Emily never thought she would see Marcus again.
When she was seventeen years old, a drunk driver ran a red light on a Tuesday afternoon and changed the entire architecture of her life. Six months before prom — six months before she would have been arguing about curfew and trying on dresses with her best friends in somebody’s bedroom with the music too loud — she woke up in a hospital bed listening to doctors talk around her like she wasn’t lying right there in the middle of the conversation.
Her legs were broken in three places. Her spine was damaged. The words the doctors used had a quality she had never encountered before — careful, cushioned, noncommittal. Words like rehab and prognosis and maybe. She was seventeen and she had just learned that maybe was the most frightening word in the English language.
The months that followed were not a movie. There was no triumphant music, no training montage, no single moment where she stood up and everything snapped back into place. There was pain, and paperwork, and the particular exhaustion of being both a patient and a person simultaneously, which turns out to be one of the hardest things a human being can manage.
By the time prom came around, she had already made up her mind.
She wasn’t going.
Her Mother Stood in the Doorway With a Dress Bag and Said Four Words That Changed Her Mind — But Not in the Way You’d Expect
“You deserve one night,” her mother said.
Emily looked at her from the bed. “I deserve not to be stared at.”
Her mother didn’t flinch. “Then stare back.”
