LUCKY SOCKS

Sarah MacLeod passed by her son’s bedroom and had to blink her eyes at the smell wafting underneath the closed door. She tried not to pester him, but this was getting worse and worse.

Despite her instincts to flee, she knocked on the door.

“Liam?” She spoke loudly, to be heard above the pounding music also coming through his door.

The music dimmed. “What, Mom?”

“Can I come in?”

There was a long pause. Sarah could hear scuffling sounds inside, and then a heavy gasp. At last, the door opened a crack, and she could see Liam’s head poking at her through the door. He had terrible acne, but he wouldn’t put anything on it or let her get him a medication.

“It’s zits,” was all he would say. “You want me to take antibiotics when it’s just zits? What happens when the plague strikes and all the antibiotics are useless? You think I’ll care about whether I have zits then?”

Liam was a very morally conscious fifteen year-old, and she didn’t exactly want to damage that. A part of her was proud that she had a son who cared about more than himself.

But the other part of her wished that he looked a little better when he dressed for church. Didn’t he care at all about girls at school, for example? She was sure they cared about how his face looked, even if he didn’t.

“What have you got in there making that terrible stink?” she asked him, hand on the door, but not pushing it, not just yet.

“Nothing,” said Liam.

“Please. That doesn’t work on me, Liam. It never has, even when you were two and shat yourself.”

“Mom!” he said, his eyes going wide.

Why was it that he hated to be reminded that he had once been a baby? She thought he had been cute, but he had insisted two years ago that she take down all his baby pictures, and only have one of his most recent ones up. She didn’t know if it was the thought of her and Colin making love, and the result of it, that bothered him. Or if it was something else entirely.

She did not understand fifteen year-old boys, that was for certain. All illusions to the contrary had been discarded one by one in the last two years.

“Do you have a still in there?” Sarah asked. The smell was more rancid than fermented, but if Liam had the recipe wrong, it might go bad like this. “Or are you making meth?”

“Mom!” said Liam again. As if that answered anything.

“Well, what is it?”

“Nothing,” said Liam.

By his actual speech, you might think him mentally handicapped. Did he know more than ten words?

Sarah pushed the door hard, with a quick thrust.

Liam stumbled backwards, a surprised look on his face. “How did you?”

Sarah made a brief motion with her arms, up and down. “Weights,” she said. “Three times a week at the gym. I’m stronger than I look.” And it didn’t hurt that he had not been expecting her. That part was courtesy of her self-defense class, but she didn’t mention that to Liam. She should have some secrets, at her age.

He, on the other hand, was still a minor.

The carpet on his floor was relatively uncluttered. Clean would be too good a word for it, however. She could see a smear of peanut butter on it, and splatters of red—probably punch, but who knew? He picked at his acne far too often.

She leaned over his bed. “Liam, it is not called cleaning your room to shove everything under your bed.”

“Mom, it’s my room.”

Ah, he speaks. All one syllable words, but still, there is a mind behind this disaster.

“Bring it out, Liam. There’s something in there that stinks. I want it out of the house,” said Sarah.

Liam reluctantly got down on his knees and pulled out everything from under his bed.

Sarah found some disgusting items, including a bowl of cheerios in milk from the day previously, but the milk had not gone bad yet, and when she sniffed it, it was only a little sweet. She poked through the random broken toys, guns and a couple of action figures, which she knew that Liam would claim not to play with anymore. There were several pairs of pants. A T-shirt he had worn all last week. Why it was not in the wash, she did not know.

She moved the T-shirt closer to her nose.

It stank.

She held it out with one finger, closer to Liam.

He shrugged.

Apparently, he had lost all sensory input from his nose. It was just overloaded.

“Throw this away,” she said to Liam. “Take it directly to the garbage can in the garage. No, I take that back. Take it to the street. Then take the garbage can out of the garage and put it on the street. Then put the shirt in the garbage can.” They would have to live with that until tomorrow, when the truck came.

“Mom!”

Back to that again. Sigh.

She opened the window.

Liam’s arms showed goose bumps, but he didn’t shiver. That would be admitting that the cold bothered him, and he couldn’t do that while a woman was around, of course. Even if that woman was his mother.

“Put on a sweater or a hoodie or something,” she suggested.

Sarah went out of the room hopefully. It still stank, but the air would circulate and in a few hours, it would be bearable.

Only it wasn’t.

By dinner time, she had gone past the room several more times, and the smell wasn’t better. It wasn’t noticeably worse, but clearly, the T-shirt had not been the only source of the problem.

She should have been more rigorous. Under the bed was not the only place to shove things. Liam undoubtedly had lots of hiding places.

