Brittney, the Tapgirl Princess

Brittney was enjoying the fact that she was "in" with the girls again. Now that most of the other girls had put metal taps on their shoes, it was like a club, and Brittney, everyone agreed, was the "Tapgirl Princess." Some of the girls just put on little heel taps, about an inch long, because they weren't sure they were ready for large taps. But to the most outgoing girls, like Brittney, the kind who were always blowing cigarette smoke into the air and talking extra loud so they would be overheard, taps only made sense if they were noisy! So, following Brittney's lead, a lot of the girls, especially the attractive girls who she hung around with most of the time, only wore shoes with large taps that were easily noticed and heard. They even started talking about the taps by the number that was etched into each one by the manufacturer.

"How come you only put number 4's on those, Nicole?"
"Oh, I wanted to put 6's on, like on my loafers and sandals, but Sam said they wouldn't fit on these heels. See, the taps cover most of the little heel as it is. But he put some nice number 3's on the toes, see, and some number 1's on the sides! So they're as clicky as my other shoes anyway."

Just to be sure that other people knew they had taps on (and were therefore worth being friends with), a lot of the girls took to dragging their heels as they walked along the sidewalk. So instead of the click-click-click sound that you first heard at Forest Glen High, you now more often heard the sound of "scrape, click, scrape, scrape" because most of the heel-strikes were drawn out as the girls' shoes slipped along the floor.

But, as usual, it was Brittney (and her friend Beth) who discovered a new trick with her taps—one that all the girls took to. Late one night, walking back to her parked car at the mall, Britney was in a hurry and walking ahead of Beth. Then Beth noticed that as Brittney was scraping her taps along the sidewalk, she made sparks with her shoes! Brittney hadn't noticed because the sparks only showed up at night and usually only the people behind you could see them.

"Hey, Brit, your taps are making sparks! Turn around and tell me if my taps make sparks too?" Brittney stopped and watch as Beth proceeded to walk ahead, each step making really long, loud drags along the parking lot blacktop.

"Cool! Beth, you are making really awesome sparks with your taps. Let's go drive over to the Rock and show the other girls. They're all waiting there for us. They will love it that we can make sparks with our taps!"

And from that point on, the boys all started calling the Forest Glen tapgirls "sparklers."

Now that was not what their teachers called them. In fact, Mr. Wilson, Brittney's math teacher was really annoyed at Brittney and the other girls who wore taps on their shoes. Kids thought Mr. Wilson was really boring, and they often came late to class. Whenever one of the girls would arrive after he started talking, she almost always would come in dragging her heels and making as much noise with her taps as she could—purposely distracting the other students and drawing their attention away from Mr. Wilson's Algebra lesson.

But it was not just the clickety-scrape sounds as the late arrivals made their way to their seats that upset Mr. Wilson. What really got to him was all the noise the girls made with their taps while they were sitting at their seat.

For most of the girls, math class was not where they wanted to be. And when a girl's mind wandered or when she wanted some attention, she'd turn her body into the aisle next to her seat, cross her legs, let her foot come up out of her shoe, and dangle her heel. As often as not, pretty soon the girl's foot would come totally out of her shoe and the shoe would fall to the floor making a hard "clack" as the heel tap banged against the hard surface. When this happened, young Laurie or Melissa or Ashley would have to slide her foot back into her shoe. In doing so, she'd have to slide her shoe along the floor, forcing the heel tap to make that sweet sound of metal scraping along a tile floor. Still more sounds to annoy Mr. Wilson.

If it was Brittney who dropped her shoe, you can be sure she'd make a whole production out of it! First, she'd let her other shoe drop too—clack! Then she'd bend down and raise both shoes up to eye level and turn them over so the heels and soles were face up, making sure everyone saw the large metal taps that covered several inches of shoe leather. Just to be sure that everyone had noticed that she had taps on her shoes, she'd bang the two heel taps together twice to make a pair of crisp metallic claps—click, click. Then she'd smile at whoever caught her eye (usually a guy she liked), run her hand smoothly over her taps and then slowly put each of the shoes back on her feet. Of course, in order to make sure that each foot was fully seated inside the shoe, Brittney would have to stomp down hard on her heels, banging the taps against the floor one more time. By this point, everyone was totally distracted and it took Mr. Wilson another two minutes to get everyone's attention—that is, unless Sarah or Megan or Jessica decided to dangle and drop one of their shoes in the same way.

Just the way things were with the "sparkler" tapgirls of Forest Glen High.