Sneakers on Blacktop started out as a dare. My friends know that I have stories for almost every occasion and topic. I was telling a story to friends and one of them asked if I could write a story about anything. With a little too much confidence I declared yes. He gave me “oblivion” as inspiration.
I started out with a young female character who is trying to put her childhood and past as far back as she can get it, hopefully to “oblivion.” In the course of writing it, I realized Oblivion wasn’t going to be a usable title. I had already written “Bathtubs in a Field” and “Swings in a Tree” and I decided to try to stick with that kind of title. Because my main character in this book does a lot of running for exercise I decided to tentatively call it Sneakers on Blacktop.
Sneak Peek:
As she ran she marveled at the fall colors, the crisp bite in the air, the cushion and crunch of the leaves under her shoes. As she ran she also ran through math equations in her head. That was what had drawn her to math all those years ago. The rules didn’t change based on where you were or who you were with. Every classroom agreed that two plus two was four and four times four was sixteen. As she moved up through the grades and into high school she leaned heavily into the math and science fields. She despised the required classes in psychology and English. Even history had essay questions on most exams. There was so much subjectivity in those fields she never felt comfortable in what she thought she knew. She could study for hours every night and never walk into a class feeling confident she could ace the exam.
Especially in English. The teachers always wanted you to find symbolism and themes and whatnot. Lydia knew she had never been good at that to begin with. But the themes always felt like they hit closer to home for her than they did for everyone else. She had to fight and rewrite her papers over and over again to make sure she kept her home life fully and completely out of what she was turning into the teacher. Her parents and family had warned her for as long as she could remember to keep their home life to themselves. That it was nobody’s business but their own.
Until she was nearly done with high school she had never questioned that presumption. Until her Psychology class was assigned a “Family of Origin” project. She completed it as best she could and made certain not to hand it in or present in class until she knew what other students were sharing. They worked in small groups and she focused on her own siblings and her parents and their grandparents, but nothing beyond those few branches. She could still remember the feeling of fear she had if anyone noticed how much detail she was going into about her parents and grandparents so she could avoid delving too deep too fast. She was sort of friends with a couple of girls in class and she asked if she could look at their projects to see how they were phrasing things. But then none of them had a family as messed up as hers.
