Claudia's Book Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  CHAPTER 1

  AN ARTIST’S LIFE BY CLAUDIA KISHI: BABY DAYS

  CHAPTER 2

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  THE TRUTH ABOUT THE TOOTH FAIRY

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  BOO FOR FOURTH GRADE

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  THE SEA ROSE

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO AVAILABLE

  COPYRIGHT

  I looked down at the blank sheet of paper on my desk. I leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. I turned and looked out the window.

  Mistake. Through my windows I could see trees and clouds and the roofs of houses. In the distance, a v-shaped flock of geese flew by. Even further above that I caught the glint of light off a plane.

  All of which reminded me that I’d rather be anywhere than right there at my desk getting ready to do my math homework. And then there was more homework after that, including a BIG writing project….

  But as usual, I’m jumping into the middle of things. I guess that’s because I see things not as having a beginning and an end, but as a big picture spreading out all around me with me (of course) at the center.

  Me? I’m Claudia. Claudia Kishi. I’m thirteen years old. I live in Stoneybrook with my parents and my older sister Janine. Janine is a genius. A real genius. I’m not kidding. Even though she’s only in high school, she’s already taking college courses because the high school stuff is too easy for her. Janine’s idea of an exciting afternoon is probably doing advanced college calculus.

  Not me. I’m in eighth grade at Stoneybrook Middle School and I’m not a great student, like Janine. It’s not simply that I don’t like doing homework (who does—except Janine?), it’s that I’m not very good at spelling and writing and math. I’m smart, but, well, school and I (except for art and maybe phys ed) just don’t agree.

  My poor parents don’t get it. My father is a lawyer and my mother is a librarian and they love books and writing and words, and they don’t always understand the way I see the world. But they’re getting used to the idea of having an artist for a daughter.

  Because that’s what I am good at: art. Maybe that explains why I see things as a whole picture all at once, an image. Sometimes, when you’re an artist, you see just a fuzzy, vague sort of image at first and it becomes more clear as you work. Other times, you know exactly what you want to create and then the hard part is making your art match what you see in your head.

  Math and English and spelling don’t exactly work that way.

  I looked back down at my desk. What I saw was a piece of notebook paper with a stack of parallel blue lines. I could imagine all kinds of possibilities for that piece of paper, possibilities involving color and shape and angles and shadows.

  What I couldn’t imagine was my math homework.

  That’s when I decided to call Stacey McGill. Who is Stacey? She’s my best friend, fellow officer in the Baby-sitters Club (more about that a little later), and resident SMS math whiz.

  Her line was busy. I sighed and hung up the phone. I stared longingly at my art supplies, but gave myself a good mental shake. If I started an art project, I might not even remember to call Stacey back and then I’d never start my homework.

  I also said no to the Nancy Drew books hidden around my room (behind the “recommended” books my mother and father approve of). But I said yes to a snack.

  Because I also have, well, an appreciation for what some people call junk food. But then, some people call wonderful works of art junk, too, right? Even Nancy Drew books! It’s all in how you look at it.

  I got up and fished around in the pocket of my good winter coat (I only wear it on special occasions, so the pockets are a great place in which to “store” things). Sure enough, I’d stored a Fruit Roll-Up in one pocket and a tiny packet of Hershey’s Hugs in the other.

  I returned to my desk, sat down, and opened the Fruit Roll-Up. Of course, that wasn’t the only junk food hidden around my room. I keep a large supply handy because I am the vice-president of the BSC and the meetings are held in my room. I’m the only member with my own phone line, so we can use the phone without having to worry about tying up the line so other people can’t use it. So I furnish the room, the phone, and the junk food.

  Besides Stacey, five fellow officers and good friends of mine are in the BSC.

  Kristy Thomas is the president of the club, because she’s the one who started it (one of her many great ideas). If there were an Olympic event in organization, Kristy would be winner and world champion. She’s also very responsible and has no problem making herself heard, which is a good thing since she lives in a very large family with two older brothers, one younger brother, one adopted sister, one stepsister, one stepbrother, a mother, a stepfather, a grandmother, a dog, a cranky cat, two goldfish, and (some of the younger kids in the family believe) a resident ghost. In addition to all that, Kristy is the captain of a kids’ softball team called Kristy’s Krushers.

  The secretary of the BSC (and Kristy’s best friend) is Mary Anne Spier. Like Kristy, Mary Anne is short (although Kristy is the shortest kid in our class) and lives in an extended family. (Her mother died when Mary Anne was just a baby, and she and her father were a two-person family for a long time.) Mary Anne is also very organized. One of her jobs as the BSC secretary is to keep up to date the club record book with all our appointments in it, and she’s never, ever made a mistake. But while Kristy is outspoken, Mary Anne is shy and very sensitive. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Mary Anne is a pushover because she is shy, though. Mary Anne can be just as stubborn as Kristy — maybe even more so.

