Free The Luckiest Girl by Beverly Cleary Page A

there wasn’t any water in the riverbed. A river with no water—I had never seen anything like that before.”
    â€œDon’t worry,” said Hartley. “There will be water this winter.”
    â€œIt seems hard to believe,” said Shelley. “At first all I could think was that I had to spend the winter in this place. I had heard so much about California I guess I expected to step across the border into the tropics.” Shelley munched a doughnut hole thoughtfully before she said, “And you know, now that I’m used to it, it really is beautiful. I love it. Oranges and olives really growing on trees, and down the street from our house there is a tree with pomegranates growing on it. Real pomegranates!”
    â€œYou make them sound like something special,” said Hartley. “I’ve seen pomegranates around here ever since we came to California when I was about three years old, and I never thought much about them.”
    â€œThey remind me of a story I used to read when I was a little girl,” said Shelley, thinking that Hartley had a nice face. Not as nice as Philip’s, with his sunburned nose, but nice in a differentway. Thinner, more sensitive, the kind of face that in the movies belonged to the man who didn’t get the girl but you sort of wished he had.
    â€œWhat was the story?” asked Hartley.
    â€œI used to like fairy tales,” said Shelley, “and this was a myth about Persephone, who was snatched away by Pluto to the lower world, and while she was there she ate six pomegranate seeds and that is why we have six months of summer and six months of winter.”
    Hartley looked at her so steadily that Shelley was embarrassed. How silly to be sitting here talking about fairy tales. She did not know what had come over her. She would never have thought of telling Jack such a thing. They were both silent a moment, and out of habit Shelley opened her mouth to say something. Then she closed it and was silent.
    â€œYou started to say something,” Hartley reminded her.
    Shelley looked down at the table. “Not really.”
    â€œYes, you did,” Hartley insisted.
    Shelley laughed nervously. “I don’t really know what I was going to say. Just anything, I guess. A boy I—I used to know always said ‘Penny for your thoughts’ when there was a silence and I guess Ifell into the habit of saying anything that popped into my mind to keep him from saying it.”
    â€œDidn’t you like the boy?” Hartley asked curiously.
    For the first time since she had left home, Shelley stopped to think about Jack. She found that being a thousand miles away gave her a new perspective. “Yes,” she said thoughtfully, “I liked him. He was really an awfully nice fellow, but you know how it is. You go out with a boy three or four times and everybody assumes you are going steady. I guess we just ran out of things to talk about.” As she spoke Shelley knew that although she was tired of Jack, she was also grateful to him. He had taken her to school dances and the movies and different places to eat so that she had learned how a girl should act and could sit here with Hartley without worrying about her behavior.
    Shelley stirred her milk shake with her straw. She had not meant to confide in Hartley but, for a boy, she found him surprisingly easy to talk to. And the thought crossed her mind that if he had been Philip she would have been more cautious in expressing disapproval of going steady. It was funny how a girl would behave one way with one boy and an entirely different way with another boy.
    Feeling that she had let the conversation become too personal, Shelley said, “I like school, too, and next semester I get to take journalism. I’ve wanted to take journalism ever since I entered high school.”
    â€œI’m going to take it too,” said Hartley. “I want to go to Stanford and it would help the