Welcome to the BSC, Abby

  For Sara Ruth Bell

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  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

  Letter from Ann M. Martin

  Acknowledgment

  About the Author

  Scrapbook

  Also Available

  Copyright

  The people in Stoneybrook name their cars. Or at least, some of them do. Such as a neighbor of mine. Residing in her driveway are two cars with names — the Junk Bucket and the Pink Clinker.

  I do not need to describe these cars. The names tell their stories. In fact, that they even have names tells a story in itself.

  But when in Rome, do as the Romans do. And when in Stoneybrook, do as the Stoneybrookians do, right?

  “I dub this … this … means of transportation the Wheeze Wagon,” I said as the Stoneybrook Middle School bus wheezed, heaved, coughed, and groaned to a stop. It gave a final lurch just as I stood up, and I almost fell into the people sitting in the seats across from me. I saved myself just in time.

  Kristy Thomas, who rides the bus with me and gets off at the same stop, started to grin. (Okay, okay, Kristy is the neighbor I was talking about, although she’s not the owner of the cars with names, just related to the owners.) “I think this thing sounds like it has a cold. Or the flu.”

  “Or asthma and major allergies,” I added as the bus coughed a few times. We made a quick exit and the bus made a slow turn around the corner and out of sight.

  Not surprisingly, Kristy didn’t say anything. Kristy is a bossy beast, but she is polite. Just like all the rest of the Stoneybrookians. Which means she is not going to comment on asthma and allergies, since I am saddled with both. Life makes me sneeze.

  Good thing it makes me laugh, too.

  “I’m going to name that thing that just departed, that the Stoneybrook school system calls a bus,” I continued. “Seriously. I’m calling it the Wheeze Wagon.”

  That brought the grin back to Kristy’s face. “So I heard,” she said.

  I was on a roll. “This bus gets to the garage and it says to the other buses, ‘I’ve got such a headache. I’m allergic to the roads, and what do they make me do all day? Roads, roads, roads. I wanted to be a boat, but does anybody listen to me?’ ”

  Kristy started laughing then and we went our separate ways. She went to a nice big house full of a million people, animals, and even a ghost.

  I went to a nice big house, too. Only it was empty.

  Surprise, surprise.

  “Honey, I’m home,” I called, just like the old sitcom fathers called to their wives, before the wives got smart and got out of the unpaid labor of housework.

  (So sue me. Housewives get no respect, no pay, and no tax deductions.)

  Speaking of “r-e-s-p-e-c-t” (which is the name of a song by Aretha Franklin, in case you didn’t know), I decided to put on some music. I am not musical the way my twin sister, Anna, is (in fact, in many ways I do not resemble Anna at all, which makes me wonder sometimes why we are twins), but I do enjoy cranking my music up loud. I like it to fill up empty rooms and leak out of the windows and doors.

  Loud music makes me less lonely.

  So where was Anna? Where were our parents?

  Good questions. I’m glad you asked.

  But enough about you. Let’s talk about me.

  I’m Abby. Abigail Stevenson. I am not a native Stoneybrookian as you might have guessed. I come from far, far away.

  Okay, I come from Long Island, which is not all that far from Stoneybrook. But sometimes it seems like another planet.

  I mean I have things in common with the local flora and fauna, and I’m starting to make friends, but I feel like an alien sometimes. I talk faster, I walk faster, I think faster. And sometimes I say things that make people’s mouths drop open and their eyes pop out.

  My schtick is different. (Schtick is a great Yiddish word, isn’t it? Yiddish is an old Germanic language originally spoken chiefly by Jews from eastern Europe, which is where my family is from originally.) Schtick, by the way, sort of means “the things I do that make me me.”

  I have a picture of me playing soccer on my team in Long Island (I was the star forward, the leading scorer, and the co-captain) and it’s a blur. You can tell who I am, but I am definitely moving fast. What I’m doing in that picture (I remember that game well) is leaving the other team in the dust. Watching the defense scramble after me to try in vain to stop me. Scoring. Making their goalie hate the sight of me.

