To most people, the rally was noise.
To Caleb Whitmore, it was music.
He woke at 5:30 that morning, before the sun had fully cleared the roofs across Elm Street.
His bedroom was small, barely large enough for the twin mattress on the floor, the plastic crate where he kept his clothes, and the school desk his grandmother had found at a yard sale for five dollars. The wallpaper had peeled in the corners, showing patches of drywall underneath. The window did not close all the way, so at night a thin whistle of wind slipped through the crack.
Caleb had grown used to it.
He sat up slowly and reached for the aluminum crutch leaning against the wall.
His left leg ended four inches below the knee.
The surgeons had done what they could when he was five years old. They saved his life. They did not save the leg. Caleb remembered almost nothing about the accident itself, only the sound of tires screaming, his mother’s hand reaching back from the front seat, rain on the windshield, and then waking up in a hospital room with his grandmother crying beside him.