Traffic was a bit on the heavy side that Friday evening, so I made it to Carl’s Pizza with only a few minutes to spare.
Tom was already there, along with our friends Jake, Nicole, Ed, and Lisa. Looking at them, I just hoped they remembered what I'd told them the day before about being on their best behavior. I wanted them to look at Sierra as a classmate, not a medical case. A few minutes later, Sierra wheeled in.
“Guys, if you haven't met her yet, this is Sierra Duncan,” I introduced her.
“A few of you look familiar,” Sierra said. “Thanks for letting me join your get together. I’ve only been in town a few weeks, and I really like the way I’ve been welcomed.”
From that moment, the gang took in Sierra and made her one of our own.
For the next three hours, the pizza, wings, breadsticks, and soda flowed, we sat around the table eating, listening to the jukebox,shooting the breeze, and playing pool. Nicole and Lisa immediately gravitated towards Sierra, striking up a conversation about that typical girl topic: makeup and clothes.
Even though she was sitting at almost the exact same height as the table, Sierra held her own and did a pretty good job. She even got the best of Ed, usually our best pool player. He gave her a tip of the hat as they finished their game.
At 10 PM, we decided to call it a night. I stayed with Sierra to wait for her mom to pick her up while the others went their own ways.
“So what did you think?” I asked her.
“I had a great time,” she smiled. “Your friends are awesome. I hope we can have some more hangouts like this.”
“Don’t worry, we will.” I assured her. “We’re always doing something. If it’s not here, it’ll be at the park, or at one of a million other locations around here. I’ll make sure that anywhere we want to hang out at will be wheelchair accessible.”
“Jimmy, you are amazing,” she said, “Even though my friends back in Miami were trying their best, I had the feeling that they thought they had to walk on eggshells around me after the accident. Don’t get me wrong, I had known most of them all my life, but after I recovered, things just didn’t quite feel the same. But here, I don’t feel that at all, it feels like I’ve been here for years.”
“We were all probably the new kid at one time,” I grinned. “I’ve never seen the guys warm up to someone so fast. Consider yourself a new initiate into the gang,” I laughed.
“What’s the secret password?” she chuckled.
Sierra’s mom drove up, I helped her in to the van, and we went our separate ways for the weekend.
Sunday afternoon, I got a text from Sierra asking for my email address, she had something she wanted to send me. I replied, and 15 minutes later, my phone notification went off. I checked my email and saw that she had sent me a file. I switched to my laptop to get a better view, and in JPEG form was a drawing that she made of all of us together at Carl’s. I was floored by the details. I fired up my printer, put in a piece of photo paper, and printed it out. I made myself a mental note to get a frame for it. That was a keeper, and I was starting to think that Sierra was too.
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