Saving the Moon

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  I felt so good I tried to do a leap. When I was up in the air, I was terrified of what would happen when I landed, but in the end, it felt better than any running shoe I’d ever tried on. Not that Mom could afford the really expensive ones.

  I took off the shoes and looked at them again. No cushioning, no padding. There was nothing inside the sole, between the glass and my foot. And when I felt the glass with my hand, it felt like glass. Hard, immobile. It was only when I put it back on my foot that I felt the soft, pliable material again that the glass seemed to become.

  I was so caught up in trying out the glass slippers that I didn’t think about time passing or my younger siblings getting home from elementary school until the door opened and they walked in, all four of them at once.

  Tara, Ellie, and Mark.

  “Hand-me-downs,” said Tara.

  “What’s for me?” asked Ellie.

  Mark was not as interested, at first.

  But Tara found a Sunday dress in peach organza with a tulle overskirt.

  Ellie found the leotard and tutu.

  And I realized that there was magic in that black plastic hand-me-down bag that I had carelessly ripped open and intended to throw away.

  When Ellie put on the leotard and tutu, she could actually do ballet. She knew all the positions. She could plie, jete, pirouette.

  The shoes that she had on seemed to turn into ballet shoes, even though they were snow boots. I don’t know how it worked. If I stared at the boots for a long time, I could eventually see that they were really snow boots and not ballet slippers. But me seeing the bootness of the boots did not change the fact that when Ellie had the leotard and tutu on, they acted like ballet shoes.

  She could stand on the tips of her toes and turn and she had amazing grace. Her arms seemed to get longer when she held them out, and she had a sense of rhythm that we’d laughed about before, because she said she wanted to be a dancer when she grew up, but she sang a half measure behind everyone else.

  For Tara, the Sunday dress made her look older, nearly my age. She walked with poise and dignity, despite the fact that she was barefoot.

  Mark came in and watched us for a few minutes before he realized what was going on. Then he rummaged through the rest of the stuff, looking for just the right thing. Mark found a pair of gloves.

  “What do they do?” I asked him.

  He flexed his hands. “I don’t know. They feel good,” he said.

  “Maybe you can hit a baseball better with them,” I suggested.

  He shrugged. “Don’t like baseball,” he said.

  “Well, they have to be magical, don’t they? Everything else is.”

  “I want to go play a video game,” he said.

  We didn’t have any new ones, but someone had given us an old video game player and Mark played the ones we had.

  I went and watched him. He was faster at his games. And that was what mattered to him.

  I took the glass slippers into Mom’s room, where there was a full-length mirror. I put them on while I was standing in front of it. I’m not sure I can explain what happened. It wasn’t like all my pimples went away or like I had a different haircut. My clothes didn’t change labels. But they looked different on me.

  I thought about the Cinderella fairy tale, about her glass slippers and how she went to the ball with them on, and everyone thought she was the most beautiful girl there. But then she ran away from the prince and lost one of her slippers and she turned back into the cinder girl, the servant. No one recognized her from the ball, not even her own stepmother and stepsisters.

  I lifted one foot out of its slipper and looked at myself in the mirror again.

  It hurt my head, like one of those fun house mirrors that distorts you. Only this time I was seeing myself the way I always looked. The drab hair, the shirt that made my middle look bigger, the pants that showed my ankles and made me look like a scarecrow. Both slippers had to be one to make it work. One of the rules of magic. There are always rules, I thought.

  The Cinderella fairy tale talked about a fairy godmother who used a magic wand to make Cinderella look beautiful. But what if she hadn’t needed a magic wand? What if all she needed was the glass slippers left on her doorstep in a magic hand-me-down bag that her stepsisters took pleasure in passing along to her because they thought it would humiliate her to have to wear someone else’s clothes?

  Or maybe the hand-me-down bag was all that was left of fairy godmothers these days.

  Mom came home and saw the mess in the living room of all the things in the hand-me-down bag. I hurried in with the other kids and we cleaned it up and put everything back in the bag.

  Mom got a little more sleep that night than usual, because she didn’t have to spend so much time on homework, or on keeping the other kids happy.

  The next day, I went to school with the glass slippers on.

  I hadn’t changed anything else.

  But it was like Cinderella in the ballroom. Everyone wanted to be by me. They whispered to me when I passed by.

  “Do you think Cherry would let me watch her do her hair? I want to learn her tricks.”

  “Did you see how that shirt makes her look? She could be a model.”

  “I wish I had her figure.”

  “She should go into fashion design.”

  I got home and saw the hand-me-down bag was still there. The tear I had made in it with my hands to get at the things inside was healed, like the bag was a living creature, not just a thing.

  “Good bag,” I said, patting it.

  I felt a little guilty keeping all the other things in it. I didn’t know what they were meant for. They hadn’t done anything for any of us.

  And then I knew what to do.

  The hand-me-down bag was meant to be passed along.

  I cinched it up around the top and walked outside. I roamed the streets, trying to think where I should take it. I was selfish enough to think—not that house. Not those girls. Not after the way they treated me.

