Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(16)

It’s too much, I say. The Backstreet Boys sing through the store speakers, and I feel embarrassed, like a little girl, just listening to the way they want it while I’m wearing this outfit. My legs are scarred and pale from my half-chaps, from all the stiff boots and pinching stirrup leathers over the years. Even worse—they’re hairy, especially my knees.

You’re just used to that long, fugly uniform skort, she says. You look hot like this, trust me. Quince will DROP DEAD.

Will you let me Nair for this? I ask. Please?

I’ll think about it, she says. It is a special occasion.

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.