Goody One Shoe

by Julie Frayn

  Her mother shook Billie’s shoulder. “Hey, it’s from me too you know. Don’t I get any hugs?”

  Billie released her father, stood, and put her hands on her mother’s shoulders. She placed a kiss on her mother’s cheek. “Thank you, Mother.”

  “You are welcome, darling. Now how about dessert?”

  “We had cake at home, Florrie.”

  “So? Special night, right? Buy the kid a piece of pie, cheapskate.”

  Her father squinted.

  “It’s okay, Daddy. I don’t need pie.”

  His face softened and he turned to Billie. “Of course you do. Apple, right? Ice cream and cheese and anything else they’ll put on it.”

  After she finished her slice of pie, her father counted out the last of his cash. A flash of panic crossed his eyes and he whispered to his wife that the tip would be a little light. Billie’s mother shrugged and examined her fingernails. When they stood to leave, Billie rested her small purse, a hand-me-down from her grandmother that carried nothing but cherry Chapstick and a small mirror — and the twenty-dollar bill her grandmother had slipped her for her birthday — onto her chair.

  Outside of the restaurant, Billie tugged on her father’s sleeve. “Daddy, I left my bag. I’ll go get it.”

  “We’ll wait. I’m sure your mother would like a cigarette.”

  “Hell, yes.” Her mother dug in her purse.

  Billie ran back inside. She picked her purse up from the chair, unzipped it, and pulled the money out. The waiter was taking the tab and the funds her father had left behind. “Excuse me, my father asked me to give you this for a tip.”

  The man’s face lit up. “Why thank you, young lady. And happy birthday to you.”

  “Thank you.”

  She pushed open the door to the restaurant. Her parents stood on the street corner, arguing. Her father had one finger wagging in her mother’s face, and her mother was tapping her foot against the pavement. She slapped his hand away, turned, and stormed down the sidewalk.

  Billie slid her hand inside her father’s and smiled up at him.

  He returned the smile. “Shall we take a walk? Your mother wants to window shop.”

  Billie nodded. She knew her mother wanted more than window-shopping. But there wasn’t enough money. It was the biggest issue between them. She wanted more. He couldn’t give it. But he’d do anything he could, spend more than he had, to make his daughter happy.

  Were all mothers jealous of their daughters?

  They strolled along the street and spied the shiny goods inside the lit-up windows.

  Her mother oohed and aahed at the jewelry shining behind the glass, at the shoes and boots and furs. She put both palms flat against one window. “Look, Danny.” She wagged a finger. “Red patent leather stilettos. Oh, and a matching purse.” She sidled up to him and slipped her arm through his, rested her head on his shoulder and ran her fingers around the buttons of his shirt. “Will you buy them for me? Pretend it’s my birthday?”

  Her mother’s batting eyelashes and sly smile were all too familiar.

  Billie’s father’s cheeks turned as red as her mother’s lipstick and his jaw clenched.

  Billie took his hand. “It’s all right, Daddy.” Similar scenes played out a few times a week, like a television rerun of an old, worn-out sitcom. Minus the com. “Let’s just go home.”

  Her father squeezed Billie’s hand. “We’ll cut through the alley. Maybe we can be home in time to watch Full House before bed.”

  Billie nodded with vigour.

  They stepped into the darkness of the alley, musty and reeking like an unclean bathroom. Dim bulbs over the back entries to stores and bars and office buildings cast deep shadows across their path. Halfway through, the thumping rhythms of hip-hop music vibrated from the bricks. Yards ahead, a door opened and the music spilled out, its heavy beat tickling Billie’s feet and bouncing in her ears.

  Three men burst from the building. One of them wore a bright red bandana on his head. The closer Billie and her family got, the louder the men became.

  “Da fuck, man? I said twenty per. You shortin’ me?” He grabbed another man by the collar.

  Billie couldn’t take her eyes off bandana man’s funny teeth. She tugged on her father’s hand.

  He stopped and turned to his wife. “Take Billie.”

  “Danny, don’t.” Her mother yanked Billie backward a couple of feet.

  “I have to. It’s my job.”

  “You are off the clock, God damn you. Can’t you just walk on by for once?”

  Her father reached into his jacket pocket where he kept his badge. “You know I can’t.”

