Chapter 23

My artificial leg had three joints: ankle, knee, and hip. That’s one reason why it’s tough to walk with a hip-disarticulation prosthesis, and why so few amputees who lose their leg at that level (that is, amputees who have no residual limb, or stump) choose to wear a fake leg. Let me break it down for you: My ankle didn’t move the way a normal ankle would. It was only capable of rotation, not flexion. Like the motion you would need for a golf swing. My knee moved more like a real one in the sense that it could swing on the plane of motion you would expect from a human knee. To take a step, I would place the fake leg in front of me and then roll across the foot, the knee being designed to bend when my weight hit the toes. This weight-induced bend in the knee would store energy in a pressurized hydraulic piston, which would then push back like a spring, propelling the knee back to a straight position and swinging the prosthesis into a forward step. That’s how I walked.

There was also my hip joint, which I typically engaged only to move into a sitting position. But the hip joint also provided my favorite feature of the prosthesis, which was its ability to extend far beyond the range of a normal human hip. Translation: I could easily do a split. Even better, I could do a split while standing up. I would balance on my real leg, lifting my artificial one with my hand and pulling it straight up until the foot pointed backward behind my head.

It was this particular party trick I employed in the dance cipher.8 I jumped into the middle, picking my prosthesis up by the ankle and hopping in a tight spin, waving the fake foot in between two positions, one where I held the straight leg out in front of me, the foot at eye level, and one where it was fully extended in an unnatural standing split with the heel touching my ear. It was no secret that I was an amputee, which I suppose was fortunate because otherwise this would have looked supercreepy, like I was some kind of manic yogi-ballerina. As it was, everyone was in on the joke, and as I hopped around the circle, they cheered and, yes, even chanted my name. For the record, they had not chanted Joseph Chuk’s name when he was crowned prom king. Take that, popularity contests.

Obviously, there could not have been a better moment to try to CFD with Evelyn.

The circle closed and I danced my way over to Evelyn. I got really close to her, but I stood so our bodies were facing each other at a ninety-degree angle. I figured this would feel less threatening to her than approaching her from straight on. Oh, she would think, Josh is standing really close to me, but our bodies are facing perpendicular directions, so I guess I am comfortable with this.

She glanced at my face and I smiled at her. She smiled back. I kept hand-cycling. Then she rotated her body away from me and took a small but discernible step to create space between us. Classic fast-dancing conundrum: Was she trying to get away from me, or had her attention been drawn to the sparkly disco ball?

So I danced the rest of that song wondering about this.

“Are you having fun?” she asked.

“Yeah!” I said, which was sort of a lie. I mean, I wasn’t not having fun. So maybe there was some fun here that I was having without noticing, and I would look back later and think how fun it was, in retrospect. The past has a way of turning up the fun volume in your memories.

“Great.” She put a hand on my shoulder, and for the briefest instant I thought we were about to CFD. “I gotta tell Rachel something.”

This was twice now that she had put me off. Was she doing it on purpose? I couldn’t be sure. I wanted to just give up, to quit trying to CFD with her, and spend the rest of the night floating around, not caring. But that was the problem: I did care. I cared a lot. About her. About us. And we were both going to college in just a few months, and after that I wouldn’t be seeing much of her. So what did I have to lose (I mean, besides my pride and dignity)? Tonight was probably my last chance with Evelyn. Who knew when she would get back together with Mason, when she would disappear completely from my life? Yes, tonight. Tonight was the night.

So I followed her over to her gossip session with Rachel, and when she leaned away and smiled at me, I leaned in and—yes, must reach out, almost there, just a little farther—put a hand ever so gently on her hip. “Hey,” I said.

She smiled and made a quick glance down at my hand. It was very brief, and I supposed she hoped I didn’t see it. But I did. What I couldn’t see, unfortunately, was how she felt about it.

“Hey,” she answered.

I started to sort of bop back and forth like people do when they are dancing. She smiled a tight, toothless smile.

She held up a finger. “Hold on. Just a second. I’ll be right back.”

My hand was left holding air as her body rotated away from me so she could return her mouth to Rachel’s ear. I saw Rachel steal a brief look at me and nod. Were they talking about me? Was Evelyn telling her she wanted to get away from me, that she was uncomfortable with my advances? Yes, probably. This was a mistake. All of it. Prom. Dancing. Evelyn. All a giant, soul-crushing mistake.

This guy Alberto who I knew, and who I guess knew Evelyn somehow, came up from behind her and started grinding on her. She took a quick look over her shoulder to see who it was. Upon seeing Alberto, she burst out laughing, like he was the funniest guy she’d ever seen, and what a hilarious joke this was that he was dancing with her like this. She pumped her hands in the air, raising the roof, smiling. He put a hand on her hip. She laughed again.

If Evelyn had been my girlfriend, I would’ve said something witty and manly to Alberto, you know, like, Get your own date, and then clocked him in the jaw. But Evelyn wasn’t my girlfriend, so her heart was not mine to defend. The song ended, and Alberto hugged her and then walked away, in search of some other guy whose night he could ruin by dancing with his date.

I didn’t recover after that. In terms of trying to CFD with Evelyn, I mean. I had tried three times, which was more than enough.

She didn’t care about me. Our friendship? What a joke. We weren’t friends. She was just a hot girl I had a crush on. Would I have been friends with her if I didn’t have that crush? Probably not. Would she have been friends with me? Again, probably not. She was just using me for the attention. She had that female intuition or whatever that told her I liked her, and she was keeping me around because it felt good to have a boy pining for her, bringing her to his prom and listening to her talk about her boy problems. What a mistake all this had been. What a joke.

After the dance, we went to After Prom, which was held in the recreation center at James Madison University. Everyone brought duffel bags with normal clothes and changed out of their formal wear in the locker rooms. Evelyn was tired, and her knees hurt. She mostly sat with Rachel, both of them in their sweats, both of them encouraging their dates to go have fun, don’t worry about us. So that’s what I did. I had fun. Or at least I tried to. I sang karaoke and I played poker with Monopoly money. I jumped in a big inflatable thing. I drank tons of soda.

The After Prom party went till nearly sunrise. Then we all went over to this guy Jon’s house. His mom had a breakfast spread for us. We ate and went to the basement to watch a movie. Evelyn found a guest room and went to sleep. When people started leaving, I woke her up and drove her home.

“I had fun,” she said when I was dropping her off.

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”

I did not say I had fun. Because I hadn’t, not really.

I didn’t call Evelyn much after that. I graduated. Summer came. It got hot. Then it was fall, and we both went off to be college students. She ended up not going to the same school as Mason. But she was dating him again. Or so I had heard.