Debutante Hill (3 page)

“Oh, more exciting than that!” Joan Wilson exclaimed. “I'd keep on making you guess, but the bell will ring soon and then we won't have time left to hash it all over. We're going to make our debuts!”

“Our debuts!” Lynn's eyes opened in amazement. “What on earth—”

“We knew you'd be surprised!” Everyone began to talk at once. “We just learned it today. Mrs. Peterson is behind it of course, and it's going to be the most fabulous thing . . . you can't imagine . . . parties every weekend, and a whole week of them during Christmas vacation ... a huge Presentation Ball in the spring...”

“Slowly!” Nancy fairly shouted above the excitement “Please, please, one at a time! Lynn and I want to digest this thing. Suppose just one person tells it.”

“Well, I will,” Holly Taylor said quickly, “because I heard about it first Mrs. Peterson was talking to Mother on the phone, and she's got the whole thing organized already. It's the first time there have ever been debutantes in Rivertown! Twenty girls have been selected, invitations
were mailed last night, and they are going to start things off by being the town's very first debs. All their friends and families will have parties for them during the year, and at Christmas there will be a whole week of big dances, just for them and their escorts. And in the spring, there will be a great ball, with everyone chipping in toward a big name orchestra. Everyone will be presented—” She ran out of breath. “It will be just fabulous,” she ended.

“Dances all Christmas vacation!” Nancy echoed happily. “Why, then Ernie will be home for them. How super!” She turned eagerly to Lynn. “Paul will be home, too!”

“Yes,” Lynn said, her own excitement beginning to rise. “It does sound marvelous. But how do you know which girls were selected? Who is doing the selecting?”

“Mrs. Peterson, I suppose,” Joan Wilson answered. “Since she's the one behind it all. But she—well, it sounds awful to say it this way, but there are really just a certain group of girls she
can
select. What she wants is to start a debutante tradition, a sort of ‘entrance-into-society' thing, the way they have in Boston and Atlanta and places like that. So she's got to choose girls from the Hill.”

Lynn nodded, accepting the fact without question.

“I suppose so. Twenty. Well, that takes in all of us, I guess and a few others besides.”

“Of course, Brenda Peterson will be one,” Nancy said.

They were all silent a moment. Then Holly said, “Well, of course. Mrs. Peterson wouldn't be doing it at all, if it weren't for Brenda.”

Somewhere a bell rang. The sound filled the air, and instantly the steps became alive with people. The girls scrambled to their feet, momentarily deserting the subject of the debuts.

“Let's try to get seats beside each other in home room this year,” Nancy said, catching Lynn's arm.

The crowd swept them forward, through the open doors into the huge central hallway. The smell of the high school rose up around them—books and chalk and desks and people and, somehow, the faint odor of chewing gum. It was a familiar smell, and to Lynn it brought back three years of memories.

When I walked down this hall the last time, she thought nostalgically, Paul was walking beside me, carrying my books, and we were both laughing because school was out and we had the whole long summer in front of us. And now summer is already over, and Paul is at college, and I'm back again without him.

Suddenly, from close behind her, there came a whistle, clear and intimate, and a low voice said, “Well, Miss Chambers! A good-looking gal, but snooty as ever!”

Lynn whirled to find herself looking into the mocking eyes of a dark-haired boy with a thin face and a sarcastic curl to the comer of his mouth.

With an angry toss of her head, she turned away again without bothering to speak.

The boy laughed, a hard little laugh, and swung off down the hall.

“Who on earth—” Nancy began, trying to see who had spoken.

“Oh, it's just that horrid Dirk Masters,” Lynn told her disdainfully. “If he isn't the crudest, coarsest thing I've ever seen! Imagine one of the boys from the Hill saying something like that!”

“You were right not to answer him,” Nancy said. “I hear he got in some trouble with the police this summer, he and
some of the tough bunch of older fellows he goes around with. It's too bad, because Anne is a nice girl.”

“Who, his sister?” Lynn looked surprised. “How do you come to know Anne Masters?”

“She had a locker near mine last year,” Nancy explained. “I didn't really know her, but we did say ‘hello' to each other every day, and she seemed like a sweet little thing, not at all like Dirk. She was in my algebra class, too, and made good grades. It's funny, because I hear Dirk's always flunking everything.”

“I guess so,” Lynn said, “if he's still in high school. He must be eighteen at least.”

Another bell rang.

“Come on,” Lynn urged, giving her friend's arm an impatient little tug, “let's not be late to home room our very first day.”

Nancy fell into step beside her.

“You know,” she confided, “I'm glad to be back. I thought I would be just miserable, coming back to high school without Ernie. We've been going together so long, I didn't see how I'd ever feel right coming back without him. But I do. I mean, I miss him, but still I feel as though the year is going to be fun.”

“Yes,” Lynn agreed, “and being debutantes will be the saving thing! Isn't it wonderful they thought it up this year? Just think, if they had waited until one year later, we would have missed it, because we'll be away at college then.”

And somehow, even without Paul to share it with her, senior year rose up before Lynn, interesting and different and exciting.

When Lynn got home from school that afternoon, Dodie was already there, curled up on the porch steps, eating an apple.

Lynn looked at her with surprise.

“What are you doing, just sitting there? Don't tell me Dorothy Eloise Chambers has taken to daydreaming!”

Dodie made a quick face at the sound of her hated name.

