Teen-Age Diary Secrets #6

A young woman learns that managing her romantic popularity comes with a price when her strategy of flirting without commitment catches up with her—each boy she dates eventually discovers she's playing the same game with them all. As Joyce navigates between Jackie, Walt, and the seemingly ideal Kent Barnes, she realizes that her "kiss and run" approach to keeping her social standing may cost her something far more valuable than a full dance card. Written with the diary-entry candor that made Teen-Age Diary Secrets essential reading for 1949 readers, this story captures the messy real stakes of teenage romance and reputation.

A young woman named Lucy sets her heart on an elegant formal for the prom—one she can't afford until she strikes a deal with her father to work at his drugstore to earn the money herself. But as the weeks of long shifts pile up, Lucy finds herself neglecting the boy she loves, and a rival's attention begins to complicate everything when an accident threatens the dress she worked so hard to obtain.

Dusty Dawn dreams of climbing the advertising ladder at Blinton, Lowie, but her boyfriend Hank keeps pulling her attention away—and when a genuine French duke arrives in town, she decides to make him jealous by chasing aristocratic romance instead. As Dusty reinvents herself with Continental manners and French flair, she discovers that impressing a distant duke might cost her something far more valuable.

When Ellen moves to a new town and meets the charming Dick Simmons, she's so eager to hold onto him that she claims to love hunting—a sport she's never tried in her life. Her small lie snowballs into a hunting trip with Dick's family, where she'll have to keep up the deception or lose everything she's worked to build.

A college freshman discovers that her initial shyness masks a troubling pattern: as she gains confidence in the dating world, she finds herself making compromises to stay popular, ultimately jeopardizing a genuine connection with a sweet, romantic boy named Don. When jealous classmates and her own insecurity begin to undermine her happiness, she must confront the mistakes that have crept into her approach to romance.