“It is,” she quickly agrees while pulling her right foot off the scale. She then steps the left in so I can measure it. “I don’t get teased for new shoes.”
I drop the pencil and it rolls away. “What?”
“New shoes,” she repeats, and shoves her feet back into her old ones. “Plus ones that fit.ement it rolls I used to have to wear my older brother’s and they never fit. They’d fall off during gym and this one boy called me clown feet, but now I get new shoes that fit. He can’t call me clown feet anymore.”
“No, I guess he can’t.” With my knees on the sidewalk, the girl stands taller than me and holds her hand out for the sheet. For the first time in my life, I feel small, and it’s not because I’m the one closest to the ground, it’s because I’m the boy who has hurt this little girl.
I scan the area. The colors of the trees and the bushes and the clothing of all the people merge together. I grow dizzy and sway with the blur, but even with the disorientation, I can make out the face of every single child I talked and laughed with.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“For what?” She wrinkles her nose.
For staying silent when she needed someone to stand up for her as everything and everyone around her was yanking her down.
“I’m sorry,” I say again, but there’s no one there. The little girl has skipped off to the trailers and the line of kids to be measured has dispersed. I’m left alone with the weight of my sins.
“Jonah?” Stella crouches beside me. “Are you okay?”
I’m not okay. None of this okay. The fact that there are kids who have parents who can’t afford shoes that fit or shoes at all, that’s not okay. The fact that idiots like me make their life worse, that’s not okay. But the damn awful pain pulsating in my chest is the knowledge that... “This was you.”
Her delicate throat moves as she swallows, then she nods imperceptibly. “And it still is.”
18
Stella
I don’t know why I have an obsession with canvas shoes, but I do, and these are the best ones yet: neon purple, with white laces and a heck of an arch. Stepping into these babies is like walking on pillows. I wiggle my toes inside the shoes and marvel at how well they fit.
The Kentucky program started two years after Nikki Berti founded Goodie Two Shoes out in Las Vegas. I was ten when I received my first pair and, sitting here today receiving my last, I still feel the same giddiness that I did eight years ago.
As much as I long to run around in my new shoes like the kids who were fitted before me, I don’t. I slip them off with great care and lay them one at a time in the box. The shoes on my feet have a few miles left in them and I need to be more forward-thinking. Shoes aren’t the only things in life that are expensive.
With both hands on the tug-of-war rope, Jonah acts as if it takes all his strength to keep from being yanked across the line by a group of eight-year-olds and when he quite convincingly throws the game, the children squeal in delight.
Jonah laughs, but the happiness drains from his face when he spots me. This is why I never wanted him to ask personal questions, why I never wanted him to know. Pity annoys me.
He rolls off the ground and waves away the pleas for another game. As he walks in my direction, I touch the rose barrette in my hair. It’s still there exactly in place, the leaf feeling as smooth as it always does.
Jonah sits beside me on the brick retaining wall and his legs slide open, allowing his knee & Bertito brush against my thigh. He’s warm and solid and if we lived in another universe, he possibly could have been mine.
He opens his mouth and then shuts it. As he tries to open it again, I save him and myself from whatever uncomfortable thing he is going to say. “They gave me hope.”
“Who?”
“This foundation. They didn’t just give me shoes. They gave me hope. They gave me the right to believe that I was more than what anyone ever said about me. And sometimes, just sometimes, it was enough to make me dream that I could become more.”
And maybe I have become more. Not the more that Joss warns me about, but more than who I used to be. I affected someone. I took a chance, befriended Jonah, and found a way to reach him. The change I’d hoped for, it’s there in his eyes. He can try to fight it, but today altered him. It’s what I wanted and no matter what happens in the next few minutes, hours, days or years, for a few seconds, I was more.
“Tell me this changed you, Jonah.” I turn my head to look at him and I hold my breath, hoping for the right words from him. I saw the shadow on his face when he connected the dots between the child he once was and the children in front of him, but I crave to hear the words.
There’s hurt in his blue eyes, but there’s also this sweet hope. “It changed me. You...changed me.”
“Good.” I break our connection and stare at the ground. “Good.”
Jonah nudges my knee with his. “Why do I feel like you’re breaking up with me?”
Who knew a statement could be like a tiny dagger to the heart? “We’d have to be a couple in order for that to happen. I’m a girl who hangs at a cemetery and you’re a boy who needed a break from normal for a few weeks.”
“We’re a couple,” he says.
I wish we had been. My skin prickles at what it could have felt like with his arms around me as he sat against a tree and pulled me close so that my back settled into him with his breath hot on my neck.