Roll With It

Physical accessibility is one of the topics through which Sumner presents the challenges of disability in this novel. She illustrates that people with a physical disability must consider how they are going to navigate their physical world, and she portrays obstacles in physical spaces that are constructed for people without disabilities. This is shown as Ellie Cowan attends school, reliant upon her aid and technology for movement throughout her day: “Sorry for not thanking my lucky stars you get to follow me to the toilet three times a day, and sorry for not loving the fact that someone else has to carry my tray to the table at lunch and that I have to wait at the back of the bus, coughing in the cloud of exhaust, while the wheelchair lift goes down as slow as Christmas” (5). Her thoughts draw a map of physical obstacles as she navigates through one day of school from the toilet to lunch to the bus. Ellie’s sarcastic tone with the repeated “sorry” subverts the expectation that Sumner addresses in the book that someone with a disability should be thankful: “[A]nybody who sees a girl in a wheelchair thinks she is going to be sunshine and cuddles” (4).

Sumner addresses physical accessibility again as Alice Cowan and her mother relocate to her grandparents’ trailer, which is less accessible than the previous home they lived in while in Nashville. Ellie narrates:

Mom has to help me every time I go to the bathroom here, which is just humiliating, but the trailer bathroom is tiny, like airplane-bathroom tiny. My wheelchair doesn’t even fit through the door. . . Mom [also] has to lift me naked like a baby into the tub and Velcro me into the bath chair, which is basically what it sounds like – a chair I sit in in the tub, with a seat belt so I don’t slip down in the water (69).

As Ellie illustrates, the bathroom in her grandparent’s trailer is inaccessible for her, her wheelchair cannot fit through the door. That means she has to be assisted by someone every time she uses the restroom or bathes. Sumner uses “baby” as a simile to convey the infantilizing feeling of Ellie’s experiences of physically inaccessible spaces.

A second challenge of disability to which Sumner draws attention is the way that people with disabilities, or their parents, must advocate for their needs. Ellie describes her mom in “advocate mode” as she prepares to register Ellie at her new school:

[T]he mom setting she developed from years of fighting for insurance to pay for things like new shoes to go over my braces and fighting school for extended time between classes and fighting teachers who thought CP was the same thing as a learning disability (98).

As Sumner illustrates, Ellie and her mother are often responsible for advocating for themselves. Society is presented as unwilling or unprepared to meet the needs of people with disabilities with regard to their medical care, insurance coverage, and accessibility to education.

Another challenge that Sumner addresses with disability is explaining one’s disability to others. Ellie faces this issue as she gets to know her new friend, Coralee, who asks, “What happened?” (86). Sumner describes this question as, “[t]he million-dollar question” (86), using a hyperbole to convey how frequently it is addressed to those with a visible disability. In response, Ellie explains that she has cerebral palsy and that it likely started before she was born or closely thereafter. Coralee attempts to make this disclosure easier by telling Ellie to ask her a difficult question in return, offering a model of a two-way conversation for middle-grade target readers.