Scar Girl (The Scar Boys #2)(6)

Anyway, I thought about the baby all the time when I was alone. And I was so desperate to tell Johnny that I thought my head would explode. I just didn’t know how.

I’d been teaching myself a little guitar—once you know how to play the bass, it’s a lot easier to learn how to the play guitar—so I tried writing a song about it. I thought it would be cool to tell Johnny with a song. Sort of romantic, you know?

It was called “Lullaby.”

Tell me,

What’s that in my belly

Beneath the cat?

I am making us a lullaby.


Tell me,

Can you feel this strange thing in my belly?

Can you feel the change?

I’m too stunned to even cry.


Does it have a name?

Is it a boy or a girl?

Will it be president?

Will it change the world?

Will it be bad

Or will it be good?

Will it be loved

Or misunderstood?

Will it be rich

Or will it be poor?

Whatever it is,

I’m gonna love it forevermore.


Because you’re our little lullaby.



There’s more, but you get the idea.

I wanted so badly to play it for Johnny, but it just never felt like the right time, you know? So the secret stayed with me.





HARBINGER JONES


The other thing going on at the end of that summer was figuring out how to keep my parents at bay. To be fair, they were giving me space, but I knew it wouldn’t last, especially with my dad.

I was already back on Dr. Kenny’s couch at my parents’ insistence—Dr. Kenny had been my shrink ever since I was eight years old, since right after the lightning strike—and it was only a matter of time before they started to push on other things, too. I mean, I was eighteen, I wasn’t enrolled in college, and I didn’t have a job. Johnny’s accident and my reaction to it bought me a little time, but sooner or later they were going to expect something more of me than eating their food, lying on their couch, watching their TV, and using their basement to play music.

But like everything else in my life, I kicked the can down the road. I figured I’d ride it as long as I could.





CHEYENNE BELLE


This was all happening at the same time the band started jamming again.

“Harry,” Johnny said at one of our first rehearsals after Georgia, “you should be singing some of our songs.”

“What? No.”

I had told Johnny about Harry’s incredible night as our front man at the keg party in Athens.

“Seriously, dude, we’re called the Scar Boys, not the Amputee Boys. You and I should share the mic. You sing some of the songs, I’ll sing some of the songs.”

Harry fought it at first, but in the end he agreed. I could tell it made him really happy, too.

I honestly think Johnny figured getting Harry, our original “scar boy,” up front would help the band. But there was something else, too. Johnny was tired. Really tired. He was going to rehab four times a week, and it was taking a toll.

He let me come with him once and I was surprised at how simple it was. I expected to see medieval torture devices clipped to his leg while he learned how to walk. Instead, it was just a plastic leg with a foam foot that he would practice walking on for about an hour. The leg, Johnny said, was temporary.

“They don’t give you your permanent leg until you’re fully healed,” he told me. “They have to wait until the stump is done morphing and changing shape before they can create a mold to fit the prosthesis.”

It’s weird how comfortable I got with words like stump and prosthesis. It’s like they’d always been part of my vocabulary, part of my life.

Johnny had been lucky . . . well, as lucky as you can be when you have your leg chopped off. The break was clean, and his skin was intact. Apparently, what happens to your skin when you lose a limb is really important. Johnny didn’t need any skin grafts, which was good. Plus, because of the way the break happened, the surgery was pretty straightforward. It was really easy for them to fit him for a new leg.

Even in the worst of times, the best things still happened to Johnny McKenna.

The day I went with him to rehab, I saw all sorts of other amputees in much worse shape than Johnny. There was one girl with a leg that was so badly scarred that I wondered what kind of accident she’d been in. It made me think of Harry.

Johnny’s recovery seemed easier than I would’ve guessed. He was a fast learner, and after six weeks his rehab went from four to two times a week, and after three months he was pretty much done. You could barely tell he had a limp.

He’d been all set to go to Syracuse on a track-and-field scholarship before the accident, and it was really important to him to learn how to run with his new leg. Johnny probably had some secret dream that he’d be the first amputee to win a track-and-field medal at the Olympics, and I don’t mean the Special Olympics.

Anyway, even though the rehab was going really well, it was still a strain for him to spend a lot of time on his fake leg. His stump would get blisters if he put pressure on it for too long, so standing in front of a microphone for two hours during rehearsals wasn’t really in the cards. He never actually told me that, but I could tell.

Since he couldn’t stand, do you know what Johnny did instead?