September 1 - Legs

It wouldn't be an overstatement to call her a freak of nature, although it would be exceedingly callous and indelicate, especially considering how gentle and unassuming she was. Unfortunately, those were characteristics that almost nobody ever got to know her well enough to glean: Her parents kept her out of public as much as possible. And considering how cruel kids could be to anyone who was even slightly different from the rest of the group (in other words, anyone), their decision was perhaps understandable. It was unsettling to imagine the mean things kids might call someone like Cindy Jenkins.
Standing a lanky six foot five inches, Cindy was almost completely legs. They were approximately 75% of her height.
Her torso was about the size of three sandbags stacked on top of each other. Her left arm ended in a knotty nub at the elbow and her right arm had a smooth, hairless hand that had three long fingers and no thumb. She had a normal sized head and no neck to speak of. Other than that, she was all legs.
Her parents and doctors had no explanation for how it had happened. She had just been born that way. No other families near them had children with any birth defects. Neither her mother nor father had any sort of genetic abnormalities in their family histories. Furthermore, they had a younger son named Scott who was normal in every way.
As was Cindy, with the exception of her legs.
And so during her early childhood years, her parents tried to both treat her normally and also minimize her contact with the outside world. It was a difficult balancing act, and keeping her hidden away at home usually took precedence.
After Cindy finished kindergarten, she and her family moved to Wilmington, Delaware so she could be treated at the Alfred I duPont Hospital for Children. Because she would be spending so much time in the hospital, her parents decided to home school her and her brother.
Another reason why they home schooled her--the bigger reason--was because they were afraid of how children in a new town would treat their daughter. By then Cindy was becoming increasingly aware of how different she was from other children. And it horrified them to think of how cruel the other children might be to her.
And so as much as possible, they kept her sheltered at home. Other than the hospital and family vacations taken in strategically chosen (and highly secluded) spots, Cindy never went anywhere.
By the time she finished elementary school, the focus of her treatment had shifted from trying to find a cure to trying to help her stay healthy and live as normal and independent a life as possible.
She was well on her way. By then, through years of occupational therapy, Cindy had developed the ability to use her feet to write, use a cell phone, brush her teeth, and do just about everything else that other people did with their hands. She felt capable and confident, but a little lonely.
Years later, after finishing middle school, her brother Scott decided he wanted to go to a 'real' high school, and so with some trepidation his parents enrolled him in the local public high school. He gradually made friends with some of the boys on his soccer team, and sometimes they came over to play video games and watch movies.
Sometimes Cindy would join them, and Scott's friends never knew how to treat her. The general tendency was for them to be overly nice to her for the first 15 seconds and then spend the rest of their afternoons looking at her as little as possible. So desperate were they not to cause an awkward situation by staring at her that they caused an awkwarder situation by not looking at her at all.
That changed gradually as Cindy joined them on the PS3 where she schooled them in Madden, Halo, and Grand Theft Auto, manipulating the controller with her feet.
In time, Scott's friends treated her almost like any other friend's sister. They still erred on the side of niceness, but that was more than OK with Cindy's parents, and it was these positive experiences with Scott's friends that caused them to rethink their decision to keep Cindy sheltered from the outside world.
As for Cindy, she had always wanted to go to a regular school. And so together they made the decision for her to be enrolled at the same high school as her brother for her senior year in high school.
The first days were nearly overwhelming for her. Up until then, her only experiences with school had been occupational therapy sessions at the hospital and what she saw on TV and in the movies, in particular, Glee and High School Musical. Her high school was not that world, not that she expected it to be. In fact, after her first week, it was hard for her to remember what she had expected.
She certainly hadn't expected it to be so crowded, although she had more or less anticipated the stares. She'd gotten them every time they went to the hospital when she was younger, but they never lasted as long as they did in the school's hallways because during the trips to the hospital they were always just getting into or out of the minivan. It was always a brief moment on the way to someplace else.
But in the hallways and classrooms of school, she was there. And unlike Scott's friends who couldn't really gawk because there were only two of them, at school the herd instinct prevailed. Everyone looked, though not necessarily in a cruel or mocking way. They just looked, sometimes out of the corners of their eyes, sometimes behind her back, sometimes indirectly, and sometimes straight on.
Cindy could sense it all around her, the way she would turn a corner or walk into a classroom and the noise level would drop suddenly as everyone tried (with varying degrees of success) to not be too obvious about staring at her. Often, she tried smiling and saying hello, but it was like they didn't notice. They almost never reacted to her efforts to engage them.
The first few weeks were hard. Most people tended either to ignore her or be overly nice to her. Rare was the person who treated her like any other 17-year-old girl. That went for students as well as teachers.
Classes themselves weren't a problem at all, though. During the time when she was being home schooled, she had been taking most of her classes for AP credit. To her new teachers, she was the ideal student, eager to answer questions and always going above and beyond on her homework.
For group projects, she usually got paired up with two or three other students at random. And she almost always ended up doing most of the work while the other members of her group goofed off, chatted with each other, and texted. At first it bothered her, but soon she decided it was just easier for her to do all the work herself than to try to make them do something she would just have to correct later.
Most of the other students at her school were pleasant to her, but they never invited her to hang out with them. They might say hello or something, but then any time it seemed like their exchange might progress into an actual conversation, someone else would show up, hijack the exchange, and Cindy would be left out of a conversation full of references to people, events, couples, and scandals she wasn't familiar with.
In an effort to make friends, she dabbled a bit in extracurricular activities, going out for the track team. With her long legs, she figured she would be a no brainer for hurdle events. But because she was afraid of injuring her feet, she ran and jumped too cautiously. If she had been any other member of the team, the coaches would have punished her, run her harder, pushed her, or kicked her off the team.
But they were nice to Cindy.
They encouraged her, clapped for her efforts, and were quick with a "Good job!" and "Way to go!" In effect, Cindy felt like the coaches were treating her like she was competing in the Special Olympics, while the other girls glared at her behind her back. She quit the team after a week, and stayed away from extracurricular activities after that.
Her parents started to worry that maybe they had all made the wrong decision, but after her first few months, things more or less normalized for Cindy. She worked on the yearbook committee, and was soon eating lunch with the other yearbook staffers every day. The other students in her AP classes gradually warmed up to her, and in time, she had made a few friends. As the school year continued, she goofed off with them more and more, and even managed to get in trouble a couple of times (but not too seriously).
Come spring, she got her driver's license, went to the prom (with a friend), and graduated from high school toward the top of her class.
More importantly, she got her first experiences with the outside world under her belt, allowing her to feel much more confident about the prospect of going away to college, which she did last week.
Her parents aren't really sure how she's doing, though, because she hardly ever calls home. Scott keeps telling them that this is probably a good sign, but they can't help worrying. She may be a six foot five college freshman, but she's still their little girl.