We Are Inevitable by Gayle Forman (read aloud txt) 📕

side of the bed,” he says, going upstairs to change. He comes back down with his sweater on backward, but I don’t have the heart to tell him. Nor do I have the heart to tell him what I did last night. Better to wait until he’s on more solid ground.

There are a lot of heavy sighs, a bit of mild groaning. Finally Ira says: “If you don’t mind watching the store, I think I’ll go for a walk to clear my head.”

“Sure. Go for it.” Ira often takes “walks”—which I’m pretty sure is a euphemism for smoking pot—when he gets agitated. He tries to keep it from me, maybe because he thinks I’d judge him for it. If it was anyone else, maybe I would. But Ira I begrudge nothing. And anyway, he’s almost always calmer when he returns.

“When you get back, I want to talk to you,” I add.

“Okay,” he says, reaching for his rain jacket, a bright yellow slicker like the kind I had in elementary school.

Thirty seconds later, he’s back. “What’d you forget?” Ira has always been a bit of the absentminded professor, but these days, he’s constantly misplacing his keys, his glasses, his shoes.

“Some fellow down on the sidewalk asking for you.”

“Send him in.”

“Can’t. He’s in a wheelchair.”

“Chad? What’s he want?”

Ira shrugs. I follow him outside to the sidewalk, where Chad greets me with an elaborate high-five-fist-bump thing that I bungle.

“What are you doing here?” I ask when the handshake finally peters out.

“Is that how you greet your paying customers?”

Chad being a customer did not even occur to me. “Oh, sorry. Did you want a book?”

“Sure, what you got?”

“We’re a bookstore, Chad. We have a vast variety of books.”

“Even comic books?”

“Even those. Do you have a specific one in mind?”

Chad strokes the part of his chin where a beard would be if he had a beard. “Wonder Woman?”

“Any particular issue?”

“Whatever you got.”

“Anything else? Aside from the Wonder Woman?”

“Well, I would like to come and peruse your vast variety of books, only how am I gonna get into your store?” He gestures to the stairs.

“Uh, right. Sorry about that.”

Chad rolls himself forward and backward, leaning back as if to pop a wheelie. The wet leaves squish under his tires. Then, casual as can be, he says, “If you had a ramp, I could come check things out for myself.”

“Yeah. We should probably have a ramp.” I say this absently, politely, and insincerely.

But it’s enough for Chad. “You know, I have a piece of plywood at my house that might work.”

“Uh-huh,” I say, watching Ira walk down Main Street.

“It used to be a skateboarding ramp and now it just sits there, because, you know, I can’t skate anymore.” Chad flutters his eyelashes, pitifully. “You know, because I’m paralyzed.”

“Sorry about that.”

“You could come take a look at it,” Chad continues.

“Uh-huh,” I say again as Ira grows smaller. Soon he will disappear. I should just run after him. Get it over with.

“Use it for a ramp.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sa-weet,” Chad says. “Let’s go.”

“Go? Go where?”

“To my place. To get the wood. For the ramp.”

“What ramp?”

“The one you just said you’d put in.”

“I don’t think I said that.”

“Sure you did. Just a second ago. Let’s go.”

“Now?”

“You got something else to do?”

I follow Ira’s slicker as he turns onto Alder, out of sight. The weight of what I have set in motion thuds in my stomach. “Come on then,” Chad says.

I look down Main Street. Back at the empty shop. “Let me lock up.” I pause, wondering if I should leave a note because Ira never checks his phone. “How long will this take?”

“Only a few minutes.” And because I don’t yet know Chad, I believe him. So I lock the door and don’t leave a note and follow Chad to his Dodge Ram. It’s jacked so high off the ground that an able-bodied person would need a stepladder to get in, and I’m puzzling how he manages it when he says, “Wanna see something rad?”

“Uh, okay.”

Chad opens the driver’s-side door and pulls out a small box that looks like an old Xbox console. He presses a button, which lowers a platform that he wheels onto. He presses another button and is lifted to the cab. He scoots into the driver’s seat and folds his wheelchair before pressing another button to maneuver a pulley that hooks the chair and lifts it to the truck bed. The entire operation takes about a minute.

“You coming or what?” Chad calls.

I clamber to the passenger side and haul myself into the seat with far less grace. As we head toward his house, he shows me how he controls everything—gas, brakes—from the steering wheel. “The town did a GoFundMe so I could retrofit my truck. Cost five grand. Pretty sweet, right?”

“Yeah, sweet,” I say bitterly.

When we arrive at Chad’s ranch-style house he points me toward the backyard, where, under a tarp, is his old skateboard ramp. He positions himself under the patio awning.

“Are you going to help?” I ask.

“I can’t go over there. It’s too muddy. My chair’ll get stuck. I’ll direct from here. It’ll be a piece of cake.”

It’s not a piece of cake. It’s a plate of barbed wire. Having not thought to bring gloves, I tear up my hands pulling nails out of the plywood plank. Having not thought to bring a jacket, I get soaked to the boxers. At one point, I’m yanking the plank toward the truck when I slide in a patch of mud, landing flat on my ass.

Chad cracks up, naturally. In the echo of his laugher, I hear Sandy’s. And then I hear the whole damn town laughing at me.

Soon, I remind myself as I stand up. Soon I will never have to see any of these fuckers again.

When we get back to the store, Ira is in full meltdown mode because Chad’s ten minutes multiplied, meaning I have left the store locked and unmanned during business hours and stranded Ira outside without his phone. He’s pacing the