  But the picture represents how I feel. A blur. Moving fast. And then wondering why the only people who are keeping up with me are the ones who are trying to slow me down.

  I stuck Aretha in the CD player and cranked her up. My homework could wait.

  Walls of boxes lined most of the rooms. Although we’d had an interior decorator get the house ready before we’d arrived, and even though we’d delayed moving in just to make sure that everything was right, we still hadn’t unpacked most of our stuff. Mom had plunged back into work even more vigorously than ever. (Her recent big promotion meant that we could move to Stoneybrook, and into a big new house.) Anna had resubmerged in her music, particularly her violin studies, and I just haven’t been motivated.

  As for my father … he died in a car accident when I was nine years old.

  So that’s our family. Absent, mostly.

  It wasn’t always this way. When my father was alive there were only four of us, but somehow, it seemed like more. We were always cooking. Literally. My mom liked to cook. She had started training as a chef at this place in New York called the Culinary Institute of America. When Anna and I were kids she taught cooking at a local college. My father was deeply involved in environmental engineering and urban planning. (Believe me, Long Island could use all the environmental help it could get. Like it has this incredible stretch of land called the Pine Barrens that some people still want to turn into parking lots!) I remember my parents used to joke about designing an environmentally correct restaurant and building it in a tree.

  Anna and I actually had a treehouse. For our birthday one year, when we were little, we held a picnic dinner in the treehouse. Dad lowered a bucket on a string — Anna and I “helped” — and Mom put the food in the bucket. Then she climbed up to join us. It was so much fun. Dad would laugh at anything, and the way he laughed, everybody else would find themselves joining in.

  But that changed after the car wreck.

  I try not to think about it. They said he was killed instantly. That he never knew what happened.

  The truck driver who ran into his car got a broken arm.

  After that it felt wrong to laugh. Sometimes it felt wrong even to be alive.

  Mom never mentioned Dad’s name after the funeral.

  Neither did my friends. They were cool, they helped by just being there. But I caught some of them watching me, as if I were going to break down and scream. Or cry.

  But I didn’t cry.

  Mom changed jobs. She became an editor at a publishing house. She worked and worked and worked. She commuted into New York City every single day except some Saturdays. She stopped cooking. Suddenly Anna and I were on our own, and we learned how to order take-out food big-time. Mom hired a housekeeper who took care of the house during the day.

  And then one day at s
chool I started laughing at this really dumb joke that my best friend was telling and I suddenly remembered how my dad used to laugh all the time. I laughed harder and harder and I couldn’t stop.

  I couldn’t even stop when class began. I had to run to the bathroom. The next thing I knew I was sitting in the bathroom stall laughing and crying and wheezing and trying not to throw up at the same time.

  After that I went home from school. Just walked out. I told Mom and Anna I’d gotten really sick, and I stayed home from school for a few days.

  Although my sense of humor wasn’t ever quite the way it was when my father was alive, it felt okay to laugh again. Laughing, I could remember my dad, and think he might be laughing, too.

  I felt alive again.

  But our family still wasn’t the same.

  I looked at the cartons. Before we moved, Mom had sold or given away practically everything. We bought all new furniture, all new everything, even chests of drawers and desks. The interior decorator decorated our big new house and we moved into a completely new life.

  I gave one of the cartons a kick. Mistake. The killer dust bunnies attacked me. All of a sudden I was having trouble breathing. I panted a little and took a couple of gulps of air. Then I hauled my inhaler out of my pocket. (Have inhaler, will travel. Actually I have two kinds of inhalers — a prescription one for when my attacks get really bad, and a regular one that you can buy in the drugstore for times like these, when I get a little short of breath.) I held the inhaler to my lips and took a couple of drags on it.

  A few minutes later my breathing was back to normal.

  I flicked Aretha off. I needed real company, so I decided to plunge into the high seas of Kristy’s family. Even if only half of them were around, that would be plenty.

