In Your Shoes

by Donna Gephart

  ALSO BY DONNA GEPHART

  Lily and Dunkin

  As if Being 12¾ Isn’t Bad Enough, My Mother Is Running for President!

  How to Survive Middle School

  Olivia Bean, Trivia Queen

  Death by Toilet Paper

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Donna Gephart

  Cover art copyright © 2018 by Chris Silas Neal

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781524713737 (hc) — ebook ISBN 9781524713751

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v5.3.2

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Donna Gephart

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Frame One: If the Shoe Fits, Throw It

  Miles

  Amy

  A Good Mistake

  F(L)Ight

  Frame Two: Footwear Meets Forehead

  Amy, the Hero of Her Own Story

  The Nice Nurse

  The Miles Spagoski Hustle

  Heading “Home”

  Frame Three: Home Is Where the Heart Is (and the Jelly Krimpets Are)

  The Center of Everything

  Not Perfect

  Amy Finds a Sanctuary

  Frame Four: Lost…and Found

  Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost.

  The Unexpected

  No Redemption

  A Precarious Place to Be

  Determination

  Frame Five: Forward Motion

  It’s Official

  The Asking

  Dead and Breakfast

  Another Chapter in Which Miles Spagoski Finds Something to Worry About

  Frame Six: One of the Greatest Stories Ever Bowled

  Waffles and Weight Lifting

  From Bumbershoot to Bowling

  Frame Seven: Surprise!

  Miles’s New Obsession

  A Story in Which Things Get, Um, Hairy

  A Short Time in Which Things Are All Right

  Party Time!

  Frame Eight: The Story Behind the Story of Life, Death and Bowling

  The Part Where a Story Is Revealed, a Gift Is Given, and a Heart Is Broken

  The Story Continues, Painfully

  An Ending

  No. No. No. No. No.

  A Sad Truth

  The Beginning of the Worst Day

  The Funeral

  Amy, at the Funeral

  Frame Nine: How Life Goes On

  Shut Up and Bowl

  Talking in the Library

  When You Love Someone…

  Friends Being Friends

  Preparing

  “Let’s Go!”

  Breath

  After

  Frame Ten: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Happily-Ever-After

  Not at the Dance

  The Idea

  The First Happily-Ever-After

  The Second Happily-Ever-After

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Dedicated to Dan—

  From our first date, you really bowled me over, babe. I’m sorry about “accidentally” throwing out your old bowling shoes.

  Life on earth is such a good story

  you cannot afford to miss the beginning….

  —Lynn Margulis

  Some stories start with “Once upon a time…”

  Some start with a dramatic moment, like the appearance of a meteor hurtling toward Earth.

  Stories can be plenty dramatic without a meteor. As I’m sure you know, while we’re living our ordinary lives in ordinary places, Earth is spinning 1,000 miles per hour on its axis. That seems pretty dramatic to me.

  While Earth spins and orbits the sun, this particular story starts in one of those ordinary places—Buckington, Pennsylvania.

  At the start of this story, there’s a nervous boy who braves freezing temperatures to get to his favorite place in the universe.

  And there’s a grieving girl who wakes in a new bedroom somewhere she hadn’t meant to be.

  There’s also a nosy, noisy narrator—Me!—intruding now and again to direct your attention to things that matter deeply.

  So this story absolutely does not begin with “Once upon a time…” or with a meteor hurtling toward Earth.

  It starts (and ends) with a bowling shoe.

  As these things sometimes do.

  Miles Spagoski jogged the four blocks to his family’s bowling center, shivering and imagining ways he might die—a frozen tree limb could crack off and land on his head, a distracted driver fiddling with a car’s heating controls could swerve onto the sidewalk and plow him flat, or, if he was outside long enough, plain old hypothermia could be the end of his short, sad story.

  But the moment Miles entered Buckington Bowl, his worries melted away like snowflakes on a warm palm. Miles relaxed, as much as someone like him could relax, onto a stool behind the front counter and kicked off his worn sneakers.

  He loved his family’s bowling center first thing in the morning, before his dad put the oldies rock station on to play through the crackly speaker system, before pins crashed on lanes 1 through 48, before video games near the snack counter beeped and blinked and beckoned. Before—

  “Hey, Spagoski!” Randall Fleming yelled through the thick glass doors, startling Miles. Backpack slung over one shoulder, face pressed against the glass where the painted words read “No gum allowed in this building,” Randall made smudges with his mouth and pounded the door with a gloved fist. “Open up. My snot’s freezing.”

