Toughing it out

He wants to stroll into St. John’s Prep in Danvers and reclaim his lunch seat with his buddies. And when his family and friends throw him a “welcome home’’ party, he wants to show them he mastered the implausible.

Jared Coppola wants to stand tall.

Nearly seven weeks after he suffered one of the most devastating spinal-cord injuries in the history of Massachusetts high school football, the 17-year-old triplet wages a distant struggle against paraplegia in which milestones are measured in increments and dreams are made of a young man’s will to once again feel the earth beneath his feet.

In this fight - after 17 days in intensive care at Children’s Hospital Boston, Jared is four weeks into exhaustive rehabilitation at the Shepherd Center, a catastrophic care facility in Atlanta - victories come as tiny revelations. Eight days ago, he no longer needed a neck brace to hold up his head. Then he found a way to brush his teeth. By Monday morning, he was able to pull on a T-shirt and sit up without back support for the first time since his life changed in a freak injury on a field in Lynn.

He notched another victory at lunch by eating a chicken salad sandwich without help.

“I don’t have bad days anymore,’’ he said in his electric wheelchair. “I can feel things getting better every day.’’

When he hit the ground Sept. 4 in a preseason scrimmage against Lynn English - he was a defensive back tackling a receiver when a player collided with him from behind - Jared’s fifth cervical vetebra was fractured, leaving him mostly paralyzed. Nearby stood his triplet brothers, Tyler, a teammate, and Brandon, a volunteer assistant since he suffered a career-ending injury to the same vetebra in a game the previous year.

“As soon as I hit him, everything went numb,’’ Jared recalled. “I could move my arms, but I couldn’t tell where I was moving them.’’

As the crisis unfolded - Jared underwent a 3 1/2-hour surgery to fuse the splintered vetebra and insert a titanium stabilizer in his neck - his family’s plight unleashed a cascade of public support that flows on. Communities throughout Massachusetts and strangers around the globe have contributed tens of thousands of dollars, countless goods and services, family meals and frequent-flyer miles, prayers, cards, and candles of hope.

The gifts included holy water from Our Lady of Lourdes in France, a shrine to healing. Jared’s mother, Dawn, who has stayed by his side for the 48 days since his injury, dabs him with the water some mornings.

“When I leave here, I want to be able to start walking again,’’ Jared said. “I don’t care if it’s with a walker, just to get out of the wheelchair.’’

Many patients with similar injuries never regain the use of their legs, though some do. Jared can move his arms, fingers, and torso, and may regain nearly full control of them through intensive therapy. But while he can feel his legs, he is unable to move them.

“The doctors say, ‘Just because you have sensation in your legs doesn’t mean you’ll ever get movement,’ ’’ Dawn said. “But they also tell him that you always keep working toward that. They won’t tell him he will walk or won’t walk, but he believes he will. He’s driven.’’

“It’s really hard, what he’s going through,’’ said Jared’s roommate, Ben Goss, as he encouraged him to push harder in therapy. “Trying to stretch your arms when it feels like they’re stuck is awful.’’

Ben, a 14-year-old lacrosse player from Dunstable, Mass., broke his neck in a car crash July 22. By rehabbing for nearly two months before Jared arrived, Ben regained control of his upper body, but his legs remain paralyzed.

The two are known in the facility as “the Boston boys.’’ As Jared grimaced, briefly stymied in trying to roll over on a gym mat, Goss barked, “Come on, Jared!’’

At that, Jared summoned all his strength and tossed his upper body as if it were a rag doll across the mat. He completed two more repetitions, then appealed for more.

“Are we going to do some of those triceps [exercises]?’’ he asked therapist Corrie Abegglen.

The room was filled with youths rehabbing from catastrophic injuries in football, diving, car accidents, shootings, and other traumas. A message written in big letters on a whiteboard read, “I Can’t Not Spoken Here.’’

