Mary Anne and the Great Romance Read online

  For IRS

  Contents

  Cover

  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

  About the Author

  Scrapbook

  Also Available

  Copyright

  “Honestly, sometimes living with my mother is like living with a very tall child,” said Dawn, and I giggled.

  Dawn Schafer is one of my two best friends, and we were spending the evening together because our parents had gone out. What Dawn meant about her mother was that Mrs. Schafer is absentminded and scatterbrained. It’s okay for me to say that because Dawn says it all the time.

  She said it again now. “Mom is so scatterbrained!” (Dawn had just found a high heel in the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator.) She removed it, set it gently on the floor, and said to the shoe, “I hope you thaw out okay.” Then she turned to me. “Well? What do you want for dinner? I mean, besides shoes. Mom left a tofu casserole in the fridge — I’m surprised she didn’t leave it in her closet — but I have a feeling you won’t want that.”

  “Do you have any peanut butter?” I asked hopefully.

  “Yes, but it’s all natural, with no sugar or salt.”

  “I’ll take it.” That was better than tofu.

  I made myself a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich while Dawn made herself a salad.

  We were getting used to these evenings. Our parents weren’t just out. They were out together, on a date. That had been happening more and more lately.

  I guess I should stop and explain who Dawn and I are before I tell you any more about our evening. Okay. Besides being best friends, we live in Stoneybrook, Connecticut, and we’re both thirteen years old and in eighth grade. My name is Mary Anne Spier. I’ve lived in Stoneybrook all my life, in the same house, but Dawn moved here in the middle of seventh grade. She moved because her parents got divorced — and she moved all the way from California! She came with her mom and her younger brother, Jeff. The reason they chose to live in Stoneybrook was that Mrs. Schafer grew up here.

  One really sad thing (I mean, apart from the divorce and the move), was that Jeff was never happy here. He couldn’t adjust to Connecticut, and he missed California and his dad too much. So after awhile, he moved back there to live with Mr. Schafer. Dawn misses the California half of her family a lot, but she talks to them on the phone pretty often and seems happy in Connecticut now.

  Anyway, so Dawn was living here with her mom and no dad, and I’d been living here with my dad and no mom (my mother died when I was really little), and one day the most amazing thing happened. When Dawn was unpacking the stuff her family had moved to Connecticut (and, as you can imagine, this took forever, since Mrs. Schafer wasn’t much help), she came across her mother’s high school yearbook. It was from her senior year, so of course she looked up her mom’s picture. Then she looked up my dad’s picture, since we knew they’d gone to school together. And guess what we found out. Our parents had been in love years and years ago!

  But their parents — well, Dawn’s grandparents — didn’t approve of the relationship. See, the Porters (Dawn’s mom’s name used to be Sharon Porter) were quite wealthy. And the Spiers were not, although — fake out — Dad put himself through law school and became pretty successful.

  Anyway, the Porters encouraged Dawn’s mother to go to college in California (as far away as she could get from Dad), and my father and Dawn’s mom finally went their separate ways. They each got married, and I think they even forgot about each other — sort of.

  Then Dawn and I reintroduced them and they began seeing each other again. At first they took things really slowly. Dad is this reserved, somewhat shy man who hadn’t dated in years (not since he and my mother had dated), and he didn’t want to rush into anything. Dawn’s mom didn’t want to rush into anything, either. But she loved dating again. She’s very outgoing. For the longest time she went out with this awful, preppy guy whose nickname was Trip, and whom Dawn and Jeff hated and called the Trip-Man. She went out with some other men, too. (That was because after she got a job, people at work kept fixing her up with their single friends.)

  All along, though, she and Dad would see each other from time to time, but now they’re the only people they date. And they go out a lot. That’s why Dawn and I were so used to these evenings together. In fact, we weren’t just used to them, we liked them!

  “Let’s eat on trays in front of the TV,” suggested Dawn. “You know what’s on cable tonight?”

  “What?” I asked. I had no idea. We don’t get cable.

  “A Hayley Mills festival.”

