Free Jean and Johnny by Beverly Cleary

least worn sides. She scrubbed the soiled spot on the back of her father’s favorite chair with ammonia and water and then shoved the chair over a thin spot in the carpet. Her father should not object just this once, since he was going to spend most of the evening in the breakfast nook anyway. She dusted with unusual thoroughness, remembering to wipe off the windowsills and the rungs of the dining-room chairs. Dustcloth in hand, she paused to look critically around the room. It was comfortable, even if it was shabby, but it needed something to brighten it, something to divert the eye—Johnny’s eye—from the walls in need of a fresh coat of paint. She wished she could think of a way to hide the crack in the plaster over the door into the hall.
    Jean went to the bathroom at the rear of the house and looked out into the yard in hope of seeing a few flowers that she could cut. The day was even more forbidding than she had realized. The small lawn was sodden, and the few geraniums along the fence were beaten down as if they would never have the courage to rise again. Juncos had stripped the berries from the cotoneaster in thecorner of the yard, so there was no hope of creating an interesting arrangement from a few of its branches. Then Jean remembered her mother’s African violet on the kitchen windowsill. Its fuzzy green leaves and purple blossoms would make a spot of life and color.
    Jean carried the African violet into the living room, where she tried it in front of the mirror over the mantelpiece, on the coffee table, on a lamp table, and finally back on the mantelpiece, where it stayed because, reflected in the mirror, it was almost as good as having two plants.
    â€œOh, Johnny, oh, Johnny, dum de de dum,” Jean hummed, as she turned the plant so the most blossoms would show. Probably her mother was right about the Chinese checker set, even though Johnny might think it terribly old-fashioned of them to keep the game around. If she found conversation difficult—not that she would with a boy like Johnny, but if she did—she could casually make the first move, smile at Johnny, and say, “Your turn. Isn’t it a quaint old game. My father simply adores it and insists we keep a set in the living room all the time.” Or something like that. The more Jean thought about it, the more certain she became that this was exactly what she wouldhave to do, except that she would have to omit the line about her father’s adoring Chinese checkers. Conversation with her whole family within earshot might be difficult. She would like to spend the evening talking to Johnny, getting to know him better. She particularly wanted to find out why he had asked her to dance that evening in December, but this sort of conversation would be impossible, unless her father happened to watch a good noisy Western on television and they could talk under cover of gunfire from the breakfast nook.
    Jean shoved Dandy, who appeared restless, out the back door into the storm and let him in again a few minutes later. Then as she dragged the dusty checker box out of a pile of cartons in the garage, she found another worry nagging at her. Because her father had to get up at five o’clock in the morning on workdays in order to eat breakfast and be at the post office by six, he was inclined to yawn, sometimes rather noisily, by nine thirty in the evening. Wouldn’t it be dreadful if he started yawning from the breakfast nook while she and Johnny were talking? She was positive that Johnny’s father, whom she pictured as a tweedy commuter with a briefcase, never yawned.
    When Sue had not come back from the library by lunchtime, Jean prepared herself a peanut-butter sandwich, poured herself a glass of milk from a carton, and ate her chilly lunch standing beside the floor furnace with her skirt ballooned out by the hot air.
    After lunch she put on her sneakers and raincoat to go to the market to buy the chocolate