Read That Summer for Free Online Page B

choosy. I got my job at Little Feet when I turned fifteen back in November, and since then I’ve been promoted to assistant salesperson, which is just a fancy title they give you so you feel like you’re moving up even when you aren’t. The first week I worked there I had to pass a series of lessons on selling children’s shoes. They sat me in the back by the bathroom with a boxful of audiotapes and a workbook with all the answers already scribbled in by someone else until I worked my way through the whole series: “What’s in a Size?,” “The Little Feet Method,” “Lacing and Soles,” “Hello, Baby Shoes!,” and finally “Socks and Accessories—A Little Something Extra.” My manager was a man named Burt Isker who was older than my grandfather and wore old moldy suits and kept a calendar of Bible quotes next to the time clock. He was rickety and had bad breath and all the children were afraid of him, but he was nice enough to me. He spent most of the time rearranging everyone else’s hours so he never had to work and talking about his grandchildren. I felt sorry for him: he’d worked for the Little Feet chain his entire life and he’d ended up at the Lakeview Mall shuffling saddle shoes around and getting kicked in the crotch by squirmy kids.
    The mall was only a few blocks from my house, so I took my time walking, eating my Pop-Tart as I went. When I got to the main entrance I stopped to put on my name tag and tuck my shirt in before going inside. I worked Sundays with Marlene, a short, chubby girl who was in community college and hated Burt Isker for no particular reason other than he was old and cranky sometimes and always nagged her for not selling enough socks. They kept track of these things, and every once in a while on a Saturday a Little Feet manager came down from the home office in Pennsylvania and set a quota for each of us on shoes, socks, and accessories. It’s hard to push socks on someone who doesn’t want them, and Marlene was always getting reprimanded for not being aggressive enough about it. They wanted you to hound the customer, and on big sale days Burt would stand behind me as I came out of the stockroom with my shoes and hiss, “Socks! Push those socks!” I would try but the customers would always say no because our socks were so expensive and they didn’t come in for socks anyway, just shoes. No matter what those higher-ups at Little Feet thought, socks just weren’t an impulse item.
    Marlene was already there when I walked in, sitting behind the counter with a donut in her hand. The store was empty like it always was on Sunday, the mall deserted except for some senior citizens from the nearby retirement home doing their laps, from Belk’s to Dillard’s and back, with a pulse-check break at the Yogurt Paradise. The Muzak was playing and Marlene was reading the Enquirer and grumbling about Burt Isker when our first customers appeared. Because of her seniority it was always my turn when it was slow, so I got up and went over to see what they needed.
    “Hi, what can I help you folks with today?” I said in my cheerful-salesperson voice. The mother looked up at me with a blank expression on her face; the father was over by the sneakers, flipping them over one at a time to check the prices. The little boy they’d dragged in with them was sitting next to his mother and gnawing on his thumb.
    “We’re looking for some new sneakers.” The father walked over to me, holding a popular style called Benja min in his hand. All the Little Feet shoes had children’s names; it was part of the gimmick. The Little Feet chain was full of gimmicks. “But thirty-five dollars seems kind of steep. Got anything cheaper?”
    “Just this one,” I said, holding up a model called Russell, which was cheap because it was an ugly bright yellow-and-pink-striped style from last year that never sold well. “It’s on sale for nineteen ninety-nine.”
    He took the shoe from me and looked at it. It