Crenshaw

21

If you ever have to live in your car, you are going to have some problems with feet. Especially if you’re stuck in there with your little sister and your mom and your dad and your puppy and your imaginary friend.

There are many kinds of feet problems.

Stinky dad feet.

The Magic Marker smell of nail polish on your mom’s toes because she says she still wants to look nice so please just deal with it.

Sister feet kicking you just as you’re falling asleep.

The scratchy surprise of dog feet trying to wake you up.

Imaginary friend feet tiptoeing on your head.

I thought hard about the feet problem. Finally I came up with a plan. What’s the worst that can happen, is how I figured it.

What I did is I took a cardboard TV box we found behind Wal-Mart. I smushed it flat. I drew on the outside of the box and the inside too. I only had three markers and one dried out when the cap fell under the backseat. So it was mostly just red dogs with blue eyes. And blue cats with red eyes.

I put stars on the inside. They seemed like a good thing to think about before you went to sleep.

I wrote kep out jacksons rum on the top. Mom said, too bad we had to leave our dictionary behind. Dad said, if only it really was rum.

Every night I opened up my box and slipped my sleeping bag inside it. When I crawled inside, I felt like a caterpillar in a cocoon. It was almost like my old room, where I could think without anyone bugging me.

When Robin kicked me in her sleep, she hit the box. Which was not exactly the same as kicking me.

Unfortunately, Aretha liked to sleep with me. So it could get a little dog-breath-y.

Also, the box didn’t help much with the stinky dad feet.

I knew we were lucky because we had our old Honda minivan, which had lots of room. I met a kid who lived for a whole year in one of those VW cars. It was red and round like a ladybug and just about as tiny. The poor kid had to sleep sitting up, squished between his two little sisters.

Another reason we were lucky was because my sleeping box was just decoration. Some people actually live in boxes on the street.

I wasn’t looking on the bright side. It’s better to have a big car than a little one when you are living in it. And it’s better to have a box in a car than a box on a street.

Those were just facts.

I wasn’t like my dad, who kept saying we weren’t homeless.

We were just car camping.