Fifteen Read online

  “What would you like?” Stan asked, as Mr. Nibley himself appeared to take their order.

  “Well, hello there, Janey,” said Mr. Nibley jovially. “Aren’t you out pretty late?”

  Jane smiled weakly. Oh, Mr. Nibley, she thought desperately, don’t. Don’t let Stan know I don’t come in here with boys after the movies all the time. That was the trouble with a town like Woodmont. Everyone in the older part knew everything about everyone else. Mr. Nibley had known her since she had to be lifted onto a stool and he had to lean over to hand her an ice-cream cone. He probably thought she was about eleven years old now.

  As Stan asked for a chocolate shake, Jane found she was too excited to eat. “A dish of vanilla ice cream,” she said at last. Tonight a chocolate Coke float seemed too childish to order.

  “Why, Janey, what’s the matter?” asked Mr. Nibley. “Don’t you like chocolate Coke floats anymore?”

  “I don’t feel like one tonight,” Jane said aloud. In her thoughts she was saying, Mr. Nibley, did you have to go and tell Stan what I usually order? And please go away. I want to talk to him.

  “Say, Janey, I just happened to think,” Mr. Nibley said. “Do you happen to know what kind of fertilizer your father is using on his begonias this year? I don’t seem to get the same results he does.”

  Fertilizer for begonias! “No, I don’t, Mr. Nibley. I never noticed,” answered Jane. Go away, Mr. Nibley, she thought. Go away.

  But when Mr. Nibley did leave, Jane found she did not know what to say. Talking to Stan when she faced him in the light was much more difficult than talking while walking beside him in the dusk. She smiled across at Stan, who smiled back at her. Jane glanced down at the initials scratched in the paint on the table and raised her eyes again. How smooth and tan, almost golden, his skin looked. It was funny she had not noticed before that his eyelashes were thick and the crest of the dip in his hair was faded to a light brown. And on his right wrist—a strong-looking wrist—was a silver identification bracelet. Maybe someday…

  “You were having quite a time with Sandra when I first saw you,” Stan remarked.

  Jane laughed. “Perfectly awful. You saved my life. I don’t know what I would have done if she had really dumped that ink all over the carpet.” This was better. Feeling more at ease, Jane told Stan about her experience with Sandra and the fly spray.

  Stan was amused. “Mrs. Norton has just as much trouble with Sandra herself,” he said. “Do you babysit often?”

  “Once or twice a week,” Jane explained. “My friend Julie and I have built up a sort of business.” She did not mind telling this to Stan, because he had a part-time job himself. There were some boys at Woodmont High who would look down on a girl who babysat regularly.

  Mr. Nibley set the vanilla ice cream down in front of Jane and, by not looking up, she managed to avoid conversation with him. She took a small bite of ice cream and looked across at Stan, who was peeling the wrapper off a pair of straws. He looked like a boy who was enjoying his date.

  “Well, if it isn’t Stan Crandall!” cried a girl’s voice, and Jane, looking up, saw Marcy Stokes and Greg.

  Wouldn’t you know it, thought Jane. Marcy would have to come along now, when everything was going so smoothly. And at the same time her mind recorded the fact that Marcy already knew Stan. Leave it to Marcy.

  “Oh, hello there, Jane,” exclaimed Marcy with a note of surprise in her voice that made Jane feel as if she were the last person in the world Marcy expected to see at Nibley’s with a boy.

  “Hi, Jane,” said Greg. “Mind if we join you? There aren’t any empty booths.”

  “Sure. Come on,” said Stan, sliding over in the booth. “Jane and I will be leaving before long anyway.”

  Marcy slipped into the booth beside Jane, and Jane felt that everything about herself was all wrong. Marcy’s simple black cotton dress and the white cashmere sweater tossed over her shoulders made Jane, in her pastel dress and white coat, feel prim and all bundled up.

  “Just coffee, Mr. Nibley,” said Marcy. This made Jane, who was nibbling at her vanilla ice cream, feel like a small girl who was being given a treat. She did not drink coffee. To her it was a bitter beverage that grown-ups—no, that wasn’t the word—that older people drank.

