Chapter 1

Symptomatic epilepsy is diagnosed when there is a known cause for seizures, such as a head injury, brain infection, stroke, or scar tissue on the brain. In the case of Robert Washington, called Bobby by his friends and mother, the head injury resulted from being hit by a car while he was riding his bike in a cul-de-sac in a suburb of Lawrence, Kansas. It was supposed to be safe because it was a nice area and it was a cul-de-sac. Nobody thought a drunk driver would be going forty-five miles an hour on a street that led to a cul-de-sac. Jessica French, however, was three times over the legal limit, both in speed and blood alcohol level. She had just gotten drunk at a weekly bridge party and had lost. She was angry and her driving showed it.

Bobby never had a chance to avoid the collision. He did not, in fact, see it coming. His attention was on the three-foot-long piece of plywood and a milk crate he’d used to make a ramp and he was pedaling towards it, trying to get some air on his bike. He did hear the car, just before it struck him, but he didn’t have time to even turn his head and look. He did get some air, being thrown fifteen feet before he impacted the short brick stand his family’s mailbox was encased in. All the houses on the street had mail box stands like that. The part of his body that stopped his flight by hitting the mailbox stand was his head.

Jessica went on, crushing the bike, and then running into the corner of the house next door to the Washington home. She was passed out when the paramedics got there.

Those same paramedics thought Bobby was dead, at first. His respiration rate, once they detected it, was eight breaths per minute. His pupils were fixed and dilated. His head was visibly misshapen.

At the hospital, surgeons decided not to operate and repair his broken skull because his brain was already swollen. Instead, they put him into an induced coma to let the swelling go down ... assuming he didn’t die. There were four doctors present during his evaluation. They were split 50-50 in terms of assessing his chances to live through the night.

He did live through that night, and then the next one and the next one, but his prognosis didn’t change, much. His tearful mother and stone-faced father were informed that their son would likely not survive, but that doctors were doing everything they could. Actually, the doctors weren’t doing much at all, except covering his shaved head to try to keep bacteria out of his brain. The best bandage they had was his skin, which was holding things together and only actually split in one small place. That had been stitched up and was covered by a sterile dressing.

While Bobby slept, litigation took place. Mrs. French’s insurance company eventually settled by putting 18.2 million dollars into a trust fund for the injured youth. The amount was that high because of the estimated costs of future surgery and because his prognosis included the more than fifty percent probability that he’d be handicapped, either mentally, physically, or both for the rest of his life, if he lived. Funds could be accessed through a fund manager for his medical care, once he left the hospital – assuming he ever did – but the rest would remain untouched until he was twenty-one. The insurance company’s lawyers believed the boy would die, which would give them a chance to ask the court to return the money to the company. The family would resist that, of course, but there was a chance. And this wasn’t a wrongful death suit ... not yet ... so if the victim died it could be argued that the money should be returned and a new action litigated. The insurance company had nothing to lose and 18.2 million dollars to gain.

It took six months, but eventually the specialists were able to do surgery to address brain damage caused by the impact and repair Bobby’s skull. No one was surprised when he began having seizures, but medication seemed to minimize them. A month later they removed the ventilator and waited to see if he’d breathe on his own.

He did.

But he did not wake up.

He remained in a coma for two more years, during which his parents fought and divorced. That’s not unusual. Family trauma of this sort often leads to that outcome. Vicky Washington, his mother, hung in there, believing that her son would wake up and eventually come home, while his father took off for parts unknown. Since Roger Washington was the only parent who was employed, Vicky was awarded both alimony and child support. Roger felt that the child support the court ordered was unfair, since all of Bobby’s medical bills were being covered and his wife actually had no “child-related expenses”. He therefore felt justified in making no payments whatsoever. As far as he was concerned, his ex-wife could get a job and support herself. After all, she had nothing to do all day because his broken son was sleeping in an extended care facility. One of the reasons they fought was because Roger kept trying to figure out a way to get to some of those millions of dollars out of his son’s trust fund and into his own bank account. One of the reasons he left was because it became clear to him he wouldn’t see any of that money until Bobby was twenty-one. He wasn’t willing to wait that long. Their bitter fights about all this led to a divorce and Vicky had neither seen nor heard of him from the day they left the courtroom after the final decree.

