My Red Shoes

Ranya Barayan
Memoir
Language Arts
December 16, 2008

It was a sunny day where I lived, no surprise there, it was always sunny. I was playing in our compound park with my sister, when boom, something hit my sister right in the head! I went to check on her. She was on the ground unconscious. I started to laugh at her! I know, I was mean. Right there and then something hit me in the eye. It swelled up and I couldn’t see. Unlike me, my sister got me an icepack and was really concerned.
I continued playing. I was not a cautious person. I would climb the highest of all poles and jump off of slides and always get hurt but never complain. When I was about to beat my record of jumping off of the highest pole in the park, something hit me in the head and knocked me off the bar I was on. When I got up, it was war!
I was not friends with any of the neighbors because for some reason they always picked on me. So there I stood alone with no one in my army but me. They had four boys with sling shots in their hands and five girls with water balloons, a total of nine. I was not scared of dying. I was afraid I would get my clothes dirty. But I had no time to think about that, rocks were flying at me. I dodged the rocks and balloons.
Then, and just then, my worst enemy of all stepped up. He was holding a big bag filled with something brown that smelled. The bag had a rip in it. It all happened so fast. A balloon in the stomach, a rock at the ankle, and a huge pile of that smelly gunk on my new shirt. That was it! I was mad! I ran home crying and tripped on my way and scraped my knees and broke my toe nails.
I went and changed and tried to calm down, then, I realized that I had left my favorite red slip on shoes at the park, so I went back to get them. I looked everywhere, but I couldn't find them. I went and rang all my neighbors' doorbells to see if they knew where they were. Two of the boys told me that they saw them in the gym, and they took me there and told me to look in the farthest corner. Next thing I knew, I was locked in the room.
I pounded hard on the door, but no one heard. I gave up and sat in a corner, scraped, bruised, and bare foot, crying. My sister found me about five minutes later and rescued me. I went home feeling hopeless. My shoes carried my soul, and now that they were gone, so was my soul. I sat in a dark room under a table sobbing. My mother came in worried; she was looking for me everywhere.
I told her the whole story and she decided to go over to the neighbors' mothers and talk with them. They forced their children apologize. They apologized and despised me even more than before. I began to cry again not because they hated me, I was used to that; it was because I still didn’t get my red shoes back. So one of the girls walked up to me and opened the nap sack that she carried around and took out my shoes. I was really angry with them but also happy that I had my shoes back.