PLEASE don’t step on my flipflops (not that you have. You haven’t, and even if you did on accident, that’s totally fine; you’re awesome). I’m just saying this, because I’m currently hooking on my toes, the third pair I’ve worn this year. The other two have had their straps mercilessly ripped from their rubber soles by repeated flipflop assailants. I must sound ridiculously obnoxious at the moment, but it’s startling when someone plants their foot on the back of your shoes and sends you lurching, in a spontaneously articulated swan-dive towards a faceplant in the pavement in front of you.

It started with Layla, my elementary school “friend.” When she chose to coalesce with the popular girls as a third grader, they decided to play a game to see how many times they could step on my flipflops to get me irked. I didn’t really retaliate. As a world-class loner with an imaginary dragon friend named ‘Draggy’- I know, creative, right?- I almost looked up to them (both literally and metaphorically), so I let them make a fool out of me and ended up with a lot of nasty gashes on my goot, the veins crimson and accentuated where the straps had bitten into my flesh like a clay-cutter. I was a pretty timid kid who wanted to solve my own problems, so I never told my mom. She thought I had navigational issues with flipflops and made me switch to wearing regular sneakers instead.

Everything was fine and dandy after that, until I was aimlessly wandering the streets of Wuhan a few years ago and stumbled upon one of my old buddies, Sky, from China. Her teacher was talking to her mom about how she’d forgotten to turn in her homework that day. I saw her mom nodd apologetically to the teacher, then patted her daughter on the shoulder, reminding her to bring the assignments tomorrow. I continued with my seemingly random walk, making a mental note to myself to swing by Sky’s house once she finished her work. That’s when a figure darted down the center of the road, to the right of the sidewalk I’d been dawdling on. It was Sky. She ran by me, her face streaked with tears, her mom trailing behind her, spitting a string of insults about being lazy at her daughter after glancing around her shoulder to make sure the teacher was nowhere within eavesdropping distance. My friend kept running. Her mom kept chasing. Sky was wearing a pair of faded yellow flipflops, the hue strikingly prominent as opposed to her pale gray dress. I have to say, I gave her credit for her astonishingly speedy escape from her mom, who seemed to have gone near-psychotic over a missing homework assignment. But it wasn’t fast enough. I guess her mom decided that Sky wasn’t within arm’s reach, but who said arms were the only useful tools in a hustled pursuit, right? Sky’s mom thrust out a foot and trapped the back of Sky’s flipflop under it, sending Sky tumbling face first into the gravel. Then I witnessed something I’d say was unfathomable, coming out of a parent. Sky’s mom kept walking with the flipflops in hand, until she reached the side of the road where her bike was chained. Sky was still sitting, her dress a sodden heap in the middle of the empty street. The mom tied her daughter’s shoes onto the back of her bike, where Sky would have normally sat, then pedaled away. Sky was crying, tears eroding the dust that had gathered on her dress from the fall. This wasn’t how I imagined I’d have greeted her that July, but I walked over to Sky and- yes, this happened- handed her my tennis shoes. The thing about streets in rural Wuhan is that they’re awfully grainy, concocted with bits of broken glass that originated from broken beer bottles of drunkards trying to re-enact their own version of Kristallnacht. Sky wasn’t going to make it home without some sort of assistance, so I told her she could borrow my shoes and get them back to me when I stopped at her house the next day. She must have said thank you, I guess, but the words were slurred and suffocated between sobs.

I crossed the street in my socks, then bought a pair of flipflops from the nearest store. I’ve been wearing flipflops in the summer ever since.