Dawn Schaffer Undercover Baby-Sitter Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Acknowledgment

  About the Author

  Also Available

  Copyright

  “Hi!” Mary Anne waved and grinned as she passed me on the porch stairs. “And — ’bye!” She ran across the lawn, leaving me standing on the porch watching as she headed down the street. I was sorry to see her leave, since I’d been looking forward to hanging out with her on that hot August afternoon.

  “Hi and ’bye to you, too!” I called. “Where are you going?”

  “Sitting job!” I heard her call back. “At the —”

  But I couldn’t hear the name, because Mary Anne was already turning the corner. “Have fun,” I yelled, hoping my voice would carry.

  A very faint “Thanks, I will!” reached my ears, even though I could no longer see my sister at all.

  Stepsister, that is. I do think of Mary Anne Spier as my sister, but we didn’t grow up together. In fact, we didn’t even meet until we were in seventh grade. That’s because I grew up in California, and Mary Anne grew up here in Stoneybrook, Connecticut. My name’s Dawn Schafer, by the way, and Mary Anne and I are both thirteen now.

  As I headed inside, I thought about how sometimes I feel as if I’ve always known Mary Anne. We became friends as soon as we met, when I moved here with my mom after my parents were divorced. My mom grew up in Stoneybrook, so it made sense for her to bring me and my younger brother, Jeff, (he’s ten) back here to live after she and my dad split up. It was wonderful to make a friend here right away, especially a friend who invited me to join the best club in the world: the Baby-sitters Club, or BSC. The BSC became the center of my Stoneybrook universe, and all the people in it became my close friends. (I’ll explain more about the club later.)

  There is no one quite like Mary Anne. She’s an incredibly loyal friend, and one of the most sensitive people I’ve ever met. It’s as if she has some special extra sense that helps her pick up on how people are feeling deep down inside. This makes her an excellent person to have around when you’re sad, and when you’re happy, too, for that matter. However you’re feeling, Mary Anne will be there for you.

  She’s also very shy, but not once you’re close to her.

  Mary Anne and I would have a hard time convincing anyone we’re real sisters, since we don’t look anything alike. I have long blonde hair (almost white, especially this time of year) and blue eyes, and she has brown eyes and short brown hair. I’m quite a bit taller than Mary Anne — she’s short for her age — and we have different styles of dressing. (I like casual, comfortable clothes, while Mary Anne’s more into the preppy look.)

  Back to my history with Mary Anne: As I said, before we became sisters, we were friends. One of the first things I learned about Mary Anne was that she was an only child, and that her mother had died when Mary Anne was just a baby. Mary Anne’s dad had brought her up on his own, except for a brief time when she lived with her grandparents, her mother’s parents. Mr. Spier took his job as a single father very seriously. In fact, Mary Anne was parented so well and so completely that she was barely allowed to grow up!

  Eventually, her dad began to see that forcing Mary Anne to wear her hair in braids and dress in jumpers wouldn’t keep her eight years old forever. He started to understand that she was a teenager, and that she needed to have some responsibilities and to make her own decisions. Finally, Mary Anne was allowed to choose her own clothes, and to decorate her room the way she wanted to. She also acquired a kitten (an adorable gray tiger cat named Tigger) and a steady boyfriend (an adorable ex-Southerner named Logan Bruno).

  Meanwhile, Mary Anne and I were becoming closer and closer. Then, one day, when we were leafing through an old yearbook of her father’s, we discovered something awesome. My mom and her dad had been high school sweethearts!

  Well, it didn’t take too long for us to hatch a plan for hooking them up again, and the cool thing is that the plan worked. It worked so well, in fact, that soon we were hearing wedding bells. After the wedding, Mary Anne and her dad, Richard, moved in with me and my mom, Sharon. (By that time my brother, Jeff, had realized that he’d never truly be at home on the East Coast, and he’d gone back to California to live with our dad.) It took us a while to settle in to being a family, but eventually we were very happy together, here in this old Connecticut farmhouse. (A farmhouse, I might add, that actually has a secret passage and its very own ghost!)

