** IF YOU DID NOT READ THE AUTHOR'S NOTE ENTITLED 'BEFORE YOU BEGIN', PLEASE GO BACK AND DO SO BEFORE STARTING THE STORY. THANK YOU!

J O N A S

Jonas had done two things when he'd come home from the hospital for the first time after the accident.

1. He'd taken a sharpie and scribbled out the lower half of the left leg on his 'bones of the human skeleton' poster that had hung on his closet door since 5th grade (the first time he'd decided he wanted to be a doctor).

2. He'd looked at the newly altered poster and cried, for the first time after and only time since.

He was looking at the same poster now.

"Jonas, honey?"

His mom's tone was familiar. It was the same tone she'd been using with him for the last year. It was as if she was tip-toeing around him, walking carefully to avoid stepping on something sharp like glass shards or a Lego. His gaze fixated once more on the mass of permanent ink on the poster. Irrevocable, unshakable. The key word was 'permanent'.

"Are you there?"

Jonas sighed into his phone, the static breath rebounding in his own ear. "Yes, mom. Here."

"Ok," she said. "Look...I know you...haven't really driven since...Well, you know." She paused, before pressing onward, her tone diplomatic. "Your sister forgot the permission slip for her travel team and you know they're leaving later this afternoon. I really wouldn't ask under any normal circumstances but I have a big meeting at work today and I just can't get away to bring it to her.

"I was just wondering if you could take it to her."

Easier said than done. He frowned, massaging the place right above his non-existent left knee where the rest of his leg should have been.

"Jonas?"

Jonas pictured himself saying 'no' and then pulling the covers over his head to block out the outside. "Ok, mom," he said, instead. After all, he'd put her through enough, hadn't he? He could do one thing for her, right?

"Ok? You'll do it?" Jonas could hear her relief through the phone. He also didn't miss the hope in her voice. She'd been trying to get him to leave the house for something, anything, since the end of the school year (really, since Jonas's Great Tragedy). He could also hear the concern in her voice. He knew she'd be worried that she was asking too much. Jonas felt bad—the uncomfortable feeling of guilt squeezed at his insides. After all she'd done for him, she shouldn't have to worry about asking too much.

"Ok," he said, again. He wished he could say that he felt more confident about saying it the second time.

He could practically see the smile on her face. "Thank you, Bird!" she exclaimed. Jonas closed his eyes and tried not to cringe at the childhood nickname ('You're so skinny, like a bird!' his mom used to say). He could picture her smiling an actual smile (not tired, or forced) and he felt a little better about himself for once. His mom was continuing, her words humming in his ear. "Taylor said the form is either on the counter or on her desk in her room. If you could just take it to the school and give it to her..."

"Yeah, all right," he said.

"All right." A pause. "I love you, Jonas."

Jonas pictured his mom. In the year since his accident, she'd seemed to shrink somehow. Her dark eyes didn't hold as much light, and there was a little streak of gray in her dark hair, that she always tried to tuck behind her ear. Jonas thought that maybe the worst thing in all of this was what it had done to Elise Avery. He held his breath a moment, before letting it out and replying. "Love you too, mom."

Jonas hung up and dropped his phone on the bed next to him.

He stared at the ceiling's bumpy plaster for a few moments, as if gathering his strength. Then he sighed and flung the blankets back, sitting up and swinging his right leg over the side of the bed, ignoring what remained of the left. Standing, and using the edge of his bed for balance, he tripped over to the closet, where he hesitated, staring at the poster's ink-mangled leg once more before pulling out the prosthetic leg from the dark corner he had shoved it into.

He sat back down on the edge of the bed and examined it. A part of Jonas hated the thing. It was a poor substitute for what he was missing. He frowned, before situating it against the stump and strapping it on. Wasn't there supposed to be a sock or something that went on before the prosthesis? A stump sock? Jonas shuddered a little; for some reason, he'd always hated that word. Stump. Trees had stumps. Legs weren't meant to have stumps.

After a bit more digging, he gave up on finding the stump sock. "It's only for a little while, after all," he muttered into his empty room (empty house, really).

