Not Without Hope by Nick Schuyler and Jeré Longman Page A

me to go to bed, I’d say, “No, I’m just going to rest my eyes.”
    Nick Butt, she called me.
    In high school, she never missed one of my games. She kept stats and a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about my basketball and football careers. After she and my father split, she worked as a paralegal and took out loans so that I could attend Kent State my freshman and sophomore years. When I moved to Florida in 2005, and worked painting jobs for my dad’s business, my mother put her foot down and said she couldn’t help support me; she told me to go back to school, that it was the right thing to do. When I applied to USF and was too nervous to call the admissions office, she called for me to find out whether I had been accepted. While I was in school, she let me charge food on her credit card.
    Eventually, she moved to Florida to be near my sister and me. I played flag football on Saturday mornings, and she drove up two hours from Fort Myers to Tampa to watch my games. Sometimes she cooked or cleaned my house. She bought the orange jacket I was wearing out here in the cold water.
    My dad, Stu, busted his ass with his painting business when we were all in Ohio. When I was a kid, we had a vacation homein Orlando. Every Christmas break, we’d hook up our thirty-foot camper and drive to Disney World. On other holidays, we would go to Myrtle Beach or Virginia Beach. In the winter, we skied in Vermont, in Killington. I got anything I wanted. I was spoiled. Four-wheelers, Jet Skis.
    Being in the water made me think about an accident that happened in my junior year of high school. I was sixteen, and I begged and begged to get a motorcycle. Let’s go look, my dad said. I ended up getting a Suzuki GSX-R600. A crotch rocket. My best friend and I went to watch a football game and had some people over to my house afterward. During the party, I took him out real quick through a dark neighborhood around a bass lake. We weren’t drinking, but we were speeding. The street looked like a straightaway, but it happened to have a turn. We went down. I must have skidded thirty yards, bouncing on my hands across the pavement. I was bruised and scratched up but I didn’t hit my head or get badly hurt. I ran over to my friend, Daniel Turner. I didn’t have a phone on me. I began screaming for help. He was unconscious, bleeding from both ears. When the ambulance showed up, Dan had awakened and was freaking out. He was swearing and throwing punches at the emergency people. He had a concussion and they put him in a neck brace. If he hadn’t been wearing a helmet, he would have died.
    He had two emergency brain surgeries to relieve the pressure and the swelling. When we got to the hospital, I knew his parents were there, and I didn’t know if he would live or die. Up to this point, it was the most scared I’d ever been in my life. I didn’t know if his dad was going to hug me or attack me. Dan was in the hospital more than a month doing rehab. As scared as I was then, though, being stranded in the Gulf now was a lot worse. It was kind of like it was in God’s hands. At least then, there was help to be found. Out here there was nothing. Whoever came to look for us would be looking for a needle in a haystack.
    I knew my dad would worry about me. He had moved to Florida, to Tarpon Springs. He still had his painting business, but he had been through some hard times—divorce, financial issues. I thought about that. I thought, If I don’t get out of this, it’s going to make his life that much harder. I knew he was proud of me. I knew both of my parents were proud of me. They thought I always did what I wanted, whether it was good or bad. I think they respected me for that. They knew once I made my mind up about something, the only person who could keep me from doing it was myself, whether it was me not doing my homework or trying to make the USF football team.
    My mom used to say to me when I was younger, “Nick if you apply yourself in school,