  Marcy flung back her sun-bleached hair with an impatient gesture and smiled lazily at Stan, as if Jane and Greg were not there. “We sure had fun at the beach that day, didn’t we, Stan?” she asked.

  “We sure did,” agreed Stan.

  What beach? What day? Jane wondered miserably if Marcy’s just-between-us-two smile meant that she had already had a date with Stan.

  “Except we ran out of sandwiches,” was Greg’s comment. “Next time you women had better remember you’re packing a lunch for men, not boys.”

  “Such as?” drawled Marcy.

  So Greg had been there too, and at least one other girl. Jane was annoyed with herself for feeling so pleased that Marcy had not been alone with Stan—at least not at the beach. But there might have been other times….

  Greg smiled across the table at Jane. Encouraged, she smiled back, but he did not say anything that would help her enter the conversation. To hide her discomfort she took small bites of her ice cream. She could not help comparing Greg and Stan while Marcy chattered on. Greg was taller and better-looking than Stan, and there was something different about him too. Greg knows everybody likes him, she thought, and he expects them to. He’s the student-body-president-in-his-senior-year type. Yes, that was it. And Stan—Stan was every bit as friendly, but somehow he was different. Quieter, maybe. Nobody would expect him to be student body president. He was just nice. The nicest boy she had ever met.

  Jane waited for an opening in the conversation that would give her the opportunity to take part. None came. I might as well not be here, she thought unhappily, while Marcy went on about the sunburn everyone got that day at the beach and the fun they all had playing softball. And if she had been at the beach with the others, she would have been miserable trying to play softball with boys.

  And then Jane began to question the success of her date. It seemed to her that she had done everything wrong and now it appeared that Stan was already part of Greg and Marcy’s crowd, the crowd that belonged and that made her feel mousy and ill at ease. Sitting beside Greg, Stan seemed older and more sure of himself. He was not the student body president type, but he was the kind of boy who would get elected to things—room representative or even president of the Hi-Y. And she was only a girl who wrote “My Experiences as a Babysitter” for Manuscript and didn’t get elected to anything.

  Stan glanced at his watch. “Well, we’d better go, Jane,” he said, “if I’m going to get you home by ten thirty.”

  “Oh, too bad,” said Marcy, her glance lingering on Stan as if his having to take Jane home spoiled her evening. “Bye now.”

  Stan hurried Jane home so fast there was no chance to talk until they were standing in the dim circle cast by the Purdys’ porch light. “Four seconds to spare,” said Stan, and smiled down at Jane.

  Jane looked at him uncertainly. “I had a wonderful time,” she said hesitantly, and opened the door. Please, Stan, she thought, I like you so much. Say I’ll see you again. “Well…good night, Stan.”

  “Good night, Jane,” he answered. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  Jane stepped inside the house and stood looking at Stan under the porch light. A halo of moths circled the bulb over his head. “Well, good night,” she repeated, careful to keep wistfulness and disappointment out of her voice. “I’ll be seeing you” could mean anything. Or nothing.

  “Good night, Jane,” he said again, and, turning, started down the steps.

  Jane closed the door behind her. Her date with Stan was over. She had had a good time in a miserable sort of way. She was proud of Stan and to be with him was a pleasure, but she had been so awkward about everything and he had been so assured, as if he were used to taking girls to the movies all the time. She wonder
ed if he had enjoyed the evening at all. That he would be seeing her told her nothing. It could mean Stan planned to ask her for another date, or it could mean he would say, “Hi,” when he happened to run into her on the street.

  Jane switched off the porch light and the lamp her mother had left on in the living room, and looked out the front window into the night. If only she didn’t feel so dreadfully young! She wished so much not to be fifteen—to be old enough to be casual about a boy and to order coffee instead of vanilla ice cream. Fifteen was such an uncomfortable age to be when she liked a boy like Stan, a boy who was trusted with his father’s car sometimes. Well, it was probably all over. Now that Stan had seen how young she was, he could not possibly be interested in another date—not when he was used to Marcy’s crowd.