He stood, wobbling for a moment. He had hardly worn the leg since he had gotten it. After the accident (Jonas's Great Tragedy was always referred to as 'the accident'), he'd gone through a few weeks of inpatient therapy, before being fitted for the prosthesis. After he'd been discharged, however, he'd given up on the metal and plastic contraption. It had spent most of its time in the corner of the closet, gathering dust. Jonas preferred the crutches. He'd gone to therapy long enough to learn how to use them properly. Why pretend everything was normal when it clearly wasn't?

He took a step forward, drawing in a sharp breath at the pain that shot up his left thigh (like his lower leg was still there and was currently being stabbed). Jonas stumbled slightly, before clenching his leg with his hand and straightening it.

You can do this, Jonas, he told himself, breathing a little heavily from the pain and the exertion of trying to walk normally. His rumpled reflection in the mirror on the back of his closet door revealed a boy who was a shadow of who he'd been before the accident—pale, and a whole lot thinner. "He's back to eating like a bird!" He'd heard his mother express her frustration with him to his father, in hissed whispers from their bedroom down the hall. He could tell when she was frustrated with him based on whether or not he could completely understand her—she was half-Vietnamese and tended to slip back into Vietnamese when she was really angry with him (his own understanding of Vietnamese covered the basics at best, as his mom had spoken to them mostly in English growing up). He tried to smooth back his feathery dark hair (his mom's hair), which was stubbornly sticking up on one side where it had had face time with his pillow last night. Then he tried on a smile which, when combined with the dark circles under his eyes, only made his reflection look slightly unhinged.

He left on his plaid pajama pants and threw on an old 'Washington U' sweatshirt his dad had given him when he'd been accepted there. His dad was more muscular (filled out, as his mom would say), and his old sweatshirt made Jonas look a little like he was going for a swim in it.

He managed to make it to the kitchen, using the wall to prop himself up, thankful that he was on the bottom floor. After the accident, Jonas's older brother, Rhys, had been forced to give up his big bedroom downstairs and take Jonas's smaller upstairs bedroom so that Jonas had easier access to the main rooms in the house. Rhys hadn't complained and Jonas knew it was because he still felt guilty for being the one driving, and for not being injured when Jonas was. Jonas let him feel guilty. Sometimes he felt bad about it, but most times he thought it was a poor substitute for what he himself had had to lose. It was complicated. He didn't exactly blame Rhys, but he didn't exactly not blame him either. He'd tried to explain this to the counselor his parents had had him go to after it had first happened (until he'd refused to go, and his mom, after a lot of tears, had given in) but had failed. After that, he hadn't tried to explain anything to the counselor.

He got the permission slip and made his way to the garage, slowly navigating the small step down from the inside of the house. He took the keys for the Bus off the wall by the garage door. The Bus was an old Honda Odyssey, with sliding doors that didn't work and a hole rusted through the door to the trunk. The air conditioner was also on the fritz, on top of the vehicle's other...charms.

Jonas opened the door and got into the driver's side carefully. You can do this, he told himself again, before opening the garage door and putting the keys into the ignition, bringing the engine to life (all six mini-van cylinders firing). He proceeded to give himself a pep talk that would have rivaled a football coach's locker room pow wow minutes before the homecoming game (well, at least what he thought that would sound like; he wouldn't know).

He tried not to think about how long it had been since he last drove, or all the times he'd tried to (when everyone was gone and he was safely alone), only to end up in a cold sweat, unable to leave the driveway. He could have kept trying—could have worked up to it, as the counselor had said—but he just didn't see the point anymore. And you're afraid, his irritating inner voice shot back.

After the accident, there were a lot of things Jonas found himself unable (or unwilling) to do. It was too easy to be reminded of what he was before he was reduced to a teenager with only one and a half legs. If he went anywhere, he second guessed everything, like after the accident, the way he saw the world had been skewed. To him, people were always either a) trying too hard to pretend he was normal or b) going out of their way to try to help him. Help carrying his backpack after school, help opening a door to whatever store he happened to be going to...one well-meaning friend had even offered to take his arm and help him walk, much to Jonas's embarrassment.

He was tired of other people looking at him like he was less...him...than he had been before the semi hit the passenger side of his brother's car. He already felt like he was somehow less than he had been before—he didn't need other people reinforcing that.