  But that’s not the end of the story.

  For a while, I was content with being bicoastal. I felt at home both in Stoneybrook and in Palo City, my California hometown. I lived most of the time in Connecticut, flying out West for holidays and short visits. Then something happened. The short visits became longer ones, and, like Jeff, I began to feel more and more convinced that California was where I really belonged. My roots are there, I guess. And friends such as Sunny Winslow who knew me when I didn’t have any front teeth. Sunny’s like a sister to me, so when I found out recently that her mom has cancer, I knew Sunny would need me nearby.

  I ended up deciding that I wanted to make California my primary home, and I moved back to Palo City. I still come to Stoneybrook for holidays, though. Plus, Jeff and I spent the whole summer here, which has been terrific. Jeff headed back early, and I’ll follow him out to California in a few weeks. Until then I’m happy to be right here in Connecticut.

  It’s been a great summer. I have totally enjoyed hanging out with Mary Anne and my other BSC friends. Plus, at the end of July, I went to Hawaii with most of the BSC and a group of kids from my old school, SMS (Stoneybrook Middle School). That trip was awesome! I can’t even begin to tell you about all the things that happened when we were in the Aloha State, but trust me, I’ll never forget my time there.

  For now, though, I feel I really have to concentrate on my last few weeks in Stoneybrook. There are so many people here I care about — friends, family, baby-sitting charges — and I want to see and spend time with them all before I go.

  After watching Mary Anne leave, I walked through the house, realizing that since Mom and Richard were at work, I had the house to myself. “Cool!” I said out loud as I headed to the kitchen for a snack. I rustled up some tofu salad (it’s like egg salad, but healthier) and a glass of organic apple-strawberry juice. My friends here sometimes make fun of the way I eat, but I was brought up to believe that natural foods are best, and that meat — especially red meat — is not a necessary part of a good diet. You should taste what Mrs. Bruen (our housekeeper in California) can do with vegetables and grains! Who needs burgers and fries when you can eat tabouli and gazpacho and three-bean burritos?

  My mom feels the same way I do about food, but Mary Anne and Richard aren’t above eating a steak once in a while, or ordering their pizza with extra pepperoni. It’s amazing how well we’ve all learned to coexist.

  That’s not the only difference between our two melded families, either. Mary Anne and her dad are major neatniks, while my mom is a believer in letting the socks fall where they may. She’s just never seen the point in filing spices alphabetically (the way Richard does), or even in separating the whites and colors when you’re doing laundry (for years all the underwear I wore was pink, even though it was white when I boug
ht it). In fact, I have to admit my mom can be a bit of a space cadet. But somehow she and Richard have learned to live with each other’s differences. I guess that’s what love is all about.

  After my snack, I headed upstairs, thinking that now would be the perfect time for a cucumber-avocado-ginseng facial. I bought this cool stuff at the mall recently. It’s an all-natural face mask. The label (which is printed with soy ink on recycled paper) says it combines “botanical extracts and rainforest-friendly ingredients for deep, natural cleansing and aromatherapy.” Plus, the company says they don’t do any animal testing. After all, why should some fluffy little bunny suffer so I can be beautiful?

  Before I put the mask on, I sat down to answer a letter from Sunny. Her mom’s been doing pretty well lately, which is a big relief. Sunny’s even been putting in some beach time, sunning and surfing at our favorite spot. Recently she sent me a purple-and-green friendship anklet she’d braided. I reached down to touch it as I wrote, thinking of sun and sand and feeling close to Sunny.

  I sealed up my letter and put it on my dresser, ready to mail. Then I pulled my hair back into a braid and opened up the jar of facial cream. But no sooner had I started to slather the goopy green stuff all over my face than the phone began to ring, and so did the doorbell!