  Sure enough, when the door to Kristy’s house was opened by her little brother David Michael and his pup, Shannon, the noise rushed out like a tidal wave.

  “Hey!” said David Michael. Then he took a deep breath and bellowed, “Kristy!”

  “Don’t yell like that!” Kristy called back.

  I started laughing as David Michael shouted, slightly more softly, “Okay. Abby’s here!”

  “Thanks,” Kristy replied in her usual firm, commanding tone of voice as she entered the hall. “Hi, Abby!”

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Pasta jewelry,” said Kristy.

  “Huh?”

  “Emily Michelle and Karen and Andrew and I are making jewelry out of pasta.” Kristy was referring to her adopted younger sister, Emily Michelle, and her stepsister and stepbrother, Karen and Andrew.

  “Like rigatoni and bow ties?” I asked.

  “Yeah. You know the names of all that stuff?”

  I shrugged. Mom had been a cook once.

  But she’d never let us play with the food!

  I settled down happily at the kitchen table, and before the afternoon was over we’d decked ourselves out in pasta necklaces and earrings and Karen had made a “hairpiece” out of spaghetti. Creative, but not practical.

  I didn’t realize how late it was until I heard Kristy’s mother calling, “Hey, guys, I’m home!”

  “Speaking of which,” I said, jumping up.

  I said good-bye quickly and slipped out the kitchen door while Kristy’s family converged on Mrs. Brewer.

  The lights were on in my house and music met my ears as I burst through the back door. Not Aretha. Anna practicing her violin.

  “Hey, I’m home!” I called.

  To my surprise, my mother entered the kitchen. She smiled. “I figured you were in the neighborhood.”

  “Kristy’s,” I said.

  “Baby-sitters Club meeting?” Mom looked puzzled. “I thought those were held on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. And aren’t they usually at Claudia’s?”

  My mom never forgets anything. This has made me an honest person. (The BSC is this club I just joined. But more about that later.)

  “Just visiting,” I said. Impulsively, I hugged her.

  She looked surprised. And pleased.

  I pulled back quickly (you don’t want to spoil your parental units), and asked, “Can we send out for pizza for dinner?”

  “Pizza?”

  I looked up and there was my sister. It wasn’t like looking in a mirror exactly. Sort of like looking in a, well, blurred mirror. I have long, dark, curly hair. Anna has short, dark, curly hair. We have pointed faces and brown eyes. We were both wearing jeans and big sweaters. I sported Timberland boots. Anna wore fuzzy slippers. She had her glasses on. I was wearing my contacts.

  Mom has brown curly hair, too, but she wears it extremely short. Her face is squarish and her eyes are a dark hazel.

  But if you saw the three of us together, you could tell we’re related. And you could tell that Anna and I are very related. A second look and you’d figure out we’re twins.

  Even twins disagree, though. “Two pizzas,” suggested Anna.

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “Because you’re allergic to everything I like, including cheese,” she said, smiling to show that she wasn’t taking a poke at me and my allergies.

  “Not garlic,” I teased.

  “Ugh,” said Anna.

  “Girls, girls,” Mom said, shaking her head with mock seriousness.

  She looked at her watch. “I suggest you work it out, order the pizza — or pizzas — and call me when it gets here. I have a little more work to do.” She headed for her study.

  Anna and I exchanged a glance. Oh well, at least we’d all be eating dinner together. It didn’t happen that often.

  We sat at the table and began our pizza negotiations.

  Kristy’s little stepsister Karen calls herself a two-two. That’s because she has families in two houses, her father’s and stepmother’s, and her mother’s and stepfather’s. So she keeps two of a lot of things, one in each house.

  The Baby-sitters Club is a two-two, too.

  Or two-two, also …

  What you’ve got here is your basic three sets of two best friends.

