Fifteen by Beverly Cleary Page A

himself. There were some boys at Woodmont High who would look down ona 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.
    â€œWell, 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.
    â€œOh, 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.
    â€œHi, Jane,” said Greg. “Mind if we join you? There aren’t any empty booths.”
    â€œSure. 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 allwrong. 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.
    â€œJust 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.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œExcept 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.”
    â€œSuch 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 withStan—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