In this group of chapters, Esperanza — aided and abetted in some instances by her friends — gives way first of all to silliness. With other children, she stares at clouds and finds significant shapes in them. Later, with Nenny, Lucy, and Rachel, she again considers the clouds, an exercise that ends up in a silly session as the girls "play the dozens" on each other. Pals again later, they prance around in high heels — an escapade that Esperanza introduces with a silly once-upon-a-time story about little people with little feet. Then Esperanza makes such a foolish fuss — for days — about taking her lunch to school that her mother at last gives in. The silliness of "Chanclas" is almost anticlimactic, with Esperanza pouting in a folding chair while everyone else dances, because she has had to wear her school shoes to the party.
All of this silliness is part of early adolescence; no one can act — or feel — quite so childish as someone who is about to leave childhood. Here Esperanza almost revels in it, from her sly embedded rhyme about "Darius, who doesn't like school, who is sometimes stupid and mostly a fool" (33) to her story about the "little feet" to her list of reasons why she should be allowed to take her lunch to school. At other times, being silly involves feeling tremendously miserable about how silly one knows one is being, and then (if one is a girl and crying is allowed) bursting into tears about it, which is sort of the frosting on the cake of silliness. But the silliness of these chapters contains the seeds of other kinds of things: spirituality, imagination, humility, and above all self-realization — the beginnings of growth out of childhood.
