The Music of Bees by Eileen Garvin (free ereaders txt) 📗

place and then shaving the stubble. The process made him sweat on warm days like this one. It was a big investment of time, really. But that was cool. These days he had nothing but time. Two hours to do his hair was no problem at all.

The reality of that hit him like a punch in the throat, as it often did when he sat in front of the bathroom mirror in the morning. The dark little hairs on his scalp poked through the white lather, standing up unwaveringly while Jacob Stevenson—or Jake, as everyone but his parents called him—could not. Jake swallowed hard. It seemed so stupid—the mohawk itself and the mohawk record, considering that in addition to having the tallest mohawk in the history of Hood River Valley High School, he was probably also the only kid there who’d ever had one in this farm town, which was short on punk and big on rodeo. It was also stupid because he no longer went to school there, having sort of graduated last spring. But mostly it seemed stupid because it was pretty much all he had to do on a given day, fix his fucking hair, now that the doctor’s appointments had tapered off and his physical therapy was down to once a month and he had all the time in the world to face the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

Jake pushed back from the mirror and looked at his body—lean and muscled in his torso and arms. His legs didn’t look terribly different than they had before. But sometimes he almost felt like they belonged to someone else.

The wheelchair was why he had “sort of” graduated. The school administration had mailed his diploma to his parents’ house while Jake lay in the hospital sixty miles away in Portland. His teachers had all passed him even though that was a stretch for a couple of classes, like PE, since he was in the habit of skipping to go to Noah’s house after second period to get high before lunch. He hadn’t darkened the gym door since before Christmas break. But even Mr. McKenna wasn’t enough of a dick to fail a PE student who was going to spend the rest of his life as a paraplegic. Irony, yo.

Jake’s mother had told him he’d be graduating when he was still doped up during those first days at the hospital. She sat next to his bed, her eyes puffy behind her pink-framed glasses. She tried not to cry in front of him, though she barely left the chair next to his bed. She sat for hours, holding his hand and murmuring that God was watching over him. She’d run through the list of people who had called and emailed to send their thoughts and prayers—his teachers, the neighbors, the mailman, people from church. People he’d never heard of, but he didn’t say that because it would have hurt her feelings. She brightened when she got to the part about the graduation ceremony, which, at that point, was still weeks away.

“We’re so proud of you, honey,” she said. “Your name will be in the program. They asked Noah to receive the diploma on your behalf, since you won’t be able to . . .”

Her voice faltered, and she stopped.

Jake winced, his smile a grimace. “Since I won’t be able to walk, you mean?”

His laughter came out in short barks, and then he couldn’t stop. He blamed the drugs, but there was more to it. He laughed and laughed at the word “walk,” which had taken on such a different meaning now that he had lost the use of his legs, his young, strong boy legs, legs that had skateboarded and run and climbed, legs he had completely taken for granted every single day of his stupid life until the day he couldn’t use them anymore. He couldn’t stop laughing even when his mom put her face into her hands and wept. He was such an asshole, he thought now, sitting in front of the mirror. He rolled forward and peered at himself, noticing how much thinner he was than he had been last spring.

He had laughed because the word “walk” had made him think of his father, Ed Stevenson, and his fleshy, angry face.

“The least goddamn thing you can do is walk your lazy ass down the aisle at graduation,” Ed had said. “You turn eighteen, we’re gonna give you a knife and fork and send you on your goddamn, merry way.”

That had been winter break of his senior year, when Jake realized his grades didn’t matter, now that he’d lost his music school scholarship, and it seemed like he might actually flunk out.

“Don’t worry about me, Ed,” Jake replied.

He’d begun calling his father by his first name when he started high school, knowing it bugged him.

“I’ll be out of here so fast you won’t even see me go.”

Jake had decided to move to Portland after the dream of music school faded to impossibility last year. He figured he’d work in a music store or a coffee shop someplace near the eastside clubs. He hadn’t worked out the details, but how hard could it be to get a job in a city that big?

However, since Jake had injured his spinal cord, his lazy ass was firmly stuck at his parents’ house. He wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and there was nothing Ed or anyone else could do about it.

He touched up the right side of his head, toweled it off, and started on the left, dragging the razor along the curve of his skull. The scraping sound was half-thrilling, half-sickening.

His father was part of a six-man building crew for Klare Construction. That meant he worked long hours on weekdays like this one, and those hours, even when they yawned wide and empty, were a relief to Jake. Weekends were harder, when Ed parked himself in front of the TV with a half rack of PBR and a bag of peanuts. Then Jake