by Rachel Hruza
Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Hruza
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Cover design by Sammy Yuen
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2526-3
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2528-7
Printed in the United States of America
To every scoli out there,
but especially to the original Scoli Squad:
Mom
Grandma
Sarah
Honorary Members: Dad and John
Thanks for always having my back.
—R.
CHAPTER 1
Gravitational Pull
I hate Isaac Newton. The moment that apple fell from the tree and he thought up gravity was the moment my body was doomed.
Let me back up. I have scoliosis, a sideways curvature of the spine. When people hear the word “scoliosis,” they either cringe (because they don’t know what it is, or they think it is something they can catch) or laugh (because they’re heartless, maniacal jerks). I used to think of Quasimodo, the hunchback in Victor Hugo’s story, whenever I heard it. Now, I automatically cower when I hear it, hoping no one associates it with me. I detest saying it, but I hate it even more when other people do.
For most people, scoliosis is something that develops due to genetics, or at least that’s what my doctor says about the type I have. But scoliosis doesn’t run in my family, so I have no one obvious to point a finger at. Instead, I blame what feels like the most probable cause: gravity, the force pulling everything (my spine included) toward the earth. And whose fault is gravity? Isaac Newton’s. Granted, the poor guy didn’t invent gravity—it had already existed long before a name was given to it—but I like to have someone to blame for my present predicament.
And that present predicament is even worse than just having scoliosis: I found out this summer that I had to start wearing a brace for it. A brace.
There are various kinds of braces depending on curvature and necessity, but I ended up with a Boston brace because my curve was low enough. Boston braces are made of white plastic and lined with a thin “cushion,” though I use that word liberally. Fastened with Velcro straps, the brace hugs the body, pushing against the curve to keep it from shifting further, and it can be concealed under clothing.
At least Newton and his gravity were considerate enough for that.
But even with the brace worn under my clothes, I was still afraid of what people would think and say about me. Pretending people wouldn’t say things behind my back (literally) made me angry, and knowing they’d be staring and whispering made my belly boil with a rage and fear I couldn’t handle. I kept thinking about my best friend, Megan, and whether she’d want to be associated with a girl who had to be strapped into a plastic container every morning. What kind of clothes would I even wear? Megan and I loved to shop together; maybe she wouldn’t want to shop with me anymore.
I also couldn’t stop my mind from picturing one boy’s perfect face: Brendan Matthews, fellow seventh-grader, beauteous maximus. For over a year, I’d had a major crush on him. And I’d just been preparing myself to talk to him this year.
Last year he was in my math class, and I hoped he would be again. I had dreams that we’d be table partners and we’d fall in love over quadratic equations and polynomials. He’d plot points onto graph paper so they formed a heart, and then he’d give the heart to me so everyone would know we were meant to be together.
But with a huge piece of plastic wrapped around me, how could I lean close to him as he whispered ratios and proportions equal to his desire for me?
I couldn’t. And Brendan definitely wouldn’t want to whisper to a plastic-cased, seventh-grade nobody.
Perhaps the worst thing to think about was that the doctor said it was impossible to cure my scoliosis. We could only expect the brace to hold my curve where it was, and possibly keep it from getting worse. Possibly. But “possibly” getting worse was a lot better than definitely getting worse, which was what was happening without the brace.
Thanks for nothing, Newton.
Before my diagnosis, I thought I knew everything about who I was and what I looked like. I’m Truth Trendon: daughter of Bob and Sue, younger sister of Charity and older sister of Harold. (My parents, who had two of the most boring names in the world, had clearly tried to get creative with their children.)
My name used to bother me, because people always thought it was strange, but it’s grown on me. I like that it’s unique.
My sister feels the same way. We used to pretend to be superheroes: Charity and Truth Trendon, fighting for justice and the American way. When my brother was born, I was rooting for a name like Freedom or Virtue, or even Patriot, but they went with Harold. Now he’s six and sounds like he’s a sixty-year-old.
At least people don’t ask him if he can’t lie. I get that all the time.
As for looks, I have my father’s nose, my mother’s mouth, and neither of their eyes. I have curly brown hair, and once in a while I get a recurring zit on my forehead. It used to be I could run the fastest of any girl or boy in the fifth grade, and I could swish a basketball from anywhere inside the three-point line. Then stupid Newton played his cruel joke, and gravity took over my body and bent my spine back on itself.
I first noticed it after a shower at the age of ten, which is way too young to have to realize horrible things about yourself. I stepped out of the tub and turned to grab my towel from the rack, but then I paused, staring at my back in the mirror. It was like a scene in a monster movie—as if my body was changing before my very eyes.
My right shoulder was tilted forward, rolled as if it had always been that way, while my shoulder blade stuck out in back a bit too. No matter how I adjusted my posture, I couldn’t make either of them sit normally back in place. I turned to see if my other shoulder stuck out, hoping that maybe I was growing wings or was a half-dragon just acquiring my abilities, but my left side remained as I remembered it. Normal.
