Don’t you just hate when you do something with good intentions and the results come back to hurt you? Well that happened to me last week.

Mr. Jordan, the George Ranch band director, had feverently reminded us band kids of a few housekeeping rules; one specifically being, the band hall is not your house. He pointed out the clothes in the corner, water jugs that get left behind each night, and food wrappers being discarded in the no-food-eating room.  Me being easily manipulated, began to feel guilty. I usually keep my tennis shoes in the room so as not to lug them in my already shoulder-breaking bag. So before leaving class that day, I decided to be good and put my shoes in my bag despite the consequence of my aching shoulder. Well I got a consequence; it just turned out to be a bit different then what I was expecting.

I wasn’t half way out of the auditorium when my left shoe fell out from my bag. Me, being oblivious, didn’t even know I was one shoe down til lunch. Panicking and swearing that I had just had it, I asked a friend if she, as a joke had taken it. Instead she recalled seeing a lone shoe next to the auditorium doors. It had looked familiar to her, but unsure of herself, she left it there. Reassured it was still there, I continued with my day. But by the end of school, I was ready to repossess my shoe. I went to the spot that had been described to me, but when I arrived, there was no shoe. Don’t panic, maybe a friend had taken it inside for you. I went inside. There was no shoe. Now you can panic.

If you saw a girl running around the school hysterically in only one shoe, that was me. I asked everyone, band members, band directors, random people in the hallways if they saw my abandoned shoe (as I pointed to my right foot). Each person I asked would have this moment of realization and would exclaim, “That was there the whole day!” or “That was your shoe?” Apparently my shoe was left neglected in the hall and seen by everyone except for me. When I had come to reclaim it, it disappeared. I quickly ran to the student service window to check the lost and found, but there was no shoe. My last hope had flown out the window. I was down a shoe, and I couldn’t borrow someone’s spare because of my ridiculously small feet of borderline size five. So I marched at band practice that day on the pavement in my socks, the shoe I did have was useless by itself, it gave me an unbalanced footing. Needless to say my feet were sensitive the next day. That’s what I get for trying to do a good deed, in my attempt to keep the bad hall a bit cleaner, I got sore feet, and a dent in my wallet for a new pair of tennis shoes.

But what happened to my left shoe? Well some say that it had taken a swim in the water fountain, others say it laid in the hallway corner. The next day I retraced my path; I went to the student service window, the Auditorium, and still no shoe. It was at the end of the day when a friend showed me what had become of it. Stripped from the laces it lay naked in the band hall. The laces were on the other side of the room, tied in an untieable knot. Another friend kindly performed the surgery of putting it back together. To do so he had to make several cuts on the laces, for the aglets were gone and made it difficult to string through the holes.  In the end I had my old pair of shoes, one slightly damp and with laces detectably shorter than the other, but surprisingly worked better than its former state. I guess my good deed got punished, but when all is said and done, I got rewarded as well. So good deeds do get good ends, it’s just takes a while to find them.