The Opposite of Falling Apart

CHAPTER 3 - JONAS

Jonas put the car in park as soon as it had stopped, bumper to bumper with the car in front of him. He didn't try to back up from the car; the thought didn't even cross his mind (or maybe it did but got lost in the rapid fire of his brain's synapses).

With the car stopped, it was easier to extricate his foot. He glared at it in disgust. He imagined shoving it back into the corner of the closet. Or better yet, under his bed, where it could gather dust, completely out of sight. Prosthetic piece of crap, he thought, his hand massaging the point where the remaining part of his left leg met plastic. Jonas ignored the pins and needles sensation in his leg and turned his gaze back to the car in front of him.

Whoever he'd hit wasn't getting out. Jonas could tell it was a she, but nothing else about her. Would she be angry? Most likely. I'd be angry if someone hit me, he thought. Well, I was angry when someone hit me.

Jonas wondered whether or not he should tell the truth about what caused the accident. He decided he would just say he hadn't been paying attention. What was he supposed to say? Um, sorry, I have a fake foot and mental issues with semitrucks, and I rear-ended you because I was trying to decide if I was having a panic attack or dying. Better Jonas look like an incompetent driver than tell her the truth and watch her expression morph into that look of pity that people inevitably got whenever they learned that he was an eighteen-year-old with only half a left leg.

He saw the other driver turn her hazards on and decided that he should probably do the same.

After doing this, he steeled himself to the inevitable conversation that would have to occur between him and the girl. So he slid over to the passenger side (having enough sense left to know that it would be inconceivably stupid to open a door into oncoming traffic, no matter how slow it was going) and opened the door. Jonas felt like every other driver on the road was watching him. He tried not to think about it. Who cares? he told himself. Not me. If anything, I'm used to being stared at by now. He almost laughed at the ridiculousness of the lie. Carefully placing both feet on the ground, he got out. With his pants covering his prosthetic leg, the view looking down was almost normal; there was no way to tell that one of his feet was plastic, except for the way it felt. Like it's dead. He wished that he was wearing almost anything other than plaid pajama pants and a too-big sweatshirt.

Jonas stepped forward. He stumbled when his left foot hit the ground. Instinctively, his arms went up, to catch himself if he fell. (Parachute reflex. He remembered reading about it when he still wanted to be a doctor. It developed sometime during infancy—you fall, the arms go out.) He regained his balance and limped onward, hand pressed against the Bus for balance. He tried to match his walking as close to normal as possible, ignoring the discomfort and pain that shot through the missing part of his leg with each step. A majority of amputees have phantom pain following limb loss, Dr. Andy, his counselor, had said, back when he first went to see her. She'd brought out a mirror. He'd obliged her, sitting on a couch in the office and holding the mirror in front of his left leg so that it reflected the right. He'd pretended he had two whole legs—normal. Be normal, be normal, he told himself as he made his way along the side of the Bus. Jonas told himself to watch where he was putting his feet, due to lack of sensation in his prosthesis, so that he didn't step too hard or trip forward. Still, he tripped a few more times, fighting his parachute reflex in order to avoid flailing his arms any more. It was like he was stumbling around with impaired depth perception or something. He couldn't help but feel like the leg might buckle; might not hold him up.

When she saw Jonas coming toward her car, the girl rolled down her passenger-side window.

"Um, hi," Jonas said, rather lamely in his opinion. He leaned one hand against her car, holding himself up, running the other shakily through his hair before gesturing toward the back of her car. "Look, I'm really—I'm really sorry," he choked out, fixing a half smile on his face like a piece of armor and hoping he didn't look as unhinged as he had in the mirror that morning. "I just . . . I looked down for a second and then I looked up, and the light was red—" Half truth. He had been looking at the semitruck. Don't think about it, he mentally ordered himself, trying to ignore the way his heart sped up at the memory.