She pounded on the door again, just before dinner was ready. “Liam, come eat,” she said.

He opened the door, a critical mistake.

But how could he resist the lure of food?

She pushed the door open, throwing Liam back, and began searching through his room methodically. She went through his drawers, top to bottom. There were some pants that couldn’t possibly have fit him for at least a year, but he kept them here, anyway, torn knees and all. The laundry basket was—ironically—empty.

His shoes were bad, but not bad enough. She wasn’t going to be fooled by a false positive a second time.

She looked in his desk. Around his computer.

She found a package of M & M’s that had turned green. Not smelly, but she offered them to Liam. “Dinner?” she asked.

Horrified, she watched as he shrugged, looked into the bag, and popped one into his mouth.

She snatched the bag back and put it in her pocket. There was disgusting, and then there was worse than disgusting.

She looked last under his blankets.

“Mom!” Liam groaned. “That’s my bed! Don’t I get some privacy in here? I am fifteen, you know, not five.”

Right, as if that meant he should get more privacy, instead of less.

She prepared herself for the worst. Playboys. Videos. Toys.

But what she found was a pair of socks. One pair.

Without doubt the source of the stench in the room. It was enough stench for fifteen rooms.

She wept as she held them out as far as she could.

“What are these?” she asked.

“Please, Mom,” said Liam, his face white. “Please, don’t take them.”

“What, they’re you’re lucky socks or something?” Sarah could see nothing in them that was special. They were plain white gym socks with a blue stripe on the side. They were inside out, and crusted with sweat and dirt, and obviously had been worn far past their prime.

“They’re not ‘lucky’ socks, Mom. They’re everything.”

“I think you’re exaggerating a little there, Liam,” said Sarah. “But if you really feel attached to these socks, I’ll find you another pair just like them. A clean, unworn pair. You can even keep them in your bed.” Sarah stood up, holding the socks.

Liam grabbed for them.

She let him.

He held one side of the socks. She held the other. “You’re going to pull them apart if you do that. And then what good will your lucky socks be?” she asked.

That stopped him. He didn’t let go of the socks, but stared at her.

“Mom, I can’t get another pair of socks. I need those,” he said. His voice was throaty, desperate.

Sarah didn’t think she had had this much of Liam’s attention since she had brought him his lunch in sixth grade, dressed in her gym clothes, still hot and sweaty.

“Fine. I’ll wash them,” said Mom. “I don’t know how much of them will survive the wash. But just promise me you won’t wear them anymore. They’re disgraceful.”

“You can’t wash them,” said Liam. He started pulling on the socks again, as if he had decided that tearing them apart was better than getting them washed.

“Why not?” Sarah asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.” If she could get Liam to admit that he was being irrational about it, she could find him a therapist that he could talk to about this strange obsession he had with socks.

Liam had for some reason attached all importance to a pair of socks. It only showed her how little she had understood of his life before. She should have looked at it more carefully, asked him more questions about his social life. He almost never spent a day with friends. And even then, did she know for sure he was with friends and not at the library? He could be faking a social life, just to make her think things were fine.

His grades were good. They’d actually gone up the last few months. It should have made her suspicious. What fifteen year-old boy starts getting better grades suddenly, without any added inducement, like a car, from the parents? And he talked about a girl he liked, who hung out with him. Maybe she was just imaginary.

“They’re magic socks,” said Liam at last.

“Magic socks,” echoed Sarah. This was very serious.

“I have to wear them every day or else the magic doesn’t work,” he went on.

“And what is this magic? The power of the Pied Piper, to bring rats to you or something?”

“I wish on them,” said Liam. “One wish a day. And I always get what I want.”

Sarah gaped at him.

“I know,” he said in a small voice. “It sounds stupid.”

“And when exactly did you start believing this?”

“It was one of the seniors, at the fraternity rush. He told me about the magic in his socks. He told me how I could get it, too.”

Sarah remembered the fraternity rush, but she hadn’t thought much of it. She’d been surprised, actually, that there had been so little hazing. And grateful. She knew that Colin would not have been on her side if she thought it had gone too far. He thought boys needed to be pushed. He had been, by his father, among others.

“It never occurred to you that he was lying to you?” asked Sarah. “That it was part of some big fake-out, that he and the others are all laughing at you behind your back?”

“It occurred to me,” said Liam. “But then I didn’t have time to put on a new pair of socks. It was four or five weeks ago. I didn’t hear my alarm and I tumbled out of bed, still dressed. I didn’t have time for a shower or anything, just rushed out the door and jumped on the bus.”

“You didn’t take a shower?” Sarah’s face wrinkled.