The house they were living in when Bobby got injured had mortgage payments of $1700.00 per month. Vicky could no longer afford that. She had to move to a rental that was half the size and which would be considered “opulent” only in a third world country where the annual income was in the neighborhood of $1,700.00 per year. She got two part time jobs and spent as much time by her son’s side as she could.

To be honest, everyone, medical staff and Vicky, were all astonished when Bobby opened his eyes one day and said, “I’m thirsty” in a voice that cracked and was so soft that the LPN who heard him had to ask him to repeat himself.

“I’m thirsty,” he whispered again.

A flurry of activity ensued, but nobody brought him anything to drink, primarily because they weren’t sure they should. It took another hour (during which Bobby said he was thirsty several more times) before a doctor ordered some apple juice for him. The patient hadn’t had solid food for two and a half years, so his initial diet was all liquid. Two weeks later they gave him some soft food and got him sit up on the edge of the bed. During this time he had roughly seven to twelve seizures per day. His medication was adjusted and his seizures dropped to three or four a day.

It was another month and a half before there began to be talk of letting him go home. He was pale and thin, but was eating better. He would need physical therapy to work on his atrophied muscles, but that could be done at home. His trust fund would cover the costs of in-home specialized care. When Vicky asked them what his prognosis was, in the extended future, the doctors shrugged and were honest.

“We don’t know,” they said. “If his epilepsy can be controlled, he might be able to live a fairly normal life. We’ll know more in six months or so.”

Red tape is everywhere, and some of it determined that Bobby was no longer entitled to stay in long term care. He could go home, where others could see to his medical needs. And so it was that Bobby Washington was put in a wheel chair and moved to his mother’s fifteen-year-old sedan, where two husky male nurses put him in the back seat and buckled him in.

Nobody thought about how Vicky would get him out of the car and into her house. The paperwork to get the “in-home care” was still being shuffled by some minor bureaucrat, somewhere. Bobby still couldn’t walk, unassisted. His legs wouldn’t support his hundred and ten pound body. He’d gotten some physical therapy in the long term care facility, but it mostly amounted to them just moving his limbs around to get them used to bending and stretching again. He hadn’t actually built any strength back.

Bobby’s brain was scarred, but there was nothing wrong with his cognitive abilities. It’s possible that, during his extended coma, his damaged sentience was restored, that his brain re-routed important brain functions around the damaged areas. Scientists think that’s possible, but so little is known about the brain that almost everything is merely conjecture. In any case, Bobby’s IQ was still a solid 125. Ironic as it sounds, in spite of the physical damage to his brain, there was nothing wrong with his mental faculties.

Bobby’s main problem wasn’t that his brain got hurt. Bobby’s problems mostly circulated around the fact that his brain was still fifteen and he was bored. What was worse was that when he “went to sleep” his body was fine and could run and climb trees and swim and dozens of other physical pursuits that might have helped with his boredom. But his body couldn’t do those things anymore. He was trapped in a body that was useless. And it made his psyche feel a bit useless, too. As a result, he wasn’t motivated to do anything and his thoughts were dark.

There were other things weighing him down, too. When he woke up the only person he recognized was his mother. Nobody he knew came to see him. His friends had moved on, both figuratively and literally. He was a stranger in a strange land. He had the education of a fifteen-year-old in an adult’s body. He couldn’t even eat unless he was careful. The first few times he tried to have a decent meal his stomach rebelled and he threw up. He had to take small bites, chew them to a ridiculous mush, and then stop long before he felt full. Initially, for example, he could eat one quarter of a grilled cheese sandwich and maybe five or six fries.

