Pepper's mother called her heels her battle boots.
She'd pick Pepper up at school, still in her pantsuit from work, out of style and not quite fitting her, and once in a while there'd be a carton of fast food fries in the cupholder between the seats.
The first thing Pepper would do at home is sit on the couch with her schoolbag, sorting it through it for her organizer and making neat, careful notes about time management, and she can hear her mother changing in the next room. Pepper listens: the hiss of the zip on her mother's pants, the sigh her mother makes when she shrugs out of her blouse, and finally two dull clumps, one and then another, her mother stripping out of her heels and dropping them in the corner of her tiny closet.
Pepper turns the television on, clicks through the channels until she finds the reruns of the soap her mother likes, and moves her papers to the table in their galley kitchen, wood worn ugly and kept even with ink-smudged phonebook pages ripped from payphone and folded tight under the table leg.
Later her mother turns off the television with a sigh and edges past Pepper into the kitchen, barefeet slapping on linoleum. She opens the freezer and groans, goes to the door to step into ratty sneakers and grab her purse.
"Takeout tonight," she says, digging in her bag for her car keys. "What do you want, Ginny?"
Pepper carefully finishes her math assignment. "Don't call me Ginny. Salad, no dressing."
Her mother rolls her eyes and shuts the door behind her with a snap. Pepper waits, straining to hear the thunk of the car door, the rumble of the engine turning over. She goes to the window to check to make sure the car has pulled out before going into her mother's bedroom.
The closet door creaks when she pulls it open, and she slips her mother's shoes on, sitting back against the bed and watching herself in the mirror. Her feet are still smaller than her mother's, even though she's just about as tall, and the strap doesn't have enough notches to tighten around her ankle. The shoes are cheap, worn shiny with age, and the stitching is crooked. She buckles them where her mother does, using the creased white lines folded into the leather as a guide, and uses the bed to pull her up.
She's tall with them on, properly tall, and she turns her legs this way, that way. She watches the play of the muscles in the backs of her calves. She likes the way they cut her legs, clean and sharp and long lean. She can feel her spine straightening out, her shoulders square. Her head lifts and she looks her reflection in the eye.
/
Pepper turns twenty two and secures an interview with Stark Industries. She wears her nicest pencil skirt and stops on the stairs outside the building, tightens the straps on black pumps, plain and inexpensive, the thread starting to fray.
My battle boots, she thinks, and walks into the building, utterly calm and extraordinarily confident.