Jessi Ramsey, Pet-Sitter Read online

  This book is for my friends Nicole, Anna, Rebecca, Katie, and Alison

  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

  “Meow, meow, meow. Purr, purr.” I leaned over the edge of my bed and peered down at the floor.

  “Pet me,” said a small voice.

  It wasn’t a talking animal. It was my sister, Becca, pretending she was a cat.

  I patted the top of her head but said, “Becca, I really have to do my homework.”

  “Then how come you’re lying on your bed?” asked Becca, getting to her feet.

  “Because this is a comfortable way to work.”

  “You’re supposed to sit at your desk.”

  This is true. My parents believe that homework magically gets done better if you’re sitting up than if you’re lying down.

  I sighed. Then I changed the subject, which usually distracts Becca. “Why are you a cat tonight?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “I’m trying all the animals. It’s fun to pretend.”

  The night before, Becca had been a dog, the night before that, a horse.

  “Well, kitty, let me finish my work,” I said.

  “Meow,” replied Becca, who dropped to her hands and knees and crawled into the hallway.

  Becca is eight and has a big imagination. If she weren’t so shy, she’d probably make a really terrific actress, but she has awful stage fright.

  I do not have stage fright, which is lucky since I’m a ballet dancer and have to perform in front of audiences all the time.

  I guess I should stop and introduce myself. I am Jessi Ramsey, and I’m eleven and in sixth grade. “Jessi” is short for “Jessica.” (And “Becca” is short for “Rebecca,” as if you couldn’t have guessed.) Becca and I live with our parents and our baby brother, Squirt. Squirt’s real name is John Philip Ramsey, Jr. When he was born, he was so tiny that the nurses in the hospital started calling him Squirt. Now his nickname seems sort of funny. Well, it always has been funny, but it seems especially funny since Squirt, who has just learned to walk, is now the size of most other babies his age.

  Anyway, as I said before, I’m a ballet dancer. I’ve been taking dance classes for years. My ballet school is in Stamford, which isn’t too far from Stoneybrook, Connecticut, where my family and I live. We haven’t lived here long, though. We moved to Connecticut from New Jersey just a few months ago when my dad was offered a job he couldn’t turn down.

  Oh, something else about my family — we’re black. Actually, that’s much more important than I’m making it sound. You know what? It wasn’t so important when we were living in Oakley, New Jersey. Our old neighborhood was mixed black and white, and so was my ballet school and my regular school. But believe it or not, we are one of the few black families in all of Stoneybrook. In fact, I’m the only black student in my whole grade. When we first moved here, some people weren’t very nice to us. Some were even mean. But things have settled down and are getting better. Becca and I are making friends. Actually, I have a lot more friends than Becca does. There are two reasons for this: one, I’m not shy; two, I belong to the Baby-sitters Club. (More about that later.)

  My mother is wonderful and so is my father. We’re a very close family. Mama, Daddy, Becca, Squirt, and me. No pets. We’ve never had a pet, although Becca apparently wishes we had one. (Sometimes I do, too, for that matter.)

  In case you’re wondering what the Baby-sitters Club is, let me tell you about it. It’s very important to me because that’s where I found most of my friends. The club is really a business, a sitting business. It was started by Kristy Thomas, who’s the president. There are six of us in the club. We sit for kids in our neighborhoods, and we get lots of jobs and have lots of fun.

  My best friend in Stoneybrook is Mallory Pike. Mal and I have a lot of classes together at Stoneybrook Middle School. And Mal is the one who got me into the Baby-sitters Club. The girls needed another member and ended up taking both of us. We were just getting to be friends then — and now that we’ve been in the club together for awhile, we’re best friends. (I have another best friend in Oakley — my cousin Keisha.)

  Anyway, the people in the club are Mallory, Kristy, me, plus Claudia Kishi, Mary Anne Spier, and Dawn Schafer. Two people who are sort of part of the club but who don’t come to our meetings are our associate members, Logan Bruno and Shannon Kilbourne. (I’ll tell you more about them later.) It’s funny that us six club members work so well together, because boy, are we different. We have different personalities, different tastes, different looks, and different kinds of families.

