Roll With It

“I very slowly pour it down the sink. The purple finds the drain in a thick swirl. Twice a day since I was six. Twice a day Mom had to use the dropper to feed me these antiseizure meds like a baby bird. But after today’s all clear, never again.”

Immersing readers in colorful, tangible imagery, Sumner displays what it is like to use medication long-term—in this case, seizure medication. It is a moment of relief and victory.

“I look down at my chair. That’s the first thing people see anyway. I had a pink sparkly one when I was little. But this one’s black with purple racing stripes I stuck on to jazz it up. There’s really not much in between – you get either My Little Pony or the kind you see old people wheeled around in at the airport.”

This quote establishes the awareness that Ellie has about her disability, which is that people most often see the wheelchair before they see her. She provides imagery here of her wheelchair, black with purple stripes, which is juxtaposed with the childhood image of a “pink sparkly” scheme. The colors exemplify the Common Challenges Faced by People With a Disability: Ellie is coming-of-age as an adolescent when the representations of disability around her do not account for this transitional period.

“But the DVD player broke last month, and there’s nothing to do back here but watch the river appear and disappear again.”

Sumner includes this acknowledgment of Alice and Ellie’s economic conditions. The implication is that they could not afford to replace the DVD player prior to the road trip. While the reader only sees Alice through Ellie’s perspective, it is an indirect indication that Alice has sometimes struggled to financially provide for Ellie.

“Two years ago, when we were driving to Eufaula for Christmas, the van broke down in the middle of nowhere. It was snowing. Mom’s cell phone died […] It took her an hour and she lost her hat in the snow, but she did it. She changed that flat in the freezing-cold middle of nowhere America.”

This quote is part of a flashback provided by Ellie, who recalls a former road trip to visit her grandparents. It illustrates Alice’s preparedness to deal with emergency situations. It is representative of her resilience as an individual.

“I dig through the drawers for a wooden spoon and notice she’s moved all the bowls and dishes down to the bottom cabinets. She’s gotten ready for me.”

This event occurs in Mema’s kitchen shortly after Ellie arrives in Eufaula. This is an important act of offering inclusivity for Ellie, and it shows that Mema is willing to take the extra steps to include Ellie in her life, a point which Sumner juxtaposes with those in the school later in the novel.

“Grandpa looks confused, and then he looks at Mema and back toward me and Mom. And like a switch flipping, he starts to cry. I’ve never seen him cry in my entire life.”

This event takes place at the front of the Methodist Church during Christmas Eve service when her grandpa begins asking who took his wallet and Mema has to explain to him that it is at home. It is clear his actions are a result of his Alzheimer’s. His tears show the difficulty in living with this diagnosis and signal a change in Ellie’s relationship with him.

“When you’re like me, you get used to seeing your body as a separate thing. Leg one. Leg two. Muscles and hair and heart that beats. It makes it all a little less embarrassing when people are always putting their hands on you.”

In this chapter, Ellie describes what it’s like to have her mother assist her with restroom usage and bathing in the trailer, as the bathroom door is too small for her wheelchair to fit through. Here, she describes disassociating from her body and seeing her body as separate, something that juxtaposes the way she feels in the water at the end of the novel.

“But in my experience, nobody would call a girl in a wheelchair attractive unless he was messing with her.”

In reference to Bert calling her attractive, Ellie’s first instinct is that he did not mean this statement seriously. This brings up an underlying issue in the text: idealized beauty, an issue exacerbated by the beauty and fashion industry.

“He’s probably on the spectrum. But I bet he’s never been tested. I bet they hear ‘spectrum’ here and think colors of the rainbow, not autism.”

By introducing a third character with a disability, Sumner provides an even wider and more varied look at what it means to have a disability. She also draws attention to the fact that a lot of individuals on the spectrum don’t have an official diagnosis, highlighting challenges for those with developmental disabilities as well as physical.

“My science teacher, Mr. Miller, yells, ‘Can you hear me okay in the back?’ Like my CP has also made me deaf. My speech teacher, Mrs. Roman, takes five minutes to tell the class about her cousin who also has cerebral palsy and is now working as the manager of a Target in Edmond ‘in spite of it.’”

On Ellie’s first day of school, she meets a number of teachers who display characteristics of ableism. One assumes that she is deaf and another, in attempting to be inclusive, expresses her preference for people without disabilities. Ellie ends the novel not happy “in spite of” her disability but, following her grandpa’s advice, because of embracing the parts of life that “you don’t make for yourself” (241).

“Her hair is bigger than I’ve ever seen it, like LEGO hair, and she’s wearing a red, white, and blue skirted leotard. Under the court lights, she sparkles like a firework.”

Ellie describes Coralee as she sings the national anthem at a school game. Her appearance is eccentric and histrionic. Using a simile, she compares her to a firework to make the image tangible for readers.

“‘Is that what you’ll do to me, then, if I get to be too much for you to handle? Do you have a file of “homes” for me too?’ There. I’ve said it. The thing I’ve never even let myself wonder until now, because Mom would never do that. Except I never thought she’d put Grandpa in a home, and here we are.”