“Anyway, I was on the bus and I wished that I’d get an A on the geometry test that day. I’d been studying all night for it, but I still wasn’t sure I really understood anything.”

“Well, you must have,” said Sarah. Liam had been pulling straight A’s in math ever since—about five weeks ago. Before that, it had been C’s, if that. But it was surely just a coincidence.

“That’s what I thought, too. I didn’t wear the socks the next day. But just in case, I didn’t put them in the laundry, either. And I couldn’t understand anything in geometry. Even my own answers on the test. That’s when I started to believe.”

“Maybe you were just tired,” said Sarah.

Liam shrugged. “I wore them the next day and wished I could get Laela to look my way. The next thing I knew, she had her arm around mine and was walking down to my locker with me. Breathing in my ear. And she wouldn’t even look at me before.”

Sarah was losing steam on her arguments. She didn’t want to suggest that Laela might be in on the joke. She didn’t want to crush Liam. Just get him to see the truth.

“And then I started having to do less homework. I had more friends. Every time I wore the socks, something good happened to me. Sometimes I didn’t have to wish it out loud. If I just thought about it, it happened. And it was more than once a day, too.”

“You’re afraid of not having the socks, aren’t you?” Sarah said.

“I’m afraid of my life being ruined,” said Liam.

“But if it’s just from wearing your socks over and over again, you could start all over with a new pair.” I can’t believe I just said that, thought Sarah.

“And lose everything stored in there? Everything those socks have given me?” His lips formed the word “Laela,” but he didn’t say it out loud.

“Liam, there’s no such thing as magic. And if there were, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be in socks.” She tried to yank them back, but this time, she was the one who let go first. And the strange thing was, she wasn’t noticing the smell of socks so much this time.

“Why not? Why should there be magic in things like rings or wishing wells or stars? They have nothing to do with us. I’m in the smell in my socks. In the DNA. Maybe that’s where the magic comes from.”

Sarah shook her head. This was what tax payers paid for science education?

“Mom, listen to me,” Liam went on. “Hundreds of years ago, people believed in magic. They don’t anymore.”

“Because they’re smarter now,” said Sarah.

“Maybe,” said Liam. “But maybe it’s because they don’t let anything of themselves build up. They vacuum everything up in their homes. They dust. They throw fingernails away. They brush out their hair. They put on clean socks and wash everything. The magic—it’s all gone.”

“You’re suggesting that I believe magic is gone because hygiene is in?” Sarah said.

“Yes,” said Liam. “We’re all about being clean.”

“Hello, disease,” said Sarah. “Microscopes. Parasites. Viruses. Bacteria. Louis Pasteur.”

“I know, Mom. But what if we’re trading magic for health? Think of all the things we’re missing.”

Sarah backed away, her hands up.

Liam held the socks to his chest. There were tears in his eyes, though whether that was from the smell or from some brain disease that was causing him to think this way, she did not know.

“Look, you can talk to your father about this tonight, when he gets home.” She had done all she could. It was time for a man-to-man conversation. Maybe Colin could outstare him, or make him see the truth about this fraternity hoax.

“OK, yeah. I’ll talk to him,” said Liam.

Sarah went out of the room and closed the door firmly. She spent the day shopping for fans and air fresheners, which would probably do nothing. Then that evening, she sent Colin into speak with Liam.

“Any luck?” she asked, when Colin came out, with a smile on his face.

“He’s going to think about what I said,” said Colin.

Sarah was encouraged, but still started looking on-line for a therapist. She wondered what she should say was the problem. Delusions? Social issues? Self-esteem?

It was cold that night, and she wore her socks to bed.

In the morning, she woke up and noticed that Colin had done the same. And they had both overslept their alarm.

“I’ve got to get to work,” said Colin. He threw on his suit, and one of his older ties. He shoved shoes on his feet, already covered with socks.

He looked down at himself, and then at her. “I’ll change them tonight,” he said ruefully. “I swear.”

Sarah watched him from their bedroom window and he pulled out of the driveway.

He called her later to say that he’d gotten that raise he’d been angling for all week, and they were going out to dinner to celebrate.

“Make sure to tell Liam to dress up,” he said. “I don’t want to pay for a fifty dollar meal if he’s still in jeans and a T-shirt.” He said nothing about Liam’s socks, however.

Sarah looked down at her own feet. She was still wearing her socks from before.

And she had been hoping for a phone call from a new client.

When the phone rang a few minutes later, she was not terribly surprised to discover that she had landed the job.

She wiggled her toes inside her socks.

Well, it wouldn’t hurt to keep them on for a little while longer.