The Heat of the Summer Sun

Same Walk, Different Shoes

“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a community writing project thatBen Wakemanorganized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.

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I sat back against the wall, the surface cooling against my heated skin even through my shirt. I blinked a few times, trying to regain some energy, trying not to want to fall asleep.

Not that anyone could fall asleep in here. Although we were sitting on top of a huge pile of twin mattresses, Alice and I were far too hot and sweaty to drift off. Even if we weren’t, the smell of ammonia burning in our nostrils would have done the job of keeping us awake.

“This job freaking sucks,” Alice muttered.

I was too tired to do anything but grunt in agreement.

I wiped the back of my arm across my forehead, smoothing out the soaking wet spots on my hairline with my fingertips. I ran an experimental hand back over the rest of my hair and found it exactly how I expected: frizzing up from the humidity. An extremely attractive look, no doubt.

“If they at least had air conditioning,” Alice complained, a half-sentence cut short out of necessity. Even she didn’t have the strength to finish the full thought.

“No one’s here in the summer to use it,” I pointed out. The dormitories were empty. That was why this was the best time of year to strip and rewax the floors.

“Apart from us,” Alice groaned.

Feet in the hallway outside made us both sit up, and when our boss appeared in the frame of the doorway, we jerked to attention – as if we could somehow hide the fact that we had been taking a break.

“Woods,” he said, looking right at me, and I felt my heart skip a beat. Was I fired? Was he about to yell at me for lazing around, not realizing I was taking my break?

“We were just –” I started, but he cut me off anyway.

“There’s a message for you in the admissions office.”

“Oh,” I said.

And he disappeared before I could ask him what it was about.

“We’ve got ten minutes left,” Alice said.

“Yeah,” I nodded, sitting forwards and gathering my courage for a second before I pushed myself down off the pile and set my feet on the floor. “I’d better go now.”

Even so, ten minutes wasn’t very long to get all the way across the other side of campus.

“Good luck!” Alice’s voice echoed off the walls behind me.

I stepped out into an oppressive wall of heat. The sun baked down on me like it wanted me cooked for dinner, and I was close enough to done already. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. Maybe people in other places used that phrase to mean blissful peace, but here? Here it just meant yet another day without the prospect of life-giving rain. Without even the chance of a little dampening of the sun’s heat, a cloud sliding over it for half a minute to let us breathe.

I half-ran, half-walked the whole way, going as fast as my feet would take me. As fast as my lungs could suck in burning, unsatisfactory breaths. I barely saw a single building on the route; I was too busy asking a hundred questions in my head.

What was this message about?

Had something bad happened back home and this was the only way they could get in touch with me?

Was my Mom alright?

Had she gotten hurt and no one had my number, and our neighbors just knew enough to tell the ambulance staff to call the college campus and ask for me?

Were they going to tell me I owed even more money? That they had made a miscalculation sometime in the past and now I had even more to pay?

Were they about to tell me that I couldn’t come back to classes when they started in the fall because I behind on payments for my tuition?

Would they really stop me from coming to class?

How the hell could I get more money or do any more work than I already was, with this and the three other jobs I had taken on for the summer?

I couldn’t ask my Mom for more than she was already giving me. She was doing enough as it was, making her own life miserable just to make sure I could get by.

Unless, of course, she was sick and that was why they were calling.

Around and around it went until, panting for breath and sweating more than ever, I landed up against the counter in admissions and breathlessly reported my name.

“Woods…” the woman behind the counter repeated, scanning her list of messages and files. “Oh! Yes.” She beamed at me.

“What is it?” I asked. I had a strange, tight feeling in my chest. Like this was the moment before something devastatingly terrible or incredibly amazing would happen. I was teetering on the edge, not sure which way I would fall. Why was she looking at me like that?

“We just wanted to let you know that your tuition has been fully paid off.”

I stared at her for a long moment. The words didn’t move through to my brain. A trickle of sweat ran past my ear. Maybe I had heard her wrong.

“I’m sorry?”

“The remaining balance on your tuition has been paid,” she said. She checked down at her list again. “All two thousand dollars of it.”

“P…” I shook my head, unable to even formulate the word ‘paid’. “What? How?”