  Miles unlocked the automatic doors for his best friend to slip through. He’d tried to make Randall call him by his first name, but there were five other Mileses in their grade, so Randall insisted on “Spagoski” for specificity. He was stubborn like that.

  “Why didn’t you open up sooner?” Randall blinked, blinked, blinked. “My eyeballs were turning into ice cubes out there.”

  “It’s not that cold.” Miles reached behind the counter and grabbed Windex and a rag. “Why’d you have to slobber all over the door? You know I have to clean that.”

  Randall shrugged. Miles went outside in his socks to quickly wipe the smudges off the gla
ss, then darted back in, shivering again. “It’s fr-fr-freezing! Feels like the temperature dropped twenty degrees since I got here.”

  “Told you,” Randall said, stamping his brand-new sneakers, even though there wasn’t any snow on the ground. “They should cancel school today and give us one more day of winter vacation.”

  Miles imagined spending the whole day bowling. He’d take his first break at lunch when his dad started grilling in the bowling center’s kitchen. And when Miles’s arm got sore from rolling so many strikes, he’d hang out with the regulars, like Stick, who’d teach him the finer points of playing pool so Miles could hustle kids at the pool table as well as on the lanes, and Tyler, the mechanic, who would take him back behind the lanes and let him help fix things when they broke down, which was often. It would be a perfect day. “They should cancel school for the rest of winter,” Miles said. “We could bowl like eight games a day every day. Imagine how high our averages would get.”

  “They should cancel that dumb school dance.” Randall kicked at nothing. “Did you see the way Marcus Lopez asked Lacey Smith to the dance before break? That idiot hid a dozen roses in her locker and then had Mr. Cedeno ask her for him over the morning announcements.”

  “Yeah, that was crazy,” Miles said. “What if she said no?”

  “Right. But of course she said yes. Way to raise the bar for the rest of us, Marcus.”

  Both boys laughed, but Miles wasn’t laughing on the inside. He knew the dumb dance was another thing he’d worry about. Would he find someone to ask? How would he ask her in a big way without embarrassing himself? Would she say yes? He didn’t have the popularity power of Marcus Lopez. And he didn’t even like dancing. You could get bumped into, stepped on, rejected, made fun of. Too much unpredictability. Miles liked bowling, where things made sense. You rolled a heavy ball down a wooden lane in an attempt to knock over ten pins. Simple. Fun. Predictable. Nothing terrible ever happened in bowling. Even the dreaded gutter ball wasn’t the end of the world. There was always the next roll or the next game. Always a chance for a do-over.

  If only life were more like bowling.

  Miles ducked behind the counter, put the Windex away, and switched on lane 48. He handed Randall a pair of size 11 bowling shoes, marveling at how much bigger Randall’s feet were than his own. Miles grabbed the handle of his black wheeled bowling bag. “You’re lucky you can ask Tate,” Miles said. “I can’t think of one girl at Buckington Middle who’d want to go with me.”

  “Aw. Come on.” Randall flung his arm around Miles’s shoulders and squeezed. “There’s got to be one girl who’s desperate enough to go with you, Spagoski. You know, someone with really bad vision who wouldn’t realize how ugly you are.”

  Miles wriggled out of Randall’s grip. He decided to think about bowling, not girls, not the dumb dance and definitely not Randall’s unfunny comment. He thought if he did everything right this morning, maybe he’d bowl his first perfect game.

  Three hundred beautiful points. Twelve gorgeous strikes in a row.

  His older sister, Mercedes, once told him some nine-year-old girl in Florida bowled a perfect game in league play. Miles figured if a nine-year-old could do it, he should be able to do it, too. He was three years older than that girl and probably had a lot more bowling experience, since his grandfather owned Buckington Bowl and his parents worked there.

  But in all his years of playing, Miles had never bowled a perfect game.

  If you believe in yourself and work hard enough, you can do anything, Miles’s grandmother, Bubbie Louise, used to say. Except bowl a 301. Even Superman can’t do that, bubeleh…and he’s got those cute tights and all.

  Miles still missed Bubbie Louise, even though she died a year ago, shortly after his eleventh birthday. Miles knew he should be done missing her by now, but he couldn’t help how he felt.

  “I’m going to kick your bowling butt, Spagoski,” Randall said as they walked toward lane 48.

  Miles shook his head. “Yeah, well, Grandpop Billy gave me a new bowling ball for Chanukah, so I’m going to kick your butt today, Rand.” Miles stretched his leg behind Randall to literally kick him in the butt, but since Randall was so much taller, Miles managed only a weak tap on the back of Randall’s left thigh.