I stared at my face in the mirror. Somehow, even my nose, chin, and ears seemed different. My vision started to blur. Then I threw up.
Scoliosis—the word hissed just like the snakelike villain it was. It had crept up and caught me without my knowledge. I hadn’t felt a twinge of pain or any shift in my bones. Newton’s evil changes were silent and so swift that I didn’t notice them until it was too late.
The only person I try to hate more than Newton is my doctor. Dr. Clarkson is an orthopedic surgeon who looks like a clown with his frizzy hair and bald spot in the middle of his head, and he talks into a tiny recorder all the time. I’ve been to see him about ten times, and I think he’s said a total of seven words to me.
The first time I visited
Dr. Clarkson, he placed the x-ray of my torso up on the screen, and I burst into tears. It looked so terrible—the way my spine rose out of my hips and then, about midway up, began to curve into my right shoulder blade. My mom, dad, and Charity were there with me. My dad, an accountant who covers well when he’s upset, stood with his arms crossed over his chest like a superhero listening to a villain’s plans to take over the world. My mom, a self-declared “part-time librarian, full-time lover of books” and the person most responsible for my love of reading, put her arms around me as we listened to Dr. Clarkson say, “Truth Trendon, ten-year-old female, scoliotic curve of eighteen degrees. Monitor for a year—”
And then he was out the door.
I made it through fifth and sixth grade okay, going to the doctor regularly to make sure my curve didn’t change too drastically. Over two years, it shifted from eighteen to twenty-five degrees, which, according to my doctor, wasn’t enough of a change to show concern. I could live with a curve of twenty-five degrees without much worry. So I didn’t worry. Much.
Which brings us to this summer, when I found out my curve had changed since my previous visit, from twenty-five to thirty-eight degrees. My spine looked like a winding road, and I didn’t have the map.
Dr. Clarkson just dictated to his dumb handheld tape recorder, “Truth Trendon, twelve-year-old female, curvature shifted to thirty-eight degrees. We will brace and continue to monitor.”
At the word “brace,” I felt my whole body go numb. It was as if I’d been smacked in the nose, and I couldn’t stop the tears from welling up and crashing over my eyelids, no matter how hard I tried. I badly wanted to believe this was all a terrible dream.
But it wasn’t a dream. It was real. And it was my life.
A week later, when Christopher Robertson, orthotic practitioner, walked into the room where I waited with my mom, I was contemplating a possible scientific and sure way to murder gravity. He was holding a huge white whale of plastic, and I almost leaped out of my seat and ran for the door. Instead, I said, “Are you crazy? There’s no way that’s going to fit.”
“I have to cut the brace down to fit you,” Christopher said. “Stand up for me.”
I did, and he wrapped the brace around me. I was fully clothed, but the plastic dug hard into my skin.
I raised my arms so Christopher could take measurements and push on different levels of the brace. The left side of the brace came up and dug deep into my armpit. It had an opening for my ribs underneath that allowed them to be shoved out the hole while the right side of the brace pushed against my curve—that was how the brace straightened me out. In front, the brace came up too high at the moment, over my “barely-there-breasts” (as Charity called them). Christopher reminded me the brace would be cut down to fit me, so my fear of my chest being mashed to smithereens faded. He also told me he would cut a small gap in the front of the brace to release the pressure on my right ribs.
At least Christopher was quiet and listened to me, even though I refused to speak other than in response to his questions. But I quit listening as he went into more detail, and I didn’t make eye contact with Mom, because if I did, I knew I would start crying.
He took the brace off me. “When I come back, I promise this will be much smaller,” he said.
When Christopher came back the second time, he chatted with my mom about how he had made a brace for a girl in a wheelchair, and she loved it because it helped her sit up.
“It just shows you should be grateful your situation isn’t worse,” he said, a bit choked up.
I wanted to kick him. Not only did I have to wear a hulking white monstrosity, but now I had to feel guilty about some poor girl I didn’t even know.
“That’s true,” my mom agreed. She tried to smile at me, but I looked away. She was siding with the enemy.
Christopher wrapped the brace around me and wrote on it with a black marker to diagram a few more places to cut the plastic away. Despite the very thin cushioning material glued to the plastic, the brace was hard and dug aggressively into my bones. In front, the brace still came up just past my bra line, making the elastic of my sports bra burrow into my skin. Meanwhile, the left side of the brace still invaded my armpit and extended down past my hip.
Christopher hadn’t lied; the brace was a lot smaller now, but I really didn’t know how I would find clothes to fit over it. It was not like a corset—sure, it strapped me in, but it was thick and hard, and it definitely didn’t make me more attractive.
