The High Five

Perfection in the Flesh

When Vivian came out as disabled in the Vorld, she had gotten many kinds of reactions. The overtly cruel ones weren't the worst. She could dismiss the haters. The ones that really cut were those that held a germ of truth. Why did your parents let you be this way? Why didn't they fix you?

Vivian had never asked her parents this question directly. Why should she? She had answered it a thousand times in her head. The procedure was too risky. They didn't want her to suffer. They couldn't bear the thought of losing her if it went wrong. But when the questions started coming in from the Vorld, they gave voice to all the lingering, unspoken doubts.

When Vivian was born, massive lower body reconstruction hadn't been perfected yet. It was best done in infancy while the body was still malleable and possessed remarkable powers of healing and regeneration. But so risky. Such tiny, delicate tissues and blood vessels. A slip of a micro-scalpel could sever a major artery or nerve. Waiting posed its own risks. With each passing year, the body lost more of its resilience. Then there was the trauma to consider. How would a young child process all those surgeries? The pain, isolation, and bodily invasion could leave irreparable psychological scars. By the time she was a teenager, reconstruction had come a long way, but the window of opportunity had all but closed. Her body had assumed its final adult form. You couldn't reshape a baked pot.

Still, Vivian couldn't help playing out the counterfactual. Even if it was imperfect, the surgery might have at least given her legs of some kind. Perhaps she would never have run, jumped rope, or played hopscotch, but maybe she could have walked. She might be just physically impaired. A girl with a limp. Not a freak with flippers.

When she finally asked her mom, the answer surprised her.

"We thought you were perfect just the way you were," her mother said. "God doesn't make mistakes. If he wanted you to have two normal legs, he would have given them to you."

"But what if it was God's will for me to get legs. That would be like a miracle, wouldn't it?"

Her mother tenderly sandwiched Vivian's hands between hers. "This was one of the toughest decisions your father and I ever had to make in our walk of faith. We prayed a lot about it—oh, how we prayed! The doctors were adamant about operating on you. They said you had a fifty percent chance of regaining—how did they put it?—moderate leg function. And all it would take is dozens of operations and years of physical therapy. But what do doctors know? They think everything can be fixed with a scalpel. A fifty percent chance—can you picture Jesus flipping a coin before healing the lame man? We already had the biggest miracle of all staring us right in the face. You were a hundred percent perfect in our eyes. Taking care of you has been the greatest privilege and blessing of our lives."

Vivian had been confused at first and then angry. And then really, really angry. A fifty percent chance at having legs? Who wouldn't take those odds?

Growing up, Vivian would sit at the window and play with her sim-pets. Her apartment overlooked a park with trees, a duck pond, and a winding trail. On any given day, people would be out jogging and walking their dogs. She secretly dreamed of having a real dog and taking it out for walks, but around her parents she always put on a good show of being grateful and focusing on life's blessings. The longing for what others had, even legs, was the whispering of the devil. And besides, she was too full of natural exuberance to wallow in sadness for very long. Her parents, being preachers, turned her challenges into valuable life lessons for their flock. After all, if their daughter, who was born without legs, could still be full of joy, what excuse did anyone else have?

Years later, when her on-stream persona went mega, she lived two different identities: Vee-Vee, the popular teen idol that was only seen from the waist up and Vivian, the look-on-the-bright-side cripple raised by two loving and god-fearing parents. Owing to the face-morph algorithm that protected the online identity of minors, only a small circle of relatives and close family friends knew they were one and the same, right up to the moment when she outed herself.