Six months after a crash left me in a wheelchair, I went to prom expecting to be pitied, ignored, and forgotten in a corner.
Instead, one boy crossed a crowded room, held out his hand, and changed the entire night.
I never imagined that thirty years later, I would meet him again.
And this time, he would be the one who needed help.
I never thought I’d see Marcus again.
When I was seventeen, a drunk driver ran a red light and changed my life in seconds.
Six months before prom, my biggest worries had been ordinary teenage worries. I argued with my parents about curfew. I tried on dresses with my friends. I worried about my grades, boys, and whether I would like the way I looked in prom photographs.
Then the crash happened.
I woke up in a hospital bed with doctors talking around me as though I wasn’t really there.
My legs had been broken in three places.
My spine was damaged.
Suddenly, words like rehabilitation, prognosis, and maybe became part of my vocabulary.
The future I had imagined for myself disappeared almost overnight.
And by the time prom arrived, I had become more afraid of people’s eyes than anything else.
I told my mother I wasn’t going.
She stood in my bedroom doorway holding the dress bag.
“You deserve one night.”
“I deserve not to be stared at.”
She looked at me for a moment.
“Then stare back.”
She helped me into my dress.
I looked at myself and barely recognized the girl in the mirror.
“I can’t dance,” I whispered.
My mother came closer.
“You can still exist in a room.”
That sentence hurt because she knew exactly what I had been doing since the accident.
I had been disappearing while still technically being present.
So I went.
My mother helped me into my wheelchair, helped me get ready, and eventually pushed me into the gym where the prom was being held.
