Jean and Johnny Page 4

  Jean, who had eaten her lunch, brought from home, with Elaine, who had bought her lunch, was eager to go outdoors and enjoy the false spring day. The two girls walked aimlessly around the school grounds, enjoying the sunshine and pausing to look at the flowering quince blooming under the windows on the side of the building that got the afternoon sun. The pink blossoms on the bare branches meant that a more lasting spring was not far away. Jean wanted to say to the other trees and shrubs, which were leafless, “Hurry up and bloom!”

  It was out at the playing field that the two girls saw Johnny Chessler, with a group of boys who were clowning in the sunshine. They were taking turns seeing how far they could walk on their hands. Confident that Johnny was too busy to notice them, the girls stopped to watch. This time Johnny was wearing his blue plaid shirt, with the sleeves rolled up, and he looked, as always, extremely attractive. Gracefully he bent over, dropped his weight onto his hands, and flipped his feet into the air, spilling change out of his pocket upon the grass. He walked easily ten or twelve feet before he stood up, grinned, and accepted his change from his friend Homer, who had picked it up for him.

  The breeze ruffled Jean’s bangs. Johnny was so attractive. “I wonder how old he is,” she remarked wistfully, pushing up the sleeves of her sweater.

  “I know how to find out,” said Elaine.

  “How?” asked Jean.

  “Ask him,” answered Elaine.

  This idea was so farfetched that Jean did not bother to comment.

  “And I’m going to,” announced Elaine impulsively.

  Jean was aghast. “Elaine! You wouldn’t!”

  “Yes, I would,” said Elaine, the light of daring in her eyes.

  “Elaine!” protested Jean, seeing that her friend meant what she said. “No!”

  Her protest was not heeded. Elaine, her head held high, marched across the playing field and through the crowd of boys, who were now playing leapfrog. Jean watched in fascination and consternation until Elaine approached Johnny. Then, because she could not bear to watch any longer, she turned her back and began to walk toward the main building, hoping that if Johnny glanced in her direction he would not think she and Elaine were together. She wanted no part of this latest inspiration of Elaine’s. Sometimes you’d think it was Elaine with whom Johnny had danced.

  Jean climbed the steps and entered the building, its nearly empty corridors seeming like dark tunnels after the bright spring sunlight. She walked to her locker and had just finished twirling the combination on the lock when she heard Elaine’s hurried footsteps.

  “Jean!” Elaine gasped, her face crimson from hurrying and from excitement. “I did it!” She leaned back against the row of lockers and clasped her notebook to her chest. “Just wait till I tell you!”

  “Elaine, you didn’t tell him I wanted to know, did you?” demanded Jean.

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that,” said Elaine, taking a big breath. Apparently she had a lot to tell. Either that, or she was enjoying making a big anecdote out of a small experience. “Well, I walked across the playing field and through this bunch of boys clowning around, and I walked up to him—he was standing by the backstop—and I stood right in front of him. He was talking to some fellows and he didn’t notice me. Well, there I was, and I had to do something with all the other fellows looking at me, so I reached out and poked his arm with my finger as if I was ringing a doorbell or something—his sleeve was rolled up and his arm was brown and sort of hairy, you know—and all the fellows stopped talking and looked at me. Honestly, I just about died! But there I was, and I had to do something, didn’t I?”

  “You said that before,” Jean reminded her.

  “And so I just came right out with it. ‘How old are you?’ I asked. And wait till I tell you what he said!”

  Jean waited.

  “He grinned sort of a lazy grin and said—these were his exact words—‘I’m seventeen, but tell her I’m nineteen.’ And I said, ‘Thank you,’ and got away as fast as I could.” Elaine, her story at an end, was out of breath.

  “Oh—” was all that Jean could say. What did Johnny mean? That he had missed none of it—the strolls through the upstairs hall to catch a glimpse of him, the giggling, whispered conferences when they had seen him? Probably he had seen Elaine write down his license number and thought that Jean had asked her to spy on him. “Oh, Elaine,” said Jean miserably. “Why did you have to go and do it? He probably thought I asked you to.”

  “But don’t you see?” said Elaine. “He has noticed you!”