  He approached the men. “Good evening, gentlemen.” He flashed his badge.” Can I see your hands please?”

  The man with the teeth dropped the other guy’s collar and spun around. The light glinted off one tooth. A gold tooth. His eyes were wild behind bushy brows.

  The guy who was being roughed up backed away, turned, and sprinted down the alley.

  Gold Tooth jerked his head at Billie’s father. “Mind your business, cop. We ain’t doin’ nothin’. Just out having a little smoke, that’s all.”

  “Sure, that’s all. Empty your pockets.”

  Gold Tooth smirked and craned his neck. He took a step forward in front of the third man who just stood in the dark and didn’t say a word. “That’s a pretty lady you got there.” Gold Tooth put his hand inside the pocket of his hoodie. “Maybe you oughtta just take her and the little one home.”

  Billie’s father rested his hand where his gun holster would be if he were in uniform. “Let me see your hands.”

  Gold Tooth yanked his hand from his hoodie and flicked open a knife. He lunged and slashed at her father.

  Her father pulled away, grabbed his forearm and swore. His sleeve was cut and blood seeped through. He turned to his wife. “Run for help.”

  Billie froze in place. The whole world slowed on its axis and every second took ten to tick by. The barrel of a gun flashed in the dim light. It was all she could see, the end of that gun, pointed at her father. It got bigger and bigger until it took up her entire field of vision.

  The muzzle flashed and a boom echoed off the walls around her. Her father fell to his knees and landed on his face on the alley floor.

  A high-pitched whine rang in Billie’s ears.

  Billie’s mother ran to her husband. She kneeled in the filth and the spilled blood, shook his shoulders. Her mouth was open and screaming but all Billie heard was that whine.

  She stood there, transfixed and paralyzed. Her feet had grown roots and her body was numb.

  The gun went off again and her mother collapsed on top of her father. Gold Tooth held the knife at his side and yelled something at the man with the gun.

  Billie looked into the eye of the gun. She prayed for him to shoot her too. Kill her too. Send her to heaven with her father.

  Gold Tooth waved his arms and yelled. Billie could hear nothing but blood coursing through her veins and the squeal and echo of gunfire. Could feel nothing but hot urine running down her legs.

  The muzzle flashed at the same time that Gold Tooth pushed the gunman.

  Billie went down. She didn’t feel any pain. Didn’t even feel her body hit the ground. A cat screeched and music pulsed through the pavement. She fell asleep to a good vibration and a sweet sensation whispering in her ear.

  First Friday in May

  MORNING COMMUTES WERE much like evenings — except most passengers were fresh and sparkling clean and didn’t stink of lost hope and dried perspiration.

  Armed with the knowledge that her contract allowed freelancing, so long as she wasn’t stealing the company’s clients, Billie felt more alive than she had in months. A few internet searches to pillage billing rates and buzzwords from other editors, a down-and-dirty website announcing her services to the waiting world, and several unsolicited emails to independent writers she found on LinkedIn and Twitter and all manner of other time-suck so
cial media sites, and she was on her way. Or at least, she’d made the first step. One tiny step.

  At the third stop of fourteen, a horde of teens hopped onto the train. She was familiar with this group. They were not a friendly bunch. They pushed their way into the metal cylinder every morning, rode the rails four whole stops before disembarking a block from school. She knew this because they were so bloody loud that everyone heard where they were going, whom they’d slept with, how horrible their parents were. Half a dozen privileged white boys trying their hardest to be street. They made snide comments to commuters who were minding their own business. Rude remarks about fashion choice and haircuts, weight, height, four eyes. Juvenile bullshit with a hard edge. An edge that would turn vicious and leave a deep wound if they were in just the right mood.

  She hated them all. Why didn’t they get off their lazy asses and walk twenty-seven blocks? Leave the subway for those who needed it. Folks who had a long commute. Struggled with mobility. Couldn’t afford to drive. Didn’t want to be annoyed, interrupted, accosted by their presence.

  One of the boys sat opposite her and gave her the same look he did every day. Not even a look at all. His gaze passed through her as if she weren’t even there, as if she were made of glass that didn’t shine, didn’t reflect. She was lucky. If he did focus on her, who knows what unmannerly verbal detritus would spew from his bully mouth.

