Never a Hero

her back and brandish her stump. It never seemed to occur to her to do it the other way.”
    “Maybe she really is right-handed.”
    “You know what she dressed as for Halloween when we were kids?”
    “What?”
    “A superhero. Almost every year. Wonder Woman was her favorite, but there was also Batgirl, Spiderman, and Superman.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Oh. And one year we were the Wonder Twins.”
    “When I was in third grade, I dressed up as Superman, but when I was getting ready for trick-or-treating, my mom said, ‘Not sure what good a one-armed hero is.’ So I didn’t go.”
    The minute I said it, I regretted it because he immediately turned serious. “Your mom said that to you?”
    I blushed and turned away. “It doesn’t matter.”
    “Like hell it doesn’t.”
    “It’s no big deal. My dad took me to a movie instead.” But I’d never asked to dress up as a superhero again. In fact, I’d quit dressing up for Halloween completely after that. “Anyway,” I said, wanting desperately to change the subject and get back to the playful banter of before, “your sister’s a trip. I can see why you wanted me to meet her.”
    “Don’t read too much into it. I also meant it when I said she can be extreme.”
    “Like the shark thing?”
    “Not that so much. But sometimes she refuses to accept that she’s different. I mean, I understand her reasoning, but it’s not always about being equal.”
    “Like what?”
    “Well, like when she was a sophomore in high school. She’d been playing soccer up until then, but suddenly that year, she decided she was going to play volleyball instead. Now, don’t get me wrong. Maybe there’s somebody out there with only one arm who can still play volleyball well, but I’m here to tell you, it wasn’t her. But she insisted. She made such a stink about how they were excluding her that the school finally caved and told the coach he had to put her on the team. Susan Granger got cut, even though she was a far better player than June, all because my sister had to prove a point.”
    “Wow.”
    “Exactly. And then she quit a year later. Went back to playing soccer instead.”
    I thought back to eighth grade, when I’d signed up for soccer. I played for half a year before my mother made a snide comment about how ridiculous I looked running across the field with my stump flapping around. My father bought me a skateboard, as if that could make up for it, but I never set foot on a soccer field again.
    It was unnerving how much my life seemed to mirror June’s, and yet in every case, I had the dark, scary, nightmare version.
    “Have you noticed the moon tonight?” Nick asked suddenly.
    The change of subject surprised me. He was staring out my sliding glass door, and he reached out to me. “Come look,” he said as his fingers touched my arm.
    Such a simple gesture, but it caused me to freeze in my tracks. Nobody ever touched my left arm. Not casually, at any rate. Sure, doctors had touched me there with cold, practical efficiency. And my mother had touched me there, but only out of embarrassed necessity. Friends or relatives occasionally, but always by accident. They always apologized for it, turning quickly away. But in twenty-eight years, I couldn’t recall anybody touching me there the way Nick was touching me now. I felt the need to hold perfectly still, lest he realize he was touching my ruined arm and pull away.
    His fingers moved again, a tickle on my flesh, a spark of energy that raced up my arm, over my shoulder, and raised goose bumps on the back of my neck. I shivered, suddenly transported back to a day from my childhood: sitting in the cold, prickly grass in the shade of a tree, the buzz of a distant lawnmower, traffic passing on the street, and me, enthralled by a ladybug crawling on my left arm. The almost imperceptible kiss of sensation as it crept down my biceps, over the inside of my elbow, around the pink apex of my stump. That tiny, beautiful bug was oblivious to the horror beneath her feet. My left arm was as good as my right as far as she was concerned. In my whole life, no person had ever touched me like that, as if unaware that my left arm wasn’t normal.
    Until Nick.
    “Owen?” he asked. His hand shifted. Not pulling away, but changing from a brush of fingers to a gentle grip around my biceps. “Are you okay?”
    I opened my eyes, like waking from a dream, to find him staring at me. My vision blurred.
    “I’ve upset you.