The Luckiest Girl Read online

  But Philip—it was the presence of Philip himself that was hardest to bear. He still talked to her in his shy and courteous way but there was a difference now, as if he, too, knew that things could never be the same. The sight of him working so doggedly over his dissecting pan and notebook was painful to Shelley. What kind of person was she, anyhow, to grind up roses at home and then come down here and cause Philip so much unhappiness? When the class came to the worm-dissecting assignment, Shelley asked herself what was the one thing in the world she least wanted to do. The answer was easy. Cutting up a worm in San Sebastian, California, under the sharp eyes of Mr. Ericson beside a boy who was not allowed to go out with her.

  Shelley mentioned Oregon so often that Frisbie said, “If you like it up there so much, why don’t you go back?” And once when Shelley started to say, “In Oregon we always—” someone interrupted by saying, “We will now pause while Shelley delivers a commercial.” After that Shelley was miserable in silence. She couldn’t go back now. At home the second semester was well under way and she would be behind in her classes if she transferred now. Besides, her father had told her that if she came to California, he expected her to stay for the whole school year.

  The weather grew colder. Snow fell in the mountains, and the sight of the green trees loaded with golden oranges against a background of snow-topped mountains almost raised Shelley’s spirits. Then she found that San Sebastian paid a price for this beauty.

  At eight o’clock in the evening the Michies turned on the radio to listen anxiously to the frost warnings. Tom went out in the night to check the temperature in the grove. Later he called Luke out of bed to help light the smudge pots. Shelley was awakened by the smell of oily smoke and a sound like the roar of airplane propellers. When she got up to close her bedroom window she saw flames shooting up from the smudge pots throughout the groves and knew that the wind machines were fanning heated air through the trees. It was an eerie and beautiful sight, like nothing Shelley had ever seen before. These Californians, who thought they could heat up all out-of-doors! What was she doing here, anyway?

  In the morning Tom and Luke came in red-eyed, washed but not clean. They had stopped to try to scrub off the greasy smoke in the showers at the gym, but smudge did not wash off easily. Their eyes were rimmed with black, and when Shelley went to school she saw that many of the boys had the same washed-but-not-clean look. As the day wore on, heads began to nod over books and drop down on folded arms. Shelley noticed Mr. Ericson smiling sympathetically at Frisbie sleeping in biology lab. She had not known her teacher was that human.

  The next days were anxious ones. Tom and Luke were grimy and tired. Mavis was worried. “We have a tiger by the tail,” she told Shelley. “Once we start smudging we can’t stop until the cold spell breaks. If it should be a long one it can eat up all the profit from the oranges.”

  The smudging continued for three nights before the temperature rose and the Michie household returned to normal. Shelley then felt it worthwhile to wash the smudge out of her hair. She had never been inconvenienced by a crop before. Things like that did not happen in the city, thank goodness.

  One day while Shelley was trying to make herself eat a sandwich, Jeannie suddenly asked, “You are really in love with him, aren’t you?”

  “In love?” repeated Shelley, surprised. Love was such a big word, almost too big to talk about. “Why, I suppose…I always think of love as something that comes later.”

  Jeannie did not say anything. She just looked at Shelley with her sharp, bright eyes. A few days later she said, “Let’s go to the basketball game together.”

  Shelley had been dreading the basketball season. “Well…no, Jeannie,” she answered vaguely. “You’d better not count on me. I doubt if I can make it.”

  “If you say so.” Jeannie’s glance was sharp and penetrating.

  Shelley was so homesick she even wrote to Jack, whose last unanswered letter had lain on her desk for more than two months. Her letter was short—she was really not eager to communicate with Jack. It was just that he was someone at home. Letters to her mother were more difficult. In each one she carefully managed to include some reference to Philip so that her mother would not wonder what had happened to him and start asking awkward questions that might force Shelley to confess that Philip was not allowed to take her out.

