Why Do We Have Bones?

Lila wiggled her fingers.

She wiggled them fast, then slow, then fast again. She made them dance across the kitchen table like tiny people running through a rainstorm.

"Lila," her mom said, "eat your cereal."

But Lila was busy wiggling. She wiggled her fingers so much that she accidentally knocked her spoon right off the table. It clattered on the floor, and her dog, Biscuit, immediately licked it.

"Oops," said Lila.

That was Monday.

On Tuesday, Lila was climbing the big oak tree in the backyard — the one with the branch that looked like a crooked elbow. She was almost to the elbow branch when her foot slipped. Her hand shot out and grabbed the trunk, and she caught herself just in time.

But her pinky finger bent in a way that pinky fingers are not supposed to bend.

"OWWWWW!" said Lila.

It swelled up like a tiny pink sausage. It turned colors she had never seen a finger turn before — purple, then blue, then a yellowish-green that reminded her of the mystery soup in her school cafeteria.

"We should get that looked at," her mom said, in the calm voice that moms use when they are secretly not calm at all.

And that is how Lila ended up at the doctor's office on Wednesday, sitting on the crinkly paper that covers the examination table, waiting to get something called an X-ray.

"An X-ray," the technician explained, "takes a picture of what's inside you."

"Inside me?" Lila said. "Like... my lunch?"

The technician laughed. "Like your bones."

Lila had never really thought about her bones before. She knew she had them, the same way she knew she had a pancreas — someone had mentioned it once, and she had nodded and moved on with her life.

The technician, whose name tag said OMAR, positioned Lila's hand flat on a special table. It was cold. Lila didn't like cold things touching her sausage finger, but she held still because Omar asked nicely.

"Don't move," Omar said. "Not even a wiggle."

This was very hard for Lila, because as we know, Lila was a champion wiggler.

There was a humming sound. Then a click.

"All done," Omar said.

A few minutes later, Lila and her mom sat in the little room again, and the doctor came in holding something that looked like a black-and-white photograph of a ghost hand.

"Here's your X-ray, Lila," the doctor said, and she clipped it up on a glowing white board on the wall.

Lila stared.

There was her hand. But not the outside of her hand — the inside. She could see every single bone, glowing white against the dark background. They were lined up in rows and clusters, long ones in her fingers, short ones near her wrist, all of them fitting together like the most complicated puzzle she had ever seen.

"Whoa," Lila whispered.

"Do you want to know how many bones are in your hand?" the doctor asked.

Lila nodded.

"Twenty-seven."

Lila's mouth fell open. She looked at the X-ray. She looked at her hand. She looked at the X-ray again.

"TWENTY-SEVEN?!" she said. "In this one hand? This little hand right here?"

"That little hand right there," the doctor confirmed.

"But—" Lila held up her hand and examined it. It didn't look like it was hiding twenty-seven of anything. It just looked like a regular hand. A regular hand with one puffy sausage finger, but still. "Where do they all fit?"

The doctor pointed to the X-ray. "See these long ones? Those are in your fingers. You have three bones in each finger and two in your thumb. And these smaller ones here near your wrist — those are called carpals. There are eight of them, all different shapes, all packed in together."

Lila counted on the X-ray. She counted once and got twenty-four. She counted again and got twenty-nine. She counted a third time, very carefully, pointing to each one, and got twenty-seven.

Twenty-seven bones. Just sitting in there. Working all day long and she had never even thanked them.

"The good news," the doctor said, "is that your pinky isn't broken. Just a bad sprain. We'll wrap it up and it will heal."

Lila barely heard her. She was still staring at the X-ray.

"Can I keep the picture?" she asked.

The doctor smiled and printed her a copy.

Lila carried that X-ray picture everywhere.

She brought it to school on Thursday and showed it to her best friend, Marcus, at lunch.

"That's YOUR hand?" Marcus said, holding the picture up to the light. "It looks like a robot hand."

"It's not a robot hand. It's MY hand. And it has twenty-seven bones in it."

"No way."

"Yes way. Twenty-seven. Count them."

Marcus counted. He got twenty-three, then thirty-one, then gave up and ate his apple slices. But he believed her.

At recess, Lila sat on the bench because her finger was still wrapped up and she wasn't supposed to climb anything. She watched the other kids hanging from the monkey bars and throwing basketballs and doing cartwheels, and she thought about all those bones.

She thought about Marcus's hands gripping the monkey bars. He was holding his whole body up with just his hands. His bones were doing that. His twenty-seven-per-hand bones were holding all of Marcus in the air.

She thought about her friend Priya, who was doing a cartwheel in the grass. For one second, Priya's entire body was upside down with all her weight on her two hands. That was fifty-four hand bones alone, catching her, holding her, keeping her from flopping into a Priya-shaped puddle on the ground.

Lila looked down at her own wrapped-up hand. She flexed her good fingers slowly, watching them curl. She couldn't see the bones moving, but she could feel them — each one rocking and tilting like tiny gears inside a clock.

She tried to imagine her hand without bones. It would be like a glove with nothing inside it. A floppy, squishy, useless glove. She wouldn't be able to hold a pencil. She wouldn't be able to pick up Biscuit's ball. She wouldn't be able to grip the oak tree or eat cereal with a spoon or give her mom a hand-squeeze, which was their secret way of saying I love you without words.

She wouldn't be able to wiggle.

Lila's eyes went wide.

Every time she wiggled her fingers — every single time — twenty-seven bones moved for her. They slid and rotated and worked together, and they had been doing this her whole life, every single day, and she had never once noticed.

What else was happening inside her that she didn't know about?

That night, Lila lay in bed and held both hands up above her face in the dark. She wiggled her fingers slowly. Ten fingers. Twenty-seven bones in each hand. Fifty-four bones total, just in her two hands.

"You have two hundred and six bones in your whole body," her mom had told her at dinner, and Lila had almost fallen out of her chair.

Two hundred and six! She was basically made of bones! She was a walking, wiggling, cereal-eating bone machine!

She pressed her good hand against her ribs and felt them curving around her like a cage. She touched the hard ridge of her shin. She reached up and felt the smooth dome of her skull, with her brain tucked safely inside like a treasure in a treasure chest.

Every bone was doing something. Protecting something, supporting something, helping something move. And they all fit together — two hundred and six of them — into one Lila-shaped Lila.

She wiggled her toes under the blanket. She didn't know how many bones were in her feet, but she was going to find out tomorrow.

Lila smiled in the dark.

Then she closed her eyes, and all two hundred and six bones settled in for the night — every single one of them exactly where it belonged.