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

little paper cones, different flavors, and that whole time, not kick each other.
    After a while, we couldn’t help it, in order to bear it, we started cracking jokes till finally I was laughing so hard at something Tuck said, I accidentally dropped some shaved ice on my bare feet, which felt very good. So, I threw some ice on Tuck’s feet and we stood there with our hot feet all cooled off, looking out at the other kids skating, something we could not do. He looked at me and said, “Ponder? You’re not a bad snow cone maker.”
    “Neither are you,” I said, and smiled.
    “Maybe we could ask Nelle if we could borrow this machine and set it up and travel all over the state of Louisiana with it.”
    I laughed. “You are crazy!”
    He looked at me and winked. “Yeah, I know.”
    After that, I did not want to kick him in the leg anymore.
     
    Wouldn’t you just know that it was Sukey who came up with the idea of playing Spin the Bottle?
    Me, Tuck, and Renée were at Sukey’s house, and then Eddie joined us. If you could have seen the look on Eddie’s face, you would of just gotten sick. All he cares about is being a boyfriend. What is the big idea?
    So we all sat down in the garage and Sukey got an empty Coke bottle. She was just about to do the first spin when I remembered that Renée had never played Spin the Bottle before. I hadn’t either, but I heard about it from my brothers.
    “Wait a minute, Sukey,” I said. “Let’s explain to Renée how you play.”
    And everybody started to kind of laugh.
    “C’mon, y’all,” I said. “Not everybody has played every game in the universe. So, here’s how it goes. You take an empty Coke bottle, okay? You put it down on a flat surface, like here on the garage floor, and you twirl it with your hands—right there in the middle of the bottle. And you just spin it around. Now, the person who spins it has to go and kiss the person who the bottle lands on. And it’s just up to Fate, as to where the bottle will land. So, no faking it. Some people have been known to fake it, so the bottle will land on a certain person.”
    “Right,” said Sukey.
    Renée said, “Thank you, Calla. I appreciate you for telling me the rules.”
    “It wasn’t just for you, Renée. I wanted to sort of, well, clean up the rules for all of us.”
    Everybody started to laugh. I told them, “Oh, hush up, y’all!”
    Renée sometimes doesn’t hear if people are laughing at her, or else she doesn’t care, which is the same thing.
    Tuck spun the bottle next and it pointed right at me! Oh, God! I got up and started to walk right off.
    “Calla!” Sukey grabbed me by the shorts and pulled me down. “If the Coke bottle points at you, you don’t walk off, you stay and get kissed. People don’t just walk away. That’s the rule, and you can’t break it.”
    “Oh, I’m going to get you one of these days, Sukey!”
    “Just try!” she said.
    So I sat back down, and Tuck was just standing there. “Now I’ve sat down,” I said. “Do I have to stand up again to get this stupid thing over with?”
    Then Tuck knelt down and looked at me, and I could tell he was thinking the same thing I was. Cooties , that’s what he was thinking, cooties . But he gave me a kiss, then he jerked back, and I jerked back too. I was dying to tell him, “Get out of here! Don’t you ever try that again.”
    But I got a sense, for that second, that maybe he liked it. And maybe I wanted him to.
     
    The next day after school, Sukey taught me how to kiss—really kiss, and not jerk back like I did with Tuck.
    “You have to practice kissing,” she told me. “When you start kissing, you don’t want to be a dumbo.”
    So we went to Sukey’s house because her mama was at work. Her mama had to go to work. She’d get all dressed up every day, and always wore her hair, which was black like Sukey’s, teased up into a beehive. I couldn’t believe that could be good for her hair, so I asked M’Dear about it.
    “Well,