  Something shadowy moving in the front yard caught Jane’s eye. Puzzled, she peered through the darkness until she was able to separate the moving thing from the shrubs and tree shadows. It was Stan. Stan was still in the front yard! He appeared to be struggling with something in the firethorn bushes on the other side of the steps. The streetlight, obscured by trees, was so dim that she could not see what he was doing. What can he be doing, she wondered, and gasped in disbelief when Stan moved out onto the lawn and she was able to see him more clearly. What she saw could not really be taking place. But there it was. Stan was wheeling a bicycle that he had freed from the thorny shrubs. Now he mounted it and pedaled down the street in the direction of Poppy Lane. Jane stood staring after him; when he turned the corner she could hear him whistling Love Me on Monday. A bicycle! Stan had ridden a bicycle over to her house.

  When Jane had partially recovered from her astonishment, she suddenly saw the whole evening in an entirely different light. A boy who rode a bicycle to a girl’s house and hid it in the shrubbery while he took her to the movies could not be so sure of himself, after all. Probably he had to be in early too and had bicycled over to save time, and had worried about the Purdys’ seeing him before he had the bicycle out of sight. And when he was out of sight he had begun to whistle Love Me on Monday, the song Nibley’s jukebox had played, so he was happy when he left her. Maybe he was even thinking about her.

  A lot of things about the evening came back to Jane—Stan’s nervous look when she had opened the front door, his crimson ears (such nice flat ears) when he stepped on the cat’s rubber mouse. Maybe the reasons she had trouble finding her left coat sleeve was that he was not used to helping a girl on with her coat. And as for Marcy’s crowd, Stan had not lived in Woodmont long enough to know who belonged and who did not. He was friendly to everyone. Well, thought Jane. Well! Things looked different now, and all because of a bicycle.

  “Jane?” Mrs. Purdy’s voice sounded anxious as she opened the hall door.

  “Yes, Mom?” answered Jane, turning from the window.

  “Did you have a good time, dear?”

  “Yes, Mom,” answered Jane. “A wonderful time.”

  Mrs. Purdy stepped into the living room in her bathrobe. “He seemed like a very nice boy. Did he ask you for another date?”

  “No,” answered Jane, and smiled out into the night in the direction of Poppy Lane. “No. Not yet.”

  Chapter 4

  All day Sunday Jane drifted around the house in a happy glow, humming Love Me on Monday and hovering near the telephone, because she was sure Stan would call. Monday she stopped humming and hated the telephone, because she was sure he would never, never call. Tuesday he called.

  “Hello, Jane? This is Stan,” he said, and to Jane he spoke the most welcome words in the world.

  “Hello, Stan,” she answered happily.

  “I have to go to work in a little while, but I wondered if I could stop by for a few minutes.”

  “I’m sorry, Stan,” Jane was forced to say. “I was just about to leave for a babysitting job.” But of course she could not let him get away, not after waiting two long days for his call. “Could you—could you come over some other time?” she asked.

  “Do you have to go far?” Stan asked.

  “About eight blocks.”

  “Why don’t I come now and run you over to your job?” he suggested. “I have the truck.”

  “Oh, that would be wonderful,” said Jane sincerely, because she was going to see him now instead of waiting for another call.

  “See you in about two minutes,” said Stan.

  “Mom, Stan is going to drive me to my babysitting job,” Jane informed her mother when she had hung up. Then, fearful that her mother might object to this short ride with a boy, she waited through an anxious moment of silence until her mother answered, “All right, dear.”

  Jane flew to her room, combed her hair, decided to change from her yellow dress into a dress Stan had never seen, decided against changing, because she might not have time, and wished her mother were wearing stockings. And all the while she wondered if Stan was coming to ask her for another date.

  In a few minutes the red Doggie Diner truck stopped in front of the Purdys’ and Stan bounded up the steps.

  “Hi, Stan,” Jane called through the open front door. “I’m ready. Bye, Mom.”

  “Hello, Stan,” said Mrs. Purdy pleasantly.

  Good for Mom, thought Jane; she isn’t behaving badly at all, even though she isn’t wearing stockings. Seated beside Stan in the Doggie Diner truck, Jane found that once more she felt shy, painfully shy. Stan seemed like a stranger, her mouth felt dry, and she couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  “Where to?” he wanted to know. “Sandra’s again?”