  Kristy Thomas, our president, is …well, talk about not shy. Kristy is direct and outgoing. Sometimes she can be loud and bossy. But basically she’s really nice. And she’s always full of ideas. Kristy is thirteen and in eighth grade. (So are all the club members, except Mal and me.) She has this long brown hair and is pretty, but doesn’t pay much attention to her looks. I mean, she never bothers with makeup, and she always wears jeans, a turtleneck, a sweater, and sneakers. Kristy’s family is sort of interesting. Her parents are divorced, and for the longest time, Kristy lived with just her mom, her two older brothers, Sam and Charlie (they’re in high school), and her little brother, David Michael, who’s seven now. But when her mom met this millionaire, Watson Brewer, and got remarried, things sure changed for Kristy. For one thing, Watson moved Kristy’s family into his mansion, which is on the other side of Stoneybrook. Kristy used to live next door to Mary Anne Spier and across the street from Claudia Kishi. Now she’s in a new neighborhood. For another thing, Kristy acquired a little stepsister and stepbrother — Watson’s children from his first marriage. Karen is six and Andrew is four. Although it took Kristy some time to adjust to her new life, she sure loves Karen and Andrew. They’re among her favorite baby-sitting charges. Kristy’s family has two pets — an adorable puppy named Shannon and a fat old cat named Boo-Boo.

  The vice-president of the Baby-sitters Club is Claudia Kishi, and she is totally cool. I think she’s the coolest person I know. (I mean, except for movie stars or people like that.) Claud is just awesome-looking. She’s Japanese-American and has gorgeous, long, jet-black hair; dark, almond-shaped eyes; and a clear complexion. Really. She could be on TV as the “after” part of a pimple medicine commercial. Claud loves art, Nancy Drew mysteries, and junk food, and she hates school. She’s smart, but she’s a terrible student. (Unfortunately, her older sister, Janine, is a genius, which makes Claudia’s grades look even worse.) Claudia also loves fashion, and you should see her clothes. They are amazing, always wild. Like, she’ll wear a miniskirt, black tights, push-down socks, high-top sneakers, a shirt she’s painted or decorated herself, and big earrings she’s made. Her hair might be pulled into a ponytail and held in place with not one but six or seven puffy ponytail holders, a row of them cascading down her hair. I’m always fascinated by Claudia. Claud lives with Janine, her parents, and her grandmother, Mimi. The Kishis don’t have any pets.

  Mary Anne Spier is the club secretary. She lives across the street from Claudia. And, until Kristy’s family moved, she lived next door to the
Thomases. Mary Anne and Kristy are best friends, and have been pretty much for life. (Dawn is Mary Anne’s other best friend.) I’ve always thought this was interesting, since Mary Anne and Kristy are not alike at all. Mary Anne is shy and quiet and, well, sort of romantic. (She’s the only club member who has a steady boyfriend. And guess who he is — Logan Bruno, one of our associate members!) Mary Anne is also a good listener and a patient person. Her mom died years ago, so Mary Anne’s father raised her, and for the longest time, he was strict with her. Boy, was he strict. I didn’t know Mary Anne then, but I’ve heard that Mr. Spier made all these rules, and there was practically nothing she was allowed to do. Lately, Mr. Spier has relaxed, though. He won’t let Mary Anne get her ears pierced, but at least she can go out with Logan sometimes, and she can choose her own clothes. Since she’s been allowed to do that, she’s started dressing much better — not as wildly as Claudia, but she cares about how she looks, unlike Kristy. Mary Anne’s family is just her and her dad and her gray kitten, Tigger.

