On Sunday afternoon, I wrote another blog post.

When you have a malformation (yuck, I hate that word) like I do, you definitely have to deal with the usual looks. The most popular look I get is the one I like to call the “I’m so cool nothing fazes me, not even your missing arms” look. These are the people who pretend they don’t notice my missing arms. You could also call this the “Sure, I’m totally used to seeing people with no arms” look or the “I have tons of armless friends” look. These people are just way too blasé about it. I mean, come on, you really don’t notice my missing arms? Because I can tell you do by how you refuse to look at my torso like the whole sun is sitting on my chest. Just go ahead and look, for goodness sake. Look and ask questions if you want. These people try way too hard.

Then there’s the look I like to call “Oh my gosh, I’m staring at your armless area. Just kidding, no, I’m not. Now I’m staring. No, I’m not.” These are the people I can clearly see staring at me out of the corner of my eye, but as soon as I look at them, they look away. Seriously people, you’re not fooling anyone. Just keep on staring—it’s okay to be curious. Everyone is.

There’s also the dreaded pity look—the “Oh, you poor thing with no arms” look. These people not only look at me, but they give me a pitifully sad smile when I make eye contact with them. They should save those looks for starving, homeless orphans. Being armless isn’t that bad.

And then there is the worst look of all. I have to deal with it because it almost always comes from little kids who haven’t learned manners yet. It’s the “I can’t stop staring at you because you’re a freak” look. Sometimes these looks end in screams and kids running away.

I stopped typing. The post sounded all lighthearted and ha-ha funny. But I didn’t write that I ignore these looks to the best of my ability. I didn’t write that I pretend they don’t bother me, but even after thirteen years of seeing them, they still hurt. I also didn’t write that the last time I got one of these looks was just the day before, while I was grocery shopping with Mom.

Mom likes to take me grocery shopping with her. She says it’s because I need to learn how to grocery shop on my own, but I really think it’s because she likes having a child slave to command. So Mom basically makes me handle all the groceries in the store—I have to get the canned tomatoes from the bottom shelf, the soy sauce from the top shelf (I’m so flexible, it would blow your mind), the cereal from the middle shelves, the bag of apples from the produce department (we go with bagged produce so I’m not putting my feet all over the fresh food in front of people), and yes, even the rotisserie chicken. The rotisserie chicken was sort of a disaster, but that’s not the point of this story. The fact that it takes us three hours to grocery shop isn’t the point either. Sometimes I wish Mom had some other hobby besides teaching Aven how to do stuff.

So I was in the cereal aisle trying to slide this box of Corn Puffs out from the shelf with my foot. I had just finally gotten it wedged between my head and shoulder, but as I stood up and turned to drop it into the cart, I caught this little girl standing in the aisle giving me the dreaded “I can’t stop staring at you because you’re a freak” look.

I stared back at her for a moment. “You got a problem with Corn Puffs?” I said.

Her mom’s head shot up from reading the label on a box of instant oatmeal. She saw what was going on and grabbed her cart and daughter and scurried away.

I acted all cool, like I couldn’t have cared less about it. But I still remember it happening. I remember every time it happens.

When I was done writing my post, Dad asked me to help him put some fresh paint on the flat wooden pictures standing by the front entrance of the park—the kind with cutouts people can stick their heads through for photographs. I seriously doubted anyone took pictures with the faded, wooden figures, but I agreed to go with him because I’m such a good daughter.

I could see why he wanted to freshen them up; the paint was so faded you could hardly tell what they were anymore, and one of them looked like you were sticking your head through a giant boob—not exactly the family-friendly image we were going for.

Dad put a chair out for me to sit on while I painted with my foot. My painting skills aren’t exactly the finest, but I can manage large simple pictures. Just don’t expect me to paint your portrait unless a stick-figure face is acceptable.

As I worked on turning the boob back into a small hill with a barrel cactus on top of it, I saw Connor walking over the bridge that connected the parking lot to the park—the bridge was built to go over a wash. Washes are like empty riverbeds that run all over North Scottsdale so that when it rains, the water can flood the city in an orderly manner.

Connor didn’t have to go through a kiosk or anything like that as he entered the park because admission was free—all the money made was from paying for the many “attractions” we had. Pfft. If you could call them that.

“Hey, Connor,” I said as he walked up to me, barking a few times on his way. “You came.”

“Hi, Aven,” he said, looking around, squeezing his hands together. “There aren’t very many people here.”

“Oh, this place is always dead,” I told him.

Connor seemed relieved.

Dad looked up from painting the gun in a cowboy’s hand. I had thought it was a sea cucumber, but a gun made a lot more sense—why would the cowboy be pointing a sea cucumber at people as they entered the park? And where would a cowboy in the middle of the desert get a sea cucumber from anyway? “Who’s this, Aven?” Dad asked.

“Dad, this is Connor. We met at school.”

Dad reached out his hand and Connor shook it. “Nice to meet you, Connor.”

“Do you mind if I take a break?” I asked Dad.

He looked at my handiwork so far. “It definitely looks less boobish, so I guess you’re free to go.” I handed him my paintbrush, slipped my shoe back on, and walked off with Connor down Main Street.