Then, when he got home, it was to a strange house, and a neighbor he’d never met before who witnessed how pitiful his body still was when he helped carry Bobby into the house and drape him on the couch. His days were filled with nothingness. He couldn’t go out. He had no friends to invite in. Daytime TV made him want to break something.

His father could have helped him come out of his funk, but his father had taken off. He knew about that because his mother couldn’t hide the fact that daddy never came home anymore. Bobby hated him for abandoning them, but couldn’t blame the man. He wouldn’t want to be saddled with someone like himself, either. Up until he got dumped on that couch by the neighbor guy, he’d loved his dad. Now, he couldn’t.

He knew about his trust fund, which, due to medical expenses, had dwindled to a little over ten million dollars, but he couldn’t spend any of that money for three more years. He knew one thing. When he turned 21, the first thing he was going to do was tell his mom she’d never have to work again. He didn’t have big plans to spend millions of dollars. He was intelligent enough to know that money wouldn’t bring happiness on his 21^st birthday because the world wouldn’t have changed. All he wanted was for his mother to be able to relax, and to never have to see her drag her tired body into the house and collapse on the couch with a groan of exhaustion.

He was so unmotivated that he didn’t even try to “get better”, physically. He avoided doing the things on the list of exercises the physical therapist sent home with him. He was eventually able to get around the house, but only because his bladder drove him out of bed and made him walk to the bathroom, using the walls to support him. His hunger or thirst required that he go to the kitchen in the same manner. He still hadn’t unpacked all the boxes his mother had lovingly and hopefully packed when she moved out of their old, nice house into the dump where they now had to live.

Basically, for Bobby Washington, he viewed the world like many fifteen-year-olds do. It was flawed. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t any fun. And it wasn’t going to get any better. The only bright spot was his mother, and even she was absent for most of his day, because she had to work two jobs to support them.

And that was when Mai Li Attenborough came into his life and, quite possibly, saved it. She saved it because she quite possibly prevented Bobby Washington from committing suicide out of despair and depression.

Mai Li was Vietnamese, by birth. The circumstances that led to her parent(s) giving her up for adoption were unclear, but luck had led an American couple to adopt her. Her adoptive mother had traveled to Vietnam, to the orphanage in which a then two-year-old Mai Li languished, and she was whisked away to the land of milk and honey. She was raised with a Chinese sister, five years older, who was also adopted, and in America she had flourished. She had always thought of herself as a normal American girl, though she faced some racism and prejudice along the way. She had ignored that, for the most part, and taken advantage of being able to get a good education, which included a degree in physical therapy. At the time she was hired to live with the Washington family and take care of Bobby, she was twenty-three. She had learned her native language and spoke it, if not fluently, at least understandably. She’d been thinking of returning to her birth country to work there, when she was offered the Washington post. She assumed she’d spend six months to a year recuperating a boy in tragic circumstances, and then be free to explore her origins.

Mai Li’s experiences as a girl and then young woman had been both quite normal, from a Western perspective, and unusual at the same time. She had all the same problems as her Caucasian counterparts, in terms of her social life. Hormones had raged through her body just like they did to the other girls. Guys were interested in her and she dated regularly. There were always issues involving Asian stereotypes, though, even with kids she grew up with and went to school with every day. She had heard them all. Asians couldn’t drive. Asians were good at math. Asian women were naturally subservient and docile. More than one boy who took her out called her “exotic” when all she did was normal stuff. One girl had actually asked her, at one point, if her pussy was sideways, instead of up and down, like “normal” girls.

All most people in America knew about Vietnamese women came from the scene in Full Metal Jacket, where a Vietnamese woman, clad in a miniskirt and hot pink tank top, sashays up to a few American GIs and says, “Me so horny. Me love you long time.” For $10 each, the GIs can get “everything” they want. So most Vietnamese women are whores, right?

