During exam week, as semester one wound down and semester two loomed on the horizon, I bought myself some new shoes. Fluevogs were on sale and I decided to splurge, telling myself that the black and white pair were practically every day shoes. Mostly, I just thought they were awesome.

Days later, I wore the shoes for the first day of second semester. Right away, before period one even started, one of my new grade 9 students told me that she loved my shoes. Over the course of the morning, students and teachers complimented my shoes. I don’t think of myself as wildly fashionable, so I quite enjoyed the attention.

After the lunch bell rang, I spent a few quiet minutes in the classroom, straightening the desks and generally tidying. I know that each new semester brings both excitement and nerves, and I suspected I might have a few drop-ins. Sure enough, one of my regulars showed up to run down his classes so far.

I can’t get over how much I enjoy this young man. We spent two years in a row in English class together, and there were times when I wasn’t sure we were both going to make it. Somehow, by the time the second class had ended, we’d muddled through some actual reading and several pieces of writing that involved more than a few hastily scribbled sentences. We had even discovered that he is secretly an incredible teacher – and got him a peer tutoring placement in some ESL classes. Now, in grade 11, he is thriving (still challenging – but thriving).

He knows that I keep a blog – “are you famous yet, Miss?” – and thinks it’s ridiculous that I read so much – “do you even sleep?” He tells me he’s a “baller” and once spent a significant amount of class time explaining why Kobe is better than Michael Jordan. And yes, I tricked him into writing an opinion essay on this. He also likes to mock my “secret crush” on Jason Reynolds. I regularly book talk Long Way Down, the Ghost trilogy and Miles Morales. All the kids know I love his writing, but when I showed a video of Reynolds talking about how he didn’t read much in high school, this student was shocked. Reynolds is a Black man with impressive dreadlocks; I am a middle-aged white teacher with what this student called “the same haircut as all the other teachers” (ouch. And for the record, he is wrong.)

He took my crush pretty seriously. For weeks he came back to it. “But you’re married,” he said. “Does your husband know?” Yes, yes he does. “But for real, if he asked you out, would you go out with him?” I suggested that it was unlikely that I would ever meet Reynolds, much less have dinner with him. “But what if you did?” this student worried. I said that I would go on an author date with him, an English teacher date – we would talk about writing and books. “That would be the most boring date ever,” he said and though I insisted that this would, in fact, be interesting for me, he was unconvinced.

But on this day we were talking about his new classes, not about books or writing. Then, after a minute of boasting that he was going to change a class because it was “way too much work” (“It’s day one,” I said, “you have no idea if it’s too much work.”), he suddenly stopped and said, “Miss, those are some fancy shoes.”

I was startled, then started to thank him, but he interrupted me. “Miss, if Jason Reynolds saw you in those shoes, he would definitely ask you on a date.” He paused. “Yeah, those are your Jason Reynolds date shoes, for sure.”

Though I expect that I will never, in fact, wear these shoes on a date with one of my favourite authors, I’m pretty sure I will call them “Jason Reynolds date shoes” for as long as I wear them. I mean, they are pretty cute.