  Miles made a mental note to himself: Grow.

  “What’s that pitiful move? This is a proper kick to the butt.” And Randall kicked Miles’s rear end so hard that Miles lurched forward, windmilling his arms to keep from face-planting onto the worn purple carpet—the one with images of bowling pins and colorful squares, triangles and circles. It was the same carpet Miles had learned his shapes and colors on when he was little.

  Miles balanced himself, muttering, “Yeah, remind me why we’re friends?”

  Randall couldn’t answer. He was laughing so hard he doubled over and started wheezing. Sometimes laughing too hard triggered coughing and wheezing for Randall. Other times, cold weather did it. Even a whiff of someone’s perfume or stinky deodorant could make Randall’s airways clog with mucus and set him wheezing for hours. The worst, though, was being around cats and dogs. They always triggered a full-blown wheeze-o-rama.

  Randall took two quick puffs of medicine from his orange inhaler, and after a few breaths his airways relaxed and the raspy wheezes subsided.

  “Who’s makin’ all that racket?” called a figure hunched over on a stool at the snack counter, his wheelchair behind him.

  Both boys looked up, startled.

  Miles’s grandfather, Billy Spagoski, sat with a mug of steaming coffee in his chapped red hands. He was wearing his “Shut Up and Bowl” embroidered T-shirt. “You boys are having way too much fun for a Tuesday morning. Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

  Don’t remind us, Pop, Miles thought, remembering all the hours he’d be wasting at school when he could be on the lanes practicing.

  “Hey there, Mr. Spagoski.” Randall waved. “I’m about to kick your grandson’s butt again.”

  Miles covered his backside with his hand in case Randall was being literal.

  “Yeah, I’ll bet you are,” Grandpop Billy answered. “Just don’t let him hustle you too badly, Randall.”

  Randall put a hand to his perfectly pressed button-down dress shirt, over his heart. “Miles? Hustle me? That boy couldn’t swindle me in bowling if I had both hands tied behind my back. Hustle me? Miles? Ha!”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said,” Billy called. “Miles. Hustle you! Got icicles stuck in your ears?”

  Miles grabbed his friend’s backpack strap and pulled. “Come on. We’ve got to hurry if we want to get in a game before school. I’m going to bowl a three hundred today. I feel it.” Then he called, “I’m totally going to hustle him, Pop.”

  Grandpop Billy laughed and then muttered into his steaming coffee, “I swear, that boy is just like me.”

  At lane 48, Miles pulled his nearly new Blue Thunder Storm Crux ball from his bowling bag and thought about kissing it for luck but simply hoisted it onto the ball return. He didn’t need luck. Miles had skill. The kind of skill that came from having practiced nearly every day since you were three and a half and you rolled your bowling ball down a purple plastic dinosaur-shaped ramp onto a lane flanked by bumpers.

  Randall picked out a black, twelve-pound house ball and hurried to lane 48 to put on his bowling shoes, after carefully placing his new sneakers on a nearby chair.

  “You got five bucks to bet on this one?” Miles asked.

  “I’ve got ten.” Randall tipped his chin up. “Sold an expensive pair of kicks to some dude in North Dakota yesterday. Cha-ching!”

  “Awesome.” Miles figured Randall spent most of the money he made selling sneakers online buying nice clothes and new sneakers for himself, but Miles managed to win some of that cha-ching on the lanes.

  Both boys put their ten-dollar bills on th
e table.

  When Miles tugged on the thick laces of his bowling shoes, he felt an unusual tingle radiate up his legs and through his body, like something magical was about to happen. “You’re not ready for me today, Randall.” Miles wiggled his toes inside his lucky bowling shoes. The shoes felt…perfect.

  Randall walked toward the foul line, pulled his right arm back and swung the ball forward, ending with his signature single hop. When all ten pins fell, Randall leapt. “Told you! I’m gonna whomp your butt today, Spagoski! Boo-yah!”

  Miles bowled a strike, too, but was quieter about it.

  Randall, on his next turn, downed only three pins, then five, to lose the spare. Randall’s following turn netted him seven pins and then only one more—another botched spare. “You guys need to oil these lanes better, or something.”

  Miles ignored Randall’s remark and followed his first strike with two more.

  “A turkey for a turkey!” Randall shouted.

  Miles didn’t respond to the insult because he knew Randall was trying to distract him from his strike streak. He decided to flip the distraction strategy back on his friend. When it was Randall’s turn to bowl, Miles asked, “Did you hear about the guy who died from getting hit in his junk?”

  Randall looked over his shoulder at Miles. “Is that a joke?”