“Yeah,” I said. “Like white sports shoes.”
I looked at the shoes in my half of the closet.
“I can wear these I suppose.” I fished out my usual shoes – a pair of battered old red Converse and put them beside the skirt in my half of the closet.
The next morning, when I got home from helping Dad at the track, Nonna Loretta was waiting for me. She’d made me lunch and there was a box beside it on the kitchen table.
“What’s in the box?” I asked.
“Take a look,” she said.
They were white tennis shoes.
“I got them in a sports store on special,” Nonna told me. “That’s what they wear at school, yes?”
“They’re not the same,” I said. “These are tennis shoes.”
Nonna didn’t see the difference. “Try them on.”
They fitted me.
“There! They look very nice,” Nonna said.
On Monday I wore my new outfit to school. The skirt was a bit big so I put a belt on it. The shoes were so white they positively glared in the sunlight. I had English first period. I made sure I was early and got my usual seat at the front, but on the way out of class Jake caught up with me.
“Hey, Lola. Cool shoes.”
I felt sick. He was being totally sarcastic.
How could I have been so dumb? The shoes were totally wrong! I wished I could have just taken them off and walked around in bare feet, but that wasn’t allowed at school.
At lunchtime, I decided the best thing to do was go to the library so that no one would see my dumb white shoes. I was on my way across the playground when Jake spotted me. He was with Ty and Tori and Jessa. They began to walk towards me. There should have been a teacher on duty, but I couldn’t see one.
“Hey, Campione!” Jake cocked his head so that his hair flopped to one side then he pushed it back coolly with his right hand. It was his trademark gesture, like he thought he was in a boy band. He was so vain about that hair; you could tell he spent hours on it each morning before school. It was shaved short up the back and the fringe was long so that it grazed perfectly against his tanned cheekbones.
“Where’d you get your shoes?”
I kept my eyes down. I tried to keep walking past him, but he stepped in front of me and blocked my way.
I stepped to the left and Jake did too. Then to the right, and he matched me, like we were dancing. I could feel my face burning with embarrassment.
Jake stepped in real close to me and then he gave an exaggerated sniff, wrinkling up his nose.
“You might want to change those shoes again, Campione.” He grinned. “Because you still stink of horse poo!”
I heard the laughter buzzing in my ears and saw the smug look on Jake’s face. And that was when I threw the punch that broke his stupid nose.
Dad broke eleven bones in his racing career. You could see how his collarbone stuck out funny from the time when a horse went up on its hind legs in the starting gate and crushed him against the barrier. Another time he spent a week in intensive care after a three-year-old he was breezing spooked at a car horn. Dad fell and another horse running behind him struck him with a hoof on the head, shattering his helmet into pieces and knocking him out cold.
He fit right in with the other jockeys in the bodega, sitting around shirtless, comparing battle scars as they drank endless cups of black coffee. Most of them were on crazy diets to keep thin enough to make racing weight. Dad liked to “mess with their heads” by sitting right beside them at the communal dining table and ordering a big breakfast from Sherry who ran the kitchen – sausages, beans, eggs and fried bread. You should have seen the half-starved look on the jockeys’ faces as Dad sat there and ate his way through it all, groaning with pleasure and savouring every bite. He thought it was hilarious.
“I punished my body harder than any of them back in the day,” Dad would say. “Taking saunas for hours before a race to sweat out the water weight and drinking those disgusting diet shakes.” He would shake his head in disbelief. “Sometimes when I sat on a horse I was so weak from hunger I couldn’t even hold him back. No wonder I fell so many times.”
When I was little, instead of bedtime stories, I would get Dad to recount the tales behind all of his broken bones. He made a real drama out of it, acting out the whole race for me. He could recall every name of every single horse and its jockey, all the details of how he rode the race and where he was in the field at the moment he fell.
The best story by far was the one about the missing fourth finger on his left hand.
“The horse was called Forget-me-not,” Dad would begin. “And when I got given the ride on him, Lola, I was punching the air with the thrill of it! He was this big, black stallion, pure muscle and power, and he was the flat-out favourite in the Belmont Stakes. My cut of the purse would come to enough money to buy my own stables.”
He would be telling me this as he sat on the side of my bed and I would be propped up on my pillows beside him in my pyjamas, wide-eyed, waiting for the rest of it as if I had never heard it before, even though I’d been told the story a thousand times.
“Anyway,” Dad would continue, “the week before the race I’m breezing Forget-me-not, working him alongside a couple of other horses to get his blood up, when he gets crowded on the rail and panics, and I don’t know what gets into his head, but all of a sudden he tries to jump the barrier! He breaks the whole railing and I must have been knocked out cold, because the next thing I know they’re wheeling me into the hospital and I can feel this real sharp pain in my left hand. So they take me straight up to x-ray and the doctors take a look and it turns out my finger is broken in three places. Must have hit the rail as I went down.”
I look at the missing place where Dad’s finger used to be.
“So they cut it off?”
Dad shakes his head. “Not straight away. They tried strapping it up with tape, and said it just needed time to heal. But I had the Belmont the next week and that tape was no good. Even with a glove over the top I couldn’t close the finger and grip the reins without screaming in pain. So I went back, told the doctors I needed painkillers, but the drugs they gave me, all they did was make me woozy. So I went back to them again, and do you know what I said?”
I did know, because I had heard this story before. And not just from Dad. I’d heard it from the other jockeys in the bodega. In the version my dad told me, he walked into hospital and insisted they remove his finger so he could ride.
But the way the other jockeys told it was even more gruesome. They said the surgeons refused to amputate and so my dad went back to the stables and got a wood block and a splitter axe and cut the finger off himself. Then, with his hand wrapped in a gamgee horse bandage, he caught a cab back to Jamaica Hills, showed the doctors the bloodied stump and told them to go ahead and stitch it up.
Dad rode in the Belmont Stakes that weekend minus his finger. Forget-me-not came in dead last.
I’m telling you this because you need to know the sort of man my dad is. So now you’ll understand why I couldn’t bring myself to go home and admit to him I’d been suspended from school.
Fernando was sweeping out the aisle between the loose boxes when I reached the stables.
“Lola!” he gave me a friendly wave. “You lookin’ for Ray? He’s long gone.”
Dad finished working the last of the horses by midday. He’d have been up since four a.m. and he’d be home having his afternoon nap by now, just like I’d told Mr Azzaretti.
“I came to see the horses,” I said.
Fernando looked at his watch. “No