The Lovesick Skunk. Joe Hayes

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       Title Page

      

       Copyright Page

      When I was a kid, I would get stuck on some simple little thing I really loved and never want to get rid of it or trade it for anything else. It might be a hat that felt just right on my head. Or a tee-shirt I’d wear until it was falling apart. Or even a favorite pencil.

      Once I had a pencil with bright-colored stripes spiraling all around it—red, purple and green—with silver sparkles mixed in. The eraser was electric orange. I was the only kid in my class who had a pencil like that. I sharpened it until it got so tiny my teacher said I’d have to hold it with tweezers. “If you sharpen it any more,” she said, “it’s going to make invisible writing.”

      And once I had a pair of jeans I wore until they were so full of holes my friends called them my Swiss cheese pants. I didn’t throw them away until my mom showed me they were about to get a hole in a pretty embarrassing place.

      But I think the thing I loved the most was a pair of black and white sneakers. They were black high-top sneakers with a white stripe that kind of curved up from the toe to the top on each side. No one else had sneakers like mine.

      I wore those shoes to school every day and to play in after school. I wore them all day long on the weekends. I wore them to birthday parties and ball games. If my mom had let me, I would have worn them to bed. And the more I wore them, the better they felt on my feet.

      By the time summer came around, the laces had been broken and knotted at least twentyfive times. The sides were all tattered. One of them had a big hole in the bottom. But there was no way I would throw them away.