Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe
Maud Hart Lovelace
Illustrated by Vera Neville
For
BICK, TESS, MIDGE, MARION, EL,
CONNIE, MIL, PAT, and RUTH
“Haste thee nymph, and bring with thee Jest and Youthful Jollity…”
—JOHN MILTON
Contents
Foreword
Epigraph
Betsy Was a Junior
1. Taking Stock
2. Making Plans
3. Introducing the Crowd
4. Aft Agley
5. The Party for Phyllis
6. Julia Leaves for the U
7. Howdy, Cy!
8. Those Things Called Sororities
9. Okto Delta
10. The Old Pill
11. “Hence, Loathed Melancholy!”
12. Agley-er and Agley-er
13. The Curling Iron
14. The Strong Silent Type
15. O Tempora! O Mores!
16. Margaret’s Party
17. A Bolt from the Blue
18. Two More Bolts from the Blue
19. Still Another Bolt from the Blue
20. “Sic Transit Gloria….”
21. The Consequences of Folly
22. The Junior-Senior Banquet
23. Tar
24. Growing Up
About the Author
Credit
Other Books by in The Betsy-Tacy Books
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
I’m embarrassed to admit that, unlike many of her most ardent fans, I didn’t meet Miss Betsy Warrington Ray until I was an adult…in my thirties!
I was introduced to her by my children’s book editor at HarperCollins, Abby McAden, when I first started writing the Princess Diaries series. Abby (who, in addition to her work as an editor, also volunteered part-time as a children’s librarian) felt the Betsy-Tacy books served as a superb example of a series that followed its heroine from occasionally flighty girlhood to mature young womanhood in a truly satisfying progressive arc.
And as can be observed by Betsy’s legions of fans, who have kept the books about her in print for many decades, thousands of others have felt the same…and as soon as I read them, I became as devoted as any of them.
How could a series of novels in which the heroine has neither red hair, a tiara, magical powers, a boyfriend who is a vampire, or a cell phone be so bewitching? Well, Betsy won my heart not just because of the humor, vivacity, and realistic emotion with which her creator, Maud Hart Lovelace, imbued her, but also because of her believable struggles to find her voice as an author…not to mention true love (both of which echoed my own struggles not just at Betsy’s age but through my twenties and even beyond).
How many of us can relate not only to Betsy’s romantic (and authorial) travails but also to her friends—like Tacy, refusing to give up her serviceable coronet of braids just because “puffs” are popular, and pint-sized Tib, always up for a party?
And how many of us have longed for a family like the Rays (those of us who weren’t lucky enough to have such unconditionally doting parents, loving sisters, and a loyal housekeeper like Anna, declaring us “puny” no matter what kind of outlandish hat we’re wearing)?
Slipping into a Betsy book is like slipping into a favorite pair of well-worn slippers. It’s always a pleasure to live in Betsy’s world for a little while, to experience her simple joys as well as her (thankfully short-lived) sorrows.
And Maud Hart Lovelace makes it easy for us to do so. When, at the beginning of each “high school book,” Betsy reviews her old journals to remind herself of the triumphs (but more often the tribulations) of the year before, it’s just like any of us glancing back at our old diaries:
Her freshman year, and her joy in finding a crowd, her discovery about her writing, and her yearning for Tony.
“I’ve never been as in love with anyone as I was with Tony when I was fourteen,” Betsy sighs to herself in Betsy and Joe, upon recalling ninth grade. Who can’t identify with this? I know I still Google my freshman crush. And he never once came over to my house for onion sandwiches.
It is, of course, just before her freshman year (Heaven to Betsy) that Betsy first meets Joe Willard—he of the blond pompadour and recklessly protruding lower lip—at Butternut Center, when he waits on her at Willard’s Emporium while she’s buying gifts for her family (because the Rays always take presents home when they’ve been away on a visit).
Her life will never be the same, but Betsy doesn’t know this, of course.
Her sophomore year, her trip to Milwaukee to visit Tib, the attempt to be Dramatic and Mysterious in order to captivate Phil Brandish, Phyllis’ twin.
“After I got him, I didn’t want him,” Betsy morosely recalls.
Of course not. After all, Phil wanted to hold hands, and Betsy, we know, just wasn’t ready to take that enormous step (as she famously informs the befuddled Phil in Betsy in Spite of Herself)—especially when she realizes her heart truly belongs to Joe Willard, upon whom Betsy sets her sights her junior year, “when she had been all wound up in sororities.”
But it was only “a small series of misunderstandings,” Betsy tells herself, that kept her and Joe apart—not, as we all know, the fact that Betsy didn’t, at that time, truly yet know herself. Surely she and Joe would end up together, as they were always meant to be.
Because in Betsy Was a Junior, just like every year, Betsy knows everything’s going to be different! This time, Betsy’s going to be the perfect friend and daughter, staying home and taking the place of her beloved older sister, Julia, who’s leaving for her first year of college at the “U” to study music. Betsy’s going to learn to play the piano, be elected a class officer, head up a committee for the junior-senior banquet, win the Essay Contest (as she attempts to do, every year)…and, of course, “go with Joe Willard.”
