Sadie, three blocks the other way, wore her new tan boots. She'd walked out of the house with her arms out at her sides like a tightrope walker, stepping in every puddle on purpose, shouting, "I can't feel anything! I can't feel anything!" and our mother, standing at the top of the outside stairs in her robe with her coffee, had laughed and called after her to stop splashing. I'd been halfway down the stairs behind Sadie. My mother's laugh had stopped when she looked at me, and she'd said, "Noemi, wait," and gone inside and come back out with a pair of my wool socks, the thick gray ones, and handed them to me rolled into a ball. "Put these in your backpack," she said. "Change at lunch."
I took them. I did change at lunch, in the girls' bathroom by the gym, sitting on the closed lid of a toilet, wringing out the wet sock into the bowl. The dry wool on my cold foot felt so good it almost made me cry. I'm telling you this because it's true and because it's the kind of thing that makes it hard to tell this story straight. She saw my shoe. She sent me with dry socks. She didn't buy me shoes. All three things were true at the same time, and I didn't know which one to believe.
When I got home, my mother was already there, which was strange for a Friday. Dr. Kemper closed early on Fridays sometimes, but not usually. She was on the couch with her phone in her hand and her face had a gray, closed look I recognized. It was the look she'd had after the times Brent called and said he couldn't make it, or the time the Corolla's transmission went, or the time our landlord raised the rent a hundred and fifty dollars in a letter he slid under the door.
"Your grandmother called me," she said.
I put down my backpack. "Okay."
"She's coming up tomorrow. She says. She didn't ask, she just says she's coming."
"She does that," I said.
"Did you call her?"
"No." This was true. She'd called me.
My mother looked at me for a long moment. "Did you say something to her? About anything?"
I thought about lying. I didn't, exactly. I said, "I sent her a picture of my science project."