When the dancing stars finally settled down and Steven Fisk finally woke up, he was lying flat on his back in a familiar place. Even with his eyes shut, he could tell that he was in his own bed. He could sense and feel his entire body, even his missing right arm, so he assumed that the bus accident was just some horrible, crazy dream. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he heard his parents’ voices.
"What a disappointment!" his father said on his left.
"What am I going to do? How could I possibly show my face at the beauty parlor?" his mother said on his right. It was like a ping-pong match of misery.
"Of all the stupid things to do! This one takes the cake! The whole freakin’ cake!" his father said.
"Oh, my God, what are people going to say about me?" his mother said.
Steve slowly opened his eyes, and he saw his parents looming over him in bed. "That's strange," he thought. "My parents are never in my room. They're never in any room together!" He looked to the foot of his blue baseball blanket and saw hundred-and-two-year-old Doc Saxon sitting with his black prescription bag on his lap. Doc Saxon rubbed his gentle chin in thought.
"Hey, what's going on?" Steve asked weakly. "Why's everyone looking at me?"
Steve's parents looked at each other, and then down to the floor.
Doc Saxon saw that it was up to him to deliver the news. "Steven," Doc Saxon said slowly and calmly, "there was an accident."
Steve looked down at his body and saw that his pajama sleeve was empty and flat by his side. "No!" Steve cried. "No! No! No! No! No! No! No!"
Wearing his Astros cap and baseball batting glove, Mr. Fisk turned his back on his son and looked at Steve's massive collection of sports trophies on his bureau. "He had such promise," his father said. "He could have been everything I always wanted to be." Through the orange leather, he fingered the tallest and shiniest trophy of the lot—Steve's MVP trophy he received at the end of last season. "We could have had a really big star on our hands."
Steve's mother, with her dyed red hair in white plastic curlers, nervously twiddled her fingers along the handle of her beloved vacuum cleaner. "I know what they’re going to say. They're going to say I'm a terrible mother!" She took a long drag from her cigarette, and blew the smoke out into the air of Steve's room, which was already thick with dread.
"Hey, what about me?" Steve asked weakly.
The good doctor stuck a thermometer in Steve’s mouth and turned to his parents. "Mister and Missus Fisk, sports and what other people think aren’t exactly the most important thing right now. What’s important is that your son Steven is alive, and he’s going to need your love and support over the next couple of days, weeks, months and years."
Steve's father clutched a souvenir baseball from the Houston Astrodome's final game, and blurted, "Yeah, well, I’ve been supporting him this long. So why stop now?"
Doc Saxon stood up and prescribed the following advice to Steve’s parents: "I’m only a family doctor, I can just repair the flesh and bone. It is up to you as a family to mend the heart and soul." He looked at his miserable one-armed patient, and announced, "Please give Steven and me a few moments alone."
Mr. Fisk rubbed Steve’s hair into a mess. "So I guess you won’t be painting that fence anytime soon, huh?" On the way out of the room, he stopped at the toy basketball hoop near the door. Mr. Fisk picked the mini basketball up from the floor and dunked it into the basket, setting off a computerized cheering noise. That sound crawled under Steve's skin, and he closed his eyes in pain and torment. In that moment, Steve realized that he would never again hear a real live crowd cheering for him. His days as a hero were over. He knew that he would never get a chance to be lifted aloft people's shoulders as a star.
