LILY, Chapter 3

Tap Shoes

LILY, Chapter 3/ Tap Shoes

June Mae did not like Raven. She did not like the new girl’s tall slender body, her long legs and arms, her long feet. Raven was three inches taller than June Mae even though they were practically the same age. June Mae did not like that. She did not like the fact that Raven wore black clothes. She did not like Raven’s hair style. Or her voice. It was like the voice of a teacher or someone like that, not like the voice of a kid. June Mae especially did not like the fact that her friend Lily now clearly preferred Raven to her. Lily practically worshipped the new girl. It was sickening.

In June Mae’s opinion, Raven was weird. Every single thing about her was. She was a weirdo from California. According to June Mae’s father, a truck driver who sometimes drove all the way out there with a load of machine parts, everyone in California was weird, you had to expect that. It was a state entirely inhabited by weirdos.

Fortunately, when the summer was over, Raven would go away. Raven’s father, the professor, had her all summer, but when school started, she would go back to her mother in California.

Soon after Raven arrived in the neighborhood, June Mae and Lily had been allowed to enter Raven’s house, which had once been Mr. Simpson’s house, and which June Mae suspected was haunted. According to Raven, the house was not inhabited by the ghost of Mr. Simpson. If it was haunted, she said, in her stupid voice, she would know. Raven said she had strong feelings about the supernatural, ghosts and spirits. She could sense them. She said ghosts have special vibrations and special people like her could feel them. She said the vibrations of ghosts are different than the vibrations of angels, who sometimes watch over us. She spun around in her living room with her long arms stretched out and declared, “See, no vibrations in here. None. No ghosts or angels.”

As if you could see ghostly vibrations, as if you could feel the vibrations of invisible angels.

Raven smiled sweetly. “Take my word for it, buddy, this house is not haunted.”

June Mae did not like it when Raven called her “buddy.” She called Lily “honey,” or “my little Lily,” but she called June Mae “buddy.” Buddy was a boy’s name. She had a boy cousin who was called that. It was as if Raven was saying June Mae was a boy. June Mae had a blocky build and short hair. Some people in her family said she was a tomboy, so she was sensitive to this sort of thing.

She considered punching Raven.

Raven’s living room looked weird. It contained furniture but all the chairs and the sofa were pushed back against the walls, so the entire middle of the room was available for tap dancing. Raven was a tap dancer. While Lily and June Mae watched with their mouths open, Raven tap danced all over the wooden floor of her living room. She told them she had a summer project.

What kid has a summer project? So stupid.

Raven explained she was going to master the steps danced by a movie star named Eleanor Powell in a musical titled Broadway Melody of 1940, a black and white movie. Raven declared it the most wonderful musical ever made. She said the “Begin the Beguine” number it featured was the greatest tap dance number in the history of movie musicals.

Until she met Raven, June Mae knew black and white movies existed but had hardly ever seen one. Who would even want to? Her idea of a great movie was Bend It Like Beckham which was about a girl who rebelled against her strict, old-fashioned family so she could play soccer.

Every day, Raven popped in her DVD of the old black and white movie, found her favorite scene, and danced along with Eleanor Powell and her partner, a skinny balding man named Fred Astaire.

June Mae felt that Fred Astaire looked like the sort of man no woman could ever fall in love with. He looked stupid and weird, dorky. He had a big forehead and a pencil neck. June Mae’s father said men who had necks like that were laughed at by other men. June Mae’s father had a thick neck like a bull.

When June Mae expressed her negative opinion about Fred Astaire, Raven laughed loudly right in June Mae’s face. “I knew you would say something like that!”

June Mae wanted to knock her down and sit on top of her. See if Raven would laugh then.

Already, after only a week of practice, Raven could do almost all the steps that Eleanor Powell did in the movie. It was sickening.

Now, Lily was also trying to learn to tap dance, even though she did not yet own any tap shoes. Raven said, if Lily’s mom could not afford them, she would get her dad, the professor, to buy Lily a pair.

June Mae offered to teach Lily how to hit a soft ball, but Lily said she did not care to learn.

Lily was actually starting to sound like Raven, like she was copying the new girl. “I do not care to learn.” Who says weird stuff like that?

Raven was completely ruining her best friend.

June Mae watched Raven tap dance and Lily attempt to tap dance with bare feet until she could not stand another moment of it and then stomped home. Somehow or other, she told herself, she was going to make Raven pay. Fix her good. And win back Lily.

Raven was tall, a whole head taller than Lily, had slender legs and arms and a long, elegant neck with a small head on top of it like the bud of a flower and short black hair cut in bangs. She did not lean against things. Perfect posture. When Raven sat down, her back remained straight. She possessed a regal quality as if she was a princess, the kind forced to live in exile. She had bright alert eyes, dark expressive eyebrows, a long thin nose, and a wide mouth that was quick to smile. She had a musical laugh.

Even though she was only ten years old, Raven did not have to have a babysitter. She wore black leggings and baggy black tee shirts. A shiny black enamel bracelet adorned one wrist. When Raven spoke, she slowly rotated the bracelet in a way that hypnotized Lily.

Raven read books, entire books from cover to cover. To Lily, she seemed a character in a book. Her skin was smooth, pale, almost radiant. Because of her fair skin, Raven disliked direct sunlight. If she had to go outdoors into the bright summer glare, she protected herself with sunscreen, sunglasses, and a sun hat. Lily did not like direct sunlight either; it caused her to freckle. She considered asking her mom if she would buy her some sunglasses.

Raven once told Lily that her own mother was breathtakingly beautiful and could be a movie star if she wanted to but she preferred not to because she felt that beauty was shallow.

Lily felt that her own mother was pretty for a mom but probably no one would say she was beautiful. She was not entirely sure she knew what the word “shallow” meant.

Raven spent summers with her father. She would be here, living across the street from Lily in Mr. Simpson’s house, for all of June and July but, when August came, she would have to return to her mother who lived in Southern California, a legendary and exotic place that Lily had never visited. Raven said Southern California was the most magical and glamorous place on earth because it contained Disneyland and Hollywood and everyone there was fit and talented and good looking. There was even an ocean and mountains, if you liked that sort of thing. Raven declared she had been to Disneyland many times but found amusement parks childish. She didn’t like the long lines. She didn’t like the beach either, because the water of the ocean was cold and the hot sunshine burned her skin.

Lily very much wished she could go to Disneyland even if the lines were long and the sunshine hot.

Raven said that her mother worked for a Hollywood movie studio. She was an important executive there and knew many movie stars. Her mother was much richer than her father, who was only a poorly paid biology professor up there. When Raven said “up there,” she would point in the general direction of the college on the hill, a collection of buildings that Lily had sometimes explored with June Mae. Raven said although her father was only a professor, he was very wise, and she loved him very much.

Lily had only met her own father a few times but was pretty sure no one would ever call him wise. Her mom called him “that idiot I used to be married to.”

Lily often felt ignorant after she visited Raven. She felt that because Raven was now her best friend, maybe after midnight, she should again visit the Big Rock, visit the bit of it that was visible, and thank it for making her wish for a best friend come true. She regretted that she had wished for cable television and the Disney Channel. She felt that wish was childish and immature. Maybe she could ask the Big Rock to forget about that wish. Instead, she could ask for tapdancing shoes.

Link to Chapter 4