A lust for shoes.

There is something incredibly disheartening about always having to run through the grass in socks. Never in shoes. Sure it's okay for the first sixteen years, but when you have friends who laugh and giggle, bounding up and down with their petite figure in such finely tailored accessories such as flip-flops, and a dad who can fully pay the electric bill every month, you get a little tired of only wearing socks.1

There's a funny story that I like to tell myself about my name, whenever I'm in an angsty kind of mood. My name's Ellie, Ellie Wellington. Now, with a last name worn by an abundant number of medieval European lords, I was destined to have every single substitute teacher calling out the roll, turn to me, and with an expression of innocent misunderstanding ask, "Ellie Wellington, Oh there you are. Ellie, short for Eleanor?"
All my life it has been my humiliation, my displeasure to answer back, "No, sir/ma'am, just Ellie."
My mother knew refinement. My father doesn't. My mother died somewhere in the midst of new born screams, leaving my father to assign me a name, a name that would follow me around for the rest of my life. 2

Ellie is the girl who runs through the grass every spring in socks. Eleanor is the girl who runs through the grass in designer, platform boots. The boots that my father had to sell on Ebay after he lost his third job.3

My socks are white, always white. When I was a child I used to want green socks, and in the most ironic way this wish was granted. White becomes grass stained rather easily.4

I'm the girl who wears the same jacket everyday. In spring and fall its the brown one from Old Navy, the one that at the beginning of seventh grade every girl had, and the one at the beginning of tenth grade that no girl wanted. In the winter, I wore the Kentucky hoodie, the one that's big on me because my dad won it, along with the tickets to the game as a raffle prize at work. That was a week before he lost his fourth job, and had to resort to the fast food industry and the half finished degree that he received after high-school--My father was never the intellectual.5

I'm the girl who has the brown eyes, and brown hair who rarely gets the jock. I'm the girl who scared my first and only boyfriend off, in the eighth grade, with my love craving thoughts. Men don't understand the concept of love. Just like my father doesn't understand the disappointment on my face after opening my Christmas presents, to find, jeans, sunglasses, a Frisbee, and billions of socks, but no shoes.6

It was the thanksgiving when I was five, that my father did something right. We had just lost our electricity, and were limited on what trimmings we could buy for our turkey leg. It was then that my father found the gift card to the local Steak House. We could both eat our 40 dollar fill. I was starved, and with huge eyes I sat across from my father, in that dark corner, watching as all the fancy shoes came and went. Our waitress had nice shoes, and when she brought me that steak I didn't know what to do. My eyes were, big, huge, and like the deprived animal that I was, I clawed into that steak. It tasted so good on my teeth. So good until I was full. Only a pathetic quarter way through of the steak I stopped, and leaning back against the cushioned end of the booth, I sat, content for the first time in my life. Completely unaware of the grandeur of the shoes that walked past me.7

Designer shoes were worn by the ladies from my father's work and late night adventures. As clothed in short black dresses, with tiny bits of breast exposed they dropped a rose into my father's grave. They ceremonially dabbed their eyes but never looked down at the casket that lay in the freshly dug soil.8

They were lucky, they got to leave while I had to stay. Tears of hate pouring down my cheeks, tears that my father's whore of a girlfriend, Mandy, counted as tears of grief, tears that made her tears of happiness, tears of triumph as she would be receiving my college money to spend as she would, on cheap beer, cheap tobacco, and more cheap men like my father.9

I had only cried like this before. Cried with such hate, and it was because of my father. After I had finished eating my steak, my father turned to me, and asked me what I was doing. I politely and innocently replied, "I'm full papa", only to get the response, "No you ain't Ellie, not for 40 dollars you ain't. Eat that steak."10

It was fun at first, eating after you were full. It was fun at first to run through spring grass in socks. But then I hurt. So I stopped only to receive the order, "Eat Ellie! You're wasting all of your daddy's hard work. Eat!" "No." I retorted back. "I don't wanna eat no more."11

I watched the girl with the barbie light up shoes pass by, how beautiful they were. I watched her, and the laughter from her parents seated at the table across from us in the sunlight, laughing as she stopped eating her steak, and with her nose up in the air pushed it away. 12

"EAT!"
"NO!"
"Ellie, if you don't eat I'll..."
Never get a Christmas present right, go through every job that half a Community College education is good for, deplete your inheritance on cheap women who walk away from my casket with other men, give your college fund to Mandy, and leave you alone. I'll leave you alone Ellie. 13

Forever in socks. Not designer shoes.14