Connor suddenly chuckled beside me. “It’s just so cool that you live here.”

I scowled at the comment. “So what have you been up to?”

“Oh, nothing,” he said. “My mom’s working all weekend, and I got tired of playing video games so I thought I’d walk over and see if you were here.”

It made me feel good that he had come here just to see me, especially since he had mentioned not liking to go out a lot. “I like to play video games.”

He looked surprised. “Really?”

“Yes,” I said, annoyed at his look of surprise. “I can play. I bet I could kick your butt at just about any game.”

“Are you challenging me? Because pretty much all I do when I’m at home is play video games. I’m like a professional video-game player.”

“We’ll just see about that,” I said. “Does your mom always work on the weekends?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, she works all the time. She has two jobs.” He shrugged again, and I realized the shrugging was another one of his tics. I wondered how many different tics he had.

“What does your mom do?” I asked.

“She’s an ER nurse.”

“That’s cool.”

“I guess,” Connor said. “Except I never get to see her.”

“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I walked up to the porch of the soda shop and sat down in one of the rocking chairs. Connor sat beside me. I tried to think of something else to talk about. “My mom took me to this cool instrument museum yesterday. Have you ever been there?”

Connor shook his head. “I don’t get out much.”

“Do you play any instruments?”

He shook his head again and barked. “No.”

I waited for him to ask me if I did. He didn’t, and I figured it was because he assumed I couldn’t. “I play.” I hadn’t meant to say it with quite so much sass.

He looked surprised again, of course. Why were people always surprised I could do stuff? I bet I’d get surprised looks if I told people I can breathe air without help or swallow my food or pee in the toilet.

“What do you play?” he asked.

“Guitar.”

“With your feet?”

“No, with my belly button.”

Connor’s eyes widened, then he pursed his lips in a little smirk. “You’re joking again, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I play with my feet, not with my belly button.”

“Awesome,” he said, rocking in his chair and blinking his eyes rapidly. He did look impressed. “Play for me sometime? I’ve got to see you play with your feet.”

I shifted in my seat. “Um, sure.” I didn’t tell him I also wrote my own music and sang.

In fifth grade, I had come to the realization that it was far more productive for me to channel my creative storytelling into songwriting than to only use it to shock people with morbid horror stories about my armlessness. I had written several songs since then. Most of them were pretty bad—like take an ice pick to your own ears bad. A song I wrote about learning how to put my first bra on immediately comes to mind. A couple were possibly worth playing, but the only people I had ever played for were my parents.

“Do you ever see your dad?” I asked him.

His expression turned somber, and I was instantly sorry I had asked. “Not much.”

“That’s too bad.” I rocked in my chair beside him.

“He and my mom used to fight about me all the time.” He looked out at Main Street as he spoke. “He didn’t understand why I couldn’t just hold my tics in. It made him angry. He always said to me, ‘Connor, why don’t you just knock it off? Look at how upset you’re making us. Just stop it!’

“And my therapy bills were expensive and my dad didn’t want to pay for them anymore. He wanted me to just take the meds and stop ticcing, but they made me feel awful. I think my dad would have done anything to just stop my tics. And when he realized they weren’t going to stop, he couldn’t deal with it. So he left.”

“I’m sure your parents had problems that had nothing to do with you or your tics,” I said, thinking Connor’s dad sounded like a real jerk.

“All their fights were always about me, my tics, my bills. I can see why they can’t stand me. I can’t stand myself most of the time. I wish I could hold the tics in and pretend to be normal.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I was sure Connor was wrong about his parents. I couldn’t imagine parents being like that. “I’m sorry. I wish I could grow arms and pretend to be normal.”

The corner of his mouth tipped up a little.

“I still don’t completely understand why you can’t hold your tics in. I know you said it hurts, but why?”

Connor thought for a moment. “It’s like when you have a bad cough. You know, when you get that tickle in your throat and you really want to cough. You can concentrate really hard on holding it in, but it’s so uncomfortable and eventually you just have to cough. That’s what it feels like to not tic—like this painful feeling in my chest builds and goes up to my throat until I just have to bark. Or it builds in my eyes until I just have to blink to relieve it. Then it builds again. And again. It never goes away for long. It always builds again.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s really weird. Why does it do that?”

Connor shrugged. “It’s some kind of malfunction in my brain.”

“Can you get brain surgery?”

Connor laughed. “That seems a little extreme. I guess they can do surgery, but only if the Tourette’s is super-bad and dangerous. I can live with mine, so I’m not going to do any brain surgery. That would be scary.”

“Yeah, I guess that would be pretty risky.” I grinned at him. “I don’t think I would do an arm transplant, even if it were possible. Could have some scary side effects.”

Connor raised his eyebrows. “Oh, yeah? What kind of scary side effects?”

“Like, what if the arms came from a serial killer, and they just had to keep killing people, even on someone else’s body? Or the arms were too dead, and then I had these zombie arms attached to my body?”

“Too dead?”

“Yeah. Or what if they had naked lady tattoos all over them? Or if they had a terrible nail fungus that slowly spread and took over my whole body?”

