Maya wiggled her toes in us, her watermelon sandals, flashing her pink glitter pedicure in the warm midsummer sun. Her light blonde hair had been separated into two braids that morning and coiled on top of her head like bear ears, but now it had fallen down while she played in the sprinkler and now was a wet mass of tangled waves. Her mother took her inside the house and used a rattail comb to separate it and braided her hair so tightly that her eyebrows were pulled into an expression of perpetual surprise.
"Mom, it's too tight!" she shrieked. Her mother removed the elastic bands and fixed Maya's hair again, this time a little looser, telling Maya not to touch her hair again. Maya found her favorite doll, Cinderella, and took her outside into the sprinkler to play. Cinderella's hair was as ratted and finespun as cotton candy; Maya's mother would just get her a new one for Christmas anyway. While Maya was telling Cinderella that she was a good girl with good friends, Shayla's mom drove up to their house in her green SUV and parked it nearly diagonally in the driveway, simply because Shayla's mom couldn't park. She took Shayla out of her pink toile car seat and brought Shayla around to the backyard where Jane was watching Maya.
"Hey Jane, how are y'all?" Shayla's mom Ashley asked as she chewed mint gum in her mouth and held the toddler on her skinny hipbone.
"Fine, and y'all?" Jane asked. Ashley put Shayla down on the ground, at which point Shayla ran to play with Maya in the sprinkler. The two women chatted until they heard Maya screaming.
"Those are my shoes, Shayla!" Maya yelled. Shayla said nothing because she couldn't talk very well. She was six months younger than Maya, and not nearly as vocal. While Shayla could say simple sentences explaining what she wanted, this statement bothered her as her brows furrowed in deep thought. Shayla gave up on finding the words, shook her head in confusion, and reached out and grabbed Maya by the ankles, pulling her down on the ground, screaming the words 'no' and 'mine' as tears ran down Maya's face.
"Baby Shayla doesn't want those! She doesn't want them," Maya said as Jane and Ashley came to separate them. Maya had forgotten about the black sparkle shoes as they were replaced in the summer by sandals with flowers on them as her favorite shoes, but like an old faithful friend, Maya had remembered them as soon as she saw them on Shayla. The shoes whispered quietly, trying to explain to Maya that they were too small for her now, but Maya couldn't hear them, and after that day, shoes lost their magical powers in her mind, and would never speak again. Instead she focused her vivid imagination on her cat, Dave.
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