It didn’t help that an American diet had done to her what it did to so many young woman in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Her body had developed into a healthy, lush female landscape of curves, hills, and valleys. She had breasts that would over-fill a grown man’s hands, a narrow waist, and hips that swelled to join “an ass to die for” as more than one of her male teenage classmates had said. Her mother had never cut her hair, and it now fell almost to that to-die-for ass. It was straight, black and heavy, and if not tied up or restrained in some way, fell and swayed like teasing curtains around her body. Whether by genetics or chance, her nipples were sensitive and often erect, especially if she wasn’t wearing a bra and the material of her top rubbed against them.

She was exotic, when compared to her Caucasian, black, and Hispanic compatriots, even though she didn’t want to be.

Mai Li wasn’t a virgin when she went to the Washington household to work. She’d lost her virginity in just the way many young women do so, after prom, while a little drunk. It had not been memorable. One other high school boy had slid into her hot (and not horizontal) pussy. He was her boyfriend, or at least she thought he was. All he wanted, though, was to fuck that little exotic Asian girl and, after he’d done that a few times, he lost interest and looked for another hot chick to bang.

The heartbreak of having been used lasted until Mai Li was a junior in college. She met another Asian, a man from the Philippines, and dated “one of her own kind” for the first time in her life. Raul was from the Philippines, though, and was not acclimatized as an American. His attitudes were Pilipino, or actually a mixture of Pilipino and Hispanic. He was macho and expected Mai Li to act like a girl from his country. They dated for three months before moving in together but that only lasted another semester. Eventually Mai Li lost interest, primarily because his macho attitude grated on her sensibilities but also, in their sex life, while he got satisfied each time, she did not. They stayed friends and study partners, but there was no romance, or sex, after that.

All in all, Mai Li’s experience with men, in a sexual sense, had been pretty unfulfilling. She had several sex toys, though, and they never let her down. She was young and her biological clock was still tightly wound, so she wasn’t worried. She hoped to meet a man in Vietnam who might understand her. She didn’t think about the fact that she really was an American woman. In an ironic way, she let racist perceptions affect the way she thought about the world and her future.

She certainly didn’t look at Robert Washington and put him any category even brushing up against an interest in any sexual or even social situation. If anything, after she was introduced to him, she thought he was kind of pathetic.

Vicky, on the other hand, was fairly elated when the short, curvy woman reported for duty as Bobby’s live-in tutor and care-giver. Vicky was embarrassed, initially, because the small third bedroom in their house was still filled with unpacked boxes and things not currently being used. She had known that the Kansas agency that supplied assistance to families with “special needs” members had a file on them and was working to find her assistance. That agency, in fact, went through some two dozen prospective caregivers before finding one who would accept the conditions of employment the Washington household presented. When they found Mai Li, they jumped on it, coordinating with the manager of Bobby’s trust fund to ensure that the financial side of things would work out. As happens so often in a bureaucratic situation, a decision was made in a vacuum that didn’t include Vicky Washington’s active participation, and she only had twenty-four hours’ notice before Mai Li came to live with them.

It didn’t start with a bang. On the first day Mai Li woke up in her new “home” her duties were still somewhat undefined. She knew her job would include physical therapy and she was comfortable with that, even if this was her first job as a professional therapist. She also knew she was expected to bring her charge to the point where he could take and pass a GED test. Other than that, she didn’t really know what to expect.

When she got up she found a note Vicky had hastily composed and left on the kitchen table before heading off to her job as a waitress in a local diner where many of her customers were long-haul truckers. The note said:

1. Get him up. Make him eat something.

2. Make yourself at home. Anything we have is yours to use.

3. There are some study materials in a box in your room that has “school stuff” written on the side. I hope they help.

4. If you can get him to go outside that would be great.

5. Please forgive him if he’s rude. He’s not a happy boy right now.

6. If you have problems you can reach me on my cell.

The number was listed, along with the number of Bobby’s doctor. “He knows all the other doctors who helped Bobby” was the last thing on the page.

