Two juniors kicked my prosthetic leg out from under me and laughed over the pieces, an $11,400 leg my late father’s fire crew paid for with two years of pancake breakfasts. “Guess your dead daddy can’t fix this one,” Kayden said. By Wednesday, the whole school knew who those pancakes were for.
I was sixteen, and insurance had told my mom a replacement would take eleven months.
Dad was a captain at Station 9 in Mansfield. A warehouse roof came down on him the winter after the wreck that took my left foot.
His crew didn’t send flowers.
They flipped pancakes in the truck bay every other Saturday and painted his engine number on the socket in red. Somebody always burned the first batch and ate it anyway.
Kayden had called me Peg since September.
That Tuesday he and the Barton kid fell in behind me after second period.
“Hop faster, Peg,” Kayden said. “Bell’s gonna ring.”
I kept my books pinned to my chest and my eyes on the tiles, because walking faster only made the click louder.
By the trophy case, his sneaker hooked my ankle.
My books went first. Then my whole weight came down on the pylon wrong.
It went CRACK.
For one second nobody in that hallway made a sound.
Then the Barton kid laughed, and everybody else remembered how.
“Somebody call a mechanic,” he said, phone up.
I sat holding the top half of my own leg, the red number scraped down to carbon.
I didn’t cry. Not there.
I cried in the nurse’s bathroom, then texted a picture to Captain Aziz, because Mom was on a double and I had nobody else.
He sent back two letters, “OK,” and nothing more.
At 7:40 Wednesday, the student lot was FULL OF FIRE TRUCKS.
Three engines and a ladder sat nose to tail where the buses park.
Thirty-some firefighters stood beside them in dress blues, and NOT ONE was smiling.
Kayden put his phone away fast.
Captain Aziz walked right past Principal Carver and stopped beside me.
“Miss Shea,” he said, and it carried all the way to the buses.
Seven forty-one
“Engine 9 is here to walk you to first period.”
He said it to me. He said it so the whole lot heard.
I was standing on the old leg. The heavy one they fitted me with at fourteen, before I outgrew it by an inch and a half.
It pinched at the top of the socket. It made me limp, swing my hip out like a door that sticks.
I’d dug it out of my closet at six that morning, from under a bag of winter hats.
“Where’s the other one?” Captain Aziz said.
“In my backpack.”
“Give it here.”
I slid the backpack off one shoulder and unzipped it. The two halves were wrapped in a Kroger bag, because I didn’t know what else you put a broken leg in.
He took out the top half. The socket. The part with the 9 on it.
He didn’t say anything about it. He turned it in his hand so the scraped side faced the buses, and he held it there.
Thirty-some firefighters watched it. Then three hundred kids did.
A mom in a gray minivan stopped in the drop-off line and didn’t pull forward. The car behind her didn’t honk.
Officer Tara, the resource officer who mostly waves cars through that line, stopped waving.
My phone buzzed in my coat pocket. Mom. Shift ends at 8. Coming straight there. Don’t let anybody make you sign anything.
I hadn’t told her about the trucks. Somebody had.
“You texted me two names last night,” Aziz said. Lower now. Just to me.
“Kayden and the Barton kid.”
“Which one’s Kayden?”
I didn’t point. I didn’t have to.
Kayden was by the front doors with his hands jammed in his letterman jacket. The Barton kid wasn’t anywhere.
Aziz looked over my head, straight at him, and nodded once.
It wasn’t a hello. It was the nod you give a car you’re letting merge.
Kayden didn’t nod back. He went white around the mouth, the way people do at the dentist.
He looked at Aziz like they’d met before, somewhere neither of them liked.
The coffee can
The first breakfast was eleven days after the funeral.
I remember the funeral mostly as shoes. I kept my eyes down the whole time, on the one foot I had left and the crutch tips beside it.
Outside the funeral home, after, there was a boy about my age in a black suit that was too big for him. He was kicking the curb, over and over, like he was trying to knock it loose.
A man in a foam neck brace came and pulled him by the sleeve into a car.
I didn’t know who they were. There were four hundred people at that funeral. Half of them were in uniform.
Then the breakfasts started.
Nobody asked us. Captain Aziz called Mom on a Thursday, and on Saturday the trucks were pulled out onto the apron at Station 9 so the bay was empty.
They borrowed folding tables from the Methodist church next door. Two griddles on sawhorses. A coffee can by the door with masking tape on it that said LEG.
I was still on crutches then. The stump hadn’t healed enough for a socket.
