The Other Shoe by Matt Pavelich Page B

done?” She was ashamed of herself without knowing why.
    â€œRemember,” Jean would say. “Remember, remember, remember, ’cause these are the good years, Dad. These years here might be the best ones you’ll ever get. Remember.”
    But, for a very long while, nothing memorable occurred. Karen was a freshman, then a sophomore, reduced to playing chess with pimpled and humped Tana Holt. The girls said, “It just flies by, doesn’t it?” They’d say, “We have so much fun.” Karen could detect little momentum, but she did become a junior. For weeks on end she’d get by on the utterance of a few dozen words. She brought her lunch in a sack to avoid standing in line for hot meals. She rode the bus sitting right behind the driver. She read Black Beauty twelve times. On Friday nights, Jean let her make popcorn and a powdered fruit drink. Karen endured like a weed in drought, having learned nothing useful so far but how to wait. She did what each day required of her.

▪ 3 ▪
    A T FIRST , M RS . Ashcraft gave her a choice: Karen could ride on the class float, or she could go to detention with the noodle-heads. She might want to try wasting time in company with Keith and Hans Boethcher and Mr. McFeely and his son, the slavering Gabe; she might like to see how much she’d enjoy scraping fossilized gum for a couple hours off the undersides of desks and heat registers. But then Mrs. Ashcraft reconsidered, and she said that, no, there was no choice—this was homecoming. Karen was to report immediately to the rec room and have her face painted. “I’ll be there in five minutes, too, so you’d better not try sneaking off to chem lab or the sick room or somewhere. You can show your support like everyone else, Miss Dent. Loosen up for once.” Karen admired silliness very much but could never join in it, for she had no personal dignity to spare, and she wanted no part of anyone’s parade, not even to watch. There would be flags and cars and silly ways of walking; there would, she expected, be some horn honking.
    The school was nearly empty. A locker slammed in another part of the building and echoed for seconds down the halls. Tennis shoes slapped linoleum, and Karen heard two shrilling boys as they ran together into, and then explosively through, the eastern exit. The big door echoed in the following silence, where it seemed at least that no one had been hurt. She read a butcher paper scroll rolled out alonga ceiling, a thing she’d read many dozen times before—H AWK ’ S E GGSELL —W E R HAWK AND R OLL !!!—and she took very short and very slow steps but reached the rec room in under a minute, and there she joined a short line of waiting girls, and there the vice president of the Hawk Chics, Darlene Mews, gave her a sponge heavy with paint. “Blue, okay? Everywhere there’s skin showing, make it blue. You have to do it by feel at first, ’cause Yvette needs to use the mirror. Jannie Fay puts your finishing touches on you when you get to her. Okay?” Darlene spoke to her as if she were an exchange student or a special-needs student, and though she was herself notoriously stupid, Darlene, as a cheerleader, had to wear only a decal on her cheek, and a little eyeliner, and the lavender ribbons that coiled so prettily in her hair.
    The girls in line ahead of Karen had already daubed themselves with this paint, which was in truth nearer black than blue, and it had made some of them almost unrecognizable, and their faces flexed to work against flesh suddenly, interestingly inelastic. Though at first touch it burned, and though it smelled to her of mold, Karen wet her whole face with it, and it almost instantly dried, leaching oil and sweat from her skin. The mix became a desiccated crust, and she looked and felt like the end of a mud puddle.
    Her head still hurt when Jannie Fay Palmer filled the hollows of her eyes with