Free Flying Shoes by Lisa Howorth

joining. Eliza and Meggie, Other William’s sister, flung themselves into the car, backpacks and girl junk flapping and banging. They were always snappish and kinetic after school, like dogs left on leads too long. Lately, William and Eliza had ratcheted up their surliness; not just after school, but it had become standard, round-the-clock behavior. Even at their ages—Eliza was only a sixth grader—they both seemed to have tapped into teenage viciousness already. Eliza, finding Mary Byrd up late one night upchucking violently in the bathroom after a night of too many cigarettes and Beefeater martinis, olives taking the place of dinner, had regarded her mother coldly and in a manner curiously like Evagreen’s, saying “Oh. My. God. Is that vomit ?” As if Mary Byrd might have been on her knees in front of the toilet doing anything else. “Go back to bed,” she had told Eliza. “I’ve got a stomach virus.” The next day Mary Byrd had overheard Eliza telling a friend on the phone, “Mom blew chunks last night. So gross. She said she had a stomach virus.”
    In her own day children respected, or were afraid of, their parents. Why would they be afraid now, when they had learned from the Berenstain Bears that dads were bumbling fuckups, and from Roseanne that mothers were for fighting with. Charles, formal and aloof, might have commanded more respect had he been around more, but Eliza and William knew better than to mess with him much. She regretted that the Eddie Haskell model of teen rudeness that she and Nick had grown up with was gone—an art kids had developed of behaving offensively without seeming callous or mean, exactly. Just smarmy and punk, like Eddie.
    Mary Byrd turned the Explorer slowly up Jefferson, watching for stray kids that might, frantic to get away from school, run into the road.
    “Mom, Taylor got the Jansport backpack that I wanted to get, so now I can’t, and I know you won’t go to the Athlete’s Foot to let me pick out another one, and this one sucks ,” Eliza said. “Even Meggie has one.”
    “Meggie sucks,” said William.
    “Everyone named William sucks,” said Meggie.
    Looking into the rearview mirror, Mary Byrd could see her daughter’s lovely face, framed by stringy blonde hair and still padded lightly with fat that had not quite settled on her bone structure, pulled into a puffy pout accented by her new red-and-blue rebel braces. “ And mine still smells like deer pee.” Some boys who liked Eliza had put some crap—deer musk or some kind of hunting jizz—on her backpack, and despite a number of washings in everything from tomato juice to, yes, Dog Gone Pee Remover from Home Trends , the faintest whiff was still discernible. The children themselves smelled meaty and stale.
    “ My backpack sucks more , and if she gets a new one, I do, too! I’m tired of Ninja Turtles.” William, who preferred to be squeezed in back between the girls rather than in the front seat where he couldn’t annoy them effectively, sprawled out, deliberately putting a leg on Eliza’s side. “She always gets everything all the time.”
    “Always everything all the time!” Mary Byrd said. “How about, ‘Hi Mom.’ Or, ‘How was your day, Mom?’ And please don’t say sucks —I don’t know how many times I’ve asked you this—outside the privacy of our own house. Or how about the privacy of your own head ? Just think it, don’t say it. You know what that expression really means, right?”
    “Yes, Mom, we know it’s about wieners. Big deal,” said William, sighing with exaggerated boredom. Meggie giggled, and Eliza looked at them both with disgust.
    “And isn’t this the privacy of our own car ?” Eliza said, and then, with almost no sarcasm in her voice, added, “So, Mom, how was your day? I hope it didn’t absolutely blow .”
    Mary Byrd thought about reaching behind her over the seat and just smacking randomly at whatever she could hit, like her own mother used to do. Another