“The one bit of color on the woman’s body was the bright yellow of the stilettos peeking out from her sensible trousers.Fuck me shoes. Damn. Any woman who wore those shoes had a streak of the unexpected. He wondered what her underwear looked like. Something delicate and lovely?”

“She had the underwear of a thirteen-year-old, as well, he thought. He glanced back at her. But the shoes of a courtesan.”

“A young man and woman walked past - a handsome young man and pretty young woman, the man in a seersucker suit and the woman in an old-fashioned summer dress - and they were walking a bit apart from one another with a space between them, and the man was looking straight ahead and the woman had her arms crossed against her chest, hugging herself, looking down at her feet, at her toes that peeked out the open fronts of her shoes, and they both had the same gleefully suppressed smile on their faces, and I knew that they were freshly in love, perhaps they had fallen in love having dinner in some restaurant with a garden or tables on the sidewalk, perhaps they had not even kissed yet, and they walked apart because they thought they had their whole lives to walk close together, touching, and wanted to anticipate the moment they touched for as long as possible, and they passed my without noticing me and Miro. Something about watching them made me sad. I think it was too lovely: the summer night, the open-toed shoes, their faces rapt with momentarily ramped-down joy. I felt I had witnessed their happiest moment, the pinnacle, and they were already walking away from it, but they did not know it.”

“Sunny laughed. "It's okay. You're right, Emma. My name is unusual, but I like to think of it as... special also."Special?Sam cocked his head as he studied Sunny. Almost all of her hair had escaped out of her ponytail now. She wore a baggy pink sweatshirt and had on the kind of drawstring plaid pants that would've set Bozo the Clown's heart pitter-pattering with envy. Her yellow tennis shoes were covered with dog hair.Yeah, special was one word for her.”

“Her golden hair moved like a hundred moths, all trying to saturate themselves in sunlight, while his hair was spiked like cleats, and he wore a shoe for a hat. He said it helped him to headstands while looking up her dress.”

“This woman talk like she from so deep in the country she got corn growing in her shoes.”