Free All This Heavenly Glory by Elizabeth Crane Page A

entirety [which racy-lyric-singing-along-to
     is curiously never questioned at Charlotte Anne’s house]). Rachel Richmond has a boyfriend. Ricky Hernandez, who played the
     Scarecrow, has been going out with Rachel since the beginning of the year, except for the week when she “quit” him after he
     came to school with a hickey he’d gotten from Yolanda Jones (Wicked Witch of the West, or “Wicked Witch of the West Side,”
     Rachel called her). Charlotte Anne has no interest in ever being the recipient of a mouth-shaped bruise on her neck and is
     sure that if any such thing somehow occurred without her consent, she wouldn’t go around showing it to everyone like the boys
     always did. Nevertheless, in the event of a possible hickey, fifth-grader Charlotte Anne Byers wants to be prepared.
    One day after school, Rachel Richmond organizes a game of Spin-the-Bottle in the playground, participants being mostly
Wizard of Oz
cast members, including herself, Ricky Hernandez, Charlotte Anne, Sue Ellen Smiley (Glinda), Paul Schwartz (the Wizard),
     and three boys from the fourth grade who played monkeys. Rachel gets the group to form a circle, puts a Coke bottle in the
     center of the circle, and proceeds to explain the simple rules of the game, that when it’s your turn, you spin the bottle
     until it points to someone of the opposite sex, and then you kiss that person. (No instructions are provided on the kissing
     itself, which Charlotte Anne feels might be useful, from the looks of things.) Charlotte Anne, witnessing the hideously moist
     displays of nine-and ten-year-old kissing, is, during the first few turns, both hoping the bottle will not spin her way and
     considering her options in the event that it does. For sure she knows she is not going to kiss Rachel’s boyfriend, even though
     he’s the cutest boy by a wide margin, and the sight of Paul Schwartz and Sue Ellen Smiley’s tongues will figure in considerably
     to her desire to put this event off indefinitely. What eventually happens is that when it’s her turn to spin, the bottle points
     toward one of the monkeys, all of whom are interchangeably monkey-looking in her mind (not to mention that she’s several inches
     taller than the tallest boy in her own grade, and the tallest monkey is about a foot shorter than she is), and Charlotte Anne
     takes a good long look at the monkey in question and runs all the way home.
    Miraculously, due to her association with the increasingly popular Rachel Richmond, the Spin-the-Bottle incident does little
     to damage Charlotte Anne’s social standing, and she and Rachel start having regular play dates, often at Rachel’s house on
     85th and Riverside, which Charlotte Anne thinks is the coolest imaginable place to live ever. Rachel Richmond and her brother
     have their own penthouse apartment. Her mother and stepfather live directly across the hall, and a babysitter lives with Rachel
     and her younger brother, Kenny, but the kids’ apartment is separate and distinct from the parents’ apartment, with its very
     own front door. (The kids’ bathroom is in the hall in between the two apartments, but Charlotte Anne sees this as a minor
     inconvenience, given the overall incredible greatness of their having their very own apartment, plus there are no other apartments
     on the top floor but there’s a beaded curtain at the top of the stairs anyway.) Most super fantastic of all to Charlotte Anne
     is the decor. Everything in the apartment is red, white, or blue, and there are three tiny bedrooms and a closet along one
     wall of the apartment, on which wall and continuing across all the doors is a wide red, white, and blue stripe that bends
     around the corner when it meets the wall, continuing almost all the way to the end of the next wall, where it ends in a giant
     arrow. (Across the hall, Rachel’s mother and stepfather’s apartment is done in a similarly mod scheme, in black, white, and
     silver, with foil wallpaper,