“You’ve thought about this a lot.”

I sighed. “You have to think about these things in case the opportunity ever arises.” I glanced over at the petting zoo and saw Spaghetti sticking his mutant head over the fence. I wondered if he was looking for me. I visited him several times a day to pet him with my foot and tell him how adorable he was—for his self-esteem. Since none of the other kids wanted to pet him, I felt like it was my sole responsibility to improve his ego.

“Come on,” I said, sitting up from my rocker. “I want you to meet someone.”

Connor followed me across the street. I stopped when I reached Spaghetti and nuzzled my face to his. “This is Spaghetti.”

Connor patted Spaghetti’s head without flinching. “He’s cute.”

“Spaghetti is a mutant,” I said, kissing his head. “Like me.”

“You shouldn’t say that about yourself.” Connor gave me a stern look, like he was my dad.

“I didn’t mean a creepy mutant,” I said. “We’re, like, cool X-Men mutants.”

Connor smiled. “Oh, well then that’s okay.”

We left Spaghetti and walked back to the soda shop. Henry stepped out onto the porch. “I thought I saw you out here, Aven,” he said.

“Hi, Henry,” I said. “This is my friend, Connor.” I felt a little warm fuzzy in my chest when I used the words my friend.

Henry smiled at Connor and then turned back to me. “You all ready for the next rodeo?”

I glanced at Connor. “I’m not going to be in any rodeo.”

Henry laughed. “That’ll be the day!” he said. “A rodeo without Aven! Well, say hi to Joe for me.” He started to walk back inside.

“I don’t know any Joe!” I called to Henry. “Do you know Joe?”

Henry just chuckled again and did that same little hand wave like he had when I’d told him I didn’t know anything about tarantulas. “You’re such a joker,” he said, then turned and went back into the soda shop.

“That was weird,” Connor said. “Who’s Joe?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The owner of the park’s name is Joe Cavanaugh, but I guess no one ever sees him or seems to know anything about him. The accountant told my parents he never visits the park.” I leaned in and lowered my voice. “And get this—pictures of the Cavanaughs in the museum here have been removed.”

“That is strange,” Connor said. “I wonder why.”

“I don’t know. I found this old storage shed behind the buildings, though. It has seven DO NOT ENTER signs on it and an old broken handle that was padlocked. I couldn’t get the doors open, but you might be able to. You want to try?”

Connor nodded excitedly. “Yeah, let’s go.”

I led him down the short trail until we reached the old wooden shed. It looked like it was on the verge of collapse—much like several of the other buildings at the park. “See all the signs?” I said.

“Cool. I wonder what’s in there.”

After a few tugs and grunts, Connor was able to slide the door open enough that we could squeeze through the opening. I scraped my nose a bit on the old wooden door, and I hoped I didn’t get any splinters in my face—getting them out wouldn’t be fun.

Connor and I looked around at the stacks of boxes, the piles of junk, the shelves stuffed with old books and papers and props. “Where do we even begin?” I said.

I looked up and saw a box perched on top of one of the old bookshelves. The writing on it was faded and water-stained, but I could just barely make out three letters: A, V, a water-stained space and then an N. “Check out that box up there,” I told Connor.

He looked up and read the letters. “A, V, N.” We stood a moment in silence before Connor barked, startling me. “Aven!” he cried.

I snorted. “Of course not Aven.” I thought for a moment. “Cavanaugh!”

“Oh, right.” Connor smacked himself in the head. “Stupid.” He stared at it awhile. “How do we get it down?”

I looked around the room for a ladder or something. “I could try head-butting it off the shelf,” I said.

Connor laughed. “If we can find something for me to stand on, I think I can get it down.”

We found a little table covered in old documents in one corner of the room. Connor moved the papers off it and dragged the table to the bookshelf. He climbed up and brought the box down, then placed it on the table and opened it. “This stuff is old,” he said, pulling out a book that looked like it had been soaked in water and left to dry out in the heat repeatedly. Though it was badly damaged, we could make out the big hairy tarantula on the cover.

“More tarantula stuff,” I mumbled, studying the cover.

“What’s the deal with tarantula stuff?” Connor asked.

“Someone here was really into them. There are tarantula pictures in the soda shop and a tarantula display in the museum.”

Connor pulled out another book—a sketchbook. The pages made brittle crinkling sounds as Connor turned them. “Careful,” I told him as a corner of one page broke off. We studied the sketches—there were several drawings of horses and Stagecoach Pass. And, of course, of tarantulas. There was also a detailed sketch of a necklace with a blue stone in it.

Connor pointed at the date on one of the pictures—1973. “Someone made these over forty years ago,” he said.

We looked through the rest of the box and found some horse figurines, an old hair brush, and a glass case that reminded me of an aquarium. “Why would there be an aquarium, of all things, in here?” I said.

He shook his head. “Maybe it’s for something else.”

I carefully turned the fragile pages of the sketchbook with my toes, and stopped on a sketch of a tarantula. It was quite life-like—someone had spent a lot of time sketching every tiny hair on each of the eight legs. Someone who clearly had a serious interest in these giant spiders. “I think you’re right.”