- The rest of the night isn't super for Stanley: he takes a cold shower (and each boy is only allowed to use the water for four minutes anyway), and he eats a tasteless and unidentifiable dinner.
- One of the other campers asks Stanley what brought him to Camp Green Lake. He says he stole a pair of sneakers that belonged to Clyde Livingston. Yeah, right: nobody believes him.
- Later, as he lies on his cot in D Tent, Stanley thinks about his path to Camp Green Lake.
- It turns out Clyde "Sweet Feet" Livingston is a famous baseball player. Stanley even had a poster of Livingston hanging in his room at home, although the poster was taken by the police as evidence when Stanley was arrested.
- Clyde Livingston himself came to Stanley's trial, and Stanley was super excited that he was going to get to meet his hero. But… Livingston was not so excited to meet Stanley.
- The ball player testified that he had donated his sneakers to raise money for a homeless shelter, and "he couldn't imagine what kind of horrible person would steal from homeless children" (6.18).
- Still lying in his cot, Stanley also thinks about Derrick Dunne, a bully who used to pick on him in school. Derrick was much smaller than Stanley, so his teachers found it funny that a little kid could pick on a bigger kid, and no one did anything to help Stanley. Not cool.
- The day Stanley was arrested was actually a Derrick-filled day: the bully had taken Stanley's notebook and dropped it in a toilet, and Stanley had to fish it out. Gross. And what's worse, it made him miss the bus, which meant he had to walk home.
- While he was walking home, the sneakers fell from the sky (well, from a freeway overpass) and hit him on the head. Seriously.
- Stanley didn't know the shoes belonged to Clyde Livingston, but he could tell there was something special about them. It was as if they were a sign from God, and they would be the key to his father's recycling project. (They smelled pretty nasty, after all.)
- So Stanley was running home when a police car pulled up beside him. Turns out the shoes had been stolen from a homeless shelter nearby, where they were going to be auctioned off at an expensive charity dinner that night. Clyde Livingston – who had once lived at the shelter – was going to be at the dinner signing autographs, and his donated shoes were expected to raise a lot of money for the homeless.
- Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
- Stanley's parents couldn't afford a lawyer, but his mother told him to just tell the truth. So he did. But no one believed him.
- And so the judge gave Stanley the choice of going to jail or going to Camp Green Lake. And here we are.