Read Dwarf: A Memoir for Free Online Page A

younger sister, I wanted to do everything he
     did, and I begged him to help me make forts out of sheets and the dining room chairs.
     I chalked up our differences to his age and the fact that he was a boy. One day, I
     figured, I would be that age, too, and prove girls could do everything just like the
     boys.
    On many a weekday afternoon, I had doctors’ appointments at Children’s Hospital Boston.
     And doctors’ appointments often meant preparation for more surgeries. They were as
     normal as brushing my teeth. I had no idea that other girls my age didn’t visit the
     doctor as regularly as I did. Nor did I realize that my doctors’ appointments were
     nothing like my friends’ appointments when they got a cold or strep throat.
    In school, there was one other girl who talked about having surgery. She, like the
     rest of the kids in my class, sat in a glossy, colored chair. Mine was just thick,
     plain wood, and it was modified, as was my desk, to sit very close to the ground.
     I peered up at her, feeling like I was practically sitting on the classroom floor.
     I was so envious of her desk and that shiny red chair.
    Turned out, she had something else I wanted, too— her tonsils removed. It was nothing,
     she explained to me, and the best part was that afterward, she could have all the
     ice cream and Popsicles that her stomach could handle. She started the Tonsil Club
     shortly after, but I couldn’t belong because I hadn’t had mine removed. I longed to
     have that operation. It was not unlike when the newest Barbie came out. If other girls
     had it, I wanted it, too. But my tonsils stayed in my throat, and instead of ice cream,
     I had crushed ice with ginger ale after every operation, working my way up to Campbell’s
     chicken noodle soup. Even though I was left out of the Tonsil Club, I was very much
     included with the “normal” kids in elementary school.
    “Why are you small?” I’d get asked once in a while.
    “I don’t know. Why are you tall?” I’d reply with a shrug of my shoulders. And that
     was that. I was smaller and they were taller. It was what it was. I remember other
     kids getting teased in school for various reasons, though I actually never suffered
     the same fate. But my classmates did notice something unusual about me: I didn’t look
     like the rest of my family.
    “Are you adopted?” a girl named Mandy asked me innocently one day in school.
    “I don’t know,” I began. “What does that mean?”
    “It means that your mom and dad aren’t your real mom and dad,” she explained. “I think
     you’re adopted. You have a different mommy and daddy somewhere, because you don’t
     look like the ones you live with. They’re so much taller than you,” Mandy continued.
    My stomach felt like it was twisting into knots.
Not my real mom and dad? Will I have to move in with new parents somewhere else?
Images of being lost and alone, like Bambi in the woods, bombarded my imagination.
     I couldn’t shake my panicked feeling all morning, so over lunch I asked Katie if she
     also thought I was adopted.
    “I don’t know,” she replied simply.
    “Do I look like my mom and dad?” I pressed on. “What about Nick— do I look like him?”
    Katie shrugged. “Maybe Nick knows if you’re adopted. You should ask him.”
    Her answer gave me enough solace to get through the rest of my day. If I were truly
     adopted, I figured, surely he would have told me. Every weekend when Dad would pick
     Nick up, we’d play and laugh, and not a single word was whispered about adoption.
    “If you were adopted, there would be papers. A certificate,” Nick said after I told
     him what had happened at school. Hebarely looked away from his Nintendo game flashing on the TV. “We can look around.
     If we find a certificate, then you’re adopted,” he added, pausing the game.
    While Mom prepared dinner and Dad let Bruiser out, Nick and I made our way to the
     spare bedroom down the hall that Mom used