One More Time for Joy by Amy Lillard

Author:Amy Lillard [Lillard, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zebra Books
Published: 2023-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

“Hey.”

Johnny B straightened at the sound of her voice. Evie.

He resisted the urge to run his fingers through his hair and make sure it wasn’t sticking up in all directions. He hadn’t been paying that much attention to it that day. But he hadn’t thought she would come up.

“Aren’t you supposed to be working in the bakery?”

“Your mamm sent me up to check on you. She said you turned off the baby monitor again.”

Johnny B willed himself not to turn pink even as he felt the heat rising into his face. How embarrassing. To have your mamm make you keep a baby monitor close so she could check on you. He wasn’t a baby. He might be a cripple, but he wasn’t a baby.

“I’m okay.” He pushed himself up a little straighter in his wheelchair, chagrined to see a smear of mustard on his light-blue shirt.

Great. The prettiest girl he’d ever seen was standing before him, and he had a stain on his shirt.

Like it mattered. She could think him all kinds of messy or all kinds of fantastic, but it wouldn’t change the fact that he was never going to walk again. Things would never be the same for him.

It wasn’t like she was without stains of her own. She had flour and what looked to be blue food coloring all down the front of her tan-colored apron. He bet his mamm was unhappy about that food coloring. Or maybe it was ink. Possibly even worse.

“So,” she started, slowly tracing the seam on her apron as she talked, “are you going to go back to school in January?”

School. That was all anybody ever wanted to talk about. What did school matter? Sure, he promised his mamm he’d go back if she let his uncle build him a room on the house. But ever since then, he had been thinking of ways to get out of it. There were so many reasons why he didn’t want to go back to school. What was an education to him now? topped the list. And then there was the fact that he would be the only one there in a wheelchair. And the fact that he would be the oldest there. And the fact that he didn’t want to go and have everybody staring at him. It was bad enough in church, but at least that was only two days a month. School would be forever and forever and another whole year.

“Why do you care?” he asked her, his voice holding a sullen note even as he tried to stop it. Maybe she didn’t notice. “You don’t even go to school.”

She looked up and met his eyes. Hers were such a pale baby-blue that they almost looked translucent. “That’s because I’ve graduated.”

Johnny B pushed himself around in his chair a bit, just from side to side. He might not have a lot of feeling in his lower body, but there were times when he had prickly pains that felt a little like someone was sticking him with a pin.

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