Bad Fashion Choices

In May 1987, my family piled into a distressingly bright orange Volvo station wagon and left Pennsylvania for southeast Texas. My new home was shockingly different. It was hot, with air like split pea soup full of bugs that bite. Unfamiliar humidity perfumed the breeze. People talked funny, said my name wrong.

I felt like a foreigner, a sore thumb, a shirt on inside out and backwards. 

When we arrived, my brother and I had to be enrolled in school, which required an in-person placement test. I wanted everyone to like me and make a good impression, so I dressed up. I put on my favorite white romper with the lettuce edge and primary-colored balloon print. A bow of looped shoelaces clipped in front of my ponytail. A couple water-filled glitter bracelets nearly sliding off my skinny wrists.

And I wore my my most awesome shoes.  

They were violent pink dress-up heels with black soles. Pretend play shoes. Not soft like the clear plastic jellies I wore that got pebbles lodged in the lattice-work holes of the soles. These were hard plastic, inflexible and strong as a GI Joe figure. When I walked in them, they clacked like a slapstick - loud, sharp, unmistakable. And because they were slipper style, they also slapped my tender heels with each step.

CLACK-smack. CLACK-smack. 

Similar to these beauties on Pinterest

In the grocery store full of squeaking cart wheels and Lionel Ritchie singing "Dancing On the Ceiling," the sound was drowned out. On the flat blue carpet of the home we had recently moved in to, the noise was muffled. But in the silent, vinyl tiled halls of Stephen F. Austin elementary school, my shoes echoed like gunshots. 

I followed the guidance counselor past more than a dozen wide open doors in the middle of an otherwise quiet school morning. My hurried, tiny strides reverberated for days. 

CLACK-smack CLACK-smack CLACK-smack CLACK-smack.

The kids sitting at clustered faux-wood patterned desks probably raised their eyes from addition facts and Battle of San Jacinto lessons to look at each other and wonder what rifle was firing, what firecrackers were being lit in the hall while they were supposed to be concentrating. 

I could hear how loud and obvious I was, and it pinked my cheeks. The counselor looked back at me from over the shoulder of her vertical-stripe belted dress and asked, "Could you maybe walk quieter?"

I switched to walking on my tip-toes, but the open backs of the slip-ons still bounced on the floor. To make matters worse, somewhere inside my left heel something had broken loose, and that particular shoe made an additional clicking noise with each step.  

Schuff-clat. Schuff-clat-click. Schuff-clat. Schuff-clat-click. 

I was an anxious disaster of mixed meter (duple-triple) proportions. 

I walked for at least an hour down that hall before we reached a small workroom where I could fill in answer bubbles with a #2 pencil. My embarrassment and regret must have bled onto the page, because that fall I was placed in a class which moved far too slowly for my quick mind. Or maybe the decision was made by the guidance counselor, who assumed only a 6-year-old of breathtakingly low intelligence would deliberately wear hard plastic dress-up shoes to an important school evaluation in her new town.

I don't know where my mother was in all of this bad-decision-making. She liked me to feel independent. 

A few months into my school year that fall, I was moved up to a different and more advanced second-grade class. But my mind has yet to get over the embarrassment of those audacious shoes in the hushed hallway and the first impression I must have made on the staff and students that day.

CLACK-smack. CLACK-smack.

In any unfamiliar room, I can still hear myself coming from miles away.

I'd like to apologize to this second grader with a perm
(another bad fashion choice)