  Dawn Schafer is the treasurer of the Baby-sitters Club. I like Dawn. She’s neat. Dawn is neither loud like Kristy nor shy like Mary Anne. She’s an individual. She’d never go along with something just because other people were doing it. And she always sticks up for what she believes in. Dawn is basically a California girl. She moved to Connecticut about a year ago, but she still longs for warm weather and she loves health food. She even looks like a California girl with her white-blonde hair and her sparkling blue eyes. Although you’d never know it, Dawn has been through some tough times lately. When she moved here, she came with her mother and her younger brother, Jeff — her parents had just gotten divorced. Mrs. Schafer wanted to live in Stoneybrook because she’d grown up here, but that put three thousand miles between Dawn’s mother and Dawn’s father. As if the divorce and the move weren’t enough, Jeff finally decided he couldn’t handle the East Coast and moved back to California, so now Dawn’s family is cracked in two, like a broken plate. But Dawn seems to be handling things okay. Luckily, she has her best friend (Mary Anne), and she and her mother are extremely close. Just so you know, the Schafers live in a neat old farmhouse that has a secret passage (honest), and they don’t have any pets.

  Then there’s Mallory. Mallory Pike and I are the club’s two junior officers. All that means is that we’re too young to baby-sit at night unless we’re sitting for our own brothers and sisters. Speaking of brothers and sisters, Mal has seven of them. She comes from the biggest family I know. Apart from that, and apart from the fact that Mal is white and I’m black, we’re probably more alike than any two other club members. We both love to read books, especially horse stories, we both enjoy writing (but Mal enjoys it more than I do), we both wear glasses (mine are only for reading), and we both think our parents treat us kind of like babies. However, there was a recent breakthrough in which we convinced our parents to let us get our ears pierced! After that, Mal was even allowed to have her hair cut decently, but I’m still working on that angle. Neither of us is sure what we want to be when we grow the rest of the way up. I might want to be a professional dancer and Mal might want to be an author or an author/illustrator, but we figure we have time to decide these things. Right now, we’re just happy being eleven-year-old baby-sitters.

  Oh, one other similarity between Mal and me. Neither of us has a pet. I don’t know if Mal wants one — she’s never mentioned it — but I bet her brothers and sisters do. Just like Becca.

  “Hiss, hiss.”

  Becca was in my doorway. She was lying on her stomach.

  “Now what are you?” I asked.

  “I’ll give you a hint.” Becca flicked her tongue out of her mouth.

  “Ew, ew!” I cried. “You’re a snake. Slither away from me!”

  Giggling, Becca did as she was told.

  I went back to my homework, but I couldn’t concentrate. Not because of Becca, but because of next week. I was going to have next week off. Well, sort of. Ordinarily, my afternoons are busy. When school is out, I go either to a ballet class or to my steady sitting job. My steady job is for Matt and Haley Braddock, two really great kids. But next week, my ballet school would be closed and the Braddocks were going on a vacation — even though school was in session. So, except for school and meetings of the Baby-sitters Club, I would be free, free, free! What would I do with all those spare hours? I wondered. Easy. I could put in extra practice time, I could read. The possibilities were endless!

  “Hi! Hi, you guys! Sorry I’m late.” I rushed breathlessly into the Wednesday meeting of the Baby-sitters Club. “You’re not late,” said Kristy, our president. “You’re just the last one here.”

  “As always,” I added.

  “Well, don’t worry about it. But it is five-thirty and time to begin.” Kristy sounded very businesslike.

  Mallory patted the floor next to her, so I shoved aside some of Claudia’s art materials and sat down. We always sit on the floor. And Dawn, Mary Anne, and Claudia always sit on Claudia’s bed. Guess where Kristy sits — in a director’s chair, wearing a visor, as if she were the queen or something.

  Club meetings are held in Claudia Kishi’s room. This is because she’s the only one of us who has a phone in her bedroom, and her own personal, private phone number, which makes it easy for our clients to reach us.

  Hmmm…. I think I better stop right here, before I get ahead of myself. I’ll tell you how the club got started and how it works; then the meeting won’t sound so confusing.