  Dawn just loves this kid who was an actress back in the sixties. Actually, I kind of like her, too. My favorite Hayley Mills movie is Pollyanna. Dawn’s is The Parent Trap.

  “A Hayley Mills festival?” I repeated.

  “Yup,” said Dawn jubilantly. “They’re going to show Pollyanna, That Darn Cat, The Parent Trap, and The Moon-Spinners.”

  “That’ll take hours!” I cried.

  “I know,” replied Dawn. “I figure a good ten, if you count commercials and cable-TV ads.”

  “When does the festival start?” I asked.

  “Right now! So let’s get our trays.”

  This is one thing I love about Dawn’s house. You can eat in places other than the kitchen and the dining room. At my house there are a lot of rules. Dad used to have even more. He used to be really strict, but as I’ve grown up, he’s loosened up. However, I would never be allowed to eat dinner on a tray in front of the TV.

  So I carried my sandwich and a banana into the den, and Dawn carried this bean-sprout-and-chickpea salad into the den, and we sat down to eat and to get our fill of Hayley Mills. After about an hour, though, we’d had our fill. The first movie shown was Pollyanna, and although we both like it, we’d seen it recently.

  “I guess there really is something to that saying about too much of a good thing,” said Dawn.

  I nodded. “Yeah. Let’s do something else.”

  First we cleaned up our mess from dinner. (We didn’t really need to, since Mrs. Schafer never notices messes, but we always feel we ought to.) Then we went upstairs to Dawn’s room.

  Here’s an interesting thing about her room. In one wall is the entrance to a secret passage.

  You want to know the truth? That secret passage scares me to death.

  You push this place on the molding that decorates the wall, and a panel swings open. If you walk through, you find yourself in a dark, dank passage that leads down a flight of stairs, goes underground below the Schafers’ backyard, and eventually comes up through a trapdoor in the floor of their barn.

  I guess I should explain here that Dawn’s house is really old. It’s a farmhouse, and it was built in 1795. A lot of people have lived in her house over the years (and maybe died there), and there’s this one particular person, Jared Mullray, whose voice was last heard coming from the secret passage — but who was never seen again. That was years and years ago, and Dawn and I have good reason to believe that Jared’s ghost haunts the passage. So naturally the passage terrifies me. That’s just the kind of wimpy person I can be.

  Dawn loves the passage. (She considers it hers, since one end of it is in her room.) She loves it par
tly because it was once a stop on the Underground Railroad, which helped slaves from the South escape to freedom in the North. She also loves it because she just plain loves mysteries, especially ghost stories, and it looks like she’s got an honest-to-goodness ghost story at her very own house.

  Anyway, to get back to that evening in her bedroom, I sat as far from the passage as possible — on the floor near the doorway to her room, so I could make a fast escape in case I heard moaning or something coming from the passage.

  Dawn tried to entertain me by telling me about the time in California when she was baby-sitting for a little boy who believed that pets could understand him the way humans could. He would always say things to the dog like, “Here, Buster, have another cookie. They’re good for your teeth. They’ll keep the tartar away and then you won’t get gingivitis. Visits to the vet are quite important, too, you know. And by the way, you better exercise. You don’t want to get overweight. Here, try some push-ups.”

  I was only half listening to Dawn. I kept thinking about my own house and my own room. Since I’ve lived my entire life in that house, I always feel safe there … and safer in my room … and safest of all in my bed.

  I was particularly glad I did not have the doorway to a secret passage in my room.

  I also began to miss Tigger, my kitten. I always miss him when I’m not with him. I miss him when I’m at school, when I’m baby-sitting, when —

  Ring, ring.

  “Oh, goody! The phone!” exclaimed Dawn. Dawn just loves getting phone calls. She made a dash for the upstairs extension. I followed her.

  “Hello?” she said. Then, “Jeff! Hi! How are you? … Yeah! Really? That’s great.” (Dawn put her hand over the receiver and said to me, “Jeff joined a basketball team. He’s practically the star player.”) She returned to her conversation. “What? … Oh, Mary Anne’s here…. Yeah, Mom and her dad are out again…. What? … Oh, to dinner and a play in Stamford…. Yeah.”

