In my school was this girl, Mary Theresa. She had what’s called prosthetic legs, which means they’re not real and they can come off. That’s what the nuns told us the day before she started school. And boy were they right.
Mary Theresa’s big trick at recess was to get swinging extremely high. I mean almost so you feel like you’re going to flip over the top. She would look for some kid on the other side of the playground, someone who wasn’t expecting it. Then, just as she reached the highest point of swinging, she would unhook her legs and fling them across the playground. And I’m telling you, she had good aim, too. She got me right in the back of the head one day, and I was all the way over by the foursquare.
She flung her legs almost every day. And of course, every day, here would come the nuns yelling something stupid like “Mary Theresa, either you keep your legs on or you take them off!” As if they were going to let her hang around all day without any legs on. Then she’d wait till the swing slowed way down. She’d kind of hop off, then kind of crawl across the playground to get her legs and put them right back on again.
