Wheels of Steel, Book 1 by Pepper Pace
Jason quickly pressed pause, his breath coming out in anxious gusts. He covered his face with his palms. Sweat had formed on his brow and he felt sick. He drew in a few shaky breaths and then when he felt calm again he pressed play and watched himself seizing. It was the first time he’d ever seen himself doing that. The guy videotaping it was repeatedly saying, ‘Oh shit, Oh shit.’ It didn’t last long, and when it was over Jason watched himself begin to chuckle. The guy had somehow zoomed in to his face and there was a peacefulness there in his expression.
Jason pressed stop and sat there quietly. He didn’t like it; that this very private moment was there on tape for everyone to see. It was yet another thing about his life that he couldn’t control. Cursing quietly he took another deep breath and then went to the bathroom to shower and to get ready for school. Maybe if his aid got here on time he’d make it to his first class, he thought this bitterly; bitter because yet again his life was being dictated by actions that he had no control over.
***
Robin was tired. She had messed up orders at work and gotten yelled at by a customer. Mama had called and instead of spending her break taking a power nap, she had spent it trying to thwart the whole vacation issue. True, she and Mama had been getting along better, but that didn’t necessarily mean that she wanted to spend a week with her.
And then, to make matters worse, after work, instead of driving straight home and doing a nose dive into her bed, she had realized that her tank was dangerously close to the big E mark and she needed to fuel up. She yawned as she filled the tank and by the time she got home it was after midnight. She needed to be out the door no later than five thirty if she hoped to be at Jason’s by six. That meant the alarm would need to be set no later than four forty-five and she could snooze for about ten minutes. That was the plan.
That left her four hours sleep.
But instead of snoozing for ten minutes, she slipped back into a deep sleep only to jump up at a quarter after five. She showered quickly, cursing at herself and swearing that there was nothing that would make her late. With no time to tame her hair, she brushed it quickly and pulled on a ballcap. She slipped on an Adidas jogging suit because it was quick, though not all that complimentary to her shape, and then she hurried out the door at twenty minutes to six.
Traffic wasn’t too bad and she pulled into a parking space in front of Jason’s apartment with three minutes to spare. She rang his doorbell proud of herself even though it had been touch and go for a few moments.
The door swung open and Jason wheeled around and retreated without a word.
“Good morning to you, too.” She said after a brief pause.
“I’m not a morning person.” He grumbled. “First thing first; I’m going to show you how to use the coffee press.” She followed him into the kitchen. The dishes from yesterday were still there. Yuck.
He instructed her to fill the teapot and set it to boil. Then he showed her where the coffee was located. He explained how much to put into the bottom of the glass carafe. She hadn’t had time to get her own coffee so when he showed her where he kept the mugs she retrieved two. By that time the water was simmering in the teapot and she poured it over the grounds.
“By the time you get the cream and sugar out it will be time to press it.” She smiled. Well that hadn’t been as tough as it had looked. “Now if you wouldn’t mind, I like heavy cream and sugar in mine, and I’m going to the restroom.” He disappeared and Robin made up their coffee. He used a tall plastic traveler’s mug and she made sure to put the lid on carefully. All she needed was for him to burn himself and get mad at her.
Then, while he was still in the restroom she did the dishes hoping that he wouldn’t get pissed or expect her to do them all of the time. The thing is, she felt that if he left dishes in the sink then one day she’d walk into the kitchen and there would be roaches and that was something that she just couldn’t tolerate.
In the bathroom, Jason was in front of the mirror, struggling with the hairbrush. His hair, dampened by his morning bath, was impossibly tangled. Some days he worked the knots out, some days he didn’t. It was a chore to maintain his shoulder length curls but he wouldn’t cut it. He needed his hair long in order to show his mother that he was man enough to make his own decisions. She hated his hair long and therefore he wanted it this way.
He had a brush that had a velcro strap that went around his fist so that he wouldn’t constantly drop it but he still managed to pull out more knots then he managed to work through. Eventually Robin made her way to the bathroom when he didn’t return to the kitchen and the clock was ticking. She stood in the open doorway and watched him struggle.
Fatigue took away much of her inhibitions. “Let me have that brush.” He gave her a mean look but when she didn’t retreat he handed it to her and grumbled under his breath. She realized that much of his annoyance wasn’t directed at anyone in particular; he was just a grumbler. She gripped a handful of damp curls and quickly brushed them smooth. When she had the ends tangle free, she gently worked the brush from scalp to end. She had his hair smooth in about five minutes.