“Of course not, silly; I'll leave that to the love-struck members of the family. I'm waiting for Janie. She's been to Nassau during the summer, and her parents bought her a whole collection of records there. She's bringing them over this afternoon.” She raised her eyes and gave her sister a penetrating look. “I know what you're going to ask now. ‘Is there any mail?'”

Lynn fought down her irritation. Even on days when everything was going perfectly, Dodie had the power to drive her practically insane.

“Well, is there any?”

“Yes,” Dodie answered, leaning back on the step and taking another bite of apple. “You got two epistles—one from darling Paul and one that looks like your deb invitation. At least, it's in a shiny white envelope with the Peterson address on the back.”

Lynn paused on her way into the house.

“How did you know about the debutante business? It's just being started.”

“Maybe so,” said Dodie, finishing her apple with one huge bite and tossing the core over the porch railing, “but it's all over school already. They say almost everybody on the Hill is going to ‘come out.' Some of the boys are even calling it Debutante Hill and saying you should hang lanterns up and down and have the Presentation Ball right in the middle of the Hill Road.”

She stood up quickly, with a sudden, catlike motion. Dodie was not built like the other two Chambers children. Whereas Ernie and Lynn were both tall and slender, with a graceful quality about them, Dodie was small and supple and animated. On first glance, she did not seem as pretty as Lynn, for there was a sharpness to her that her sister did not have, but when she was with people she liked and wanted to have like her, she had a charm that was all her own. Almost everyone liked Lynn. Fewer people liked Dodie, but the ones who did thought she was absolutely wonderful.

“Where is the mail?” Lynn asked now.

“Oh, around some place,” Dodie replied helpfully. She glanced down the street and caught sight of Janie. “Hi there! My, what a pile of records! You must have bought out Nassau.”

Lynn sighed and turned to go into the house.

Everyone always said, “How nice it must be for you to have a sister just a year younger; somebody to share everything with!”

Well, it would be nice, Lynn thought, if only that were
the way it was. But it isn't—not with Dodie. We have hardly anything in common.

Pausing in the hall, she caught sight of a little pile of mail on the table. Thumbing through it, she quickly located the two letters that were addressed to her.

She opened the one from Paul first. It was the first letter she had ever received from him, and she gazed half-shyly at the hasty, boyish scrawl which would be all that would represent Paul to her until he returned at Christmas time. It was funny to know and care for someone as much as she did for Paul, and yet have his handwriting such an unfamiliar thing. It was like seeing a part of him she had never seen before, meeting and getting to know him in a different way.

After reading the first paragraph, she sighed in relief, for, strange as the handwriting seemed to her, the letter was Paul all over.

Lynn smiled and turned over the page. It was nice that Paul wrote such a good letter. It made him seem closer somehow. She read with interest his account of the first days of classes, of the beanies the freshmen had to wear, of the piles of books which were now residing on the shelf beside his bed.

The letter ended:

After the heavier envelope, the small white one beside it felt as though it could not contain a thing. It did, however. As Dodie had anticipated, it was the exciting invitation. Lynn Chambers was being officially invited to participate, as a Rivertown debutante, in the Presentation Ball in the spring and in all the parties and festivities leading up to it during the year.

It will be fun, Lynn thought happily, sliding the card back into the envelope and dropping it into her skirt pocket. She felt like showing it to someone, but her father was at his office and her mother did not seem to be around, either. Wandering into the kitchen, Lynn found out from Rosalie, who was busily peeling carrots for dinner, that Mrs. Chambers was at a Hospital Auxiliary meeting.

Dodie was in her room with Janie, playing records. Lynn could hear them laughing together as she passed the door, but there was no sense of breaking in to show the invitation to Dodie. She knew all about it already.

Stopping at the second-floor telephone, Lynn called Nancy. “Hi! Did your invitation come?”

“Sure did! Impressive, aren't they! And I got a letter from Ernie, too.”

“Swell! My family will be burned up when they hear that. They haven't even had a postcard from him.”

The two girls chatted for about twenty minutes and then Nancy rang off because she wanted to wash her hair before dinner. Lynn replaced the receiver and wandered aimlessly into her bedroom. She decided to begin a letter to Paul.

She had nearly finished it when Rosalie announced that dinner was ready.

There were candles on the dinner table. It was one of the few things that Mrs. Chambers insisted upon, and, although her father scoffed at it, Lynn thought it a lovely custom. It gave the dining room warmth and grace and a kind of old-time charm. Beneath his laughing protests, she knew her father liked it, too.

The rest of the family was already at the table when Lynn slid into her seat. Her mother turned to her with a smile.

“Well, how was the first day of school? How does it feel to be a senior?”

“Not too different from being a junior,” Lynn admitted. “One thing is going to be different, though. Your daughter is not only a senior this year; she is going to be a debutante.”

“A debutante!” Her father looked up at the words. “I haven't heard anything about this.”

“No,” Lynn said, laughing at the surprise on his face, “and I hadn't either until today. Mrs. Peterson is organizing it. They told me about it at school, and then the invitation came this afternoon.” She pulled the small white envelope from her pocket and slid it across the table, then turned to help herself from the plateful of rolls Rosalie was serving. “Sounds like it's going to be a lot of fun. Nancy will be one, too.”

Her father read the invitation and handed it, wordlessly, to her mother.

Mrs. Chambers read it and laid it aside, saying, “This is a brand new thing, isn't it? I don't think I've ever heard of a debutante in Rivertown before.”

“It sounds like something,” Dr. Chambers growled, “that that foolish Peterson woman would come up with.”