It wouldn’t be a Maud Hart Lovelace book if anything went according to Betsy’s plans. But Betsy crashes and burns so spectacularly in Betsy Was a Junior that the novel quickly became one of my favorites of all time. Betsy tells herself so many times that she’s going to buckle down and “be serious.” She confesses to looking forward to a chance to finally getting to work “almost with longing.” (This is something I say to myself ten times a day, only to be distracted not by a fudge party, like Betsy, but by a new episode of Law & Order. Speaking of which, mmmm, fudge.)
Later, Betsy’s well-meaning decision to start a sorority at Deep Valley High School—the Okto Deltas, or Eight Devils—hampers her progress with her writing even more. Though the “progressive dinners,” dances, sleigh rides, and theatricals the Oktos host boost Betsy’s popularity immensely, especially with boys, her writing isn’t the only thing that falls to the wayside, with disastrous but typically Betsy-esque results.
She had prided herself on being a popular girl. But she had never been less popular. Of course, the “popularity” with boys had been nice….
Friendships, Betsy’s grades, and even poor sister Margaret’s eyelashes—but worst of all, the competition against Joe Willard for the cup in the Essay Contest, which Betsy prizes more than anything—are all jeopardized, until Betsy finally realizes:
Sisterhoods!…You couldn’t make sisterhoods with rules and elections. If they meant anything, they had to grow naturally…. You ought not to go through life, even a small section of life like high school or college, with your friendships fenced in by snobbish artificial barriers.
“It would be like living in a pasture when you could have the whole world to roam in,” Betsy thought. “I don’t believe so
rorities would appeal very long to anyone with much sense of adventure.”
(Though of course we know from Elle Woods of Legally Blonde that sororities can’t be all bad.)
It’s the whole world that Betsy’s parents are determined to give to Betsy and her sisters, in spite of the fact that Mr. Ray voices a hope that his eldest daughter, Julia, will “meet someone she’ll want to marry” after college and “settle down and use her voice for lullabies” instead of pursuing a career in the opera.
Don’t worry: It’s not that Mr. Ray has old-fashioned ideas on what a woman’s place is. As Anna Quindlen wrote in her excellent 1993 speech to the Betsy-Tacy Society: “While the Rays have three daughters, early on two of them are already committed to having careers outside the home, Julia as an opera singer, Betsy as a writer. Betsy’s parents are totally committed to this idea for them both…arguing vociferously that Betsy’s work is as good as any that appears in popular magazines.”
And “not once, in any book, does any individual, male or female, suggest to Betsy that she cannot, as she hopes to do, become a writer.” It’s just that “music is a very hard career,” Mr. Ray worries, and Julia is “too young to make such an important decision.” When events transpire in Betsy Was a Junior to make all of Julia’s dreams a reality, however, Mr. Ray soon finds out where her true priorities lie and is satisfied about Julia’s aspirations for her future. Because the Rays are always ready to support their daughters one hundred percent, as long as they aren’t trying deceive anyone…most especially themselves.
But the art of self-deception is one at which Betsy Ray excels, one that again and again almost ends up costing her not only her career dreams—such as when “boys and parties” keep her from doing any “serious writing” in Betsy Was a Junior (and what aspiring writer of any age does not find this lament familiar?)—but also the love of her life, as when Betsy attempts to balance two beaus, Tony Markham and Joe Willard, in Betsy and Joe.
In fact, it isn’t until Betsy buckles down in Betsy and Joe, actually managing to finish and send out her stories about “New York debutantes” (all of which are rejected—not that this bothers Betsy: she merely writes more and sends them out again, a perfect lesson for any aspiring writers out there…though in real life, Maud Hart Lovelace sold her first short story at age eighteen, for ten dollars, to the Los Angeles Times), stop using Magic Wavers in her hair, and be honest with herself and with Tony Markham, that she’s able to achieve two of her longest held and most elusive goals, both of which involve Joe Willard.
It takes a trip back to Butternut Center and Willard’s Emporium to seal the deal, however.
His blue eyes, under those heavy brows, were boring into her. His lower lip looked defiant, and so did the swinging walk with which he came toward her. She blushed.
“What are you doing here?” Joe asked. His tone was almost rough.
“Don’t act as though you were going to put me out,” she said. “I’m buying presents to take home to my family.”
“Oh.” He seemed nonplused.
“The Rays always take presents home when they’ve been away on a visit.”
And so, with the expertise of a true artistic genius, Maud Hart Lovelace brings us neatly back to where we began with Betsy and Joe: exactly where the two of them met, so they could put aside their many misunderstandings and start over.
Because both of them have grown in the four years since the “high school books” began. They aren’t awkward fourteen year olds anymore but adults. Things have changed…as they rightfully should have in a series that begins when the heroine is five years old and follows her from kindergarten to high school graduation. Suddenly Betsy Ray, senior, who didn’t believe in holding hands her sophomore year, is rethinking some of her long held beliefs.