  I realized that at the club meeting the very next day. The BSC meets from five-thirty to six P.M. every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in Claudia Kishi’s room. There are seven members, plus two associate members, who don’t attend all the meetings and who weren’t there that day. Which left best friends Kristy and Mary Anne Spier, Claudia and Stacey McGill, and Mallory Pike and Jessica Ramsey.

  Let’s start with Kristy, since she’s the president of the BSC, the supposed Queen of the Great Ideas, and the squeaky wheel most likely to get the grease, and her best friend, Mary Anne Spier, living proof that opposites can get along.

  This is what Kristy and Mary Anne have in common. They are both short (Kristy is the shortest person in the eighth grade), they both have brown hair, they have known each other practically their whole lives (and, in fact, lived next door to one another until recently). They each lost a parent when they were young. Kristy’s father just walked out one day when she was six or seven; the next time they heard from him he was in California. Mary Anne’s mother died when Mary Anne was a baby.

  Now Kristy and Mary Anne both have “blended families.” That means that their parents have remarried and they have stepsiblings and new lives (and even potential ghosts …).

  Kristy’s mother remarried not too long ago — to a millionaire, lucky Kristy — and Kristy and her two older brothers, Sam and Charlie (owner of the Junk Bucket), and her younger brother, David Michael, moved into Watson Brewer’s mansion. Which is how Kristy acquired her stepsiblings Karen and Andrew Brewer. Then Watson and Kristy’s mom adopted Kristy’s youngest sister, Emily Michelle, who is from Vietnam and was an orphan. Nannie, Kristy’s maternal grandmother (owner of the Pink Clinker), also lives with them and helps keep order in the chaos, which includes a great dog, a cranky cat, some personality-free goldfish (but then what goldfish aren’t), and the ghost of one of Mr. Brewer’s ancestors. Believing in the ghost is an option: Kristy’s little si
ster Karen does, but then she thinks the woman who lives next door to her, and between the Brewers’ house and ours, is a witch.

  When Mary Anne’s father remarried, he chose his high school sweetheart, Sharon Porter Schafer, who’d moved back to Stoneybrook from California after her divorce. She brought two kids with her, and one of them, Dawn, became Mary Anne’s other best friend, and then her sister, when Mrs. Schafer and Mr. Spier got married. Mary Anne and her father moved into the Schafers’ old farmhouse with its own barn, near the edge of town. Dawn discovered a secret passage in the house that might be haunted.

  But now Dawn and her younger brother Jeff are California kids again. Jeff missed California and his father so much that he moved back. Dawn visited them awhile ago — and only returned to Stoneybrook long enough to realize that she wanted to stay in California, too.

  It was a hard decision for Dawn. It was hard for Mary Anne and her new blended family to reblend, too.

  But lucky for me, because Dawn’s departure meant the BSC needed a new member and fast. So when I moved to town, they checked out my sister and me and invited us to join the club.

  Anna said no.

  That surprised them. I don’t think anyone’s ever said no to them before. I said yes.

  But I think I’m still going to surprise them.

  Anyway, Kristy and Mary Anne are organized. Kristy is president of the BSC, captain of a little kids’ softball team, Kristy’s Krushers (I’m now the assistant coach), and a good student.

  Mary Anne is the secretary of the BSC. She keeps track of when we have sitting jobs and where and with whom. She writes everything down in the club record book. She’s never, ever made a mistake. Not once. She also has a boyfriend and she makes good grades at school.

  Oh, yeah — they are both pretty stubborn, too.

  But Kristy and Mary Anne are not exactly alike.

  Kristy is the most outspoken person on the planet. Okay, maybe not the planet, but probably in all of Stoneybrook. Shy she is not. She is energetic and quick-tempered and her big mouth gets her in trouble sometimes. But it also gets things done. She’s not afraid to try out a new idea.

  That’s how the BSC came into being. One day Kristy was sitting at home listening to her mother try to find a baby-sitter, one painful phone call at a time. Suddenly she thought, what if my mom could make one phone call and reach a bunch of baby-sitters?