  Then came the night of the first basketball game with Santa Theresa, the night Philip could not play. Shelley had made up her mind that she could not face this game. She had to go to school but she did not have to attend a basketball game. She felt so miserable she thought perhaps she was coming down with a cold.

  Tom left the house early that evening. Shelley went up to her room to study. Her head felt heavy and when she swallowed, she was pretty sure her throat was scratchy or was going to be. She heard some of Luke’s friends stop for him on the way to the game. Soon Mavis and Katie would be gone and she would have the whole house to herself. She was so miserable she felt as if in complete solitude she would dissolve into a puddle of tears.

  Shelley sat huddled at her desk when Katie knocked and entered. “Hi,” said Shelley forlornly. She knew that Katie would not mention Philip, because she had not spoken his name since the day he told Shelley he could not see her. This was so unlike Katie that Shelley was sure Mavis had taken her aside and told her to say nothing about Philip.

  “Come on, go to the game with Mommy and me,” Katie pleaded.

  “No, thanks, Katie,” said Shelley with a wan smile. “I really don’t feel like it.”

  Mavis appeared in the doorway behind Katie. “Come on, Shelley,” she urged.

  Shelley smiled and shook her head.

  “It will be lots more fun if you come,” begged Katie.

  Shelley was touched as she always was by Katie’s eagerness for her company, but she still shook her head.

  “Come on, Shelley. You’ll feel better if you go.” There was quiet insistence in Mavis’s voice.

  Shelley was, after all, a guest in the Michies’ house and Mavis was the coach’s wife. Shelley had an obligation to please whether she felt like it or not. “All right,” she agreed, trying to conceal her reluctance as she pulled her coat out of the closet.

  The gymnasium where the two teams were already warming up was bedlam. Pairs of yell leaders from both schools were leading yells that seemed to Shelley to reverberate from the walls and ceiling. Santa Theresa had brought along an electric megaphone that added to the din.

  Mavis led the way to the section of seats across the aisle from the coach’s bench, where room was soon found for the family of the popular coach. “Thank goodness, San Sebastian is expected to win,” she remarked, as they sat down on the bench.

  Shelley supposed she should have worn a white blouse and sat in the rooting section behind the team, but she was too dispirited to care. She did not feel like mingling with the other students and wondering what they were thinking of her.

  The referee blew his whistle and tossed the ball into the air to start the game. It was at that moment that Shelley saw Philip, sitting on the end of the players’ bench farthest from her. He was wearing his letterman’s sweater, the sweater that would not have a second strip added to the sleeve at the end of the year. His feet were spread apart, his hands were in his pockets, and he was leaning forward, tense, following the ball as if he were playing the game himself. Shelley was surprised to see him, although she realized she should not have been. A boy like Philip would care about the game even though he was not allowed to play.

  San Sebastian scored. Santa Theresa scored through the basket at the end of the gym where Shelley and Philip had scattered hay a long time ago. “Take it away! Take it away!” chanted the San Sebastian rooting section. “Score! Score!” yelled the opposing section, the rooters making their voices swoop up on each word. The leader with the electric megaphone was carried away by the sound of his own voice electrically magnified until it seemed to Shelley to fill the entire gymnasium, with sound waves so
vibrant they were almost visible.

  San Sebastian scored twice. Philip could not sit still on the bench and when he sprang up for a better view, Shelley wished desperately for her school to win to make up for Philip’s not being allowed to play. Katie jumped up and down and screamed. Santa Theresa made three baskets in a row. A San Sebastian player fell and hurt his knee. Time out. Philip sat down on the bench sideways, facing the player beside him, talking earnestly.

  The playing started again. The referee’s whistle shrilled. There was a foul against Santa Theresa. “Score! Score!” swooped the electrically led rooting section. “Take it away! Take it away!” screamed San Sebastian. Santa Theresa scored. The ball was in the hands of a San Sebastian player, who was dribbling it down the length of the gym. Philip was on his feet again. The ball teetered maddeningly on the edge of the basket, wobbled, and fell through. The electric megaphone seemed to be ringing inside Shelley’s head. Katie beat her arm in excitement. More shouts, more feet pounding on the floor, more arms waving, the referee’s whistle and, somehow, Santa Theresa was ahead by four points at the half.

