Free All This Heavenly Glory by Elizabeth Crane

when you go to your father’s,”
     making it almost remarkable that the teen/adult Charlotte Anne doesn’t have more issues with food than she does, and the truth
     is that she probably does gain weight on these trips given the extant Willy Wonka universe in Iowa, but another truth is that
     C.A. Byers is kind of wishing that her mom would just say, “I missed you.”

Perversion #2:
Declining the Ken

    A LTHOUGH FIFTH-GRADER Charlotte Anne Byers and her new best school friend (such distinctions being crucial in assuaging the anxieties of the best
     day-camp friend, best in-the-building friend, and all-around/real/true/first best friend), Rachel Richmond, still play with
     Barbies, their respective interests are turning toward other things. Rachel Richmond is trying to figure out how to keep her
     tube top up and wondering what it would be like to live in Hollywood. Charlotte Anne is thinking of a career change. After
     an impressive early career as an opera singer, she is beginning to have a stage fright that will ultimately spell the demise
     of her operatic career, and sometime during the rehearsals for P.S. 166’s fall production of
The Wizard of Oz,
in which she was to play the lead role of Dorothy, Charlotte Anne asked to trade roles with Rachel, who was playing the Cowardly
     Lion, to no one’s objections. (Charlotte Anne’s mother assured her daughter she respected her decision to decline the lead,
     although she did casually note in the same breath that Rachel sang out of tune, which in her household was a crime unequaled
     by any other atrocities.) Charlotte Anne has also recently won the school spelling bee and, as a fortuitous by-product of
     her having just seen
West Side Story
at the Regency, first prize in a competition to write a caption for a photo of two pigs kissing (“Maria! I just met a girl
     named Maria!”), for which she received a check in the sum of ten dollars. Her more recent profession as a child model and
     actress has been the most short-lived; in spite of her freckle-faced good looks, a local commercial in which she was supposed
     to slurp up a noodle out of a bowl of soup and say, “It’s slurpy delicious,” ended in a recast on the first day of shooting
     due to Charlotte Anne’s inability to smile on cue. Fifth-grader Charlotte Anne Byers is not the sort of actress inclined to
     think about motivation, but without some due cause simply cannot manage more than what comes across on film, apparently, as
     a knowing closed-mouth smile, which the director naturally felt might be a little disturbing to the population at large who
     might not want to buy noodle soup from a kid who looked like she maybe knew something about this product, or something about
     the advertising world, or something about anything a fifth-grader ought not to know something about, not to mention that she
     was neither a soup-slurper nor the kind of kid who’d use a made-up word unless she made it up herself. The end of her modeling
     career may be a marginal disappointment to her mother, who spent seventy-five bucks on professional photos, but not any kind
     of disappointment at all to Charlotte Anne, who, after the success of the pig caption, is more interested in a writing career.
    In addition to taking over the role of Dorothy, and of equal importance, Rachel Richmond knows about boys. Fifth-grader Charlotte
     Anne, who is not necessarily ready to become directly involved with boys, becomes aware that Rachel has some useful information
     that could help her in the future. (Also, Rachel Richmond’s very cool parents invited their daughter’s twelve best friends
     to see the original Broadway production of Hair for her tenth birthday [one or two, whose parents felt the material was unsuitable,
     declined], which cast album Charlotte Anne subsequently begged her mother to drop the four dollars and ninety-nine cents for,
     and played until it skipped, and which album’s score she would memorize in its