Evan Sonnet was beat. His first day on the job, hauling tables and working food service on campus, had taken it out of him. He told his friends he was not looking forward to a three-hour drive home to suburban Pittsburgh, especially with a busted stereo and none of his favorite music. But he knew his parents would like to see him for Mother's Day weekend. He phoned around 6 that evening to say he would be on his way soon. On May 10, Evan Sonnet got in his car and drove west from State College.

He is still trying to make his way home.

He cannot recall most details of the accident that brought him so close to death, that forced him to come back slowly through nearly 21 years of life.

"Just that it happened, and I'm here," Evan says, shrugging his shoulders and fidgeting in a wheelchair in a hospital room, with braces on his right arm and right leg, a prism over half his glasses, and a mind that still fails him too often.

On May 10, Evan was a rising junior at Penn State and a newly confirmed staff writer at The Daily Collegian, looking forward to spending the summer of 2002 living among friends at Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and working for the university. On July 1, he began remembering how to speak again.

When Evan talks now, it is slurred and clipped. The right side of his body is numb. He endures six or seven hours of therapy a day at a brain-injury rehabilitation clinic in Monroeville, about half an hour from his home in Greensburg. He usually needs help or a walker to travel from one side of the room to the next. But doctors, nurses, friends and family agree that he has come far since the night he was flown to Altoona Hospital and a neurosurgeon said to his parents, "It would be a mercy if God took him."

Evan was unconscious from the moment emergency crews found him, about 21 miles out of State College, on U.S. Route 220. Witnesses said Evan swerved to avoid hitting a recreational vehicle, and hit a pole. (Evan said he remembers it as a truck.) His father later said it was a good thing he was driving alone at the time, because the passenger seat was eliminated. The pole ended up where the console is, in the middle of the car.

Around sunset that Friday, the chaplain at Altoona phoned Evan's parents, Anne and Tom. He told them to drop whatever they were doing and get up to the hospital right away, Tom remembers. There wasn't much time. After a frantic drive along the winding roads Evan was to have taken home, Anne and Tom arrived to hear the neurosurgeon's grim news: He said he hoped they had other children.

"Yeah, we do, but - what about him?" Anne recalls saying of Evan. The patient had "pre-morbid characteristics," but his mother kept hope alive. Anne said she doesn't blame the doctors for their early predictions. "They're scientists. From a scientific standpoint, 'decerebrate' means there's nothing there."

Evan's friends at the fraternity heard about the car accident, and prepared for the worst. But the father of one of the students, who was a physician, knew that if Evan were to have a chance, he would have to go to a different hospital, one that would be more prepared to treat his case.

On the morning of May 11, Evan - still in a coma - was flown by helicopter to UPMC Presbyterian in Pittsburgh. The staff there rolled Evan into a special unit with individual supervision. When he started running a fever, and developed pneumonia, the nurses packed his body in ice and turned down the temperature.

"The room was like a meat locker," Tom said. Anne said, "They were just keeping him alive by machine."

Like many friends from high school and college, Josh Sroka (junior-economics) went to visit Evan while he was comatose.

"It was rough to see him the way he was," said Sroka, who roomed with Evan last fall at the fraternity house at 403 Locust Lane, and remembers talking to him just before he got in his car that day. "He was always very upbeat. Everyone wanted to hang around with him. ... He loves music. He always listens to music."

So while Evan's parents kept vigil by his bedside, praying to the saints and the Blessed Mother, talking to him, holding his hand, touching him, some of his friends made him a mix CD of classic rock, his favorite: The Doors, The Who, Led Zeppelin.

They played his music, and Evan responded. Signs of life came as flickers on the computer monitors hooked to his body. He made it clear there was at least one song on the CD he didn't like that much, and others he did.

Evan's condition improved to stable, and they moved him to the rehab clinic in Monroeville, where therapists began moving his limbs, sitting him up, and trying to make him do it on his own. More signs - lifting his eyelids, picking his nose, shuffling his feet, grunting out sounds - soon followed. In early July, after seven weeks asleep, Evan spoke. He said his older brother's name.

The speech therapist, who mostly had been talking to herself, was amazed. "She fell off her chair," Anne said. "He started to wake up and come around then."

Evan has a schedule. At 9 o'clock, he practices talking. At 10 o'clock, he practices walking. At 11 o'clock, he relearns the rules to games such as Sorry! and Yahtzee and horseshoes. At noon, he breaks for lunch. By the end of the day, he's usually tired out with the physical and mental exertion.

"Listening to a therapist is hard," Evan says. "It's hard to listen to it, to take it [in]."

His parents, who have been with him almost every day since the accident, attribute his recovery to determination, willingness to survive, a stubborn will and his childhood background in the discipline of martial arts. If there were any tears, they weren't to be shed in front of Evan.

So much about healing the brain is a "gray area," Evan's father says. Thus, positive energy and smiling strength each day can help, Anne says.

They are thankful that the catastrophic hospital bills have been covered by Anne's insurance. She teaches high school English. Tom audits for a utility firm. The cost has been a little more than $400,000 so far, Tom said, including two $10,000 rides in a medical evacuation helicopter.

Friends and family say they can start to see Evan's personality shining through. "He's sarcastic, he's very funny. And if you take everything personally, seriously, I don't know if that's going to work," Evan's mother said. She is happy they have come far enough to be able to joke with Evan - "Don't act like you're brain injured."

Evan's friend, Josh Sroka, recently visited Monroeville and talked to him for the first time since the accident: "That was probably one of the hardest things I've ever had to face."

One of Evan's trademarks, Sroka said, was a sarcastic little nod of his head and curl of his lip, followed by a simple "Yep."

"The best part of Ev was always his sense of humor and sarcasm," his fellow fraternity member said. "You can see some of that coming back to him. You know it's there."

During a conversation, Evan punctuates his replies with a hint of that trademark move or a left-handed thumbs-up. A nurse ducks her head in the door to ask Evan, almost as you would to prompt an excited middle-school student: Who played Penn State in football Saturday night?

"Nebraska," he says. And who won? "Penn State," he replies proudly, nodding his head slightly and pumping his fist in the air. (Evan confides to a visitor that he actually fell asleep during the third quarter, but heard about the glory the next morning.)

By January, he is hoping to return to Penn State, back to his fraternity and classes and the Collegian, but he knows he will have to make more progress. "Community living," they call the goal. Recent small field trips to get new shoes and have breakfast at Eat'n Park are recent steps along the journey. In the meantime, there is another place on his mind.

A week ago, with 9/11 memorials all over his television, Evan heard some good news about a different date to hold close: Sept. 28, the day staff at the rehab clinic have planned for his homecoming.

"Going home is big," he says, nodding his head. "Yep."