  He was their leader. Each of his crew did his bidding, sometimes without the benefit of words being spoken. That morning he wore a new accessory. A red bandana, do-rag style.

  She closed her eyes to avoid looking at him. The spectre of a gold-toothed man in a bright red headscarf loomed behind her lids. Her hand trembled and she blinked the memory away.

  Senseless tribal tattoos snaked up from under the hood of the subway bully’s jacket and crawled around his neck. He probably thought they meant warrior or strength or leader. She’d bet they meant puppy. His hoodie fell open and underneath, a T-shirt emblazoned with the symbol of Batman.

  She hated Batman.

  The people who killed Bruce Wayne’s parents didn’t shoot him full of lead. Didn’t cost him a leg. They just shot him full of angst and cost him a normal life.

  Billie had fought for normal. Fought to keep friends, freaked out by the eleven-year-old’s missing limb, by the metal and rubber that replaced flesh and bone. No fancy skin-like cover, no-siree. Grandmother couldn’t afford that. When Billie hit puberty, the boys avoided her. Budding breasts be damned, they couldn’t get past the missing part, the gnarled, scarred, misshapen knob at the end of what was left of her calf. But still, she fought for normal. It just never found her. No date for the prom, no sleepovers with her girlfriends. There were no girlfriends. Just books. Books and her father’s mother, who tried her best to be a replacement for Billie’s own mom. Except Grandmother didn’t drink. So that was an improvement.

  Billie vowed to be as normal as possible, just to spite the bastards who took her family. To spite the kids who couldn’t see past her handicap, past her deformity. Who couldn’t see her at all.

  The subway shook and Billie focused her eyes. Bat Head was gone. She found him standing in front of the door, waiting for it to open. When it did, he led his crew out into the big wide world to annoy the crap out of decent people everywhere. She blinked, glanced around, and rested her head against the window behind her. Her fingers found the carved surface of her gold cross.

  Seven more stops.

  A manuscript landed on her desk with a slap. Billie jumped and jostled her teacup, sloshing oolong onto her mouse.

  “An old-fashioned one. Paper and all.” Katherine crossed her arms. “Due by the fifteenth. You can handle it, right? It’s only six-hundred pages.” She smirked.

  “In two weeks? Without a computer?” A knot grew in Billie’s stomach. So much for spare-time to freelance.

  “Two weeks. Assuming you still want to work here.” Katherine loomed over her and leaned in. “You think I wouldn’t see that piss-poor excuse for a website you threw together? Think I’m not checking up on all you proofing-pool rats and what you say about me?”

  Billie swallowed. “I checked my contract. I’m allowed. I’m not taking any clients away from the company.” Her head lightened and her cheeks warmed. “I promise.”

  “You know where you can shove your promises. By the fifteenth. Or consider yourself released to work freelance. Permanently.”

  Katherine stormed back to her office. Jeffrey poked his weasel head out of his hole, one side of his mouth upturned.

  Billie put one palm atop the almost three-inch-thick manuscript. She flipped through a few pages. Typewritten, single-spaced for crying out loud. Who uses a typewriter? Single-spaced? She rubbed the bridge of her nose and shook her head. Good thing she had no social life. It would have been sacrificed to the editing gods anyway.

  She ogled her computer, ran one finger across the keyboard. She reached for the monitor and depressed the power button, a long sigh feathered across her lips. A second before the screen’s light died, she noticed the date. May first. May Day.

  How bloody appropriate.

  Monday, May 4th

  BY SUNDAY, BILLIE’D HAD enough and escaped her apartment, unchained herself from the insufferable prose of Edward Morse, soon-to-be not-so-bestselling author of fantasy drivel, and fled to find sanctuary in church. She hadn’t attended services for months, and even then, only to absorb the beauty that was the Reverend Gabriel Keene, the message he conveyed less spoken than effervesced from his full lips. His take on the word of God.

  But that wasn’t her God. Not anymore. She wasn’t afraid of her God. He was her friend, her confidante. Her God understood that all good people aren’t perfect. That those who are the most broken need the most leeway.

  She’d sat in one of the front pews, distracted by the pretty priest. Visions of dangling modifiers and mangled expressions impeded her prayers. No, that Sunday hadn’t been about God. Billie had just needed a better view for a couple hours.