  Mary Anne’s extended family includes another member of the BSC: Dawn Schafer. Dawn moved to Stoneybrook, where her mother had grown up, with her mom and brother after her parents were divorced. After Mary Anne and Dawn became friends and discovered the fascinating parental fact that their parents had dated in high school, they naturally decided that Mr. Spier and Mrs. Schafer had to get together again. The result: a wedding. And now Mary Anne and her father live in this cool old farmhouse (that might be haunted) with Dawn and her mother, making Dawn Mary Anne’s best friend (along with Kristy) and her sister. Dawn is the alternate officer of the BSC. That means she takes over the duties of any BSC officer who can’t make a meeting. I think of Dawn whenever I eat junk food, because Dawn never lets the stuff touch her lips. She thinks sugar is disgusting. I still haven’t made up my mind about the tofu she eats. I actually like Tofutti, which is a sort of ice cream made of tofu. And Dawn, who is tall and has long, pale blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, is a good argument for healthy food — if being smart and laid-back and looking totally together is the result of all those sprouts and tofu!

  Jessi Ramsey is one of our two junior officers. (The junior officers are in sixth grade, and can’t baby-sit at night yet, except for their own families.) Like Dawn, Jessi is tall and slender. She has black hair and warm brown eyes. But if you look at Jessi carefully, you can tell by the way she stands (and by the way she often wears her hair pulled back in a bun) that she is studying to be a ballet dancer. She gets up every morning at five-thirty to practice, and she takes lessons several times a week. Pretty awesome.

  Mallory Pike, the other junior officer, couldn’t be more different in some ways than her best friend Jessi. Mal has red hair and freckles and wears glasses and braces. And it’s not that she is uncoordinated, but she’s not particular
ly athletic either. Being the oldest of eight kids (three of her brothers are triplets) makes her an excellent baby-sitter. It’s also given her a headstart on what she wants to do someday: write and illustrate children’s books. Meanwhile, she enjoys the relative calm of Jessi’s family (which is made up of two parents, one aunt, and Jessi’s younger sister and brother) and Jessi enjoys the high energy of the Pikes. Differences aside, Jessi and Mal have a lot in common. They share a love of mysteries, for example. And they both love horses.

  Of course, I saved the best for last — my best friend and the BSC treasurer, Stacey.

  I had never had a best friend before Stacey moved to Stoneybrook from New York. And when Stacey’s parents moved back to New York after Stacey and I had become best friends, it was awful. So while I wasn’t glad when Stacey’s parents later got divorced, I was totally pleased when Stacey and her mom returned to Stoneybrook.

  Stacey is a math whiz and, like Dawn (but not me), she watches what she eats. Stacey has to. She has diabetes, a disease that makes it hard for her body to handle sugar. She has to be very careful about what she eats (she can’t have sugar) and even has to give herself insulin injections every day. If she isn’t careful, she could get very sick. Stacey takes it all in stride. When we hang out together, she munches on apples and pretzels while I go on Mallomar binges.

  Stacey and I are about the same height and we have long hair, but hers is blonde. She is also a super cool, New York-style dresser, and probably the most sophisticated girl in SMS. She sometimes wears a lot of black (it’s a New York City thing) and always looks as if she knows exactly where she’s going and how to get there.

  And besides being smart and elegant and a true blue loyal best friend, she’s excellent at explaining math things.

  Math … sigh.

  I reached for the phone again. This time Stacey answered.

  “Hi,” I said. “Math.” (I didn’t have to tell her who it was.)

  “Hold on,” she replied. A moment later, she was going over the questions with me. By the time we were through, she’d helped me figure out how to solve the problems. But we didn’t hang up immediately. Instead, even though we’d seen each other at school that day, we planned a shopping trip to the mall over the weekend.

  And we talked about our latest assignment for school: to write our autobiographies. Stacey was thrilled with the project. I wasn’t — although I admitted to Stacey that I had been looking through my baby book and going through boxes of old stuff that my mom and dad had saved from when Janine and I were kids.

  “I’m remembering the weirdest things,” I said. “Like the time I drew all over the bathroom walls and then tried to convince my mom it was an art show.”

  Stacey cracked up. “Hey, you were doing something that was very in. Remember that art gallery owner in New York who had one of her first shows in her bathroom?”

  I’d forgotten about that. I grinned. “Yeah … anyway, my parents and my sister are remembering these little-kid embarrassing things which I am not going to put in writing anywhere.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Stacey. “But wait till you start writing, Claud. You’re going to get into it.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “It’s a self-portrait with words,” Stacey pointed out.

  I thought about that for a moment. I liked the idea. I told Stacey so. Then we talked a little while longer about important things, such as what we were going to wear the next day.

  I hung up and finished my homework (including my math).

  Then I looked at myself in the mirror. A self-portrait with words. When I was in kindergarten and the teacher told us to draw a self-portrait, I’d drawn a butterfly. I was the only kid who had not drawn a literal portrait of herself: two eyes, a nose, a mouth.

  My self-portrait had been different then (I still have it, and I still like it). Looking back at me from the mirror wasn’t a butterfly: just Claudia Kishi, with long black hair and brown eyes and an enormous shirt and patchwork vest over striped leggings. I looked down at my high-tops and back at the earrings I was wearing. I’d made them myself out of leftover bits of broken jewelry that my friends and family had given me: patchwork earrings.

