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staring down toward the floor at the foot of my wheelchair when I hear a loud, angry bark. I’ve watched enough Dog Whisperer episodes to know that this bark sounds different than the dog’s excitement of a few moments ago. This barking is angry, scared, and is followed by a low, deep growl, a clear warning sound. Suddenly my wheelchair jerks. The growling sound is right next to me. My body tenses up involuntarily.
    â€œNo! Rusty!” the man yells.
    Mom hurries to my side and tries to shoo Rusty away.
    I hear Paul, close by, laugh and say, “Never seen a wheelchair before huh, buddy?”
    â€œBe careful,” the man says as I feel my wheelchair jerk again.
    But Paul speaks calmly and firmly to Rusty. “It’s okay, buddy,” he says, almost whispering, “Sit. See? It’s okay. We don’t bite wheelchair wheels around here. Just sit and stay.”
    I’m so rattled that I’m shaking, and I realize Rusty can’t control his fear any more than I can control mine. It’s kind of a downer to realize that I have so much in common with a dog.
    Sarcastically I think, “Welcome to my world, Rusty.”

11
    T he phone rings and Mom picks it up. After saying hello, she says, “Hi, Syd.”
    It’s my dad calling. My dad is the poet Sydney McDaniel, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning book Shawn , his version of our lives, of my life with him. Shawn tells the story of what he went through after I was born brain injured. The book made him rich and famous.
    I see the tension in Mom’s face as she listens to him, and I hear how uptight she is when she replies, “No, Debi moving in isn’t about the money—”
    Dad must have interrupted, because Mom gets quiet.
    Now Mom says, “No, honestly, we’re doing fine. We’re giving this thing with Debi a trial run to see how it works—”
    She listens a moment and answers, “Yes, of course Paul and Cindy agreed—”
    Another pause. “Well, the dog is a handful, but Paul seems to have his number already.”
    A laugh from Mom. “No, you’re right, Debi’s not exactly a great dog trainer.”
    They talk for another few minutes and finally Mom says, “Okay, see you then.” She hangs up the phone.
    Hearing Mom talking to Dad reminds me that I hardly think about his mercy-killing plan anymore. It’s not that this wasn’t important to me, but now that I don’t have death hanging over me, I have so many other things on my mind.
    I suppose if you are a normal person, a person who takes everything about your normalcy for granted, it would be impossible to understand how a guy like me feels about life in general and my life in particular. The truth is that I’ve been mostly happy. But since that near-death thing with Dad, I’ve also wondered, what does my life mean? Being brain injured the way I am, unable to walk, talk, or communicate in any way with anyone, I wonder, why was I even born?
    People talk all the time about having some purpose, some God-given reason for being alive. On TV shows like I Survived , people who had close encounters of the scariest kind, horrible near-death events, often say, “It just wasn’t my time to die,” or “God has plans for me.”
    So what is God’s big plan for me? Why am I alive if no one can ever know me? There are about seven billion of us on the planet now. We are eating, pooping, arguing, sleeping, waking up, robbing banks, dressing little kids to send them off to school, reading, watching TV, blowing up things, praying, laughing, planning murders, planning families, passing the sugar or pulling the trigger on a shotgun—how do I fit into all of this?
    After what happened with my dad, I have felt this need to make a connection with someone. And that’s part of the reason—other than her pure, utter hotness —that my crush on Ally overwhelmed me. I wanted to