He was bigger and stronger than Jake. Pomeroy played football, so Jake would usually have dodged this kind of wrestling match. But for some reason, he dropped his cigarette and spun around to grab Pomeroy’s meaty torso. Maybe because Megan was watching and laughing. Jake threw himself at the bigger boy, wrapping his arms around Pomeroy’s waist. His friend staggered under his weight.
“Christ, Stevenson!” he yelled as he slipped.
It would have been no big deal, except they were standing on the second-story roof over the patio. Jake fell, his body twisting in the air, and landed with a sickening thud on the low wall separating Mrs. Pomeroy’s rose garden from the driveway. He looked up and saw Megan and Pomeroy peering over the edge of the roof. He wanted to laugh up at them that he was okay, but he was not. And things would never be the same again.
Unlucky, the doctors told him later. That was what they called his incomplete spinal cord injury to T11 and T12 in his lower back.
Jake felt sick remembering. He took a deep breath and wheeled himself down the hall to his room. The loop had started in his head.
He would never walk again, the surgeon said, but at least he had good control of his upper body since the injury was only partial. “You can be grateful for that.”
Jake had stared at the guy. Grateful? Gratitude was far, far from his mind then.
He pulled on his favorite gray Dickies shirt, buttoned it up, grabbed his backpack, and slung it over his chair.
He was lucky to have the use of his hands and arms, the redheaded nurse had told him, despite the asymmetry of strength on one side.
He slid his sunglasses into his shirt pocket.
He was young and otherwise healthy, his PT said over and over again. He could have a really great life.
Jake lifted one leg onto the foot rail with both hands and then the other. He pulled on his Doc Martens, laced them up, and wheeled through the house, out the door, and down the ramp.
“A successful career,” his therapist said.
He put on his sunglasses and stuck in his earbuds. He turned up the volume on his iPhone, and the familiar rasp of ska-punk filled his head.
“Computer programming, maybe,” his mom suggested, nodding at the social worker and then at Jake. “You like those games so much, don’t you?”
He maneuvered his chair down the gravel driveway and out into the bike lane that snaked along Belmont. His wheels kicked up dust and bits of gravel. He smiled at his speed. The chair was pretty fly. His classmates had taken up a collection for it. Otherwise he’d have the crap-assed one his dad’s insurance would have covered. They had announced it at graduation, Noah told him. He was glad he hadn’t been there to have to thank them, which would have been so humiliating, though he was grateful for it. He would spend the afternoon, as he had been lately, now that the spring rains were tapering off, out near the orchards where he knew he wouldn’t run into any of his friends. Those who weren’t at college—like Noah, who was working to save money to travel—would be at work or hanging out at the skate park.
The air smelled green and fresh. It pricked something in his heart. This season—when unexpected rain showers swept across the valley floor and the wind turned the orchards into waves of blossoms—had always filled him with hope. The chorus frogs sang in the irrigation ditches, and the days lengthened imperceptibly. Hawks perched along the fence line of county roads, and tiny finches darted through the air. Flickers keened in the shadows of the forest. He never told anyone he noticed these things. But spring always brought him a secret joy, the promise of something new. Now he felt his heart try to rise toward it and fall back defeated.
He turned up the music. It was Spring Heeled Jack’s Connecticut Ska, which launched the band into the U.S. punk scene in the early nineties, just before Jake had been born. Jake would focus on Pat Gingras’s trumpet and parse how the band’s sound was changing before Gingras was replaced by Tyler Jones. He would make up arguments in his head, today taking the position that Jones’s style maintained the band’s classic ska-punk sound, but who believed that, really? If you had any ear at all, you could hear Spring Heeled Jack working toward the mainstream sound of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, which would eventually swallow some of its members. Other days he would conjecture that Gingras’s sound was authentic and true to the real mission of the music, which was what he really believed. So did every other genuine ska fan. It didn’t matter. It was like his Tomb Raider games. Just killing time in the jail that was his life. This life had replaced the life he was supposed to have—one of music and promise, the other life that now felt like something he had imagined.
Jake’s musical ability, which had been obvious from an early age, was a mystery to his parents, who were not musical people. Luckily his teachers noticed and had suggested he join the school band. He’d been playing trumpet since middle school. He couldn’t remember life without music. He didn’t have words to explain it, this vivid thing that lived in him.
In the fall of his senior year, Jake had been offered a three-quarter scholarship to Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, mostly based on his musical ability and letters of recommendation. If his grades had been better, it might have been a full ride, but 75 percent was enough. He was going to study music theory, history, and performance with trumpet as his primary instrument. He kept the acceptance letter in his trumpet case for months and pulled it out to reread when he was alone even though he pretty much had it memorized.
“Dear Mr. Stevenson,