  I was still wearing butterfly colors. Maybe the kindergarten Claud was even smarter than she’d realized.

  I went back to my desk, sat down, and pulled my notebook toward me.

  I don’t remember being born, of course, but my mother and father do because they were both there (of course, my mother had to be there). My father said I started “expressing myself creatively the moment I was born.” My mother says it’s true: I started yelling when the doctor held me up and told my parents, “You have a beautiful baby girl.”

  I don’t remember coming home from the hospital and I don’t remember my first meeting with the person in our family I looked most like when I was born (and look most like now), my grandmother, Mimi. Mimi had stayed home to take care of my older sister Janine, who was three and a half at the time.

  I wish Mimi were still alive, so I could ask her about that meeting. There are a million things I wish I could ask her. I miss her every day. She always understood me and she was the person I was closest to in our family. She called me “my Claudia.” I have a picture of Mimi when she was twelve and a picture of me when I was twelve. I matted them and framed them together and they are hanging over my desk while I am writing this. I miss her, my Mimi.

  I asked my sister if she remembered the first time she met me. And although my sister was only three and a half, she remembered.

  I knocked on the door of Janine’s room. I knew she was inside, probably corresponding with Mars on her computer. I could hear her tapping away. It took her a long time to stop tapping and say, “Come in.” I guess she was pretty focused on what she was doing.

  I went in. “May I sit down?” I asked.

  Janine looked a little surprised to see me, but she nodded and I plopped down in her chair. I’d brought my notebook with me and I flipped it open. “I’d like to ask you a few questions,” I said.

  Janine looked even more surprised. She took her hands off the keyboard and folded them in her lap. She straightened her shoulders and stared at me seriously. I wondered if this was how she takes tests or sits in interviews. (My sister has won a million awards for being a genius and has been written up in the newspaper a gazillion times since her own birth announcement.)

  “To what do these questions pertain?” she asked.

  She talks like that, too. But I’m used to it. I knew she meant: what was I going to ask her about?

  “No sweat,” I assured her. “We have to write our autobiographies for school and I wondered if you remembered when I came home from the hospital.”

  Janine relaxed — a little. And she smiled — sort of. She tilted her head and thought for a long moment. Then she said, “Yes.”

  “Could you tell me what you remember?”

  “Yes,” said Janine again. “It was in the early afternoon. Mimi and I had just finished lunch. We were having my favorite lunch at the time: alphabet soup and I had found all of the alphabet except y and z.”

  Good grief, I thought.

  “Mimi was trying to teach me how to spell ‘Claudia’ with the alphabet letters when we heard mom and dad pull into the driveway. A minute later, they came in through the side door, holding you.”

  “You remember all that?” I exclaimed, taking notes as fast as I could.

  Janine nodded. “Of course. You were in a green blanket. Mom handed you to Mimi and Mimi looked at you and said, ‘My Claudia.’ ”

  I felt sudden tears sting my eyes. I bent over and pretended to erase something in my notebook. Janine paused for a moment, too, and cleared her throat.

  Then she went on. “It was a sunny day. I remember that because we went outside and Dad took a picture of Mom, Mimi, me, and you together. Then I went back inside with Mimi and she told me I would have to be a good example for my new sister. So I ate all the letters in the alp
habet letters and then I finished my soup.”

  Janine unfolded her hands and turned back to her computer.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Janine, her fingers poised above her keyboard. “To the best of my recollection.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  * * *

  Mimi was my first best friend, really, before Stacey. But my first two friends were Kristy and Mary Anne, who lived next door to each other across the street from me. I don’t remember the first time we all met. I know our parents used to take turns taking care of the three of us even when we were pretty little.

  But one of my earliest memories involves Kristy and Mary Anne. We were about four and a half or five and my folks had just had our driveway changed from gravel to cement. And they were having a little cement walkway made in the backyard.

  We were fascinated by everything: the cement trucks, the tools, the way the guys putting the cement down kept smoothing it back and forth. We’d been playing with trucks and making cement mixer sounds in the sandbox in a corner of the yard.

  Anyway, that day, they’d finished the walkway and had put up strings with strips of white cloth tied to them so nobody would walk on the wet walk by accident.

  And of course, the moment we heard that you could leave permanent footprints in the cement, we were even more fascinated. We knew we wouldn’t be allowed to do this, so we didn’t ask about it.

  Instead, we sat under a tree in the backyard, playing in the sandbox (Kristy had a toy dump truck that actually made beep, beep, beep sounds when it was dumping its cargo, of which I was deeply envious), while Mimi worked in the garden nearby. After awhile, Mimi pushed her straw hat back, wiped her-forehead, and asked us if we wanted something to drink.

  We said no. We nodded when Mimi said she would be right back and agreed that we would stay where we were. Then we kept playing while Mimi checked the back gate to make sure it was locked so we couldn’t get out.

  And the moment the back door closed we practically flew across the yard to the wet cement.

  “Look!” I said, leaning over. I drew my fingers through the cement. I still remember how it felt: wet and gritty. I wondered if it would taste sandy and crunchy (maybe I liked junk food even then!). I wiggled my fingers and made four wavy lines in the cement.