  Dawn talked for awhile longer, and my mind began to wander. I thought of how my life had changed in the last year. The business of Dad dating Mrs. Schafer was major, of course. Then there was the business of Dad letting up on me and becoming less strict. Finally there was another kind of business — the Baby-sitters Club. Maybe that was the most important business of all.

  The club consists of seven members — Dawn, me, Stacey McGill, Claudia Kishi, Mallory Pike, Jessi Ramsey, and Kristy Thomas. Kristy is the president of the club and my other best friend.

  And wouldn’t you know it — just as Dawn was hanging up with Jeff, and I was thinking of Kristy, the phone rang again. Guess who it was?

  Kristy!

  She was calling to see if Dawn and I were together and what we were up to. She was baby-sitting that night, the kids were already in bed, and she sounded sort of lonely.

  I began to think back to when Kristy and I used to be each other’s only best friends….

  Up until last summer, for as long as I could remember, Kristy and I had lived next door to each other on Bradford Court. (Claudia Kishi lives across the street.) Kristy and I were nearly inseparable, even though we are opposites in terms of personality. But we were the best of friends anyway. We still are — except that a few things have changed. One, Dawn moved here and she became my other best friend, especially after our parents began going out. Two, Kristy’s mother remarried and the Thomases moved across town.

  This is beginning to sound a little complicated, so let me back up and tell you about the members of the Baby-sitters Club. As I said, the president of the BSC is Kristy. Like Dawn and me, she’s thirteen and in eighth grade. Unlike Dawn and me, she has a very unusual family. Kristy has three brothers — Sam and Charlie, who are in high school, and David Michael, who’s only seven. When David Michael was quite little, Mr. Thomas walked out on the family and never came back. So Mrs. Thomas just took things in hand and raised her four kids alone, getting a really good job at a big company in Stamford, Connecticut. Then, when Kristy was in seventh grade, Mrs. Thomas started going out with this man named Watson Brewer, who is an actual millionaire. They finally got married, even though Kristy didn’t want them to. She hated the idea of a new father, especially one who was going bald. But Watson has two adorable children — Karen, who’s six, and Andrew, who’s four — and slowly she reconciled herself to the idea of the wedding and of moving into Watson’s mansion. Now I, personally, would have died to live in a mansion, but believe me, I could also understand about not wanting to leave the house you’ve grown up in. Anyway, it’s a good thing Kristy did move to a mansion because her family is so big now. Living there are her brothers; her stepfather, Watson; her mom; and every other weekend, Andrew and Karen. Plus, her family recently adopted Emily, a little girl from Vietnam, and when that happened, Nannie, her grandmother, moved in to help care for Emily, since both Watson and Kristy’s mom work.

  Here are the important things to know about Kristy: She’s a tomboy and coaches a softball team, Kristy’s Krushers, for little kids. She’s the shortest girl in our class, she’s got brown hair and brown eyes, and she’s on the immature side. She doesn’t care much about the way she looks. She always wears the same kind of outfit: blue jeans, a turtleneck shirt, a sweater (well, not in the summer, of course), and running shoes. Sometimes she wears a baseball cap with a picture of a collie on it. That’s because her family used to own this wonderful old collie, Louie, but he got sick and had to be put to sleep. Now they have a Bernese mountain dog named Shannon, plus Watson has this old, fat cat named Boo-Boo.

  A few others things about Kristy — she has a BIG mouth (she just can’t help saying what she’s thinking), she gets lots of good ideas (the idea for the Baby-sitters Club was hers), and most important, she’s terrific with kids.