  But after about an hour of this, I realized that I didn’t need to decide anything at all. The bag would decide for me. All I had to do was walk with it and let it guide me. I had the glass slippers on, and maybe that helped or maybe they just made the walking seem less painful.

  The house I left it at was on the other side of town. I thought it would be a poor house, one like ours where you could see the need from the outside. But it wasn’t. It was one of those mansions that I had to look away from when we drove past because it made me feel a pit of envy in my stomach. I didn’t feel that anymore.

  I just thought about the Cinderella who was waiting inside, not expecting a hand-me-down bag to have anything she wanted in it. But she would be surprised, like I was, at the magic. I didn’t know what she needed, but the bag would have it.

  LUCKY SOCKS

  Sarah MacLeod passed by her son’s bedroom and had to blink her eyes at the smell wafting underneath the closed door. She tried not to pester him, but this was getting worse and worse.

  Despite her instincts to flee, she knocked on the door.

  “Liam?” She spoke loudly, to be heard above the pounding music also coming through his door.

  The music dimmed. “What, Mom?”

  “Can I come in?”

  There was a long pause. Sarah could hear scuffling sounds inside, and then a heavy gasp. At last, the door opened a crack, and she could see Liam’s head poking at her through the door. He had terrible acne, but he wouldn’t put anything on it or let her get him a prescription for medication.

  “It’s zits,” was all he would say. “You want me to take antibiotics when it’s just zits? What happens when the plague strikes and all the antibiotics are useless? You think I’ll care about whether I have zits then?”

  Liam was a very morally conscious fifteen year-old, and she didn’t really want to change that. A part of her was proud that she had a son who cared about more than himself.

  But the other part of her wished tha
t he looked a little better when he dressed. Didn’t he care at all about girls at school, for example? She was sure they cared about how his face looked, even if he didn’t.

  “What have you got in there making that terrible stink?” she asked him, hand on the door, but not pushing it, not just yet.

  “Nothing,” said Liam.

  “Please. That doesn’t work on me, Liam. It never has, even when you were two and shat yourself.”

  “Mom!” he said, his eyes going wide.

  Why was it that he hated to be reminded that he had once been a baby? She thought he had been cute, but he had insisted two years ago that she take down all his baby pictures, and only have one of his most recent ones up. She didn’t know if it was the thought of her and Colin making love, and the result of it, that bothered him. Or if it was something else entirely.

  She did not understand fifteen year-old boys, that was for certain. All illusions to the contrary had been discarded one by one in the last two years.

  “Do you have a still in there?” Sarah asked. The smell was more rancid than fermented, but if Liam had the recipe wrong, it might go bad like this. “Or are you making meth?”

  “Mom!” said Liam again. As if that answered anything.

  “Well, what is it?”

  “Nothing,” said Liam.

  Did he know more than ten words anymore? Had he done something to damage his own mind?

  Sarah pushed the door hard, with a quick thrust.

  Liam stumbled backwards, a surprised look on his face. “How did you?”

  Sarah made a brief motion with her arms, up and down. “Weights,” she said. “Three times a week at the gym. I’m stronger than I look.”

  The carpet on his floor was relatively uncluttered. Clean would be too good a word for it, however. She could see a smear of peanut butter on it, and splatters of red—probably punch, but who knew? He picked at his acne far too often.

  She leaned over his bed. “Liam, it is not called cleaning your room to shove everything under your bed.”

  “Mom, it’s my room.”

  Ah, he speaks. All one syllable words, but still, there is a mind behind this disaster.

  “Bring it out, Liam. There’s something in there that stinks. I want it out of the house,” said Sarah.

  Liam reluctantly got down on his knees and pulled out everything from under his bed.

  Sarah found some disgusting items, including a bowl of cheerios in milk from the day previously, but the milk had not gone bad yet, and when she sniffed it, it was only a little sweet. She poked through the random broken toys, guns and a couple of action figures, which she knew that Liam would claim not to play with anymore. There were several pairs of pants. A T-shirt he had worn all last week. Why it was not in the wash, she did not know.

  She moved the T-shirt closer to her nose.

  It stank.

  She held it out with one finger, closer to Liam.

  He shrugged.

  Apparently, he had lost all sensory input from his nose. It was just overloaded.

  “Throw this away,” she said to Liam. “Take it directly to the garbage can in the garage. No, I take that back. Take it to the street. Then take the garbage can out of the garage and put it on the street. Then put the shirt in the garbage can.” They would have to live with that until tom tomorrow, when the truck came.

  “Mom!”

  Back to that again. Sigh.

  She opened the window.

  Liam’s arms showed goose bumps, but he didn’t shiver. That would be admitting that the cold bothered him, and he couldn’t do that while a woman was around, of course. Even if that woman was his mother.

  “Put on a sweater or a hoodie or something,” she suggested.

  Sarah went out of the room hopefully. It still stank, but the air would circulate and in a few hours, it would be bearable.

  She watched Liam take the T-shirt outside, and smiled at him—which he refused to notice.

  But the smell didn’t change.

  By dinner time, she had gone past the room several more times, and the smell wasn’t noticeably worse, but clearly, the T-shirt had not been the only source of the problem.

