TLR / The Worst Team Money Could Buy

She tosses her cigarette butt and jumps up, but she grabs her handbag instead and clutches it in front of her like someone watching a car swerve to miss her before slamming into a brick wall. Meanwhile, on his knees, the leg man throws a hand to my belly like Johnny Bench’s baseball glove goes up on a strike out pitch. He catches me.

And I’m steady, although I still can’t reach the other bar.

“Could you help her stand?” he asks Mom, impatiently.

She lunges to prop me up by digging her fingernails into my armpits; her purse jammed into my back somehow levels me. “See that? You’re doing it,” she says to the mirror.

No, you are, I say back to her image in my head.

“Now,” he says, “guide her hand to the other bar. Good. She has to get used to standing alone. Okay. Let go.”

“Are you crazy?” says Mom’s eyebrows in the mirror.

My eyes sweep down the mirror from her face to myself standing beneath her. I still can’t believe it’s me and yet it’s the way I’ve always imagined myself. I’m a whole girl. And, even better, I will no longer have to squiddle. I will be one who walks.

I smile at myself in the mirror until I notice the flesh toppling over this corset like a doughnut. No wonder it hurts. I’m not a fat kid, not even chubby, but every ounce of baby fat on that thigh is being wrenched by this corset like hands squeezing a throat.

I don’t want to look, but I can’t tear my eyes away from it.

The muscles inside of my thigh tighten and cramp. This is too hard, and I’m even holding the bars. How will I walk outside on the street? And then I think: Once a squiddler, always a squiddler. My knee wobbles.

The leg man grimaces. “Sit down. I don’t like how it’s fitting.”

He doesn’t like how it’s fitting? I fall onto my seat, relieved, jubilant, and now that I’m invested: a Nervous Wreck.

The leg man has already disappeared. He’s taken both legs back to his workshop. I haven’t even tried on the second. In the mirror I zero in on the grass stains.

My ecstasy deflates with every clang from the workroom machinery. There is buzzing, hammering, and a noise unlike anything in the civilized world, a noise so shrill it hurts my teeth and lingers. It takes me out of my body, while my head fills with more questions: What if these legs don’t work? Can I do this? Why do I have to do this? What sin have I committed?

I ask my mother The Question again. It’s the same one I’ve been asking since I first realized that I’m different. Mom is so sick of The Question. We get it from the 60