The left shoe went first. It was a gray canvas sneaker with a white rubber toe, the kind that comes in a bin at the discount store with the pairs held together by a plastic thread, and I had bought it myself, more or less, the summer before seventh grade, with twenty-two dollars of birthday money and a coupon my mother found in the mailer. By November of eighth grade the rubber along the left toe had come unglued from the canvas in a long smile, and every time I put my weight on that foot the smile opened and showed my sock.
I'm telling you about the shoe first because for a long time I thought the shoe was the whole story. I thought the story was about being thirteen in Spokane in November with a hole in your shoe, which is a small, stupid, ordinary thing to be sad about, and I knew it was small and stupid and ordinary, and that made it worse. There were kids at my school whose parents were in jail. There was a girl in my science class who lived in a motel on Division with her mom and two brothers. I had a bedroom, even if I shared it. I had a winter coat, even if the zipper only worked if you held the bottom and pulled sideways. I did not think I had the right to be upset about a shoe.
My name is Noemi Arriaga. That November I was thirteen and three months, in eighth grade at the middle school up on Wellesley, and I lived with my mother and my little sister in the upstairs half of a split duplex in the Audubon Park neighborhood, on the north side, where the streets are lined with big old maples that drop their leaves all at once in the first hard freeze and then lie there in brown, slick mats until the plows push them into the gutters with the snow. The duplex was gray with white trim that needed painting. The downstairs neighbor, Mr. Esparza, had a collie named Moxie who barked at the mail carrier every day at exactly two-fifteen like it was his job.
The first real snow came the second week of November, and then it warmed up and rained on top of the snow, and then it froze, and then it warmed up again, which is what Spokane does in November, and which meant that every sidewalk between our duplex and my school was either ice, or slush, or a puddle with ice at the bottom. It is nine-tenths of a mile from our door to the front steps of the school. I know because I measured it on my mother's phone once when I was trying to make a case for a bus pass. Nine-tenths of a mile in a shoe with a smile in the toe means that by the time you get to first period, your left sock is soaked through, and by second period it is cold, and by lunch your toes have gone a waxy white color and feel like they belong to somebody else.
I tried plastic bags first. You put your foot in a grocery bag, then you put the sock over the bag, then you put the shoe on. It works for about four blocks. Then the bag tears at the toe, where the shoe is torn, which makes sense when you think about it, and then you have a wet sock and a wet bag and you squeak when you walk down the hallway, and a boy named Dominic Ferreira says, "Who's farting in a raincoat?" and everybody laughs, including you, because what else are you going to do.
So I switched to duct tape. We had a roll of the silver kind in the junk drawer by the stove. Every morning I wrapped the toe of my left shoe, twice around, pressing the tape down into the groove between the rubber and the canvas with my thumbnail. It held better than the bag. It also looked exactly like what it was. I learned to sit with my left foot tucked behind my right ankle under my desk. I learned to stand in the lunch line with my left foot slightly behind me, like a ballerina, if ballerinas were extremely embarrassed. I got good at it. You can get good at almost anything if you have to do it every day.
The right shoe was fine, by the way. That's the other stupid thing. The right shoe was just a little too small, which is a different problem. My feet had grown a whole size since summer. My mother said I had my father's feet, long and narrow, which she said the way you'd say someone had inherited a bad back.
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving week, I came home from school at three-forty with my left foot numb, and I sat on the edge of the bathtub and ran warm water over it the way I'd learned to, not hot, because hot hurts when your foot is that cold, and I watched the color come back, white, then blotchy pink, then red. Sadie banged on the door and said she had to pee, and I said use the other bathroom, and she said we don't have another bathroom, and I said exactly, and she laughed through the door, and I let her in.
Sadie was eight. She was in third grade at the elementary school three blocks away, and she had our mother's blond hair, almost white, which she wore in two French braids that our mother did every morning at the kitchen table while Sadie ate cereal with her eyes closed. She had our mother's small hands and small feet and our mother's way of laughing with her whole face. Her father was Brent Vail, who had been our mother's second husband, who had lived with us from when I was five to when I was nine, and who now lived in Tri-Cities with a woman named Ashlynn and a boat he talked about more than he talked about his daughter.
I am not going to pretend I didn't love my sister. I did. I do. She used to climb into my bunk during thunderstorms when she was little and press her cold feet into the backs of my knees, and I would let her. So when I tell you what happened that Wednesday night, please understand that none of it was Sadie's fault. I knew it then, even while it was happening. Knowing it didn't help as much as you'd think.
Our mother got home at six-twenty. She worked the front desk at a dental office on Francis, Dr. Kemper's, where she answered the phone and scheduled cleanings and argued with insurance companies about whether a crown was medically necessary, and she usually came home with her jaw tight from smiling all day at people who were afraid of the dentist. That night she came up the outside stairs slowly, and I heard paper bags crinkling against the railing, and I knew before she opened the door that she had been shopping, because she only came up the stairs that slowly when her arms were full.