  Girl yell leaders took over the floor with their giant pompoms of colored crepe paper, green and yellow for San Sebastian, purple and white for Santa Theresa. They performed their stylized dances, shaking their pompoms to the right and to the left while Philip sat with his hands clasped between his knees.

  “I do so hope Tom wins his first game,” said Mavis, “but now I am not so sure.”

  “He’s got to win,” said Katie.

  The pompom girls left the floor and the janitor came out with a push broom to sweep up the scraps of crepe paper left behind. This time, when play was resumed, San Sebastian was trying for the basket through which Philip had shot an imaginary ball when he and Shelley were decorating for the barn dance. That bittersweet memory. San Sebastian scored three times in succession and the rooting section was in a frenzy. Then suddenly in front of Shelley there was a tangle of sinewy legs and sweating bodies. She and Katie had to throw up their arms in front of their faces to avoid being struck by the ball.

  Shelley knew then that Philip must have seen her, and after that she would not let herself look in his direction. She wondered what he was thinking about her, if indeed he bothered to think about her at all. It would be so much easier if they had quarreled or he had met a girl he liked better or she had met another boy. Then she would have had some idea of how to behave, because she knew how other girls had acted (and perhaps should not have acted) in those more ordinary situations.

  The rest of the game for Shelley was a noisy blur of knees, elbows, and a bouncing, flying ball. And then it was over and San Sebastian had lost. Mavis was quiet. Katie drooped. Shelley had a glimpse of Philip talking to one of the players on his way to the locker room. He looked serious and from the gestures he was making with his hands, he seemed to be reenacting one of the plays.

  And it was all Shelley’s fault. Things might have been different if Philip could have played. Now all she wanted to do was to leave the gymnasium without meeting him. This should not be hard to do. Philip, she was sure, would not want to meet her.

  Shelley followed Mavis and Katie through the straggling crowd that had cheered for the losing team. At the end of the gym, under the basket that San Sebastian’s ball had too often failed to go through, Shelley felt a hand on her shoulder. It was a boy’s hand, and the feel of it made her start. She looked back and found herself looking into Hartley’s dark eyes.

  Hartley smiled at her, a sympathetic smile. “Don’t feel that way,” he said. “It’s only a game, you know.”

  “I know, but—” was all Shelley could say.

  “I know,” answered Hartley, and Shelley knew that he did know. He patted her shoulder and with an encouraging smile, disappeared into the crowd.

  Shelley found she felt a little better. Somehow, Hartley’s pat on the shoulder had helped, because it showed he understood how she felt. She thought of the evening he had helped with the Michies’ ironing and had taken her to Vincente. She had really enjoyed that evening, but of course that was a long time ago.

  Chapter 11

  It was the mail that brought about a change in Shelley’s feelings. On this particular delivery the mailman left in the Michie mailbox two letters for Shelley and a package for Katie. All three were to prove important to Shelley.

  Shelley returned from school one afternoon to find Mavis reading a book with Smoky curled up in her lap and Sarge lying on the rug at her feet. “How did biology go today?” Mavis asked, looking up from her book.

  “Ugh. We dissected a crayfish,” answered Shelley, and then added thoughtfully, “but you know, dissecting is rather interesting. A worm has five pairs of hearts. I didn’t know that until I dissected one.”

  “There are a couple of letters for you,” said Mavis.

  Shelley knew. She had spotted them on the mantel the moment she entered the room. Never had mail seemed so precious, and the most precious letters of all came in the square white envelopes addressed in her mother’s neat handwriting and the pale blue envelopes that displayed the handwriting Rosemary was experimenting with this year, a backhand with little circles instead of dots over the i’s. Rosemary was always experimenting with something—nail polish, hair styles, personalities.

