A Girl from Yamhill by Beverly Cleary

into our home. Evenings, when my father came home from work, Mother’s gentle greeting was always “Well, how did it go today?”
    â€œAll right.” My father said little about his days at work, but then, he always was a quiet man. He could not have enjoyed standing eight hours on a marble floor, but he did not complain in front of me.
    After supper, Mother still read aloud to my father and me. At first she read travel books and Greek or Norse myths, but more and more she searched for humorous stories, usually in The Saturday Evening Post , which we bought for a nickel once a week from a neighborhood boy.
    When I went to bed, I overheard worried, serious conversations. No matter how hard I tried, I could not hear what my parents were talking about. Finally Mother, desperate for a confidant, said to me in a voice filled with anguish, “Oh, I do pray your father won’t decide to go back to the farm. For me, those years were years of slavery.”
    This was a complete surprise. Going back to the farm had never entered my mind. I had forgotten we still owned it. My father never mentioned in front of me his wish to return, for in those days parents did not discuss adult problems in front of children.
    Tensions tightened. My father began to fly into rages over trivialities. A gentle man, he now terrified me by swearing, going into the bedroom, and slamming the door. I suffered over these outbreaks because I was afraid of what he might do when he came out. However, he always emerged quiet and in control of himself. Each time, I hoped such an outburst would be his last. I did not connect them with his dislike of the bank’s marble floor or his longing to work outdoors once again.

Love and the Spelling Bee
    Except for having mumps, I remember very little about the first half of fifth grade. I do recall that every day after lunch, we pulled out our composition books, and the teacher, a tense, unhappy woman, sat at her desk dictating numbers in sequence. We translated them into Roman numerals and wrote them down in columns. CLXXXIV, CLXXXV, CLXXXVI, CLXXXVII, CLXXXVIII, CLXIX . We had to think and write fast to keep up.
    â€œCan’t you slow down?” we objected. Our teacher ignored us. On and on she droned, her thoughts elsewhere.
    Bored, lulled into drowsiness by her monotonous voice, most of us fell behind, skipped, and dropped out, only to begin again after lunch thenext day. “Beverly comes home from school exhausted,” Mother told the neighbors.
    Miss Sampson, in 5B, was another teacher who wore navy blue and chalk dust and seemed old. She was kind but uninteresting. She gave us one homework assignment, the construction of a paper box the correct size to hold one gallon. Mine was wrong.
    Johnny, the boy from Gregory Heights, now sat across the aisle from me. The class had decided, and I did not discourage them, that Johnny and I were in love.
    One day Miss Sampson left the classroom for a few minutes. “Kiss her,” someone whispered to Johnny. “Go ahead and kiss her!” The whole class began to hiss with insistence.
    I was startled. Being in love was pleasant, but actually—kissing? What would Mother say if she heard about it? Johnny, interested, agreeable, daring, gave me a challenging look.
    Accepting Johnny’s silent dare, I extended the back of my right hand. Johnny took my fingers in his, as if he were a nobleman in a pirate movie, and kissed my hand, which I then quickly withdrew.
    Miss Sampson returned, and the class immediately reassembled itself and tried to pretend it had been working on fractions the whole time. Isat blushing. A boy had kissed my hand! To this day, I have difficulty with fractions.
    One morning I found in my desk a salmon-colored envelope. Inside was a matching sheet of paper with a downhill sentence printed in pencil: “I love you Bevererly.” It was signed by Johnny. Happy that Johnny had finally, after three years, admitted