  She should have been more rigorous. Under the bed was not the only place to shove things. Liam undoubtedly had lots of hiding places.

  She pounded on the door again, just before dinner was ready. “Liam, come eat,” she said.

  He opened the door, a critical mistake.

  But how could he resist the lure of food?

  She pushed the door open, throwing Liam back, and began searching through his room methodically. She went through his drawers, top to bottom. There were some pants that couldn’t possibly have fit him for at least a year, but he kept them here, anyway, torn knees and all. The laundry basket was—ironically—empty.

  His shoes were bad, but not bad enough. She wasn’t going to be fooled by a false positive a second time.

  She looked in his desk. Around his computer.

  She looked last under his blankets.

  “Mom!” Liam groaned. “That’s my bed! Don’t I get some privacy in here? I am fifteen, you know, not five.”

  Right, as if that meant he should get more privacy, instead of less.

  She prepared herself for the worst. Playboys. Videos. Toys.

  But what she found was a pair of socks. One pair.

  Without doubt the source of the stench in the room. It was enough stench for fifteen rooms.

  She wept as she held them out as far as she could.

  “What are these?” she asked.

  “Please, Mom,” said Liam, his face white. “Please, don’t take them.”

  “What, they’re your lucky socks or something?” Sarah could see nothing in them that was special. They were plain white gym socks with a blue stripe on the side. They were inside out, and crusted with sweat and dirt, and obviously had been worn far past their prime.

  “They’re not ‘lucky’ socks, Mom. They’re everything.”

  “I think you’re exaggerating a little there, Liam,” said Sarah. “But if you really feel attached to these socks, I’ll find you another pair just like them. A clean, unworn pair. You can even keep them in your bed.” Sarah stood up, holding the socks.

  Liam grabbed for them.

  She didn’t let go.

  He held one side of the socks. She held the other. “You’re going to pull them apart if you do that. And then what good will your lucky socks be?” she asked.

  That stopped him. He didn’t let go of the socks, but stared at her.

  “Mom, I can’t get another pair of socks. I need those,” he said. His voice was throaty, desperate.

  Sarah didn’t think she had had this much of Liam’s attention since she had brought him his lunch in sixth grade, dressed in her gym clothes, still hot and sweaty.

  “Fine. I’ll wash them,” said Mom. “I don’t know how much of them will survive the wash. But at least they won’t stink up your room like this anymore.”

  “You can’t wash them,” said Liam. He started pulling on the socks again, as if he had decided that tearing them apart was better than getting them washed.

  “Why not?” Sarah asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.” If she could get Liam to admit that he was being irrational about it, she could find him a therapist that he could talk to about his irrational attachment to a pair of lucky socks.

  It only showed her how little she had understood of his life before. She should have looked at it more carefully, asked him more questions about his social life. He almost never spent a day with friends. And even then, did she know for sure he was with friends and not at the library? He could be faking a social life, just to make her think things were fine.

  His grades were good. They’d actually gone up the last few months. It should have made her suspicious. What fifteen year-old boy starts getting better grades suddenly, without any added inducement, like a car, from the parents? And when he had a girlfriend, too?

  �
�They’re magic socks,” said Liam at last.

  “Magic socks,” echoed Sarah. This was very serious.

  “I have to wear them every day or else the magic doesn’t work,” he went on.

  “And what is this magic? The power of the Pied Piper, to bring rats to you or something?”

  “I wish on them,” said Liam. “One wish a day. And I always get what I want.”

  Sarah gaped at him.

  “I know,” he said in a small voice. “It sounds stupid.”

  “And when exactly did you start believing this?”

  “It was one of the seniors, at the fraternity rush. He told me about the magic in his socks. He told me how I could get it, too. But only if I never washed them. Ever.”

  Sarah remembered the fraternity rush, but she hadn’t thought much of it. She’d been surprised, actually, that there had been so little hazing. And grateful. She knew that Colin would not have been on her side if she thought it had gone too far. He thought boys needed to be pushed. He had been, by his father, among others.

  “It never occurred to you that he was lying to you?” asked Sarah. “That it was part of some big fake-out, that he and the others are all laughing at you behind your back?”

  “It occurred to me,” said Liam. “But then I didn’t have time to put on a new pair of socks. It was four or five weeks ago. I didn’t hear my alarm and I tumbled out of bed, still dressed. I didn’t have time for a shower or anything, just rushed out the door and jumped on the bus.”

  “You didn’t take a shower?” Sarah’s face wrinkled.

  “Anyway, I was on the bus and I wished that I’d get an A on the geometry test that day. I’d been studying all night for it, but I still wasn’t sure I really understood anything.”

  “Well, you must have,” said Sarah. Liam had been pulling straight A’s in math ever since—about five weeks ago. Before that, it had been C’s, if that. But it was surely just a coincidence.

  “That’s what I thought, too. I didn’t wear the socks the next day. But just in case, I didn’t put them in the laundry, either. And I couldn’t understand anything in geometry. Even my own answers on the test from the day before. That’s when I started to believe.”