Read Online Poster Child by Emily Rapp - Free Book Online

action itself—I had my natural heel at the end of the short leg.
    For two months before the fitting, I wore a walking cast that looked like a pirate's peg leg; it began at my hip and narrowed to a cone of hollow plaster that extended past the end of my stump. It looked like an ice-covered tree limb and was fitted at the bottom with a rubber knob.
    "For traction," Dr. Elliot told me, pointing at the knob as he helped me put on the cast in the examination room.
    "So you don't slip and fall," Mom said. I leaned my weight on the cast and took a few stiff-legged steps.
    Dr. Elliot saluted me and said in his best "pirate" voice, "Harrr . . . who goes there, missy?"
    "Harrr," I replied, and bared my teeth in a piratelike grin.
    He and I laughed. Mom looked pale.
    As we walked through the hospital corridor on our way to the parking lot, I asked Mom if I could get an eye patch to complete my pirate outfit. She refused. "You are not a pirate," she said. The tone of her voice warned me not to push it.
    Dr. Elliot's pirate image stayed with me long after I stopped using the cast and began walking with a wooden leg. I envisioned myself as the solo sea-weary girl preparing to embark on a grand adventure. I wanted to battle foes and fight for the underdog; I would be a combination of guts and glam, beauty and strength, with my unique body—like a one-of-a-kind sailing ship designed to withstand dangerous waters—propelling me into the unknown world.
    Rinehart Schmidt, my first prosthetist, had an office on a busy street in Denver near the Capitol building. It was next door to a bar and grill; the changing rooms, which were brown and windowless, always smelled of French fries and frying hamburgers. The bathroom was in the corner of the back room, where limbs-in-progress and other prosthetic parts—feet, calves, hands—were kept propped up on plaster pedestals or leaning against walls. Saws, hammers, screwdrivers, and other metal objects were scattered over two long worktables that ran the length of the room. A dusty transistor radio atop an old refrigerator was always tuned to a country music station. The toilet seat in the closet-size bathroom was bumpy and uneven, as dried plaster had been spilled on it and never cleaned up; there was no mirror on the wall and no soap for your hands on the sink. Often I had to yell through the door and ask Schmidt to bring me a roll of toilet paper that always smelled like cigarette smoke after he cracked open the door and tossed it through to where I waited on "the John," as he called it. Through the bathroom wall, I heard the clink of dishes being washed at the restaurant next door.
    Schmidt was a short, wrinkled man nearing retirement. While he was making adjustments to the leg, he often smoked cigars or cigarettes, letting one or the other dangle from his mouth. When Mom asked me what I thought of him, I replied, "He's older than God."
    Schmidt's bald head sweated constantly. A single piece of white hair swept over the dome of his freckled head. Sweat dripped from the end of his hair onto his cheek or rolled off his long nose and landed, trembling, on the edge of his lip. The handkerchief kept in his lab coat was covered in yellow and black stains and clumps of dried plaster, but he wiped his sweaty forehead with it anyway. The first time I met Schmidt, he cuffed me lightly on the shoulder and said, "Who's looking pretty today?" He had fat fingers, and his palms were wide and rough feeling, with deep, painful-looking cracks, as if he'd been rubbing them with sandpaper.
    "Let's see what we have here," he said. Standing on one leg, I leaned against the examination table. Schmidt sat on a low stool with wheels and examined my stump, gently tracing my new scars with the callused pads of his fingers. The scars on my hip were bumpy and sometimes slightly tender. What did we have here? I wondered, and felt nervous. I stared at the top of Schmidt's head; I watched to see if his eyebrows raised at all,