Six dollars a plate. Kids under ten ate free. Firefighters paid double, which was a rule Aziz made up on the spot and nobody argued with.
A guy named Stephen sang Garth Brooks at the griddle every time. Same two songs, two years straight, and he never once got the second verse of either.
The insurance company would pay for a basic leg. The heavy one. The one I was wearing in that parking lot.
The good one, the carbon one that could take a kid running for a bus, was $11,400 they wouldn’t touch.
Mom worked doubles at the hospital. There wasn’t $11,400 anywhere in our house. There wasn’t $1,140.
So there was the coffee can.
There was also a man by the hose rack.
He came every other Saturday, same as us. The first year he wore a neck brace, the big foam kind. The second year he had a cane with a rubber foot on it.
He never ate. He bought a plate, set it on the end of a table, and stood in the back of the bay with his coat zipped.
He paid with a fifty every time. He never took change.
And Aziz never put that fifty in the can.
I saw it the first Saturday and every Saturday after. Aziz would take the bill himself, fold it once, and put it in his shirt pocket.
Then the man would leave before the second batch came off.
“Who is that?” I asked Mom once, in the car.
“Leave him be.”
“Is that the guy?”
I didn’t have to say which guy. There’d been a man inside that warehouse when the roof started going. Dad went back in for him. That’s the whole story anybody ever told me.
Mom kept her hands on the wheel at ten and two.
“He’s somebody’s dad too,” she said. “That’s all you need.”
So I left him be.
The day the carbon leg came in, the crew painted Dad’s engine number on the socket. A red 9, with a stencil and a model paint brush. The guy doing it had hands that shook, and it took him three tries.
Aziz had a rule he said so often it stopped sounding like words.
Picture before you touch it.
At a wreck, at a kitchen fire, at a gas leak. You photograph it the way you found it, because afterward everybody remembers it different.
He said it to me the day I got the leg. He tapped the 9 with one finger.
“Anything ever happens to this, picture before you touch it.”
That’s why, on Tuesday, sitting on the tile by the trophy case, I didn’t touch the pieces first.
I took out my phone and took the picture.
Now Aziz had his hand under my elbow, walking me up the front steps on the leg that pinched. The whole crew fell in behind us, two by two, in their dress blues.
Principal Carver stepped in front of the doors.
“Captain, you cannot park three engines in my bus lane.”
Room 104
The principal’s office is Room 104. Everybody calls it the fishbowl, because one whole wall is glass onto the main hall.
Principal Carver sat behind her desk. Aziz didn’t sit. I took the chair by the window with my backpack in my lap and the bottom half of my leg still in the Kroger bag.
The top half was on her desk, on her blotter, 9 side up. Aziz had set it there and stepped back.
“Captain, I respect what your people do,” Carver said. “I do. But I have parents calling. I have a bus lane full of fire engines.”
“They’ll move when she’s in class,” Aziz said.
“She can go to class right now.”
“Then they’ll move right now.”
He didn’t move.
Carver opened a folder. She already had one made. She slid a sheet across the desk to me.
It was Tuesday’s incident report. Three lines.
Student fell in B hallway between periods. Prosthetic damaged. Nurse notified, no injury.
“That’s what we have from yesterday,” she said.
“I didn’t fall,” I said.
“I understand that’s how it felt.”
I’d told her on Tuesday. Right after the nurse’s bathroom, on a pair of crutches the nurse dug out of a supply closet, I’d come into this exact office and told her what Kayden said and where his foot was.
She’d said she’d talk to the boys.
She had. By sixth period both of them had written statements.
I tripped. They tried to help me up. The Barton kid said he only had his phone out to call somebody.
Call who, he didn’t write down.
“Both boys say she lost her balance,” Carver said to Aziz. “The camera by the trophy case hasn’t recorded since spring. There’s a work order in.”
“There was a video,” Aziz said.
“Was there?”
She looked at me.
There had been. Tuesday after school, the Barton kid put it on his story. Fifteen seconds. He stuck a wrench on it and the words mechanic needed.
By nine that night it had four hundred and something views.
Ashanti from my chem class sent it to me with nothing but a row of red angry faces. I sat on my bed with the old leg propped against the closet and read the comments. I couldn’t stop.
Then I reported it.
It came down in under an hour. I was proud of that for about ten minutes.
That was my one move. My big fix. I got the only proof deleted myself.
“It’s gone,” I told Carver, which was true. It was gone from his story.
What I didn’t say was that I’d recorded my screen before I hit report.
