Poster Child by Emily Rapp Read Free Book Online Page A

smelled of sweat on clean but sticky skin. These smells of summer temporarily masked the odors wafting up from the cast, which would be on for another four weeks. My cousins took turns drawing on it; they signed their names under their creations and then passed the pen to the next girl who wanted to leave her mark on the brick house.
    Sarah caught a firefly and pulled off its blinking back. I loved those lightning bugs because even when they were dismembered, part of them lived on. There was no pain to imagine, no struggle to witness; there was only light that gradually and beautifully faded. Sarah bent her dark head over my hand and attached the firefly's lit back. Dulling quickly, it balanced on my sweaty finger, a ringless jewel.
    The brick house came off on my fourth birthday. Afterward, I wore a walking cast, a cone of plaster that extended past the edge of my stump. I walked on this for a while as the healing was completed.
    When this second cast was removed, physical therapy was required to restrengthen the atrophied muscles. Mom helped me do the exercises in the bathtub, because warm water helped the muscles relax, making them easier to flex and stretch. "Kick, one-two-three, kick," Mom said as my splashes dampened her blouse and a rubber duck floated to the far reaches of the tub. She drew a smiley face on the end of the stump with bath paints and put a doll's skirt on it, and I called it Super Stump. Super Stump loved to fly around, particularly in Andy's face. She got me in trouble a few times, but I was proud of her. Sometimes I would bend her up to my mouth (my knee was still functional) and sing into the heel as if it were a microphone. Andy and I both learned to balance a spoon lengthwise on the end of Super Stump. We loved showing our friends this cool trick. I felt that my leg made me different and special and interesting to other kids. Instead of being the dorky kid sister, I was a novelty. "Hey, watch this," Andy would say, and off came my leg and out came the spoon, followed by the oohs and aahs as it trembled on top of the line of stitches at the bottom of my stump.
    But how to explain what had happened to me? Nobody understood about PFFD, least of all me. When kids asked, "What happened to your leg?" I replied, "A dragon bit it off." I thought this was genius—what a glamorous tale! What a story I had! I told everybody this, embellishing it more each time (the dragon challenged me to a duel, and I lost; the prince threw me out of the castle, and the dragon attacked me) until Mom told me to stop. She said that it wasn't appropriate, that I was lying.
    I didn't get the artificial leg as originally planned. In October, Dad noticed a bump on my left hip and made an appointment with Dr. Elliot. After several X-rays, Dr. Elliot, looking pale and visibly shaken, reported the news. "This has never happened to me before," he explained. The plate had failed to heal; the "screw" that had been inserted into the hip plate was floating around and had broken in the socket. He told us to come back the next day while he came up with an alternative plan. Mom always wondered if this problem had been caused by the walking cast, which had not been connected to my hip and slumped to the floor when I sat down.
    Dr. Elliot recommended a hip surgery in October that would take out the screw (embedded in the bone) and the plate. This would be followed by three to six weeks of traction in the hospital to keep tension on the leg. The surgery took about six hours; after four hours, Dr. Elliot appeared in the waiting room and told my parents that there would be no need for traction, as he could do a bone graft on the crest of the hip and place pins in the bone that would then be removed in three to four weeks.
    During this long surgery that my parents found difficult to sign off on, Dad had refused to go to the hospital chapel with Mom. Instead, he walked around on different floors of the hospital, poking his head into the rooms of