That was fine by Jared. At St. John’s, he is known as the toughest of the Coppola triplets. While Tyler and Brandon wanted to play glamour positions in football like running back and wide receiver, Jared demonstrated a singular desire to become a hard-hitting defensive back, coach Jim O’Leary said.

Off the field, Jared was seen as the leader of the triplets. After the three inherited the Explorer from their older sister, Brittni, it was Jared who took the keys and did the driving. And when their older brother, Derek, left to play football at the University of New Hampshire, it was Jared who promptly abandoned the triplets’ bedroom and claimed Derek’s.

He is the lone fraternal triplet, with Brandon and Tyler sharing identical features, and his brothers have reacted remarkably differently to Jared’s ordeal. Tyler has assumed Jared’s football legacy. He wore Jared’s number 34 in the season opener, took over Jared’s cornerback position, and, according to O’Leary, has played with as much skill and intensity as anyone this season at St. John’s. On Tyler’s recent visit to Atlanta, he treated Jared like the able-bodied brother he knew, coaxing him to try to play ping-pong and pool.

By contrast, Brandon has fixated on Jared’s medical condition. He decided after the accident he would rather be a doctor than an engineer and asked to take an elective in neuroscience at St. John’s (his guidance counselor recommended he wait a year). Brandon also texts or calls at least once a day to check on Jared’s progress.

Dawn said Brandon has been deeply affected by the trauma. After Brandon fractured the same vertebra as Jared, he wore a neck brace for three months and was able to return to the baseball team in the spring (he no longer can play contact sports).

“This has been a lot for Brandon to handle because he sees what could have happened to him if his injury had been an inch worse,’’ Dawn said. “Now he really wants to figure out a way to solve spinal-cord injuries.’’

“Our kids just weren’t hitting people as hard as they were before the accident,’’ O’Leary said. “I think we’re just starting to play again a little bit.’’

Players at Lynn English also have been haunted by the incident. They regularly ask athletic director Gary Molea for updates on Jared, and they signed a game jersey with Jared’s number to deliver to his house with a care package of food.

“Our kids took it hard,’’ Molea said. “It was the scariest thing I’ve seen in the 20 years I’ve been around.’’

Football teams up and down the East Coast have raised money for the Coppolas. In Atlanta, a pastor at St. Pius X High School delivered a special blessing to Jared and an offer for the football team to watch televised games with him. O’Leary and St. John’s principal Ed Hardiman soon will visit with keepsakes from several college and pro teams, including footballs signed by the Patriots and Arizona Cardinals (former Prep quarterback Brian St. Pierre plays for Arizona).

Jared, who has watched tapes of the games he has missed this season, said he still loves football. His game jersey hangs next to his bed and he follows teammates by texting (he taps the phone keys with a pencil until he regains better control of his fingers), video-communicating through Skype, and checking a website, jaredcoppola.org, that his older brother’s girlfriend created for him. St. John’s soon will launch a webcam connection between the school and Jared’s room.

But Jared no longer dreams of playing football again. Those thoughts faded while he lay in intensive care.

“I wouldn’t want to go through this again,’’ he said. “It’s not worth the injury. I’ll try to find another way to stay involved.’’

His rehabilitation will be interrupted for three weeks in November for surgery to treat a bedsore with a skin graft. But he spent yesterday at the Atlanta airport practicing clearing security and boarding a plane in his wheelchair in anticipation of returning home for Christmas.

After the holiday, Jared and Dawn will return to Atlanta for at least a month before he is released to live at home and resume classes at St. John’s. By then, he hopes to operate a manual wheelchair or, best of all, walk again.

Regardless of the outcome, he has yet to sell himself short in rehab. Even through the pain, his green eyes have shined, his spirit strong, his grit as evident as the St. John’s insignia on his shirt.

“It’s hard to believe, but he doesn’t get sad,’’ Dawn said. “He says this [stinks] sometimes, which it does. But he never says, ‘Oh, my God, I want to stay in bed today.’ It’s amazing how he has risen to the challenge.’’

Bob Hohler can be reached at hohler@globe.com.