Picture before you touch it.
I did it with my thumbs shaking and the volume off. Then I couldn’t watch it. It was sitting in my camera roll right under the picture of the leg, and I hadn’t opened it once.
I wasn’t going to open it here. Not in a glass room, with a fire captain and a principal and every kid on the way to first period walking past.
Not and watch myself go down.
“So without footage,” Carver said, “I have two juniors and one sophomore. I have to be fair to all three of them.”
“Fair,” Aziz said.
“Yes.”
“Okay.” He nodded at her folder. “Who else has called you this morning?”
Carver didn’t answer right away. Her eyes went to her monitor.
Then she turned it around so we could see.
An email, sent at 6:02 that morning, from Kayden’s father. The subject line was the whole message.
Is the fire department coming to the school today?
Mom’s badge
Mom came through the glass door at 8:14 in her scrubs.
She had her hospital badge still clipped on, flipped backward. Her hair was the way it gets after sixteen hours, flat on one side.
She looked at the trucks through the window, then at Aziz, then at me.
Then at the socket on the desk.
“Oh, baby,” she said. To the leg or to me, I couldn’t tell.
She sat on the arm of my chair and put her hand on the back of my neck. Her hand smelled like the hospital soap, the pink kind.
“Mrs. Shea,” Carver said. “Thank you for coming in. I was just explaining to the captain—”
“I heard what you were explaining,” Mom said. “I read the report you emailed me at four o’clock yesterday. Fell.”
“That is what both students—”
“She’s been walking on a leg since she was fourteen. She knows what falling feels like.”
Carver closed the folder. She opened it again.
“Kayden’s father is coming in at eight-thirty,” she said. “He asked to be here. I thought it would be best for everyone to sit down together, now that this has become—” She waved at the window.
At the trucks. At Stephen, standing by Engine 9 with his arms folded.
“What’s the father’s name?” Mom said.
Carver looked at her screen. “Clarence.”
Mom’s hand came off my neck.
She stood up. Then she sat down again, in the other chair this time, hard, the way you sit on a bus that brakes.
“Mom?”
Her eyes went past me, to Aziz.
“You knew,” she said.
“I called him last night,” Aziz said.
“You called him.”
“At ten o’clock. After she sent me the names.”
“And you didn’t call me.”
“You were on the floor till eight, Karen. I wasn’t going to put this in your head at a nurses’ station.”
That was the first time I’d heard him use her name like that, flat, like they’d had this exact fight before about something else.
“Who’s Clarence?” I said.
Nobody answered me.
Carver looked from my mom to Aziz like she’d walked into the wrong meeting.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Is there some history here I should know about?”
“Yes,” Mom said.
And she didn’t say anything else.
I took my phone out. I don’t know why. I just needed my hands on something. The screen lit up on my camera roll, on the picture of the leg on the tile, the scraped 9. Under it, the thumbnail of the video.
I put the phone face down on my knee.
Out in the main hall, the bell rang for first period. Kids flowed past the glass and every one of them looked in. Somebody pressed a phone flat against the window and Aziz turned and looked at him until he took it down.
Then the hall cleared.
A man came down it slowly from the front doors. He had his coat zipped to the chin.
He walked with a cane.
He stopped at the trophy case, right where it happened, and looked down at the floor for a long time.
Then he came and opened our door.
The hose rack
It was the cane with the rubber foot.
It was the man from the back of the bay. The fifty-dollar man.
He was thinner than at the breakfasts. Or the coat was bigger. He stood just inside the door and didn’t take it off.
He didn’t look at Carver, or at Mom, or at me.
He looked at the socket on the desk.
“That’s Darren’s number,” he said.
“Sit down, Clarence,” Aziz said.
“I’ll stand.”
“Sit down before you fall down.”
Clarence sat. In the chair nearest the door, with the cane across his knees.
Carver picked up her desk phone and asked the front office to send Kayden down from first period. She said it in her calmest voice. She was holding the phone with both hands.
Nobody talked while we waited. The clock over the door ticked. Out the window, one of the ladder guys was eating a granola bar.
Kayden came in without knocking.
He saw his dad and stopped. Then he saw the leg on the desk, and he stopped again.
“Sit,” Clarence said, and pointed with the cane.
Kayden sat in the last chair. His letterman jacket made a noise against the plastic.
Up close and sitting down, with his head ducked, he looked fourteen.
He looked like a boy in a suit that was too big for him, kicking a curb.
“What did you say to her?” Clarence said.