  Now Shelley picked up the two letters, and as she did so she noticed beside them the package addressed to Katie. Sitting on the couch she weighed the two letters on her fingertips before she decided to open Rosemary’s first. It was written on notebook paper and many of the words were underlined.

  “Dear Shelley,” it began. “I’m writing in study period as usual—I have so much to do I’m simply frantic, to put it mildly. Anyway, you’re sure lucky to be way down there in sunny California practically surrounded by handsome basketball players.” (How am I ever going to explain Philip away, Shelley wondered. Of course she could not admit Philip was not allowed to go out with her, not after the way she had described him to Rosemary.) “Jack turns up once in a while to take me to the movies or something. But don’t worry. We are Just Pals and I am keeping him safe from Other Women until you come back in case you still want him. I think he’s sort of cute, though. Right after you left he took me to this movie that was made in Italy where everybody kept saying a rivederci (I guess that’s how you spell it) instead of good-bye and now Jack says it too. Don’t worry—as I said before, we are Just Pals, but the way things are around here a boy in the hand is worth two in the bush or any old port in a storm or something like that. Anyway, it is beginning to snow here, not that a little snow would interest anyone who spends all her time lolling about under a palm tree—”

  Shelley giggled and dropped the letter into her lap. If Rosemary could know what San Sebastian was like during smudging! Then Shelley picked up the letter and reread it thoughtfully. She had half hoped Rosemary would like Jack so much she would want to go steady with him. Apparently this was not going to happen. And now Jack was saying a rivederci. Well, as Rosemary said, probably a boy in the hand was worth two in the bush. Rosemary was always so practical about these things.

  Shelley tore open her mother’s letter, which had come by airmail, and, as always happened when she opened a letter from her mother, the guilty memory of the morning she threw the roses in the Disposall crossed her mind. “Shelley dear,” the letter began. “I am so glad biology is going smoothly for you this semester. Philip sounds like a very nice boy and it must be pleasant to have him sitting beside you a second semester. Mavis writes that his family is very well liked in San Sebastian. I hope, dear, that you will remember that living in a small town is quite different from living in the city and that everyone will notice everything you do. I am sure Philip is a very nice boy and I know I can trust you not to lose your head—”

  Shelley stopped reading. Lose her head! As if she had a chance! Honestly. I’ll put it on my list, she thought. If I ever have a daughter my age I will not talk about her losing her head. And if her daughter went away
to school, she would not write for references on every boy she happened to go out with. What did her mother think she was—a child? Shelley did considerable mental sputtering before she went on reading. “By the way, whatever happened to the boy named Hartley, whom you mentioned when you first went to California? It has begun to snow here and by tomorrow your father will probably have to shovel the driveway before he can get the car out. It seems only yesterday that I used to bundle you into your snowsuit and red mittens so you could run out to catch the first snowflakes.”

  Shelley folded the letter and returned it to its envelope. Poor Mother, she thought, she really does miss me even if I was so awful about the raincoat that day. She sounded lonely. But even if she was lonely, Shelley wished she would not write to Mavis for references and talk about Shelley’s losing her head.

  Shelley looked across the room at Mavis and was grateful to her. Mavis had simply written a nice letter answering her old friend’s inquiries about Philip and had said nothing about his not coming to see Shelley anymore. She had not mentioned the matter to Shelley, either, although Shelley was sure she knew all about it, and for this Shelley was also grateful.

  And the worst of it was, Shelley did not know how she was going to explain Philip away in her letters. She had mentioned him often and enthusiastically, because she knew her mother wanted her to have a good time. When she had reluctantly confessed her D she had not mentioned Philip at all, because she did not think her mother would approve of a boy who flunked. Shelley did not want to confess the real reason she was not going out with Philip. After all, she had her pride. Maybe she should start making casual references to other boys in her letters. Her mother had already inquired about Hartley. Now that he was in her journalism class, she saw him more often and it would be easy enough to say something about him in her letters home.

  Katie came in through the front door and flung her books on a chair. “A package from Nana!” she exclaimed when she saw the package on the mantel. “Loot!”