Free The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder by Rebecca Wells Page A

number! We all clapped and stomped. He was so shy afterward. It was two people inside of him. Now, Eddie tried to dance like James Brown, and he did give it his all. But his all wasn’t very much as far as I was concerned. But Renée clapped and said, “Oh! You’re just like James Brown—except you’re white!”
    Then Sukey said, “Renée! Gosh! That was a stupid thing to say.”
    Well, I guess Renée could be really kind of sissy and slightly dumb at times. That’s just Renée. My brothers and my friends can be goof-balls sometimes, but I still love them.
    Anyway, we all hung out together. Of course, we went to Nelle’s Shop ’N Skate.
    It was so much fun to skate there! I became a better and better skater all the time. In fact, I was so smooth that if they had a roller-skate Olympics down here, I would have been in it.
    Tuck turned out to be a pretty good skater. I mean, right off the bat—that shocked me. He put on a pair of skates, and he was around and around that rink before I knew it!
    “Hey, Tuck!” I said. “How’d you get so good?”
    “I don’t know. I guess it just comes natural to me.”
    Well, everything comes natural for you , I thought. “Well, goody-goody for you.”
    Then Nelle came and chimed in, “I don’t want to just see y’all drinking Coke without having a bite to eat.”
    So she went back to her kitchen and threw something together—some good fresh Holsum bread, mayonnaise, a little mustard, if you wanted it, and ham. Maybe some tomatoes if she had them. You’d cut that thing in half—mmmm! It was so good! “If you eat this with your Orange Crush,” Sonny Boy said to Renée, “it is a full meal.”
    Renée looked horrified. “Well, I don’t know. For me a full meal is supposed to be hot, like shrimp and rice with salad or something like that.”
    “Renée,” Eddie said, “that’s just what I like to eat!”
    Brother. Those two lovebirds should just go out of my ear’s reach for a while.
    “I think that just Cokes are full meals,” Sukey said. “They’re filled with everything. Mama doesn’t care if I have a Coke for breakfast. In fact, whenever I wake up and it’s hot outside, I drink a Coke. My mother’s got the whole refrigerator just filled with Cokes.”
    I started drinking Cokes, just a little. M’Dear allowed us to have one Coke a day. But Cokes for breakfast?
    But we were allowed to have belly-wash, which is what we called the drink you make out of these big bottles. You’d pour the liquid inside into water, and it made it all orange, which was called “orange belly-wash.” Or you could get it in different flavors like raspberry, depending on what Nelle ordered.
    Grape was my favorite. The grape drink in the purple bottles it came in—I loved to see it! It was like grape bubblegum, it was so dark. And then once Nelle mixed it with water and poured it over ice, it was perfect! She used it straight for her snow cones.
    Sonny Boy and Will and Tuck would skate with their arms touching each other at the waist. They just skated all the way around the rink as a trio, and none of them fell. Then they spun away from each other and started skating alone, practicing skating backwards.
    They were taking over the whole rink. I hated it. So I got in there and said, “I’m skating too.”
    “No,” Sonny Boy said, and Tuck backed him up. “Come on, Calla. This is for boys.”
    “What do you mean, it’s for boys?”
    Tuck piped up, “We mean it’s for boys , not for girls.”
    And then I couldn’t help it. I kicked him in the leg. He grabbed on to the rail, or he would have fallen.
    And the next day was when Nelle made Tuck and me start selling snow cones together. We had to stand together at the end of the rink where the snow cone machine was and pour different flavors over the shaved ice. For hours and hours at a time Tuck and me had to stand there and take kids’ and big teenagers’ money, make change, go back and forth between the shaved ice, the