Chapter 35

I went back to my hotel room and lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Sasha was the final girl on my list, so the scientific investigation was now complete. Complete, but not insightful. I had no answer, no single unifying explanation as to why I could never find a girlfriend. I had found no fatal flaw in my personality or appearance like I had expected to. The investigation, I concluded, had been a complete failure.

Some months went by. One night I went to see a movie by myself. Near the end, one of the characters lost a limb. Which happens in movies all the time, right? No big deal. The lights came up and I walked out to my car and sat down in the driver’s seat. Then I started to breathe all weird. Oxygen came in short gasps. I thought about the character in that movie, and then I was thinking about the little boy I had once been, the boy who had lost a limb of his own, and I felt incredibly sorry for him. I wished I could reach back through time and hold his hand, comfort him in some way. I felt such grief over his life. Over my life.

A little gasp came out of my mouth, and then I was crying.

I thought, why am I crying? This doesn’t make sense. My amputation was so long ago. I am over it. I have accepted it and moved on with my life. Right?

And that’s when I realized the real reason, the actual reason, I had set out on my scientific investigation in the first place: I wanted to find an explanation, any explanation at all, other than the obvious one. I had always been the guy who had overcome his amputation. I mean, I went to the Paralympics. I had been an elite athlete, a world-ranked ski racer. I had never used my disability as an excuse for anything. That just wasn’t the kind of person I was. So I had not wanted to blame it for my lack of success with girls, either.

And if I was honest with myself, this was why I had really begun the investigation. I had hoped the girls I interviewed would tell me that I had been too nerdy, or too serious, or too silly, or too anything, really. In fact, I would have even considered my investigation successful if one or two of the girls had told me they didn’t want to date me because I was an amputee. At least that would allow me to say to myself: See, there is a problem, and the problem is with these girls being too shallow to date a guy with a disability. In other words, the problem is with them and their psychological shortcomings, not with me and mine.

But of course, no girls had told me that. The truth was, I was the one who had a problem with my disability. Sitting there in the parking lot crying, I finally admitted to myself that I was deeply and painfully insecure about it. That was why I never tried to talk to Liza Taylor after the pumpkin shoe–relay incident. That was why I was too scared to kiss Francesca at the waterfall. That was why I had never told Evelyn my true feelings about her. And that was why I had lost my nerve with Sasha and stopped calling her after the pageant. Because I was insecure about having one leg. It made me doubt myself. It made me feel inferior. I had always known this, deep down, but I had not wanted to admit that there was an element of my disability I had yet to overcome, so I concocted this investigation to find some other explanation on which to place blame.

And for this reason, my hypotheses had all been flawed from the beginning. The problem had not been with the girls, and the problem had not been with some characteristic of mine; the problem had been with my believing there was a problem. It had been with my believing that the way my body was shaped disqualified me from having a romantic relationship. It was not the shape of my body, as it turned out, but my insecurities about that shape that had kept me single.