  Her cubicle walls quaked when she slammed her briefcase, heavy with the six-hundred-page manuscript, onto her desk. It had become her cross to bear. The anchor that kept her from drifting off into calmer waters. The old ball and chain, without the side benefit of rote sex and fake orgasms. It became a metaphor for her life, heavy with sorrow and unrequited grief for lost parents, lost childhood, lost limb. It was the weight of her loneliness, the burden of her mutilation, the utter heft of her failure at normal. It was her new handicap.

  She picked up her mental red pen and edited the clichés out of her own thoughts. If she were one of her clients, she’d have dumped herself a hundred pages ago.

  The latches opened with a hollow click. She peered inside. The fat ream of paper stared back at her, her own red deles and carets and strikethroughs taunted her with just how little she’d accomplished, just how much more literary offal she had to slash and correct and, worst of all … read.

  She hauled out the manuscript and slumped into her ergonomic chair. Only seventy-eight pages in three days. At that rate, she’d be freelancing before the week was up. All weekend she’d tried to focus, to find the mental energy to face the slop on the pages. She’d sit on the sofa with thirty sheets, nod off, awake to paper all over the floor. Have to sort it, stack it, put it back in order. Not an easy task since the fatuous author didn’t number the pages.

  She tapped the manuscript with her red pen and sighed. Reading aloud, perhaps that would work. Billie cleared her throat. “The earth shook when he took me in his arms. Or maybe it was just me, trembling at the cold, clammy touch of his undead fingers. His teeth penetrated the silky white flesh of my virgin neck. An explosion of light emanated from him like a glitter bomb. A glitter bomb of love.”

  Billie threw up in her mouth a little.

  “How goes it?” Jeffrey stood at her elbow, failing at his barely veiled attempt to size up her progress. He was on standby, waiting for her to blow it. He’d probably measured her desk
, one of the few near a window, before she got to work. Presumptuous, brown-nosing little wiener. She suppressed a grin at the thought of him in a rhinestone-studded dog collar, trailing behind Katherine, a leopard-skin leash in her hand.

  Billie lowered the lid of the briefcase. “It’s going, Jeffrey. Just like you are. Back to your hole.” She flicked her fingers at him. “Shoo.”

  He huffed at her and stuck his lower lip out, turned and retreated to his hovel in the corner.

  She clicked her computer on and stared at the screen while it went through its daily start-up process. When the cursor turned from spinning blue circle to hollow arrow, she clicked on the Outlook icon and watched her inbox fill up.

  She’d missed the due date on a ninety-thousand-word nonfiction self-help book. Not that it would make any difference to sales. Publish now, publish five years from now, same old love-yourself, art-of-attraction, smile-and-the-world-smiles-with-you flapdoodle that filled literal and digital bookshelves. And flew off them too. Why did people fall for such falderal? If anyone needed some feel-good self-help, it was Billie. But even she couldn’t buy into the shallow end of that psychobabble pool. Thrice-weekly workouts at the gym, that was her salvation. A beating heart and the promise of heaven was all she needed. Or so she kept telling herself.

  An hour later, her emails answered, other authors put off with the excuse of competing deadlines, which was no lie, she buried herself in the huge typewritten pile, the third vampire novel she’d edited that year. Come on, people, vampires are so twenty-ten. What would be the claim to fame for this group of neck biters — glowing? Sparkling? Or maybe some good old-fashioned blood sucking murder for a change.

  Seven hours, six cups of coffee, three stale doughnuts, and one new red pen later, she’d fought her way through forty-seven more pages. She rubbed her neck and eyed the pages, like the aftermath of a bad slasher flick. Serves the author right, all that passive-voiced, head hopping, cliché-riddled claptrap. Thank God for small mercies, after the glitter bomb of love, the story was rife with actual sucking of blood, death, and gore. No angst-ridden, teenaged, ashen-yet-shiny vamps. But the prose was painful. It wasn’t bad enough he was ripping off Bram Stoker’s original character, this author was channeling the adverb-heavy, run-on sentenced, writing style of the late nineteenth century. The kind of stories only palatable in the modern day when computer-generated on the big screen at the multiplex. Not wrought on paper — actual bloody paper — and fraught with twisted metaphors and obvious similes and repeated misuse of common idioms. Intents and purposes, damn it, not intensive purposes. Penal system, not penile system.