“It looks like you had a gift donation,” she said, her smile spreading wider. I understood that part now, at least. She was congratulating me.

A gift donation?

But who would be likely to have paid my tuition for me?

Not my Mom, who was barely scraping by. Not the father I hadn’t had since I was a baby. My friends mostly had their tuition paid off fully by their own parents, but it wasn’t like any of them were rolling in it. Not enough to just give me two thousand dollars as a gift.

“Who?” I asked, at last. I felt like my brain was short-circuiting. None of this made sense.

“It’s an anonymous donation,” she chirped. “They didn’t wish to be named. They just want you to know them as ‘a friend’.”

I took a breath. An anonymous gift of the kind of money I had been struggling to raise quarter by quarter. The kind of money that would stop me from going even further under with my student loans, which by now were already so massive I wasn’t sure what I was ever going to do about them.

How was any of this supposed to make any sense?

I blinked at her, took one more breath, and shook my head. “Okay,” I said. “I think we need to start again. Who is this message for?”

“For you, Ms. Woods,” she said, giving me a light smile. I could see she was finding it kind of amusing that I couldn’t compute any of this. “I already checked your identity before you got here – we have you registered as working on the campus today. That’s why I was able to send your supervisor over instead of trying to get you on the phone.”

“But,” I said. I stopped and started again twice. “But you must have it wrong. Maybe the gift went to the wrong person.”

It can’t be for me. No one would ever do something like this for me. It’s me against the world.

No one cares this much about me.

“It’s for you,” the woman said, her smile widening and going softer. “It’s really for you. The tuition is paid off.”

Somehow, it was this repetition that really sealed it for me.

“My tuition is paid off,” I repeated, and for the first time, I believed it.

“Yes,” she nodded, her smile opening to a grin. “I just thought you’d like to know.”

“Okay,” I said, starting to stumble backwards towards the exit. “Thank you.”

And I burst out into the outside world, stepping under a blue sky, closing the doors behind me.

I looked up into that blue. A single white cloud lazily traversed the space above me, too small to do anything meaningful.

I breathed deep.

Someone cared about me.

Someone out there was a friend. Enough of a friend to do something this huge for me and not even want any thanks for it.

I took five steps and my legs were shaking so much that I had to hold on to the corner of the building, a joyful laugh bursting out of my lips without any warning. I felt dizzy. Like I had been struggling to breathe under the weight of something sitting on my chest for so long that now it was gone, I was breathing too fast, getting drunk on oxygen.

I looked around in all directions, a smile beaming its way onto my face, unable to stop it. There was no one around. If I had expected my mysterious benefactor to be waiting around a corner with a surprise banner, I was wrong. There was no one here.

I laughed again, putting my hands on my knees, leaning forward, taking breath after breath of fresh, clean air.

A thought struck me as I straightened.

Things weren’t always going to be this way.

This daily struggle was now alleviated, and one day I wouldn’t struggle so hard at all. One day I would be soaring, riding currents of air like the birds wheeling happily above me. One day I would have the kind of money in my pocket that could make a difference to someone else’s life.

I made a vow to myself then and there that I would.

Because if I could turn someone else’s legs into jelly, make them laugh and grin without any control, lift a weight off their chest and allow them to breathe…

If I could do this for someone else, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.

I laughed one more time and headed back towards Alice and the waiting dorms, my feet strangely light, like I was walking on the surface of a different planet. I’d rewax all the dorms with a smile. The heat wasn’t going to get me down – not today.

Today, I knew I had someone who cared.

Today, I had a friend.

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No progress report this week - I wanted this post to stand on its own. I also wrote a second entry for SWDS based on a different prompt - you can find the other one here.

If you want to check out the rest of my short stories, you can do so here (there is considerably more heat in my average post, so be warned).

If you’re reading this post from the SWDS challenge and you’ve never heard of me before: Crowhill Cove is a spicy, angsty gay romance writing experiment aiming to answer the question of whether a relatively unknown author can run a Substack alongside book launches and build up enough of a following to make the amount of work required worthwhile. Subscribe if you want to follow my progress, including in-depth analysis and sharing of everything I’m doing to try to make it happen, from marketing efforts to the actual writing of the books. You can even vote on what I’ll write about next. And it’s all free!