Mai Li thought about finding something to eat first, but then decided she might as well have some company. She had met her young charge the afternoon before, but hadn’t had time to talk to him except during her evaluation of his physical plant. It had taken several hours to develop a plan for his physical therapy, with goals and mileposts and all that. By the time she was finished with that her patient was already in bed. Vicky had talked to her for half an hour, but then went to bed, too. The poor woman had looked worn out.

Now she would have time to get to know her patient, so she went to his room and tapped on the door. When there was no answer, she opened the door and peeked in. There was a lump under the covers on the bed.

“Bobby?” she called.

The lump moved, but there was no answer.

“It’s time to get up, Bobby,” she said, going into the room.

She looked around. The room was a mess. Dirty clothes littered the floor and other clothes, either clean or dirty, hung out of open drawers. A stack of boxes stood against one wall, under a window that was dirty and fly-specked.

‘Have you no pride?’ she thought, looking at the bed.

“Come on,” she said, stridently. “We have a lot to do, today. Get up and we’ll get you something to eat.”

“Go away,” came a groan from under the covers.

“I can’t go away,” she said, patiently. “I’m here to help you get back on your feet and back into the normal world.”

“Fuck the normal world,” growled her charge.

“What are you wearing?” she asked.

A lump rose under the covers as what she assumed was his head lifted.

“What?”

“I asked what you’re wearing,” she said.

“Why the fuck would you ask me that?”

“Because I’m about to take the covers off of you and I don’t feel like seeing a naked man right now,” she said.

Another lump formed, a lateral one, as his arm lifted. A tousled head appeared as the covers were dragged off of it. Bleary eyes peered at her.

“I’m not naked,” he said, sounding confused.

“Good,” she said, as she stepped forward.

She lifted her foot to clear a pile of jeans and something striped, probably a shirt, and reached for the covers. As she gripped them and pulled, his hand scrabbled to grab the cloth covering him. He was too weak, though, and she pulled the covers out of his grip easily. She whipped her arm and the covers slid across his body to fall in a long pile on the floor.

“Get up!” she ordered. “We’re starting your physical therapy today and you need fuel for your body to use when we do that.”

“I didn’t ask you to come here,” he complained, laboriously rising on one elbow.

“Your mother did,” she said. “And I’m here, so get used to it. Come on. Do you need help getting out of bed?”

This question was prompted by her saddened eyes taking in his emaciated condition. She’d seen during her eval of him that the boy was a bag of bones. When she took the job she expected to take a reasonably healthy person and recover from some minor physical trauma. As soon as she saw him she realized she’d have to build him up from scratch. It was then she had understood why the term of employment for this job was open-ended. It was going to take a long time to get him back on his feet.

“I can get out of bed, thank you very much,” he muttered.

She watched as he worked his way to a sitting position. He was wearing boxers, in a plaid design. They looked two sizes too big.

“I’ll go get breakfast started while you get dressed,” she said. “Wear something loose so you can bend and stretch. What do you want to eat?”

“I’m not hungry,” he said.

“Well, you have to eat something,” she said, firmly. “It’s part of your therapy. I’ll go investigate the possibilities for breakfast. See you in a few.”

She returned to the kitchen and started going through the cupboards and refrigerator. She found flour, salt, baking powder, and sugar, and used them to make a basic pancake batter, using milk as the liquid component. There were pans and skillets on the stove top, which looked out of place in this low-rent accommodation because it was a nice glass-top model that looked expensive. The refrigerator looked out of place, too. It was big and stainless steel, with a large pull-out freezer drawer below double doors above.

She had two pancakes ready on a plate and was thinking about going back to light a fire under Bobby when he shuffled into the room. Like his boxers had looked, his shirt looked like a 3X garment on a medium frame, and his sweat pants looked like the string in them had been pulled out as far as it would go.

“Good morning,” she said. “I found butter, but no syrup.”

“It’s under there,” said Bobby, pointing vaguely at a lower cabinet door.

“Can you get it?” she asked. She was already assessing his capabilities.

