He swallowed.
“It did. But Elena needed a new wheelchair.”
For a moment, I just stared at him.
Elena was one of his classmates.
I knew her as a sweet girl with sharp eyes and a beautiful smile who usually had a book balanced on her lap whenever I saw her at school events.

She had been paralyzed after an accident when she was younger.
But I had no idea there was anything wrong with her wheelchair.
“Her old chair was barely working,” Alejandro explained quickly. “The wheels kept sticking, and she kept pretending everything was fine, but it wasn’t.”
He shifted his weight.
“She missed lunch twice last week because it took too long for her to get across the building.”