The Music of Bees

Content Warning: This section mentions mental health conditions and thoughts of death by suicide.

At his home in Hood River, Oregon, 18-year-old Jacob Stevenson looks in the mirror, surveying his impressive mohawk, which is more than 16 inches tall. Jake is paraplegic and uses a wheelchair. He sustained a catastrophic spinal cord injury nearly a year earlier on an April evening at a party. He’d been playfully wrestling with Tom Pomeroy, partly because he wanted to impress a girl named Megan Shine. Tragedy struck when he fell from the second-floor roof to the patio below and hit a wall. Since the accident, he has been struggling to come to terms with his life-changing injury. He’s miserable and doesn’t know what he’ll do with his life. He wanted to attend music school—he plays the trumpet—but that opportunity fell through. To cheer himself up, he goes for a ride outside in his wheelchair, going uphill and downhill as fast as he can as dusk approaches. A pickup truck strays over the white line into the shoulder and almost hits his chair.