“You did that quick.” She met his eyes in the mirror and then she quickly swept off her cap. Her tight curls sprung out from beneath it. “Ahh.” He said in understanding. She had hair about as unruly as his. She handed him back the brush and then quickly pulled the cap back on her head. She looked over at the toilet.
“Did you already…?”
“Yep. All taken care of.” He wheeled out of the bathroom. “I’m going to eat breakfast and then you can help me shave. After that we can hit the road.” He ate Cheerios again and was equally as messy. Robin sat at the table sipping her coffee and watching him with steadily drooping eyes. He read the paper and ignored her. When he coughed she sat up straight and stared at him as if she had gotten caught with her hand in the cookie jar. If he noticed he didn’t mention it.
Just so that she wouldn’t feel the desire to continue to doze off she told him about the class. “Mary Louise set up my seizure emergency class for this Saturday.” He peeked at her over his paper.
“Yeah. She left me a message.” He folded his paper neatly. “I made you a schedule of my classes. Tomorrow is Friday and I only have two so you won’t have to get here until eight.” She almost wanted to drop to the floor and kiss his feet. “But I have massage therapy and I’ll need you to get me there and back. Still it will be a fairly short day.”
“Okay.” She wondered something. “Jason, you don’t have an aid for the evening, do you?”
“Currently, no.”
“Well…don’t you need one?”
“At dinnertime and at bedtime, yes. But most times I just have a shake or soup so I don’t have to worry about choking.” He wasn’t a hermit so if people came over or he went out then he could risk heavier food. Bathing still required some effort; not the actual washing himself, but getting in and out of the tub without killing himself. And it would be much more efficient if he had an aid that could help him with the bathroom, but he already knew that Robin was too green for something like that. He could do it, it just took three times as long.
“So what do you do in the evenings if you have to run an errand?”
He gave her a long look. “I don’t.” He sipped his coffee and saw the look on her face. It was filled with pity, which he didn’t like. “My mother helps me if I need to do things like shop. She comes over every Friday for that kind of stuff. And she takes me to doctor appointments. But I had a decision; either get an evening aid or a daytime aid. Obviously it was more important for me to have a person during the day.” She knew that Pinnacle didn’t have enough people…gee she wondered why.
She heard a faint sound of musical beats and he reached in his pocket for a cell phone. “Link.” He said. “Yeah, I already saw it.” His brow gathered and he looked peeved. “It’s not cool. I don’t give a shit, that wasn’t cool to post that…that was…” He just shook his head a grimace appeared on his face. Robin
“Dude!” Link was saying. “No one even thought the seizure was real, didn’t you see that?! The guy filming it was tripping out at how you threw that in at the end! Fuck, Top, if we start teaming up I’ll throw a seizure in at the end! They all love the fact that we’re in wheel chairs and our logo with the wheelchair and it’s like Daft Punk with the helmets! Top…man we gotta talk about expanding our horizons. Go check out the comments on that guy’s page! People are wanting to know where they can see us play!” Jason put the phone on speaker and wheeled into the living room.
“Hold on, I’m looking.” He refreshed the desktop computer and went to Youtube. After a moment he was back at the video letting it play out as he read the three messages. “Link, ass! There’s only three messages and you left one of them!”
Link was laughing. “Yeah, well…”
But the other two were asking about where they’d be playing next. And one even said that they had all of Wheels of Steel mixes; which only amounted to seven, though YouTube had some practice mixes that got lots of positive feedbacks.
Robin had washed up the last few dishes and the Portishead beat caught her attention. She went out to the living room, curious, and saw Jason at the computer. Then she heard someone begin scratching with the tune and it was really good. She walked up behind him to see what he was looking at. It blew her away when she saw the familiar red tangle of curls suspended behind headphones.
She looked at Jason in awe, pointing at the big computer monitor. “That’s you…” Jason looked at her quickly and then pressed stop.
“Link, I gotta head out.”
“Top-’ But he disconnected the phone.
“You’re a DJ?” She asked in admiration. Then she really took a close look at his equipment. And that’s when she finally understood what the woman in the cafeteria had been talking about. And of course Top was his stage name. God she felt dense. Jason was shutting down the computer.
“Some friends and I mix music and make videos under the name of Wheels of Steel.”
“Oh that is so cool! And you’re on YouTube?”
He wheeled himself to the closet. “Yep. Look, as much as I love talking about mixing and beats, we gotta head out, it’s after seven. I need you to grab my backpack and laptop.”
Robin jumped to her task even as she was still curious about the new information she’d learned about this strange young man.