He withdrew from everyone. Jonas with two legs had never been incredibly social or popular but he'd had friends, at least. He had since distanced himself from them. It was too easy for them to make comments like "can't believe coach is making us run laps today" or even the completely innocuous "break a leg" before a presentation at school. Jonas would give anything to run laps aimlessly around the soccer field, or for his leg to ache with something other than phantom limb pain. He was tired of being reminded. He was tired of his friends realizing he was there, and then turning to him and apologizing awkwardly. Really, he could handle the comments. What he couldn't handle were the pitying looks that came afterward, or the way their words trailed off when they caught his eye...because that was what reminded him he was different now.

Jonas always thought he would be fine if people would only act like they had before, but a small part of him, that annoying inside voice, wondered if he would really be ok if people acted like nothing had changed. What's the point of pretending nothing has changed when everything has? But he couldn't stop trying to pretend, at least in front of anyone outside of his family.

So he didn't go places with them anymore. He didn't go to hang out at the mall, or go to the movies. He didn't go watch their soccer games. He didn't drive.

He just existed, as if suspended in the moment in which he had regained consciousness only to realize he was short an appendage.

He slowly backed the bus out of the garage, and then down the driveway. He shifted the vehicle into gear and drove down his street. This wasn't so bad, right? Not so bad... (He felt very much like a fifteen year old learning to drive their parents' minivan.)

He'd never been sad about the leg. He always wondered if it was just that the shock had been so terrible that it had yet to wear off, even almost a year later. It just...was. This was his situation now, and he didn't feel that becoming emotional was going to help anything. Besides, Rhys had cried enough for the both of them. Jonas had never known his older brother could cry that much...could cry at all, in fact. (Rhys had gone to visit the counselor after Jonas had stopped seeing her...Dr. Andy. Supposedly it had helped. At least Rhys didn't cry anymore.)

His mother still cried, sometimes. Especially after an unsuccessful day of trying to get Jonas to show some interest in something other than watching the Star Wars movies over and over again (and wishing that there was some way he could get his hands on a robotic leg like the robotic hand that Luke Skywalker got after getting his own chopped off with a lightsaber) or playing video games on the Playstation his parents had gotten him after the accident, mindlessly defeating enemies until his head felt empty of any worries about what his first year of college would bring. "I don't understand! I just want to help him and I don't know how!" he heard her cry to his father one night, when he'd snuck down the hall for a drink, a phantom on crutches in the darkness. (He'd gone back to his room without the drink, and with guilt squeezing his insides again.)

He pulled the bus to a jerky stop at the stoplight. This was it. The last thing between him and the main road.

The light turned green and he shakily accelerated, turning rather ungracefully but managing to stay in his lane which was a plus. Jonas mentally added another point to his first-time-driving-again score.

After several turns, he was about ready to convince himself that this really was ok after all. His muscle memory was starting to kick in, and his braking and acceleration weren't so shaky and halting.

In hindsight, maybe he'd spoken—or thought—too soon.

At that moment, a semi-truck passed in the left lane. He held his breath. His vision wobbled a bit, sparking in and out of static like a radio with a bad signal. He imagined that the truck was coming into his lane, and ended up swerving dizzily, only to find that the truck was firmly in its own lane, and it was only the spinning of his head that was warping things. Was he dying? Or just having a panic attack? The horizon line was wonky, and Jonas desperately pleaded with himself not to pass out. He was too busy holding his breath and watching the truck tensely, trying not to give in to a flashback to the moment when everything had gone black...to see the light in front of him turn red.

When Jonas did notice the light, he panicked. He went for the brake with his right foot, which seemed abnormally sluggish, while his left foot, the one belonging to the unwieldy prosthetic leg, somehow got stuck under the pedal. Shouldn't have done this. Shouldn't have done this, was all he could think, over and over as he slammed down on the brake, pressing it down as far as it would go with his shoe-lace caught around it and his prosthetic foot jammed up under it. His thoughts switched from shouldn't have done this to I'm going to die now; this is it to what if I lose another leg. No-legs-Jonas?

The van came to a stop, but not before bumping into the car in front of him, jolting it slightly.

And everything stopped, but the ringing in his ears. Shouldn't have done this.