  “I’ll get it!” I yelled (to nobody), suddenly feeling completely discombobulated. “I’m coming!” I didn’t know what to do first. Should I wipe off the mask that was — I checked in the mirror — making me look like something out of a Star Trek movie, grab the phone, or answer the door?

  There was no time to think, much less do anything about the way I looked. I ran to the hall table, picked up the cordless phone, and punched the “talk” button as I ran down the stairs to the door. “Hello?” I said into the phone as I pulled the door open.

  “Hi, Dawn, it’s Emily,” said the person on the phone.

  “Aaah!” shrieked the person on the porch.

  Emily Bernstein, a friend from SMS, wanted to know if I could go to the movies with her that weekend. The person on the doorstep turned out to be another old friend, Erica Blumberg, who had stopped by to see if I wanted to go for a hike some afternoon. (She hadn’t counted on being scared out of her wits by Dawn-the-alien.) Once I’d calmed Erica down, I made plans with both girls. I knew I’d better grab the chance to see them, since my last few weeks in Stoneybrook were going to be busy ones.

  After fifteen minutes I rinsed off the mask and examined my face. Was it glowing in a special way? Had the aromatherapy affected my mood? I couldn’t tell. The girl in the mirror looked just like the same old Dawn, and I felt the same as I usually do, too. I felt happy, but busy, and a little overwhelmed by how much energy it can take to keep up with all the people — on both coasts — in my life.

  I glanced into the mirror one more time and shrugged. Then I checked my watch. Before long, everyone would be home. I didn’t have time to worry about how I was going to manage my social life. It was time to start dinner. For tonight, being with my family would be enough.

  Do you ever take memory pictures? I bet you do, even though you might not call them that. Sunny and I did when I first found out I was leaving Palo City, which was right after my parents told me they were splitting up. Sunny and I visited all the places and people we loved, and everywhere we went I looked at things in a particularly careful way. I paid attention to textures and colors — such as the sand and the sky at the beach — and to expressions, such as my friend Jill’s unique crooked smile. I was making a mental photo album, which I knew would be more lasting and meaningful than any leather-bound collection of “real” pictures.

  I was doing it again, during a BSC meeting on Wednesday afternoon in Claudia Kishi’s room. Making memory pictures, that is. I looked around the room, noticing every detail. Then I looked at each of my friends in turn, paying attention to the special qualities that make me care so much about them. That’s what’s great about memory pictures. They don’t just show you what a person looks like; they show you what a person is like.

  In a few weeks I’d be carrying those memory pictures back to California. Instead of attending BSC meetings, I’d be hanging out with the members of the We Kids Club, which is sort of a laid-back, West Coast version of the BSC.

  Maybe I should explain a little about the BSC. It was Kristy Thomas’s idea, which is why she is president of the club. Kristy is constantly having great ideas, but this one has to have been the best ever. It’s so simple: parents need baby-sitters, and baby-sitters need jobs, right? So what’s the easiest, most efficient way to hook them up? How about having a bunch of excellent, responsible sitters meet three times a week, say, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from five-thirty until six. Parents can call during those times to set up jobs, and voilà! Everybody’s happy.

  There’s a little more to it than that, of course. For example, it’s not always easy keeping track of our busy schedules, so we have a record book for that. We also keep a club notebook, in which we each write up every job we go on. Everybody reads it once a week, so we’re all up to speed on what’s going on with our clients. And we each have a Kid-Kit, a box of hand-me-down toys and games that we bring with us on jobs when we think a little extra entertainment might come in handy — for instance, on rainy days.

  All of the above were Kristy’s ideas. See what I mean about her?

  I gazed at Kristy, taking a memory picture. She was leaning back in the director’s chair she always sits in, grinning and gesturing as she told the rest of us about a softball game Kristy’s Krushers (a team she manages, made up of kids not ready for “real” baseball) had played the day before. Kristy, who has brown hair and eyes, was dressed in her summer uniform: a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. (In winter she replaces the T-shirt with a turtleneck and the shorts with jeans.) But what she wears doesn’t define Kristy; her energy does. That energy would be an important part of my memory picture.