  Claudia Kishi is the vice-president of the BSC. I always think it’s so weird that Claudia, Kristy, and I could have grown up together (right from the time we were born) and have wound up as such different people. Claudia is one of the coolest people I know. She has an artistic flair that extends to her clothing and hair and just generally the way she looks. What I mean is that Claud is a terrific artist — she can paint, draw, sculpt, make collages, you name it — and those talents show up in her appearance. She always wears the trendiest outfits. For instance, at our last meeting she was wearing layers — a shocking-pink tunic over a white shirt with pink and yellow umbrellas printed on it. Over the tunic was a wide, low-slung yellow belt with a pink plastic buckle. The shirt, but not the tunic, was tucked into a pair of black knickers, and below the knickers were yellow stockings.

  Then there’s her hair. Claud’s hair is something else. Her family is Japanese-American, and Claud has this shiny, black hair. But her hair isn’t just shiny and dark, it’s long. And Claud can find a million ways to wear it. At that last meeting, she had divided it into five braids and had woven pink and yellow ribbons into the braids. Claud also has dark, almond-shaped eyes and a super-creamy complexion.

  She is so cool.

  Claud lives with her parents and her older sister, Janine, who is a true genius. Janine is so smart that even though she’s only in high school she takes classes at the local community college. Claudia’s grandmother, Mimi, who was a very special person, used to live with her family, but Mimi died not long ago. That was really sad.

  Here’s what Claud likes: art, junk food, and Nancy Drew mysteries. Her room is a real mess because she’s got art supplies scattered everywhere. And since her parents don’t approve of either Claud’s junk-food habit or Nancy Drew, she has to stash those books and the food where they won’t be found. She’s got mysteries under her mattress and candy in her desk drawers. Here’s what Claud doesn’t like: school. She’s very smart, but her teachers are always saying that she doesn’t apply herself. Mr. and Mrs. Kishi finally had to tell Claud that the only way she could stay in the BSC was if she kept her grades up to at least a C average. So far, she has.

  I’m the secretary of the club, and I guess you already know pret
ty much about me. I’m on the shy side, my dad dates Dawn’s mom, I live with my father and Tigger, and Dawn and Kristy are my best friends. I lost my mother when I was very little, and I’ve grown up in the house I was born in.

  Here are some things you don’t know about me yet: I actually look a little like Kristy. I’ve got brown hair and brown eyes, too, and I used to be on the short side, but now I’m growing. I’m a couple of inches taller than Kristy. Also, until recently I didn’t care much about the way I looked. Well, that’s not true. The fact of the matter is that Dad used to pick out my clothes for me and I always ended up looking like a baby in these dumb jumpers or plaid kilts. But when he loosened up, he let me pick out my own clothes. I’m nowhere near as cool as Claudia, but I did buy some neat stuff. If Claud’s fashion sense could be rated a ten, and Kristy’s a two, I guess I must be about a six. Maybe a seven.

  Another thing about me: I am very sensitive. This is good and bad. It’s good because I think it makes me more understanding of other people. My friends in the BSC often come to me when they have problems because they know I’ll listen and be sympathetic and sometimes offer advice, but I try not to judge them — just to understand them. Being sensitive is bad because I cry at the least little thing. I’m incredibly sentimental. Maybe being sentimental is why I’m the only one in the club to have … a boyfriend! Can you believe it? I barely can. His name is Logan Bruno and he comes from the South — Louisville, Kentucky. He’s actually part of our club, but I’ll have to explain that later.

  Enough about me.

  On to Stacey McGill, the treasurer of the club. Stacey is originally from New York City, and is about as cool and sophisticated as Claudia. Maybe that’s why Stacey and Claud are best friends. (Guess what Stacey’s real name is. Anastasia Elizabeth!) If Claudia’s fashion rating is a ten, then Stacey’s must be a nine and a half. Her clothes are amazing, too, but she doesn’t have that artistic flair that Claud does. (Did I mention that Claudia often makes her own jewelry? She makes ceramic beads or earrings, or beaded bracelets, things like that.) Stacey has no interest in art, but she does have a body wave in her short blonde hair, and pierced ears. (In case you’re wondering, Claudia has one hole in one ear and two in the other; Stacey, Mallory, and Jessi have regular pierced ears; Dawn has two holes in each ear, and Kristy and I plan never, ever to let someone punch holes through our earlobes. The very idea makes me shiver.)