Then he kissed her. Betsy didn’t believe in letting boys kiss you. She thought it was silly to be letting first this boy and then that one kiss you, when it didn’t mean a thing. But it was wonderful when Joe Willard kiss her. And it did mean a thing.
Have truer words ever been written in any book? Because it most certainly would be silly to let first this boy and then that one kiss you, when it doesn’t mean a thing (although it could be argued that you couldn’t know it wouldn’t mean a thing unless you tried it first with a variety of boys, just to be sure).
But when you are old enough—and when it is the right person—it most certainly does mean a thing, as Betsy finds out, the spring of her senior year.
By setting aside pretence (and Magic Wavers…though of course it is always nice to have curls now and again), and being fully herself, Betsy becomes at last who she’s truly always wanted to be: a writer, the name on the calling cards she receives as an eighteenth birthday gift from her mother, the kind of heroine any author would be honored to have created, whether her books are about a charming turn-of-the-century Minnesotan aspiring authoress, or a reluctant princess:
Miss Betsy Warrington Ray.
—MEG CABOT, 2009
Betsy Was a Junior
1
Taking Stock
BETSY RAY SAT IN a rowboat which was anchored in Babcock’s Bay, two watery miles opposite Murmuring Lake Inn, where the Ray family had been spending the summer. The oars were folded across the boat and on the seat beside her lay a fat notebook which she used as a journal and several sharply pointed pencils. She sat with her arms bound about her knees, staring at a gauzy-winged dragon fly which had come to rest on the prow of the boat. Her expression was serious, not to say grim. She was taking stock.
Betsy was fond of this bay. It was strewn thickly with water lilies. Their flat green pads and creamy, richly scented blossoms floated on the water all around her. The shore was lined with trees—willows, cottonwoods, box elders. In other parts of the lake rows of summer cottages or low-lying farms came to the water’s edge. This cove was remote; moored here, you might have thought that you were in a wilderness except for the fact that a green wooded point, jutting into the lake to the east, showed the rooftop of the Inn.
When Betsy wished to achieve the illusion of a wilderness she did not look in that direction.
Murmuring Lake Inn was a highly social place. Crowds of young people followed a careless routine—walks, boat rides, and leisurely games of croquet; bathing every afternoon at four. Mothers rocked, read and embroidered on the shady porches and vacationing fathers fished. Mr. Ray drove out from his shoe store in nearby Deep Valley every night, and in the evening there were launch rides and informal hops in the big parlor.
Betsy had had a gay summer. She was sorry it was ending tomorrow. She wondered now, staring at the dragon fly, and beyond him across the glassy lake, whether it had been too gay, but decided that it hadn’t been.
“It’s been wonderful,” she thought. “It’s just the sort of summer you ought to have at sixteen.”
Betsy was sixteen and next month she would begin her third year of high school. She was exactly halfway through, which made this an excellent time for taking stock.
“I wish I was just beginning and had it all ahead of me,” she said with a long romantic sigh. But she said it because she thought it was the proper thing to say. She was really pleased to be an upper classman.
She had certainly had fun. She belonged to a flexible Crowd of a dozen or so boys and girls who stirred up fun as briskly as the cook at the Inn stirred up hot cakes for breakfast. She had really been too frivolous, Betsy decided. Yet the two years had had their perplexities, too, their worries, and even their heartaches.
She had had heartaches over boys, over wanting to be popular. The Ray house, with its three daughters, was always full of boys but boys liked Betsy usually in a friendly sort of way. She had longed to be a siren like her older sister, Julia.
In particular, during her freshman year, she had had a heartache over Tony. Although a classmate, he was slightly older, more sophisticated than the rest. He had a bush of curly black hair, bold laughing eyes, a lazy drawling voice. Betsy had thought she
was in love with him, but he had only liked her in a maddening, brotherly way. By the end of the year, however, her infatuation had ebbed away. She liked Tony still, almost better than any boy she knew, but now her feeling was as sisterly as his was brotherly.
“That’s life for you,” Betsy said aloud, and appropriately, the dragon fly flew away.
In her freshman year, too, she had had a heartache over losing the Essay Contest. Every year the two societies into which the school was divided competed for a cup in essay writing. Both years Betsy had been chosen to represent her class and both years she had lost to Joe Willard. He was an orphan who was working his way through school. Betsy liked him very much but she didn’t like losing the Essay Contest.
She had minded it most the first year, for then she had felt guilty. She had not prepared for the Contest properly, she had not read the material she was supposed to have read. One of the great lessons she had learned in high school had come after that defeat. She had learned that her gift for writing was important to her and that she must never neglect it.
“I haven’t really neglected it since,” she thought. “I’ve kept up my journal, I’m writing a novel, I worked hard on my English assignments last year and I studied for the Essay Contest. I lost it again but this time it wasn’t through any fault of mine.”
She had not done her best because, by an ironical chance, the Contest had coincided with a quarrel she had had with Phil Brandish.
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