The Light Circus

1. Boss of the manor.

June 2019.

{Will}

My day starts when my butt hits the seat of my chair, ready to roll. I sleep in sweatpants and a T-shirt so when I wake up I don't have to wrestle my legs into clothes. They're shitty and stiff in the morning anyways--more cooperative at the end of the day than when I first wake up, if you could ever call my body cooperative. So it's whatever, who needs that drama first thing. Work smarter not harder.

I buckle up and unlock the brakes, zipping out of my room and down the hall of Lakeland Manor, a fancy name for an ordinary bungalow house where a crew of staff provide 'home-like care' for children and youth experiencing disabilities. My home as long as I can remember.

The first thing I check, skidding around the corner down the hall--because my body is slow when I first wake up but my brain and my chair sure aren't--is who's staffing the Manor today. There's always two people on, three when Soph is awake.

Boss Lady is in the office off the hall, staring at the screen clicking the mouse, and I hear Spices talking patiently in the bathroom over the water splashing and Soph complaining loudly. She hates getting her head wet. Makes me glad I can shower myself; that was a fight worth having when I turned eight. I don't need help getting in and out of the shower--my biceps are bigger than most of the guys' here and I can press my body weight. Not that we're picking favourites, but I can pretty much count on my arms every day. My hands get stiff and curl into claws sometimes, which sucks for typing DMs to my friends but works fine to grip my wheels and go.

In the kitchen, Ethan is prying a waffle out of the battered waffle maker with a butter knife.

"Don't electrocute yourself, bro," I say nice and loud behind him, and he jumps, then grins over his shoulder at me. My treads are sneaky as hell.

"That's a toaster," he says. "Want whipped cream?"

I scoot up to the table and brake. "What the hell kind of question is that? Of course I want whipped cream." They've given up telling me not to swear. This is my home and the government pays them to be here and look after me. I can say what I want and they can't kick me out--I'm the boss.

I smack the tabletop. "Keep 'em coming, Ethan, I'm hungry!"

He slides the waffle on a plate and tops it with a 'whoosh' of canned whipped cream. "You got it, kiddo."

Ethan is the only staff who gets a name around here, and he's the only person allowed to call me 'kiddo.' I can remember him all the way back to my ninth birthday, so he's earned it.

Hannah slouches into the kitchen, yawning and scratching her butt through her saggy leggings. She hasn't bothered to put her ears in under her dark rats' nest of hair--her fingers fly in a quick "Morning, dipshit" for me. I snort a laugh and wave back, mouthing, "Asswipe."

Technically, Hannah should be in a home for able-bodied kids-there's nothing wrong with her, except most people don't understand Sign. So I guess Social Services thought the simplest thing was to dump her off on us? My fingers are pretty curled up for Sign--Hannah says I sign like a constipated turtle. But whatever, she lipreads and I have no trouble talking. When she uses her mouth to make words, her voice sounds weird and she prefers to not. So one very long, very boring school break she taught me to understand her signing and now that's my job around here-be the loud one.

I'm a natural.

Soph arrives with the whirr of her wheelchair, damp and flushed from her shower.

"Morning Soph," I say, through a mouthful of my third waffle and whipped cream.

She says 'morning' back with a long, cheerful warble of sound. We all speak Sophie pretty well around here. She never hides how she's feeling and that's kind of refreshing.

It's Saturday so I slept past shift change. Usually I listen at the office door to figure out what's happening with our day without having to ask anybody. At the table, Hannah catches my eye, flicking her fingers, signing quick as her thoughts.

"Are we going to the fair today?" She lifts her eyebrow at me, nudging her chin at Ethan.

I say out loud, "Hey Ethan, who's taking us to the fair today? There's roller coasters to conquer and Sophie wants a corn dog."

Soph jerks and laughs, adding her two cents in a long syllable of sound, which I gather is: "More like ice cream and a giant stuffed poodle."

"Ummm..." Ethan looks uncomfortable, and I watch him while shovelling the fifth waffle in my face. "The van is in the shop. We don't have wheels today guys, I'm sorry."

Hannah makes a sharp sound of protest. Sophie's chair is heavy; it's like a sedan to my racing bike, complete with motor. She glides smoothly from place to place with all her wheels sturdily on the ground. Without the lift on the van, she's not going anywhere today.

"What the hell Ethan," I snap. "We've been in school all week-you couldn't take the van in to the shop Monday to Friday? Do you just expect us to sit around staring at the TV all day? Is that what living our best life looks like?" I feel the weight of the girls' expectancy beside me, watching Ethan's response. I'm the only one of us who can yell and swear and this is my job around here, to make sure the grown ups don't just park Sophie in front of Paw Patrol all day.

Ethan throws up his hands to try and stop the tirade. "It wasn't my call, Will. If I could pack you all into my car we would be there already, you know that."

I glower at him, then lower my face to swipe up the whipped cream from my plate and lick my fingers, trying to think. "You can pack me into your car," I grumble. Soph makes a protesting noise, but it's true. My chair breaks down and you can lift it with one hand to put in the trunk. Most days I can get my legs to take a couple steps to drop me into the front seat of a car. I have feeling from my head to my toes, just my muscles are tied up in knots full-time and that makes my legs not super-useful for things like balancing.

"I'll make other arrangements," Ethan hurries to say. "I'll call the families. I forgot it was fair day."

I exhale, pushing my plate away. My chest feels tight: I'm still angry. The girls have families-parents and aunties and siblings that are around so often it's almost like they live here too. "So what the hell am I going to do today?"

"You have a date with your mentor."

"Don't say date, that's gross."

He shoots me a smirk that tells me he's just bugging me. I roll my eyes at him. "Is it still Darth Sidious?" That's not his real name, but I don't bother to learn names. Most of these people come and go and I never know if they'll be around a couple months or a couple years. If they make it past two birthdays, I might let them have their name back-if I can remember it.

"No, it's someone new."

'Someone new' is late. Sophie's mom and Hannah's auntie swoop in and for, like, ten minutes I hover on the edge of their happy bustle, smiling like I'm a part of it. It does make me feel better to see Soph's relaxed, happy face as her mom hugs her and her chair-but it make me feel worse at the same time. Tbh my mom never hugged me like that when she was around. I've managed not to think about her much in the months she's been gone; it's not like I saw her so often that I should miss her. Just summers.

I drop my eyes to my hands, digging at the tension in my ropy legs. School's out in a week and the coming months look pretty effing bleak if I can't get Ethan to take me on a road trip to somewhere.

Preferably to see my dad, if I could just figure out who and where he is.

*Annnnd welcome to Will Fortin's amazing brain. How did you like being dropped right into Will's head, after meeting him through Meg's eyes in the prologue?

I don't normally love first-person pov stories but I loved the energy of Will's first-person voice when this first scene poured out of me, more than a year ago. He was such a dynamic character I just had to do all the homework required to have my main character be a person who uses a wheelchair full-time, so I could go on and tell the rest of his story!

Most of this novel will be told through Will's voice, with some interjections from Meg's third-person pov. I've never experimented with switching between first and third person-- how's it going for you as a reader so far? Any differences between the two voices you notice right away?*

1982 words.