  Kristy never seems tired or bored. She thrives on chaos. Her home life, for example, would make me crazy, but she loves it. She lives in a huge mansion with her mom and stepdad (Watson Brewer, who happens to be a millionaire), her little brother, David Michael, her two older brothers, Charlie and Sam, her grandmother, Nannie, and two-year-old Emily Michelle, whom Kristy’s mom and Watson adopted from Vietnam.

  Also, Watson’s two kids from his first marriage, Karen and Andrew, stay at the mansion every other month, and when they’re in residence so are their pets: a rat and a hermit crab. (Luckily the other pets, two goldfish, an old cat, and a puppy, don’t seem to mind the invasion.)

  Kristy’s “real” dad — that is, her birth father — is out of the picture completely. He skipped out on the family a long time ago. Her mom was the one who held the family together for years, and I think she has been a great role model for Kristy.

  Next, I turned my “mind-camera” toward Claudia, whose room we were all sitting in. She’s the vice-president of the BSC, mainly because she’s the only one of us with her own phone and a private line. We can use her phone for our business without worrying about tying up her family’s line.

  My memory picture of Claudia would have to be in brilliant, living color. It would have to capture her shining black hair and her beautiful, dark, almond-shaped eyes (Claud is Japanese-American). And it would have to do justice to the outfit she was wearing that day: a bright yellow pair of overall shorts over a tie-dyed baby-T in all the colors of the rainbow. She wore purple jellies, and her toenails, which showed through the plastic, were painted scarlet. A green scrunchie, holding her hair into a cool-looking Pebbles ’do, topped off the look. As always, Claudia was a treat for the eyes.

  As I watched, Claud, who was sitting on her bed, reached beneath her pillow and pulled out a movie-theater size box of Dots, those giant gumdrop candies that always make your teeth stick together. She grinned when she found it, and tossed it to Kristy. Claudia seems to think that one of the vice-president’s duties is to provide munchies for our meetings, and she takes the j
ob seriously. Of course, for her it’s a labor of love. She adores junk food, even though her parents disapprove.

  That’s why she usually hides it in her room. She also hides her Nancy Drew mysteries, since her parents aren’t crazy about those, either. They’d rather she read more challenging books. Claudia is not a star student, to say the least. Unless, that is, you’re talking about art class, where she always pulls A-pluses. Claudia is an extremely talented artist and craftsperson, but spelling and algebra will just never be important to her. Her older sister, Janine, on the other hand, is clueless when it comes to art. But as a certified genius, she shines in the classroom.

  Claudia’s best friend, Stacey McGill, sat next to her on the bed. I did the mental snapshot thing, and here’s what I saw: a blue-eyed, curly-haired blonde with a certain air of sophistication, but with something deeper beneath that. Stacey was wearing a pair of tailored khaki shorts, brown moccasins — no socks — and a simple, classic white shirt; very Banana Republic, very Stacey.

  Stacey’s sophistication probably comes from the fact that she grew up in New York City. Her dad still lives in Manhattan — her parents are divorced — but Stacey and her mom live here in Stoneybrook. And my sense that there are deeper currents beneath her polished surface? I think it has to do with Stacey’s diabetes. Being diabetic means that for the rest of her life, Stacey will have to be very, very careful about what she eats. (Having diabetes means her body doesn’t process starches and sugars as well as it should.) She also has to monitor her blood sugar and give herself shots of insulin every day. That’s a lot for someone our age to handle, but Stacey has learned to take good care of herself. And I think she’s grown up a lot in the process.

  Stacey is the BSC’s treasurer. Every Monday she collects dues (ignoring the club members’ groans and complaints), and out of those funds she pays for club expenses such as Claudia’s phone bill. If there’s money left over, Stacey will parcel it out for new supplies for our Kid-Kits, or even a pizza bash.