“Nothing.”
“Kayden.”
“I said hop faster. Everybody says stuff.”
“What did you say to her?”
Kayden looked at the floor.
So I said it. It was the first thing I’d said since Mom came in.
“He said, ‘Guess your dead daddy can’t fix this one.'”
Clarence closed his eyes.
Mom made a sound. Small, through her nose. Not crying.
Carver wrote something down, then stopped writing, like she wasn’t sure it was the kind of thing you write down.
“He said fix,” Aziz said.
Nobody asked him what he meant. He wasn’t asking anybody.
Clarence opened his eyes and looked at me for the first time. Really at me. Two years of every other Saturday, and I don’t think he’d ever once looked straight at me.
“The belt line came down on my legs,” he said. “In the warehouse. I couldn’t get out from under it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Your dad came back in. I heard him yelling my name. He didn’t even know me. He got my name off somebody outside.”
He held his hands up, apart, to show me something heavy.
“He got that off me and shoved me toward the door. Then the roof.”
He put his hands down on the cane.
“I got out. I got a neck brace and a cane. He got Station 9 on the side of a church.”
“Dad,” Kayden said.
“I’m talking.”
“You’re always talking about it.”
Clarence turned in his chair. Kayden had his head up now. His face was red and his eyes were wet and he looked at me, not at his father.
“Everybody in my house talks about your dad like he’s Jesus,” Kayden said. “Every night. Like he’s at the table.”
Twenty-six fifties
Clarence put a hand on his son’s arm. Kayden shook it off.
“He’s a kid,” Clarence said. To Carver, mostly. “He’s a kid who’s had two bad years. We lost the house. I haven’t worked since. We moved into the apartments on Park Avenue in August and he had to change schools and start over junior year. You know what that is?”
“Mr.—” Carver said.
“I’m saying, he says stupid things. Boys say stupid things. Rashid, you know. You were sixteen.”
Aziz didn’t say anything.
“He didn’t mean to break it,” Clarence said. “Did you, Kayden. You didn’t mean to break anything.”
Kayden didn’t answer.
“She tripped,” Clarence said. “That’s what the boy told me. That’s what he wrote. The other boy too. They were horsing around in a hallway and she tripped. And it’s terrible. I know what that leg is. I know better than anybody in this room what that leg is.”
He tapped the cane on the floor, twice.
“And I’ll say this, since we’re all sitting here. I put money in that leg. Every other Saturday. Fifty dollars. Ask Rashid. Two years. That’s thirteen hundred dollars of mine.”
Mom turned her head and looked at him.
“So when we start talking about who owes what,” Clarence said, “I want that on the table. I want it counted. That’s all I’m asking. That’s fair.”
He looked at Carver when he said fair.
Aziz unbuttoned the top of his dress coat.
He took out a bank envelope. White, soft at the corners, the flap tucked in instead of sealed. He set it on the blotter next to the socket.
“Twenty-six fifties, Clarence,” he said. “Count them if you want.”
Clarence looked at the envelope. He didn’t touch it.
“We didn’t spend a dollar of it,” Aziz said.
“That was for her.”
“You never asked how she was. Not once in two years. You stood by the hose rack and you bought a receipt.”
“That’s not—”
“You wanted it on the table. It’s on the table.”
Clarence’s face did something. It went flat, and then it went loud.
“You think I wanted to be the one he went back for?” he said. “You think I asked for that? You know what it’s like? I can’t go in the Kroger. I can’t go to the Kroger without some woman in the cereal aisle telling me what a hero Darren Shea was. Like I don’t know. Like I’m not the reason. My boy hears it at church. He heard it at the Fourth of July. They read the name off at the fireworks, Rashid. The fireworks.”
“I know,” Aziz said. “I was there.”
“Then you know.” Clarence was breathing hard. “And now you bring three trucks to my son’s school. To scare a sixteen-year-old kid. Over a hallway. Over she tripped.”
Carver cleared her throat.
“Mr. Clarence,” she said. “Captain. Without footage, I really—”
I turned my phone over on my knee.
I opened the camera roll. The picture of the leg on the tile. And under it, the video I hadn’t watched.
I pressed it. I turned the volume all the way up. Then I leaned forward and set the phone on Carver’s blotter, between the envelope and my dad’s number, and let it play.
It was fifteen seconds.
You can hear my leg first. The click. Then Kayden, close to the phone. Hop faster, Peg.
The trophy case goes by on the left. A sneaker comes out from the bottom of the frame and goes behind my ankle and pulls.