  The club began with Kristy, as I said before. She got the idea for it over a year ago. That was when she and her mom and brothers were still living across the street from Claudia, and her mother was just starting to date Watson Brewer. Usually, when Mrs. Thomas wasn’t going to be around, Kristy or Sam or Charlie would take care of David Michael. But one day when Mrs. Thomas announced that she was going to need a sitter, neither Kristy nor one of her older brothers was free. So Mrs. Thomas got on the phone and began calling around for another sitter. Kristy watched her mom make one call after another. And as she watched, that mind of hers was clicking away, thinking that Mrs. Thomas sure could save time if she could make one call and reach several sitters at once. And that was when Kristy got the idea for the Baby-sitters Club!

  She talked to Mary Anne and Claudia, Claudia talked to Stacey McGill, a new friend of hers, and the four of them formed the club. (I’ll tell you more about Stacey in a minute.) The girls decided that they’d meet three times a week in Claudia’s room (because of the phone). They’d advertise their club in the local paper and around the neighborhood, saying that four reliable sitters could be reached every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon from five-thirty until six.

  Well, Kristy’s great idea worked! Right away, the girls started getting jobs. People really liked them. In fact, the club was so successful that when Dawn moved to Stoneybrook and wanted to join, the girls needed her. And later, when Stacey McGill had to move back to New York City, they needed to replace her. (Stacey’s move, by the way, was unfortunate, because in the short time the McGills lived in Stoneybrook, she and Claudia became best friends. Now they really miss each other.) Anyway, Mal and I joined the club to help fill the hole left by Stacey, and Shannon Kilbourne and Logan Bruno were made associate members. That means that they don’t come to meetings, but if a job is offered that the rest of us can’t take, we call one of them to see if they’re interested. They’re our backups. Believe it or not, we do have to call them every now and then.

  Each person in the club holds a special position or office. There are the associate members, Shannon and Logan, and there are the junior officers, Mal and me. The other positions are more important. (I’m not putting the rest of us down or anything. This is just the truth.)

  As president, Kristy is responsible for running the meetings, getting good ideas, and, well, just being in charge, I guess. Considering that president is the most important office of all, Kristy doesn’t do a lot of work. I mean, not compared to what the othe
r girls do. But then, the club was her idea, so I think she deserves to be its president.

  Claudia Kishi, our vice-president, doesn’t really have a lot to do, either, but the rest of us invade her room three times a week and tie up her phone line. Plus, a lot of our clients forget when our meetings are held and call at other times with sitting jobs. Claud has to handle those calls. I think she deserves to be vice-president.

  As secretary, Mary Anne Spier is probably the hardest-working officer. She’s in charge of the record book, which is where we keep track of all club information: our clients’ addresses and phone numbers, the money in the treasury (well, that’s really Dawn’s department), and most importantly, the appointment calendar. Poor Mary Anne has to keep track of everybody’s schedules (my ballet lessons, Claud’s art classes, dentist appointments, etc.) and all of our baby-sitting jobs. When a call comes in, it’s up to Mary Anne to see who’s free. Mary Anne is neat and careful and hasn’t made a scheduling mistake yet.

  This is a miracle.

  Dawn, our treasurer, is responsible for collecting dues from us club members every Monday, and for keeping enough money in the treasury so that we can pay Charlie, Kristy’s oldest brother, to drive her to and from meetings, since she lives so far away now. The money is spent on other things, too, but we make sure we always have enough for Charlie. What else is the money spent on? Well, fun things, like food for club slumber parties. Also new materials for Kid-Kits.

  I guess I haven’t told you about Kid-Kits yet. They were one of Kristy’s ideas. A Kid-Kit is a box (we each have one) that’s been decorated and filled with our old toys and books and games, as well as a few new items such as crayons or sticker books. We bring them with us on some of our jobs and kids love them. The kits make us very popular baby-sitters! Anyway, every now and then we need treasury money to buy new crayons or something for the kits.

  The last thing you need to know about is our club notebook. The notebook is like a diary. In it, each of us sitters has to write up every single job she goes on. Then we’re supposed to read it once a week to find out what’s been going on. Even though most of us don’t like writing in the notebook, I have to admit that it’s helpful. When I read it, I find out what’s happening with the kids our club sits for, and also about baby-sitting problems and how they were handled. (The club notebook was Kristy’s idea, of course.)