I was a strange child.

There’s no way of getting around it. While many young girls were interested in Barbies and playing princess or house, I had a different agenda. From fourth through sixth grades, I went through this weird phase where I suddenly decided I was going to be a “skater kid” (even though I had never touched a skateboard in my life), and that I was only going to wear these hideous brown skater shoes and camouflage Bermuda shorts.

I also felt an over-heightened need to prove that girls were 20 times better than boys (a fact that we all know is true anyway) and that I had to beat all of them at everything. Including kickball.

For those of you who have read my other columns, you already know that I’m a self-proclaimed “water sport person” and _not_ a “land person.” Basically, I suck at all sports that are played on land. Unless I am partially submerged in water, I completely lack hand-eye coordination.

After our unit in gym where we learned all the rules behind that extremely complicated game of kickball, it became the coveted sport of recess. Only the athletic, cool kids were the ones who played. While my crowd of friends normally just pretended to be horses throughout the duration of the break, I decided that one day, I was going to break the norm and play kickball. And that I was going to win.

I stepped up to the base, my eyes focused intensely on the big red ball perched precariously in front of the kicker’s foot. He rolled the ball towards home plate. I kicked as hard as I could, and took off running. I rounded first base and was stomping on second when one of my feet went in front of the other at an abnormal angle, and I tripped and fell on my face.

If that wasn’t embarrassing enough, I felt a searing pain going through my foot as I lay plastered on the blacktop. I could barely stand as a few of my “horse friends” helped me limp off the field. Even though my foot felt like it was about to fall off, the recess monitor told me I’d have to wait 10 minutes until recess was over to go to the nurse because she was too lazy to take me there, and my foot didn’t look “that bad.”

Once I got to the actual nurse’s office, apparently she didn’t think my foot looked “that bad” either, even though by this point it was roughly the size of a cantaloupe and I was hysterically crying for my mom.

The nurse sighed and called my mom because I refused to go back to class. My parents took me to the emergency room, where I was informed my foot was fractured in two places, and that I would need a cast.

Sadly enough, I was pretty excited about getting a cast. There were three other people in my class with broken feet and crutches at the time (maybe there was something in the water), and having a foot cast seemed to greatly boost your popularity. Between the people who would have to carry my books for me as I hobbled to classes and the amount of people who would want to sign my cast, things were looking up for Taylor Wanbaugh.

My doctor totally ripped me off, though. He gave me a _walking air cast._ I didn’t even need crutches and my cast was plastic and removable.

“Trying to make things easier for me” — _psssshhhhh._ He obviously didn’t know the inconvenience level of my cast was essential to my place in the fourth-grade social hierarchy.