I saw the jeans hanging in the shop window on Main Street, and I knew I needed them. In fact, I’d never needed anything so badly. I stopped dead in my tracks on the sidewalk and stared in at them, and felt desire tickle the back of my throat like an impending sneeze. They were perfect.
I’d never felt this way before—not about a piece of clothing. Clothes had never meant anything to me. Back in Strathfield, the Australian suburb where we’d moved from a month earlier, I’d spent most of every day buttoned into my school uniform—the same white, round-collared short-sleeved shirt and navy-blue jumper that all my friends wore. On weekends and after school, I lived in my swimsuit and terrycloth pull-on shorts, or whatever woolies my mother insisted I bundle up in when the temperature plunged to 55 degrees. The only denim trousers I’d ever owned had an elastic waist.
I didn’t even know what brand the jeans in the window were. They weren’t identifiably nicer than any other pants, and I had no idea what made them better than the gray, pleated ones I’d worn on the first day of eighth grade at my new Connecticut school. But after Wendy Pierce and Laura Mickler had circled me in the schoolyard at lunch that day, jeering at my “loser” clothes, I had spent the next few days studying theirs very closely. The jeans in the shop window had the same narrow legs, the same tiny white label across the front zipper, as Wendy’s and Laura’s did. I knew that owning them, and striding through the school cafeteria in them where everyone could see, would lift me out of the outcast niche my schoolmates had already slipped me into. The jeans had the power to change everything.
Now I just had to convince my mother to buy them.
She was at the town library just around the corner from Main Street, taking forever to choose and check out books. (This, I learned much later, was how she coped with the strangeness of being in a new country: she curled up with novels and anthologies, and lost herself in the stories they told.) Once she emerged, I’d only have a few seconds—the time it would take to walk past the shop on the way to the parked car—to plead my case.