He rubbed his cheek. “My Mom’s going to shit if she sees this…” She hated facial hair. He didn’t much care for it either but now he was getting pretty shaggy and even though it was his thing to be the defiant son, the beard was just damn itchy. “You’ll meet my Mom tomorrow. Open the door.”
She opened the door. “I’m going to meet your Mom?” She didn’t know why she needed to do that. If his Mom was going to be around then she didn’t need to be here. She kept that thought to herself though. He wheeled down the walkway and to her car. She opened the door for him and he stood up and swung his legs out until he was in position to sit down in the passenger seat. Once again she wondered why he didn’t use crutches or a walker. She loaded his things into the backseat and then quickly loaded the wheelchair into the trunk. Today she did it much faster.
He was already wearing his headphones and had tuned her out. She would have asked him about his music but he obviously wasn’t interested in talking to her. She slipped a CD into the player. He wasn’t the only one who enjoyed music while driving. She put in Maxwell’s Black Summer’s Night. After a while she saw Jason smirk, or at least she thought it was a smirk. Sometimes it was hard to tell when his face tensed and relaxed under a power that wasn’t his own. The only things that were exceedingly clear is when he smiled or when he scowled--the latter done with more frequency.
“What?” She had thought about ignoring the look but was curious. “You don’t like Maxwell?”
“It’s not that. Let me just guess, you have C.D’s with Erykah Badu, Trey Songz…” He stared at her, “and Drake when you’re walking on the wild side.”
She glanced at him. “What’s wrong with that?”
“I didn’t say anything was wrong with it. I just had you pegged right.” She listened to the same rehashed R & B and hip hop and probably thought that was all there was.
“I don’t have any Drake. So there, you were wrong.” Now it was her turn to scowl. “And it’s no big leap to look at a black woman my age in Cincinnati and guess what kind of music I listen to. If I was in the south you would have guessed Ludacris, T.I., Chamillionaire.”
He was staring out the window when he said, “Oh I’m so sorry Miss Jackson, did I forget OUTKAST, I apologize a trillion times.” She cracked a smile. Well he certainly knew his music.
He glanced at her. “So what do I listen to?”
“Everything.” She said. “You’re a D.J.”
Jason looked at her; really looked at her for the first time.
Chapter 11
At school she got him out of the car and into the building quite efficiently, not giving him the opportunity to complain about anything she did. His first class was some type of math. She could tell by the equations written on the dry marker board. They were early enough that people were still filing in. Jason pointed out where he wanted the laptop set up and then he wheeled up to the professor. They talked in hushed tones. The professor seemed to be considering something and he glanced at her then he nodded his head.
He wheeled back to where he had her set up but didn’t bother to explain what he and the Professor had been talking about. “I wish you would have remembered to grab my coffee.” He said. Then he opened his laptop and powered up. She ignored him, wanting to say that she was an aid, not a psychic. But she was not interested in starting an argument. He slipped on headphones and she saw him navigate to YouTube. Damn, is that all he did was listen to music? She liked YouTube also but she did do other things.
He was plugged into a playlist which he minimized and then he pulled up another page. It looked like hieroglyphs. He then opened up the book bag that she had set out for him and withdrew a calculus book. She knew it! Some type of math!
He stared at her. “Okay, Robin. I use a graphic software for calculus because my handwriting is pretty bad. The program I use is MathEQ, but sometimes I need hands. So I’m going to ask you to write some things out for me-”
She sucked in a nervous breath. “Jason…I don’t know anything about calculus.”
“You don’t need to. I’m going to show you what to write, ok?”
“Ok…” She did not want to do this, but as long as all she had to do was copy what he told her then she’d do it.
“Ok, on the board is the problem. Write it on the paper. Write the word PROBLEM first and then the figures.
Oh my god…She wrote the strange figures down. He pulled up an online calculator and began putting in figures. It seemed to take him a long time of putting in figures, concentrating on what he was doing, but after a few minutes he turned to her again.
“Write the word; LIM.” She did it. “Write an equal sign next to it. Now draw a horizontal line…longer. Good. Now on the top line write a number three…” And on and on he went telling her to write numbers and X’s and minuses and parenthesis and then a new row of numbers and symbols and then finally the last which was the answer. “Robin, write Solution. Write my name on it and hand it to the Professor.”
She got up and went to the Professor’s desk. He appeared to be doing some grading. He glanced up at her and she handed him the paper. When she turned to go back to her seat he stopped her.
“Just a minute. This will only take me a moment.” She waited while he placed various checkmarks on the paper. He handed it back to her with a giant C circled. Then he went back to his other problem.