  “I guess he couldn’t help it, the way we watched him and giggled as if we had never seen a boy before,” said Jean in a flat voice. “Well, now we know we aren’t invisible. We must have thought we were. Let’s just forget the whole thing.” It wasn’t as though she had ever really known Johnny, or anything like that. To him, she was just a girl he had danced with once (but why? why?) and now he must think she was a very silly person. And he would be right. She was silly.

  “I don’t see why you feel that way,” said Elaine. “I thought you would be pleased that he had noticed you. I would be.”

  “I am never going to look at him again,” resolved Jean. “Well, my next class is in the annex. I guess I might as well go out before the halls are mobbed.”

  “If that’s the way you feel,” said Elaine humbly, “I am terribly sorry. I just thought…”

  Jean walked toward the bright square of light made by the open door at the end of the corridor. Students were beginning to straggle in from outdoors. Automatically Jean nodded and spoke to acquaintances, but her mouth and eyes refused to smile. How could she ever have behaved as she had? Why, everyone in school must know she had a crush on Johnny! And everyone must know how hopeless it was, because Johnny was a senior, attractive and popular in his collection of expensive woolen shirts. And who was she? Just a fifteen-year-old girl, small for her age, and noticed by practically no one at all.

  As Jean walked through the doorway and emerged from the dark hall into the sunlight, she almost had to close her eyes because of the sudden brightness. At the foot of the steps, as she was turning toward the annex, she bumped into a boy. “Excuse me,” she said, and stepped to the right. Unfortunately, the boy stepped to his left at the same moment. Then they both stepped to Jean’s left and Jean was suddenly aware that she was facing a blue plaid shirt. This boy was Johnny.

  “Say, what is this, a minuet?” asked Johnny, and then smiled when he recognized Jean. It was a genuine smile, warm and friendly. “Oh—hi,” he said. “How’s the cute girl?”

  “Hi,” answered Jean, and fled toward her classroom in the annex. She wondered where she had found the breath to speak that one syllable, because now she could scarcely breathe. Johnny had smiled and had actually spoken to her! He had called her a cute girl. Maybe Elaine was right after all. Maybe she ought to be pleased that Johnny had noticed her.

  As she slipped into her seat, Jean’s emotions were in a snarl. Johnny had remembered her, or anyway noticed her at school, and now he had smiled and spoken and called her a cute girl. Nobody had ever called her a cute girl before. Cute? What did it really mean? It was a word she had often used carelessly, like all the other girls, but she had never thought of it as a boy’s word. Kittens were cute. Puppies were cute. Hats were cute.

  Jean slid out of her seat and walked to the dictionary on the stand by the blackboard. She turned toward the end of the C’s and ran her finger down the columns until she came to the word cute. She studied the definition intently: “cute (kut), adj., cuter, cutest. 1. U.S. Colloq. Pleasingly pretty or dainty.” Pleasingly pretty or dainty. Then the word really was a compliment!

  Jean, who had been called Midge or Half Pint so often that she had come to think of herself as insignificant, now felt herself blossoming. A boy had called her a cute girl, which meant pleasingly pretty or dainty, and she had been wearing her glasses. She began to feel that she really was pleasingly pretty or dainty—in the United States in a colloquial or conver
sational sense, of course.

  Suddenly Jean laughed out loud. Colloquially in the United States was the very best way for a girl who lived in California to be pleasingly pretty or dainty.

  “The dictionary is funny?” remarked the boy in the nearest seat.

  “My favorite joke book.” Jean smiled blithely.

  “Dames,” muttered the boy, and although he tapped his forehead he returned Jean’s smile.

  Jean felt as if the boy were noticing her for the first time. Prettily and daintily she slid into her seat.

  Chapter 3

  After the near collision on the steps, Johnny began to speak to Jean whenever he saw her at school. Every word he spoke increased her happiness—someone was noticing her at last. “Hi. How’s the cute girl?” he would drawl, while she colored in the light of his smile. Sometimes he would say simply, “Hello, Jean.” This made her even happier, because the words told her that Johnny had taken the trouble to learn her name. She imagined him stopping someone in the hall and asking, “Say, who is that girl over there? The cute one.”

