Returning the favor

Two boys' complete friendship

The first day Max Miller went to the hospital to see Logan Aldridge, Logan was so sedated he didn't know Max was there. The next day, Logan opened his eyes, and Max got to say hi. If Logan thought it weird to see Max, he didn't let on.

It was the summer after seventh grade, and Max and Logan hardly knew each other. When the boating accident happened that severed Logan's left arm, Max found out about it from another friend.

His mother, Susie Miller, drove him to Chapel Hill to see Logan in the hospital. She told her son that Logan's accident was sad and frightening, but it wasn't something to hide from. Still, Max was uncomfortable. He wasn't one of Logan's closest friends.

But he wanted to be.

The week before the accident, he'd hung out with Logan, really for the first time.

None of Logan's good friends could accompany him to his family's vacation home at Lake Gaston, straddling the Virginia border. But Max could. He didn't care that he wasn't Logan's first choice. He was just happy to be included.

The boys spent the weekend wakeboarding, the equivalent of snowboarding on water, and getting to know each other.

They'd played lacrosse together in middle school, where Logan was the best player Max had ever seen. Logan would run onto the field and handily dodge the players assigned to defend him. His skills on the playing field spilled over into the school day. He was outgoing and popular, and he'd attended Ravenscroft School in North Raleigh since first grade.

Max had started at the school only the previous year, in sixth grade; he was shy and a little tentative, a nice kid but not really part of the in crowd.

That was about to change.

Why it came to pass is captured neatly in one paragraph on the opening page of a leather-bound scrapbook that Logan's mother, Lisa Aldridge, used to chronicle the event that took her youngest son's arm and its aftermath.

It was just another lazy summer weekend at the Lake Gaston house. Logan, a wakeboarding fanatic, was about to hop out of the water and into the boat. First, he had to stow his ski rope.

Lisa Aldridge wrote: "6/26/04: 7:30 p.m. at Lake Gaston, finished wakeboarding and on the boat, Logan was holding the ski rope, ready to wrap it up and store. The boat propeller grabbed the rope and in a second, the rope tightened its grip on Logan's left upper arm. EMT arrived and transported him to South Hill, Va. The UNC Tar Heel One helicopter flew in and Logan arrived at UNC Memorial Hospital at 12:30 a.m. on Sunday."

It was there that his left arm had to be amputated.

His mother compiled a book of get-well cards ("I'm sorry to hear about your accident, that really sucks man," wrote one friend) and pictures of various classmates visiting Logan. Max isn't in many of those photos for the same reason that you tend not to take pictures of people you see all the time. Photographs are memory aids. If someone is always there, you don't need help remembering him.

In the strained early hours, when the accident loomed stark and fresh in memory and muscle, Max first showed up.

Logan had reached out a hand in friendship to him. Now, when Logan needed help, Max returned the favor.

"Max was always just there in the beginning," Lisa Aldridge said.

The night after the amputation, after Max had gone home, Logan saw his reflection in the plate glass of his hospital room window. He cried hard, said his mother.

"You're not a freak," she told him. "Your friends will learn from you."

After that night, he never cried about it again.

As long as Logan remained hospitalized, Max kept him company. The injury scared some other kids away. They feared what he'd look like, worried they wouldn't know what to say.