Lizbeth's eyes shone with the intensity of the sun matted with creamy almond cheeks. During school years she considered her fiery eyes her greatest asset which enhanced her stature within Hana Jin Elementary. She carried around a moose skin purse her father had gifted to her after his trip out in the backcountry of Maine, which furthered her position as most popular.

However popular, Lizbeth never appreciated the toll coming with power. Most girls her grade wore what she wore, in her raggedy tattered hand-me-downs from Auntie Loretta. Coming from a family of seamstresses and tailors, her mother made it strict to never shop like the other children in elementary. Lizbeth never understood.

She was walking along the battered streets of Pallas Avenue when she saw a pair of Buckie Pawl boots in Wagga Wagga's shop window. It wasn't the first time she laid her eyes on them- she saw them in her mother's fashion magazines, who rated the Buckie Pawl boots the next big thing. When people asked Lizbeth about the first love of her life, she would say her Buckie Pawl boots. Nothing stopped her. Fifteen at the time, nothing but determination surrounded her. She shuffled back to the farmhouse, strode into the shed, and built a lemonade stand. The only paint she had was an old shade of royal white, tainted with swirling baby blue. She liked the odd color though, brushing it on. After squeezing ten of her mother's precious lemons, she took the concentrate to Pallas Avenue and started her Buckie Pawl fund.

At first nobody came, taking a greater liking towards the greek food across the road. A couple women who seemed to think Lizbeth was two years old bought a cup, and at the end of her first week she managed to make $7.50. Barely enough to buy a shell bracelet from Wagga Wagga. In the end of each day Lizbeth disintegrated her stand, brought it back home with quivering hands, tanned more than the last, and set the dismantled stand parts in an old ditch where Pa tried to grow grapes.

At the end of the week on that day, Lizbeth fulfilled her daily duties of cleaning the dishes, molding cornbread, practice threading, still thinking of her Buckie Pawl boots which waited behind oily glass. As she dragged a silver needle through the hem of her mother's red dinner dress, she knew what she needed to do.

That following morning before the rooster could crow Lizbeth ran back to the ditch, past her dismantled stand, and to the Davidson household. The house was the definition of tidiness: perfectly trimmed roof with active shingle cleaning, inch cut grass leaving behind not a single deviation, a cookie cut chimney decorated with a pink bow. Careful not to damage Mrs. Davidson's yellow tulips beside the west face, Lizbeth grabbed part of what used to be a nail for a picture frame and scaled up the wall. She didn't dare look down; the clinging was scary enough. There wasn't a single room for error, not here. She held onto Matthew's windowsill, hanging like an anvil on a vine. Not here, not here, she whispered to herself as she lightly swung in the wind. The sun was just peeking from the corn stalks, the rooster could crow any time now. She imagined how her pa would react once he saw her empty room. And he, a veteran of the Vietnam War, had a wide assortment of torture devices waiting. Lizbeth peeled her fingers off the wall and crept them across the windowsill. She swung her legs like a pendulum, all night oatmeal energy.