  One cloudy afternoon late in February, Jean, quite by accident, made an important discovery. The last class of her day was Clothing I. Her project for this class was a dress with set-in sleeves, a problem that had given her considerable trouble. No matter how many times she basted those sleeves into the armholes, they persisted in puckering at the shoulders. That afternoon Jean had grimly ripped out her basting threads twice, and by pinning the sleeves every quarter of an inch (so that was the secret!), she finally had them basted smoothly into place.

  Jean took her work to Mrs. Rankin, the sewing teacher, to have it approved, but she was put off while her teacher interrupted the class to make an announcement. The Costume Club, whose adviser was Mrs. Rankin, needed members, and anyone who studied Clothing was eligible. Jean, who always thought of clubs as activities for other people but not for herself, paid little attention to this announcement. Sue was taking extra courses in typing and shorthand and did not have time for clubs, and so Jean, used to following in her sister’s footsteps, had not thought about joining any clubs either. By waiting with her sewing in hand until Mrs. Rankin was through speaking, Jean finally had her work approved, but by that time the class was nearly over and all the sewing machines were occupied.

  Jean made up her mind that she was not going to leave until she had those sleeves stitched into her dress. She was tired of sleeves, she was tired of the dress, and she wanted the whole project out of the way. She whiled away the time tidying her sewing box. This had been an exasperating afternoon.

  “Are you going to join the Costume Club?” whispered Mitsuko Yamoto, who sat across the table from Jean.

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Jean, without thinking at all.

  “I am,” said Mitsuko. “Everybody says it is lots of fun to be behind the scenes at the senior play and the variety show and things. The school rents most of the costumes and all the club has to do is press them, fit them, and see that the right people get into them.”

  “Come on, Jean, why don’t you join?” asked another girl who shared the table.

  Someone vacated a sewing machine—fortunately one of the good ones—and Jean, intent on her sleeves, hurried to get it before someone else did and did not bother to answer the girl’s question. She stitched slowly and carefully. While she stitched in the right sleeve, the bell rang, but she went on working. She was about to stitch the left sleeve when Elaine came into the sewing room.

  “Oh, there you are,” said Elaine. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Aren’t you going home?”

  “Not until I finish this sleeve,” answered Jean. “I have had to rip it out so many times I don’t dare try to hurry with it.”

  “I guess I’ll run along,” said Elaine. “Mother wanted me to come straight home today so we could do some shopping.”

  Jean successfully stitched the sleeve, put away her sewing things, gathered up her books, and hurried out of the room, very nearly bumping into Johnny and his friend Homer Darvey, who were walking down the hall. “Oh—hello,” she said, startled at seeing Johnny.

  “Hi,” answered Johnny with a grin.

  “Hi,” echoed Homer.

  Because the two boys were obviously leaving the building by the same door she always used, Jean found herself walking with them. In a panic she tried to think of something to say.

  “Do you take sewing?” Johnny asked.

  “Yes,” answered Jean, longing for witty words to spring to her lips.

  “I didn’t think girls knew how to sew anymore,” remarked Johnny.

  “Oh, yes,” answered Jean. “Practically everybody sews. Girls, I mean.” It was silly to feel so confused, just because she was walking down the hall with a boy—two boys—but Jean could not help it.

  “I was just telling Homer about my trip to the mountains last weekend,” remarked Johnny, as they left the building and walked down the steps.

  “Do you ski?” asked Jean, knowing very well that he did.

  “Every chance I get,” answered Johnny. “I drove up early Saturday morning with some fellows. One of them has a cabin.”

  “Then you must have run into that storm I read about in the papers,” said Jean, pleased that she could add to the conversation.

  “I’ll say we did,” said Johnny. “It looked pretty threatening when we got there—the wind was blowing and the clouds were getting lower all the time—so we decided to get in some skiing before we took time to unload our food or our sleeping bags. Well, I was up on the mountain when the storm broke. The wind must have been blowing sixty miles an hour when I came down that mountain, and the snow was so thick it seemed to be coming from all directions at once. I didn’t know whether I was going to make it back to the cabin without hitting a tree or a boulder, or not. And I wasn’t sure where the other fellows were.”

