After the mall, my mother drives us down to Fort Lauderdale, to my uncle’s shoe warehouse. My other uncle, Uncle Bert, works the forklift inside. The warehouse is a giant, chalky-smelling place with leaning mountains of white shoe boxes. They each have our name—Madden—printed all over them. Some of the shoes are new, but others are damaged discards—two left feet, a nail in the insole—and sometimes I’m allowed to climb up and pick from these piles.
My Uncle Bert hops off his forklift when we pull up to the side entrance of the warehouse. He licks his fingers and smooths down his mustache. He looks like my father if my father were to quit shaving and wear tube socks and take up the Grateful Dead. He’s my favorite uncle. Did I hear my favorite girl found a date to the middle school dance? he says.
With Quince Pearson, I say.
That’s not just any date, says my mother.
Quince Pearson—I think I’ve heard of him, says Uncle Bert. He pulls a soft pack of smokes from the front pocket of his plaid shirt.
’Bout this tall? Yes. Handsome? Yes. Best taste in girls?
Uncle Bert, stop! I laugh. I can’t stop laughing. I am eleven years old, and I can finally joke about love. Stand up inside it.
Uncle Bert lets me climb the shoe mountains for the rest of the day. Find the perfect dancing shoes! he says. Better be dynamite!
I love opening each box under the humming, ginger glow. I love the crackle of tissue paper, the smell of suede and glue. I can barely fit into even the smallest of the shoes, but I still know every term, what I like and what I don’t like—the choke is all wrong, the toe spring is perfect—because this has become one of the many languages of our family.
All the VJs and pop stars on MTV have made my uncle’s shoes extra famous, so the A-girls recently asked me for a new white, chunky sneaker called the Bobbie. If you deliver, Addison Katz said, we’ll be your very best friends. I came to the warehouse, and Uncle Bert helped me collect and label the Bobbie boxes, each and every size. My mother wrapped them in expensive paper, pressing each crease with a gentleness that wrung some kind of sadness inside me. The next day, when I handed over the gifts next to our school lockers, the girls tore open the boxes, tied up the laces, and left the wrapping paper crunched in the halls. They never spoke to me again, but the shoes are worn in by now.
On the floor of her bedroom, my mother does her best to curl my hair with hot rollers. My hair is too short for this, an ear-length bowl, so we decide to move on. She surprises me with a box of tiny, plastic rhinestone flowers that open like clams and snap on to strands of hair, and she clips them all over until my head looks like a cluster of stars. Tonight, she lets me remove all the orthodontic bands from my mouth. I spit my plastic lip bumper into its case, slide my headgear out of its molar-hooks, and now my mouth is only partially metal. My two lips meet for the first time in a year. My mother swipes a berry-colored powder across my cheeks and some sky-blue eyeshadow, to match my shirt.
I walk down the hallway toward my father on the couch. He stands up—something he seldom does. You look beautiful, he says, without sarcasm. I’ll be damned.
My parents drive me the five minutes to school. I’ve never seen it at night before, and suddenly it feels bigger, more dangerous, like what I imagine a college might look like. Go find your man! screams my mother, as I shut the car door. I wave them good-bye, walking backward, until the taillights on their new Mercedes shrink and die out.
I like the hallways when they’re like this, dark and gaping. Usually I have to be careful of somebody coming up behind me to unzip my suitcase or smack a sign on my back, but right now, in this moment, I’m the most beautiful girl in the hallway. I am night blooming in my cloud shirt and black, leather platforms with my very own name inside. I am a girl, with a date, attending my very first dance.
Queera! says Clarissa. She arrived with the A-girls but promised to sneak back out of the gym and find me in the halls. She looks nice, wearing a slinky rhinestone dress and a crown of butterfly clips. Her black curls are gelled into a bun and she looks skinnier tonight; I wonder if she’s been eating. Weeks ago, when she bent over to use her locker, a boy named Ian screamed Slim Fast! and the whole hallway roared. Since then, I’ve only seen her suck down plastic tubes of fat-free yogurt in the cafeteria. Sometimes, she and the other girls chew on granola bars and spit the brown pulp back into plastic cups. All the taste, no calories.
How do I look? I ask, taking a deep breath.
Your skirt is totally split up the side, you know that right? How very Con-tramp-o Casual of you.
I look down and Clarissa is right—my skirt must have ripped when I was climbing out of the backseat. The front and back are connected by only a few thick threads. My whole thigh is showing, along with my tie-dye Limited Too underwear.
Well now-the-fuck what? I say. My parents aren’t coming back for hours.
You’re such a boner-killer, you know that? she says. Come on.
Clarissa leads me to a classroom, Mrs. Vag’s. The lights are still on. Student government runs late here, and Clarissa is in charge of the key. I’ve run for student government twice—Don’t be saddened, Vote for Madden!—but never made the cut. Both times, my mother baked campaign cookies for the entire middle school that everyone devoured, mumbling, Who knew she could make cookies without fortunes inside?
Inside Mrs. Vag’s room, in this kind of light, Clarissa’s glitter and charcoal makeup looks exaggerated and clownish. I wonder if I look the same. She walks over to Vag’s desk and picks up a stapler. C’mere, she says, getting on her knees.
I walk over to her.
Take the shoes off, she says, I can’t even reach your ankle.
Shoes are the one thing I have on girls my age. Most girls in Middle are allowed one pair of starter heels for dressy occasions—strappy, kitten things only a half inch off the ground, the kind of shoes my veiny-calved grandma might wear. I’ve been wearing platforms and clogs most of my life—sample styles stuffed with padding—with cheetah patterns, leather tassels, sawtooth soles. They don’t match our uniforms, but they’re not banned from school yet.
Clarissa works from the top and works her way down and around, snapping the jaws of the stapler quickly, efficiently, like she’s done this before. She pop pop pops the metal teeth like bullets. She pulls the fabric together and squeezes. She reloads the stapler and works until my whole side looks silver.
An improvement, she says.
Clarissa can be cruel, a real bitch. She lies and taunts and she can’t be trusted, not yet, but here’s the thing: she loves me more than any other friend I’ve ever known. There is a tenderness between two people who desire so much more than what they can have, who reach for the cards they have not been dealt, two girls who will soon be ridiculed for exposing their hairy backs at a bar mitzvah service—Did you goats escape from the petting zoo?—who will spend the next few years quietly shaving each other down the spine in an empty bathtub, bleaching each other’s mustaches, helping each other vomit up cheese fries and pastries; these little tasks that seem, to us, to so many young girls, like the very membrane between a life of being seen and no life at all. My love for Clarissa is so strong it changes the temperature of the air around us—that’s how it feels—which is precisely the thing about losers, the thing that binds us here on Mrs. Vag’s floor, and the thing that will bind us even after we change, grow up, become new people, meet other former and current losers: losers stick together. We recognize one another. Eighteen years from this moment, when I watch Clarissa walk down the aisle on her wedding day, her skin is flawless as skim milk in a white, backless dress.