The cold got into the hallway before it got into the rooms. Willa Keene knelt on the entry rug with one brown sneaker in her lap and the other already on, the lace chewed flat where her teeth had worried it on the bus. The rubber at the toe had gone the color of a wet paper bag. A pale thread lifted near the eyelet when she breathed.
She was eleven, and she had learned to make herself smaller than doorways. Her brown hair was pulled back with a black elastic that had lost its gold cuff somewhere between the first week of school and this one. Freckles lay across her nose in a scatter her mother called sun damage even in November. She wore a beige sweater with a pull at the cuff and jeans that had been her sister's, hemmed twice, still long enough at the heel that the canvas rubbed.
From the kitchen came the tick of the kettle and the brighter sound of a phone. Audrey was seventeen and already dressed for a day that wanted witnesses. Shiny black puffer, hoop earrings taking the light off the stair rail, blonde hair smoothed into a low tail that had not fought her. She smelled like the good dryer sheets, the ones in the blue box on the high shelf.
Their mother came down with a gray shoebox in both hands, the way people carry a thing that still has a receipt in it. Patricia Keene was forty-four. Her blonde hair was pinned into a bun so nothing could escape and testify. Beige turtleneck. Camel coat already belted, as if the morning were a hallway she only had to cross. She looked at Willa's feet and stopped on the third step, which made her taller than the conversation required.
"You're not wearing those embarrassing shoes today."
Willa's fingers stayed on the lace. "They're the only ones I have."
"They are not." Patricia came the rest of the way down and set the box on the shoe bench, beside the rack where Audrey's clean white trainers sat like they had never met a street. "I put these out last night. You walked past them."
Willa knew the box. It had lived on the top shelf of the hall closet since April, under a wool hat nobody wore. Inside were white leather sneakers, barely creased, half a size too narrow, a return Audrey had not wanted and a correction Patricia did. Willa had tried them once in her room with the door shut. Her toes went numb before she finished counting to a hundred and twenty, which was how long she held a balance when no one was timing her.
Audrey leaned on the newel post and lifted the lid with one finger, careful of the tissue, or careful of being seen to be careful. "Maybe you should have been more popular."
It was not a shout. Audrey rarely shouted. She had a voice that knew where it would land. She took one white shoe out and turned it so the sole flashed, spotless, and looked at Willa over it with a smile that had already finished its work.
Heat moved up Willa's throat and stopped behind her eyes. She did not let it become anything her sister could use. She set the brown shoe on the rug and pressed the tongue flat. The canvas gave a small tired sound. On the insole, if you knew to look, laundry marker had once said W.K. and a date. The letters had softened into the cloth. She still knew the day. She did not say it in this hallway.