My books go. I go.
The sound on a phone speaker is worse than it was in the hall. A flat crack, like a branch in cold weather.
Then the quiet. One second of it.
Then the Barton kid laughing right into the microphone, and the hallway laughing with him, and his voice. Somebody call a mechanic.
And under all of it, Kayden, laughing too. Guess your dead daddy can’t fix this one.
The video stopped on me sitting on the tile, holding the top half of my own leg.
Nobody in the fishbowl said anything.
Carver had her hand flat over her mouth.
Mom wasn’t looking at the phone. She was looking at me. I couldn’t look back at her, so I looked at the envelope.
“Turn it off,” Clarence said.
It had already stopped. I didn’t touch it.
“Turn it off,” he said again, to nobody.
Kayden was staring at the phone like it was a dog that might bite.
“I want Officer Tara,” I said.
Carver lowered her hand. “Miss Shea, we can handle this internally, there are disciplinary—”
“I want Officer Tara,” I said. “Please.”
Mom said, “You heard her.”
Carver picked up the phone.
It took Tara four minutes. She’d been in the lot the whole time, by the trucks, so she knew what this was before she opened the door.
She watched the video twice with her reading glasses on. The second time she watched only the bottom of the frame.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s criminal damaging. Value like that, it’s a felony charge, juvenile court. Restitution on top of whatever the school does.”
“Felony,” Clarence said. “For a—”
“For eleven thousand four hundred dollars,” Tara said. “Yeah.”
“I can’t pay eleven thousand dollars.”
“No,” Aziz said. “You can’t.”
Carver started writing again. Ten days for Kayden, out of school, starting now. The same for the Barton kid. She said she’d be calling his mother as soon as we were done here, and she said it like she was looking forward to it.
Tara turned to me.
“I’m going to need the leg,” she said. “Both pieces. It’s the evidence.”
“For how long?”
“Until it’s done. Could be a few months. I’m sorry.”
The 9 was face up on the blotter.
I’d known it was coming since Aziz set it there. I think he did too.
Clarence got up. He held the cane in one hand and reached across the desk with the other and picked up the bank envelope. He didn’t count it. He put it inside his coat and zipped the coat back up to his chin.
Then he stood by the door and waited for his son.
Kayden walked out ahead of him and didn’t look at anybody.
Tara held open a brown paper bag. I took the top half of my leg off the blotter. I ran my thumb once over the red paint where it was still red.
I didn’t take a picture. I already had one.
I put it in the bag. Then the Kroger bag with the bottom half.
Tara folded the top over twice and wrote on the label in black marker. The date, my last name, and a number.
She carried my dad’s number out the door under her arm.
Saturday in the truck bay
Two Saturdays later the trucks were out on the apron again.
The Methodist church tables. The griddles on sawhorses. A new strip of masking tape on the coffee can, because the old one had peeled. Somebody had written LEG on it again, in the same block capitals.
I was on the old leg. It still pinched. Mom had bought a gel liner off the internet that helped some. I walked like a door that sticks, and nobody in that bay looked at it twice.
Stephen was at the griddle singing the first verse of “The Dance.” Then he hummed where the second verse should be.
Mom was there on her day off, in jeans, taking money at the folding table. She took a five from a guy and gave him back a dollar and told him to keep the line moving.
The back of the bay was empty. Just the hose rack and the hoses rolled up on it.
Nobody stood there. Nobody left a plate on the end of a table.
Aziz came over in a Station 9 T-shirt with a spatula in each hand. He held one out to me handle first.
“First batch is yours,” he said.
“I don’t know how.”
“Nobody knows how. That’s why it’s the first batch.”
I stood at the griddle on the old leg with my hip swung out. Stephen showed me where the batter goes. Thick, and then you don’t touch it.
I waited too long. The edges went black and the bay smelled like it.
Everybody in line booed.
I flipped them anyway, all six, and they came over dark brown and stiff. Stephen laughed so hard he had to stop singing.
I took the worst one off the griddle with my fingers and blew on it.
Then I ate it standing up, in front of everybody.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who still shows up on Saturdays for a family that isn’t theirs.
For more stories about family loyalty tested by money, read “He Told a Judge He Made $1,100 a Month, So I Stopped Asking” and “I Stood by the Coat Hooks and Canceled the $1,486 Payment on My Parents’ House”. There’s more family drama in “My Sister Has Run Our Family Trips On Dad’s Visa Since She Was Nineteen”.