The third time Christopher came back, he had put thick Velcro straps on the back of the brace. Now he could tighten it up, and when he did, it actually took my breath away. I felt like all the air had left my lungs and there was no way any was getting back in. He disappeared once more to cut the excess Velcro. This time I cried when he left. It seemed so real now; the thing fit me.
Christopher returned with the finished brace and two stretchy white cotton shirts to wear underneath to keep it from rubbing against my skin. I hated to think of all the other girls at school who would be able to wear tank tops in the hundred-degree August heat, while I’d be trapped in my own insulated plastic sauna. Probably covered in a muumuu. At least I’d be colorful.
Since the clothes I had on weren’t going to fit over the brace, Christopher strapped the brace over my clothes, and I wore it out to the car. It was difficult to walk since the back of the brace dug into my butt cheeks as if it were trying to mold them into Silly Putty. I’d never had a tiny rear end, but I didn’t necessarily want a big flat one either.
I couldn’t fight back more tears as my mom helped me into the car. She had to help. I couldn’t get in on my own. I bent my knees and she gently pushed me into the front passenger seat.
I kept crying as she drove out of the parking lot.
“It’ll be okay, Tru,” she said. “It’ll be okay.”
I didn’t say anything.
After ten minutes, I undid my seatbelt, reached behind me with my right hand, and pulled the Velcro apart. Immediately the pressure gave way, and after a bit of fumbling, I pried the brace off and threw it onto the back seat of the car. Its sides clacked together like two cymbals, only the sound of the plastic was short and hollow. It looked huge and evil, as if it were taking up the entire back seat.
Even if it was going to help me, I hated it.
Mom and I spent the drive home mostly in silence. She’d wanted to take me shopping for clothes to wear with my new brace, but I nixed that idea right off the bat. If I didn’t have clothes to wear over it, I wouldn’t be able to wear it in public.
At least, that was the plan until I got home and Mom pulled out a pair of jeans she’d worn when she was pregnant. I tried them on. The elastic band was still a little baggy over the bulky square brace. But I tied a shoelace around the top of the jeans, and that kept them up. Great! Now, rockin’ my mom’s preggo pants, I could try to live life to the fullest as a freak of nature.
I borrowed Charity’s cell phone (a technological luxury granted in my family once we hit high school) and called Megan so she could commiserate with me, but she didn’t answer. She was having a wonderful time on vacation while I was trapped in my own personal, portable torture chamber.
At dinner that first night, I tried to make a joke about being trapped in Tupperware, but no one really laughed. Harold just looked at me, sitting in my high-waisted pregnant-mom jeans with my brace showing, and said, “It has to have a name. Herman.”
I scowled at him, but Charity grinned. She was two years older than me, a soon-to-be ninth grader, and she knew what cool was. “Herman,” she laughed. “That’s perfect, Harry.”
“You should decorate it,” Mom said.
“No way,” I replied. “You guys can name it, pet it, and feed it when I’m not wearing it, but there’s no way I’m going to attach myself to it. The sooner this piece of crap is out of my life, the better!”
Dad looked at me. He hadn’t said much since I’d gotten home and Mom had re-strapped me into the b
race—just patted me on the head when I’d tried, somewhat unsuccessfully, to flop onto the living room couch before dinner (I’d crushed my right pinkie under the plastic that jutted out by my hip).
“Think of it as a big, long hug,” Harold said. He was getting far too excited about this scoliosis thing. He’d even drawn a picture of the family where everyone else looked normal, but my caricature was a stick-figure with a crooked spine. Mom made him throw it away, but not before I saw it.
“Think if I gave you a big, long punch in the face,” I said.
“Truth!” my mom cried.
“I’m not hungry.”
I pushed out my chair and stood up. The brace dug into my already sore butt muscles.
“Ow!”
I leaned forward so the plastic didn’t dig in behind. Then it dug into my hip bones. “This isn’t fair!” I shouted, waddling out of the room. I paused, to see if anyone said anything. Nobody did.
They all felt bad for me.
That night, taking my brace off before bed and letting it clunk against the floor didn’t even feel good: in the darkness, the brace’s opening for my ribs looked like a wide, smiling mouth that was laughing at me.
CHAPTER 2
Braced
“How do you breathe in it?” Megan asked. She held up the brace and looked through the middle of it, which wasn’t even twelve inches wide. She’d just returned from a family vacation, and I was relieved to finally get to see her again and show her my brace. School was starting in a few days, and after three weeks, I’d kind of grown accustomed to wearing the enormous eyesore. The first few days, I’d worn it for just four hours at a time, building up to wearing it during all waking hours. Figuring out how to do things like use the toilet had been a nightmare—my mom and Charity had found me weeping on the bathroom floor with my pants around my ankles, since I couldn’t reach them to pull them up.
“It was rough at first,” I admitted, sprawling out on Megan’s bright green comforter. I wanted to take advantage of every moment I had out of the brace, so I moved my body in every direction I could.
