The next day at lunchtime, I headed to the bathroom again to wash my feet. But this time, when I finished, I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I thought about the other kids watching me while I ate, and my stomach cramped up painfully like it had the day before.

I locked myself in the handicapped stall and sat down. I pulled out my lunch and began eating, careful not to put my bare foot on the floor or drop my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which would pretty much put an end to eating that day.

I always ate peanut butter and jelly at school. That’s because peanut butter and jelly sticks together nicely. A turkey sandwich with lettuce, tomato, and cheese would be a disaster for me. I’d seen people who couldn’t even eat turkey sandwiches with their hands without stuff falling out all over the place. I imagined trying to eat a sandwich like that in the bathroom, everything ending up on the gross floor except a single slice of mayonnaise-y bread I still managed to hold in my toes. I giggled at the thought.

As I munched on a carrot, I heard a couple of girls enter the bathroom. They were talking about some cute boy who had looked at one of them. I rolled my eyes and continued crunching on my carrot, hopeful it wasn’t as loud to them as it was to me. A ton of boys had looked at me. Heck, boys were looking at me all the time, but I didn’t think this was how the boy had looked at this girl.

When the bathroom was finally quiet and the girls had obviously left, I packed up my stuff and headed to class.

Art went a little better that day. Mr. Jeffries had apparently learned his lesson and didn’t make any more pleas for help on my behalf.

The day after that, I couldn’t bring myself to eat in the bathroom stall again. Besides the fact that it was flat-out gross, it was also depressing. Instead, I told myself to stop being such a coward, and I ignored my cramping stomach. I sat in the same secluded spot I had sat reading on my first day, and I ate my lunch, hoping no one would notice me. Some kids did pass by and sneak glances at me, but I tried not to pay any attention to them or to my thumping heart. At one point, a group of three girls walked up to me as I took a bite of my string cheese, carefully held between two toes. I dropped it on my napkin, not wanting them to see me eat it like that. I smiled nervously at the girls.

“Um, hi,” one of the girls said. She had on a cute flowery tank top with spaghetti straps, and once again I felt the sting of being too afraid to wear such a thing.

“Hi,” I said. “How are you?” I hoped desperately I didn’t have any food on my face because I wasn’t about to wipe my mouth with my foot or shoulder.

“We’re good,” another girl said. She was also very stylish, dressed in a cute green tank top and jean shorts. “How are you?”

“Good,” I said, hoping the girls weren’t just here out of curiosity. I scolded myself for assuming that was all that interested them. Maybe they were going to ask me to come sit with them so I didn’t have to eat lunch alone.

“Is it okay . . . um, is it okay if we ask you what happened to your arms?” flowery-tank-top girl asked.

Yep, curiosity. I sighed. I didn’t have the energy to tell them my arms were chopped off in a guillotine or something like that. And these girls seemed far too nervous. I would probably terrify them. Instead, I recited, “I have an extremely rare genetic disorder that causes malformation of the limbs.”

The girls looked alarmed. “Is it contagious?” green-tank-top girl asked.

I gazed at the girl, searching her face to see if she was serious. I imagined passing my armlessness on to other people, their fully grown arms shrinking and shriveling and getting sucked up into their shoulders with a terrible slurping sound after I touched them. I slowly shook my head and spoke carefully so she would understand. “No, it’s genetic. That means you have to be born with it.”

The girls’ faces all relaxed as flowery-tank-top girl said, “Oh, that’s good. It was nice meeting you.” I watched them walk away.

I looked down at my string cheese. The girls hadn’t met me at all. They hadn’t even asked me my name. No, what they had met were my missing arms. It was all they had seen and all that had interested them. And not just out of curiosity but because they were afraid—afraid they could catch it from me.

I didn’t feel hungry anymore. I packed up the rest of my lunch, stuck it in my bag, and waited for the bell to ring.