he ought to, and she didn’t know what to do with that.
Max tossed an ice-cream wrapper into the trash bin with all the precision he’d shown on the basketball court. “Truth is,” he said, his voice losing the edge it had held a moment ago, “I was a lot closer to the Kikowitzes of the world than to geeky kids like Simon.” He shot Heather a guilty glance. “Let’s just say I’ve shoved my share of kids into lockers. And, okay, I’m not especially proud of it, but I think I’d rather be that than go through life like Simon.”
Heather tried to picture a teenage Max prowling the halls of GFHS, picking on kids and collecting detention slips. It didn’t take much imagination. “Football team? Motorcycles?”
He laughed, and Heather reminded herself how such charming smiles shouldn’t always be trusted. Sometimes those dashing ways covered some pretty devastating weaknesses. “No,” he corrected her. “Basketball and my dad’s old Thunderbird. Well, before I rolled it my junior year, that is.”
“You were a terror in high school.” She nodded over to the black car with flames and the HTWELZ2 license plate. “It boggles the mind.”
“Very funny. You have no idea how much work it takes to make a car like that look so cool. No way was I going to drive around in some suburban-housewife minivan.” He looked at her, hard. “I’m still the guy I was, and if people can’t take that it comes in a wheeled version now, it’s their problem.”
It was an admirable thought, but his words came with such a defiant edge that Heather wondered how many times a week Max chewed someone’s head off for an ill-phrased remark or just plain ignorance about life with a disability. Bitterness did that to some men. “Maybe that’s just it. Maybe Simon hasn’t figured out who he is yet. I had no idea who I was in high school—I just bumbled around most of the time trying to stay out of the sights of all those mean cheerleader types.” She borrowed Max’s measurement. “I suppose I’d say I was a lot closer to Simon than thugs like Kikowitz.”
“Thugs like me?” Again the disarming smile, the penitent hoodlum with his hand over his heart.
“I don’t know too many thugs who would round up a bunch of wheelchairs to play basketball with a geeky kid and two hapless ladies.” She was going to say girls, but hadn’t she chided Max for the label earlier?
“Don’t call my sister hapless. She was in the army, you know.” He wheeled a careless arc around the front walkway, ending up a foot or two closer to her than his earlier position. “So let me guess—4-H Club? Junior Librarians of America? Church choir?” He did not list them with any admiration—that was certain.
“Art, mostly. I kept to myself a lot. And not choir, but church youth group.”
“I knew it.” Max executed a spin while he rolled his head back. “One of those.”
“Hey, cut that out. I had a...good time in high school.” That was at least partially true. Some of high school had been great, but she’d learned her sophomore year what Simon already knew: high school wasn’t kind to sick or injured kids.
Max stopped his maneuvers. “No, you didn’t.”
Heather froze.
“Girls who had awesome times in high school do not come back as guidance counselors. You want to help people. And you want to help people because you don’t want anyone to go through what you did.”
“Where do you get off making assumptions like that?”
Max threw his hands in the air. “Hey, don’t get all up about it. Do you know how many physical therapists I’ve had since my accident? How many counselors and docs? Pretty soon it gets easy to recognize the type, that’s all.”
“Oh, yes, JJ told me you used to tear through a therapist a week back at the beginning. A paragon of empathy.” That wasn’t particularly fair to throw back at him, but for Heather, his attitude struck an old nerve. “Look—” she forced herself to soften her voice when Max’s eyes grew hard and dark “—I want you to help Simon, and I think you might actually be able to. But not if you dump him into some labeled box based on your own experience. Simon’s had his disability his entire life—he’s never known anything different. You need to respect who he is, not who you want him to be, or this will never work.”
Max didn’t reply at first. He looked down, fiddling with a joint on his chair. “Okay, I get it.” When he raised his eyes again, the edge in his features was replaced by something else. Determination? She couldn’t quite tell. “What do you want to happen from all this?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know if you want Simon to be happy, to be less of a target or to be able to punch Kikowitz out. What’s the end goal here?”
She thought carefully before she answered. “I want Simon not to be afraid of who he is or what Kikowitz might do to him. He’s brilliant, you know. Simon’s one of the smartest kids at our school. I want him to enjoy coming here, not dread it.”
Max didn’t appear to have an immediate answer to that. After what she hoped was a thoughtful pause, he said, “You want him to be able to take risks?”
“He needs a few outlets, I’ll admit that.”
Max pivoted to face her. “Then we go sailing. You, me and Simon on Saturday afternoon. That way we both can convince the geek there’s more to life than Math Club.”
“Don’t call him a geek. And how did you know Simon was in Math Club?”
“Puh-lease. I saw two calculators in his backpack. The dock behind Jones River Sports, two o’clock. You’re in charge of permission slips and snacks.”
Heather tucked her hands into her pockets. “Who said you could take over here?”
“Eleven therapists,” he called as he started down the ramp, clicking the remote starter on his car to send it roaring to life as he descended. “Actually twelve, if you count the one who lasted ten minutes. And four nurses. And there was an intern at Adventure Access who—”
“Okay!” Heather shouted as Max somehow made the engine rev before he even got into the car. “I get the picture.”
Max checked his watch again Saturday afternoon. Since when did he get nervous about stuff like this? Chronically late, he didn’t have a leg to stand on—if he could stand—about anyone’s punctuality. Still, Simon’s dad seemed like the guy to show up ten minutes early, not twenty minutes late. And where was Heather? He wheeled the length of the dock again, needlessly checking the ropes that tied the Sea Legs to the dock, frustrated with how much he’d managed to invest in one kid’s sailing lesson.
It was the look in Simon’s eyes that did him in. That heartbreaking eagerness at the mention of going sailing nearly instantly squashed by a dad’s harping voice. Parents were hard enough to take at that age as it was. To have all that other stuff loaded on top, then compounded by kids like Kikowitz?
Kids like he’d been?
The faces of all the kids he’d ever bullied had haunted him last night. He saw Simon’s face every time he shut his eyes, and it was making him crazy. Sleepless, fidgety and just plain nuts.
The sound of tires on gravel hit his ears, and he looked up, expecting the Williamses’ big red