  “Not today, thank goodness.” Jane was able to laugh naturally. “This afternoon it’s Joey Dithridge.” She gave an address in Bayaire Estates, the no-down-payment-to-veterans side of town, and Stan started the truck. Jane felt a thrill of pleasure just to be riding beside him. Of course, the Doggie Diner truck, with the back filled with packages of horsemeat, wasn’t exactly the same as a convertible; but since Stan was the driver she did not care.

  “Is Joey as bad as Sandra?” Stan asked. “She’s a handful.”

  “No, Joey’s different,” said Jane. “He’s medium-hard to sit with, but not like Sandra. It’s just that he’s three years old and into everything, so he takes a lot of chasing. His mother doesn’t keep anything around that he can hurt, and that helps. She’s not like some mothers who can’t make their children mind but expect a sitter to be able to. I just have to keep pulling him out of drawers and off the backs of chairs and things. Sometimes I can get him interested in trying to fill a shoe box with worms he digs out of the yard with an old tablespoon, and that keeps him busy. Or I can always read him The Night Before Christmas.”

  Stan laughed. “In August?”

  “Oh, yes,” answered Jane. “It’s his favorite book.”

  Stan stopped the truck in front of the Dithridges’, one of the new houses in a long row on a straight street. Few of the houses had lawns, but most of them had new shrubs too small to hide the foundations, and every house had at least one tree, two or three feet high, planted in the space that would someday be lawn. On the sidewalk in front of nearly every house was a little wagon or tricycle. Farther on down the street a bulldozer roared and a cement truck rumbled.

  Stan turned to Jane and grinned at her. “I like that yellow dress on you,” he said. “You were wearing it that day when you were with Sandra, and you looked cute with your hair all mussed up.”

  Jane felt herself blush with pleasure. Stan had remembered what she was wearing the first time they met! This was most significant. Now he would surely ask her for a date.

  “Hi!” Little Joey Dithridge came running out of the house to meet Jane.

  “Thanks a lot, Stan,” she said, reluctantly opening the door of the truck. If they had been riding in a car, she would have waited for him to go around and open the door for her, but riding in a truck was different.

  “I’ll see you soon.” Stan started the truck. “Don’t let Joey wear you out.”

  “Good-bye,” cal
led Jane wistfully, as Joey joyfully tackled her around the knees. “Hi, Joey.”

  “I’m going to chop you up in a million pieces!” cried Joey.

  Jane laughed. “No, you won’t,” she answered, “because I’m bigger and I’ll chop you up in a billion pieces first.” This was the way she and Joey always greeted each other. Joey laughed delightedly while Jane absentmindedly pried him loose from her knees. So Stan liked her in the yellow dress! But he had not asked her for another date. He had said he would see her soon. Soon. Jane did not like the word. It could mean anything—an hour or a week or a month. Men were so exasperating.

  But Stan did see Jane soon. He saw her the very next day; he came by for a few minutes before he went to work and stayed long enough to drink a Coke. Friday evening he telephoned to ask her to go to the movies again on Saturday. When Jane informed her mother and father that she was going to the movies with Stan again, she noticed her father raise his eyebrows ever so slightly, and an expression (could it be disapproval?) crossed her mother’s face. They did not object, but Jane was left with a feeling of uneasiness. She hoped they would not start being stuffy and giving her lectures about seeing too much of Stan (“He’s a nice boy, but…” “Really, Jane, I think you are a little young…”) and all that sort of thing—not when everything was going so beautifully. Oh, please, please don’t spoil it all, thought Jane, resolving not to mention Stan so much, even though lately it seemed as if his name was always on the tip of her tongue.

  “By the way, Jane,” said Mr. Purdy jovially, “I noticed a mysterious bicycle in the shrubbery that night you and Stan went to the movies. I wonder whose it was.”

  “Pop, please don’t tease.”

  “Tease? Who’s teasing?” Mr. Purdy asked.

  “Pop, promise you won’t ever mention the bicycle to Stan,” Jane begged. “I’m sure he doesn’t want me to know he rode it over here.”