Forty years ago, I found myself on a battleground. Not the kind we see on the nightly news, with explosions and children dying for little reason, but the mean playground of an American public school. This was the crucible where our young are ground, prodded, probed, and tested to see who is acceptable and who is not. When I first stepped onto the bus my first day, I had no idea how strange I would seem to others. I was about to find out the hard way.

I looked different from the other kids in my class; I have two fingers on the right hand, no left hand, and instead of feet, I have large, uncomfortable prosthetics that stretch to my knees. Since I am large, and I used to wear a hook on my right arm, I looked somewhat like a character on my favorite TV show from my youth: I looked like the robot on Lost in Space. When I'd run around my home waving my arms in the air shouting, "Danger, Will Robinson!" my mom would shake her head and smile with amusement. When I did this on the playground, children would look at me frightened that lights would start blinking on my round shaven head.

I lost the first battle on the playground my first day. During the thirty minute ride to school on the bus, a boy named Wayne and I both fell madly in love with a girl named Rose. She feigned interest only in a picture of some guy named Elvis, but we knew that was just a front; she was afraid to pick, so we would have to settle this like men. When we got off the bus, Wayne told me it looked like we'd have to fight. Then he punched me so fast I never saw it coming, and the next thing I knew, I was lying flat on my back, with Wayne and Rose looking down on me with that, "to the victor goes the spoils" look on their faces.

The second battle I won because of my hook. A hook is a caste with two curved, metal prongs on the end and a strap that goes down the arm in the caste, around the shoulders and loops around the other arm. Every time the wearer puts tension on the strap, it opens the prongs that are held together with a thick rubber band. While bragging about the superhero abilities we each possessed, several boys talked of baseballs they could bat into orbit, cars they could outrun, comets they could out burn. When it was my turned they looked at me with pity, and I knew I was about to be excused from the exercise, so I did what any self-respecting young boy would do, I lied. "I can catch wasps," I bragged, knowing I would soon enter the pantheon of teenage

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