“Of course I can get it,” he grumbled. “I’m not a cripple.”

“Did you study the Bataan Death March in school?” she asked. “It happened during world war two.”

“No,” he said. “Why?”

“Because you look like a survivor of the Bataan Death March,” she said. “All you are is skin and bones.”

“You’re not supposed to say stuff like that,” he objected.

“Why not? It’s true,” she replied.

“It’s not nice,” he said.

“I’m not here to be nice,” she said. “I’m here to get you back to where you were before the accident.”

“I’ll never be like I was before the accident,” he said.

“Well, you won’t be if you have that attitude,” she said. “I’ve looked over your medical records and, according to your doctors, you defied the odds more times than I could count. There’s no reason you can’t get better, stronger, and more capable. You can’t lie around like you are now all your life. Don’t you want to go out into the world and get a job, maybe meet a nice girl and go on some dates?”

“No girl will want to go out with me,” he said, sullenly. “I have seizures. It freaks people out.”

“Well, it won’t freak me out,” she said. “Your records say your current meds are working pretty well.”

“Yeah, if you consider having two or three seizures a day working pretty well,” he argued.

“I’m not a neurologist,” said Mai Li, “but I know there are cases where people have been taught how to tell when a seizure is coming on and prepare for it so it isn’t so disruptive. Maybe we can research that and give you a little more control over your life.”

“Yeah. Sure,” he said, obviously dismissive.

“We’ll talk about that later. Right now eat your pancakes before they get colder than they are. You want me to put them in the microwave and warm them up?”

“I can’t eat all that,” said Bobby, looking at the plate.

“Okay, then, eat as much as you can. We’re going to start putting some meat on those bones. After you eat we’ll start your first PT session.”

Their first PT session didn’t go swimmingly, either, with one possible exception. He had eaten the equivalent of one pancake and drunk a glass of orange juice. Now they were on the living room floor as she showed him what she wanted him to do. She had changed into an exercise suit consisting of a spandex body suit that showed too much in the crotch, which was why she had on running shorts. Her hair was up in a ponytail and there were elastic bands holding the tail together every five or six inches so it wouldn’t swish too much.

Bobby might have been disillusioned with the world and un-inspired, generally speaking, but there was nothing wrong with the part of his brain that was male. He knew a babe when he saw one, and his new babysitter, which is how he thought of her, was definitely a babe. His libido was interested, even if the rest of him was not.

That interest waned a bit as she made him stretch. One would think that atrophied muscles would stretch easily, but that’s not the case. Any unused muscle becomes shorter, which means normal positioning of the bones makes it stretch more than it’s used to. Holding a stretch like that causes pain, and for the next hour Bobby felt like she was torturing him. When he didn’t do what she asked him to, voluntarily, she put her hands on him and moved him into the position she wanted. That hurt just as much as doing it himself. The one slim, silver streak in the cloud he was under was that, whenever she got near to him, she smelled wonderful.

Next came elastic bands of various colors, which he was required to grip and stretch. She tied one end of a band to a doorknob and had him stand a couple of feet away while he pulled this way and that. He had to grip and spread his arms. He had to loop the band around his foot and pull, leaning back. She worked every muscle in his body and, after two hours, he flopped on the floor and spread his arms in limp surrender.

“No more,” he whined. “Everything hurts!”

“It’s a good start,” she said, thinking about how, when he pulled his hands apart using the yellow band, they only went six inches. The yellow was the lightest band she had and he should have been able to stretch it two feet. “I’ll give you a massage and that will help with the pain.”

The massage started off roughly, too. She had him strip down to his boxers, the same ones he’d been sleeping in. He was sweaty from the workout his body was unaccustomed to. And he was ... odiferous.

“Shower, first,” she said, leaning away from him. “You smell.”

“You’re really kind of a bitch, aren’t you?” he said, callously.

“All I do is speak the truth,” she said, ignoring his crude barb. “You smell bad. When was the last time you showered?”

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