This excerpt exemplifies Ellie’s reaction to learning that her mother is considering assisted living for her grandpa. The end result is that Ellie releases a buried concern about herself: the fear that her mother will place her into assisted living due to her disability. The reader has access to Ellie’s public dialogue and her private feelings, meaning that they receive not just her confession but a sense of its significance.

“I’m just so tired of all this, and I don’t mean the hospital. The wheelchair thing I can handle. But I hate it when the rest of me doesn’t work. That’s what nobody gets – the CP isn’t only about not being able to move my body; it also makes my whole system weak. I get sick more than most people. I get worn out more than most people. I get ambulance rides and hospital stays for stupid reasons. And I hate it.”

After collapsing at school and being hospitalized for pneumonia, Ellie expresses her frustration at being susceptible to infections. She explains that this facet of CP is the most difficult for her. Sumner hence creates a highly personal, emotive perspective on medical facts.

“‘[…] you have to understand something. You are my first priority. I have never been so scared in my life as I was when they called me from the ambulance. You weren’t conscious, honey. You were barely breathing. I can’t lose you, Ellie. I can’t.’ Now she’s crying into my lap like a little kid […].”

Alice expresses her fear about Ellie’s health after she is released from the hospital. Although the reader does not have access to Alice’s internal thoughts, Sumner gives readers a glance of what it is like to be a parent to a child with CP.

“No, let me say my bit. Ellie, you are not normal, but I wouldn’t want you to be for all the tea in China.”

This is part of the apology that Coralee offers Ellie for telling Ellie she would never be “normal.” Coralee emphasizes that she wouldn’t want Ellie to be “normal” because she likes her as she is. This dialogue juxtaposes with the words of Mrs. Roman since Coralee expresses that she does not love Ellie “in spite of” her disability but because of it.

“I’m my best self when I’m baking. I’m patient and I’m not nervous and I’m good at it. And so now I’m trying to be great at it.”

Ellie explains why she finds joy in baking. She feels at her very best as a person when she is engaging in this hobby, which is why she is continuing to pursue it. Sumner uses Baking as a motif throughout the novel to portray Ellie’s identity and sense of belonging.

“I turn back to the damage. It’s like a cake sunken in the middle and crumbled to bits.”

Ellie describes the damage that has been inflicted on Bert’s miniature Eufaula model by bullies. In the form of a simile, she describes it as a sunken, crumbling cake; Sumner uses a baking simile to convey Ellie’s efforts to be empathetic and compare Bert’s hobby to her own. She finds the rest of Bert’s model to be beautiful and requests to help him make repairs. She finds value in the different skills that individuals have.

“She looks so beautiful that for a minute I put my fork down. She’s wearing a white sleeveless dress, and her arms are freckled from the sun, and she’s gained some weight since we’ve been here with all of Mema’s cooking. She doesn’t look so breakable.”

Ellie describes Alice at the fish fry in a way that shows her some of the ways that she has changed since they have been in Eufaula. Ellie notices that she looks happier and more beautiful here, signaling Alice’s character development through her own eyes.

“The Buick’s in there, but I can’t get the chair between it and the wall. Up in front, Grandpa sits slumped over the wheel like he’s fallen asleep.”

Ellie describes what she sees when she is able to get the door to the garage open. She realizes her grandpa is unconscious at the wheel and that she is unable to fit her chair into the garage to help him. Here, readers see Ellie feel helpless due to using a wheelchair, with higher stakes than ever before in the novel to create its climax.

“Ellie, I know I’m not right some of the time […] But most of the time I am, honey, and that’s just a hard line to walk.”

Jonah Cowan discusses his diagnosis directly with Ellie for the first time. He explains how it is difficult to be coherent sometimes and incoherent at others. Again, the reader has access to a first-person account of a disability, this time from his speech rather than Ellie’s thoughts.

“Honey, it’s not like they’re dumping me at a street corner and going on their merry way. Some of the places we’ve looked at are mighty fine, nicer than our trailer, that’s for sure. And your grandma would come with me. We’d even get a little space to do some gardening.”

Her grandpa discusses assisted living with Ellie. He discloses that he has been playing an active role in deciding what his future looks like and that some of the assisted living facilities they have looked at seem like a good option. This makes him a rounded character with agency.

“We sat out there all afternoon roasting hot dogs and playing cards while the yard filled with puddles, and Mom and Mema watched from the porch.”

Ellie describes a memory with her grandpa. Their fishing trip was canceled because of a storm, and she was very upset. To make it up to her, her grandpa made other plans for her and it was even better than the planned fishing trip. This anecdote frames the ending of the story in which Ellie feels happiness and freedom in her life as it is.

“I’m in the back with Bert and Coralee in a nest of life vests and inner tubes.”

In this image, Ellie is riding in the back of a truck with her friends to enjoy the lake. It is a little glance at the life that they have built in Eufaula with the paraphernalia of an active childhood.