  “Weren’t you scared?” asked Jean.

  “Some, but I knew that if I kept going downhill I would come to the cabin,” said Johnny, his gestures suggesting skiing.

  Jean could see him, slim and handsome in his ski clothes, skiing through the blizzard. “What happened? Did you make it all right?”

  “It took some doing, but I finally got down that mountain,” said Johnny. “I could hardly see the cabin. Well, the way the snow was drifting I thought we might get snowed in before the weekend was over. Then I remembered the sleeping bags and all the food in the car, and I thought I better get it unloaded before the car got buried. So I left my skis on the porch and sort of felt my way over to the car. I had just opened the door to take out a box of groceries from the floor of the backseat when I happened to look up and there was the biggest bear I have ever seen. He was so close I could have shaken hands with him.”

  “Johnny!” exclaimed Jean. “What did you do?”

  “I can tell you I didn’t waste any time getting into that car and slamming the door,” Johnny went on.

  “Well, that bear went prowling around the car—I guess he must have smelled the bacon. Bears like bacon, you know. Well, there I was shut in the car with the bear snuffling around. Sometimes the car would shake and I knew he was trying to break in. I was really caught in a trap. I couldn’t chase the bear away, and I didn’t dare get out.” Johnny paused dramatically.

  Jean waited in suspense for Johnny to go on with the story. He smiled down at his eager audience, enjoying the suspense he had created.

  Then Homer spoke. “Except that bears hibernate in the winter,” he said seriously.

  Jean and Johnny stared at Homer and then shouted with laughter. His statement of fact was such an anticlimax.

  “Homer, I have never had the rug pulled out from under me quite so fast,” said Johnny, slapping Homer on the back. “Oh, well. It was a good story while it lasted.”

  Earnest, earthbound Homer, with no imagination at all, thought Jean. How like him to spoil a good story. “But maybe this bear had insomnia,” suggested Jean. “Maybe he couldn’t sleep, so he got
up to fix himself a snack.”

  “Thanks, Jean. You’re my pal,” said Johnny, smiling down at her as they stood on the sidewalk. “Well, so long.”

  “So long,” said Homer.

  “Good-bye,” said Jean, and stood a moment watching Johnny as he walked toward the parking lot with Homer. Johnny was everything she had hoped he would be—interesting, full of fun, the kind of boy who would make up for a girl’s shyness. Jean chose to walk home along a street lined with cherry trees flowering like pink clouds in the sharp breeze. That was one of the nice things about Northgate. In the flat part of town the streets were lined with different kinds of flowering trees. Jean could walk to school on a plum street and walk home on a cherry street. Jean reached out and caught a pink petal as it drifted to the ground. Johnny had walked down the hall with her!

  After that Jean took to lingering in the sewing room after school, so that she could leave at the time Johnny might be coming down the hall. At first Jean made up excuses for not being able to leave when Elaine came for her, but finally, when she saw that Elaine’s feelings were hurt, she whispered, so none of the other girls would hear, “Look, Elaine, if I leave just a little later, sometimes I run into Johnny and he walks down the hall with me.”

  “So that’s it! I was afraid maybe you were mad at me about something.” Comprehension sparkled on Elaine’s face. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll keep out of your way.” Naturally in a situation like this a boy took precedence over a girl. “Good luck and happy hunting!”

  “I’m not using a bow and arrow.” Jean could not help laughing at Elaine’s expression. “I knew you would understand,” she said seriously, thinking that one of the reasons she valued Elaine’s friendship was Elaine’s cheerful acceptance of whatever she wanted to do.

  Once Jean found Johnny and Homer waiting for her outside the classroom door. Actually waiting for her! This, Jean felt, was significant, and after that if she did not see the two boys, she waited for them to come. When Jean could find no reason for lingering any longer by the door of the sewing room, when she had reread half a dozen times the schedule of classes posted outside the door, when she had started to leave and stopped, pretending to go through her notebook looking for something she might have forgotten, she walked home alone—and missed the companionship of Elaine.