Poor Mallory! Read online

  This book is for

  Bonnie Black,

  who keeps things running smoothly.

  Thank you.

  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

  “Underwear! Underwear!” I sang. “How I itch in my woolly underweeeeear.” (I held the note for as long as I could). I turned to Jessi Ramsey, my best friend. “Hit it, Jessi!” I cried.

  Jessi picked up the song. “BVDs make me sneeze, when the breeze from the trees hits my knees.” (We were beginning to giggle.)

  “That’s it! You got it!” I said. “That’s the whole song.”

  “Your brothers know the weirdest songs,” commented Jessi as we walked along. School was over. We had survived another day of sixth grade at Stoneybrook Middle School (or SMS).

  I am Mallory Pike, better known as Mal. And Jessi is really Jessica, except she’s only known as Jessi. Most days, when school is over, we walk home together, but just partway. After a couple of blocks we branch off, Jessi going in one direction and I in another.

  “Want to come over this afternoon?” I asked Jessi. “The triplets” (they are three of my four brothers) “will teach you the song about Johnny Rebeck and his sausage-making machine.”

  “I’d like to come over,” replied Jessi, “but I’m baby-sitting for Charlotte Johanssen. I’ll see you at the Baby-sitters Club meeting at five-thirty, though, okay?”

  “Okay,” I replied.

  We had reached our parting place. Jessi pretended, as she always does, that we were parting forever. She put the back of one hand to her forehead and began to moan. “Parting is such sweet sorrow,” she said in this wispy voice.

  “Will we ever pass this way again?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, tomorrow,” Jessi answered, and we laughed. “See you later,” she said.

  “Later!” I called to her.

  I walked the rest of the way home by myself. Under my breath I sang, “Oh, Mr. Johnny Rebeck, how could you be so mean? I told you you’d be sorry for inventing that machine.” Suddenly, I realized just what, exactly, I was singing about. “Ew, gross!” I said out loud. And then I wondered where my brothers had learned their weird songs. Probably at day camp when they were little.

  When I reached my house, I shifted my book bag from one hand to the other and ran across our front lawn. We live in a medium-sized house in an average neighborhood in Stoneybrook, Connecticut, a small town. Sometimes I wish our house were just a little bigger. That’s because I have seven brothers and sisters. We could really use the extra space. My brothers share one bedroom (two sets of bunk beds), my sister Vanessa and I share another room, and my two youngest sisters, Claire and Margo, share a third room. (My parents have the fourth bedroom. It isn’t very big.)

  “Hi, Mom!” I called as I opened the front door of our house. I took off my jacket and hung it in the coat closet. “Mom?” I called again. “Mom?”

  “She’s upstairs,” said Claire, emerging from the kitchen. Claire is only five and goes to kindergarten in the mornings, so she comes home from school before the rest of us do. “She’s lying down,” Claire added.

  “Is she sick?” I asked in alarm.

  “Nooo, but …” Claire trailed off.

  “But what?” I asked her.

  “We came home from school and the phone was ringing and Mommy answered it and she kept saying, ‘Oh, no,’ and then she hung up and she said she had a headache and she went to her room.” Claire said this in a small explosion of words.

  “Hmm,” I replied. “Well, I’ll go upstairs and see what’s wrong.” I wasn’t too worried. If something really awful had happened, like if one of my grandparents had died or if Dad had been in an accident, Mom would be racing around doing things, not lying on her bed.

  “Mom?” I called. I was standing in the upstairs hallway and the door to her room was ajar.

  “Mallory?” Mom replied. “You can come in, honey.”

  I pushed open the door. Mom was sitting on the edge of her bed.

  “I was just getting ready to come downstairs,” she said.

  “Oh…. Mom, what’s wrong?”

  Mom sighed. “I might as well tell you. And we should probably warn your brothers and sisters this afternoon, too.”

  Warn them? About what? This sounded dangerous. I replayed what Claire had told me. My mother had obviously gotten bad news over the phone. Had her doctor called? Was Mom sick? Maybe she’d heard those awful words: We have your test results, Mrs. Pike, and they don’t look good.

  “Are you sick?” I cried.

  “Oh, no,” said Mom. “It’s nothing like that. Look, I’ll tell you first, and then you can help me tell the others as they come home from school.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Well … well, it’s the company your father works for,” Mom began. (Dad is a corporate lawyer for a big firm in Stamford, Connecticut, which is not far from Stoneybrook.) “You know that it hasn’t been doing well.”

  I nodded. Dad had been talking about that lately.

  “Apparently this morning the president announced that half of the employees will be asked to leave.”

  “You mean fired?” I exclaimed. “That won’t happen to Dad.”

  “Your father thinks it might,” said Mom. “Pink slips have been appearing on desks ever since the announcement was made.”

  “Pink slips?” I repeated.

  “A pink slip is notification that you’re being asked to leave your job,” Mom explained.

  “Oh…. But Dad hasn’t gotten one yet.”

  “No. He thinks he will, though. He hasn’t been at the company as long as most of the top executives have.”

  “And I know what that means,” I said. “It means he doesn’t have seniority.”

  “Right, smarty-pants,” said Mom, smiling finally. Then she sighed. “We better go downstairs. I hear voices and footsteps.”

  “And thuds,” I added. “The triplets must be home.”

  I was right. The triplets were home. So was everyone else. And they were all in the kitchen fixing sloppy, disgusting after-school snacks. There were Byron, Adam, and Jordan, who are ten; Vanessa, who’s nine; Nicky, who’s eight; Margo, who’s seven; and Claire, who’s five. (I’m eleven.)

  Mom waited until everyone had fixed a snack and was sitting at the table in the kitchen. I joined my brothers and sisters, but I didn’t feel like eating.

  “Kids?” said Mom.

  “Yeah?” replied Byron, just as Adam flicked a Cheerio at Nicky, which caused Nicky to laugh and snort milk up his nose.

  “Kids, this is serious,” said Mom.

  The giggling stopped. The eating stopped. Everyone faced our mother. Then she repeated what she had told me upstairs. I tried to help the little kids understand what she was saying.

  “That’s silly,” scoffed Vanessa. “Dad’s job is important.”

  “Yeah, he won’t get fired,” said Jordan.

  “What’s a pink slip?” asked Claire. “I don’t get it.”

  Mom explained again, patiently.

  “I want Daddy to get a pink slip!” exclaimed Claire. “If he didn’t have to go to work, then
he could stay at home and play with me.”

  “Jerk,” said Adam. “If he doesn’t work, how are we going to get money?”

  “Yeah, we need money to buy food and clothes and stuff,” said Nicky.

  Claire finally began to look worried, so I said, “But we have a savings account, don’t we, Mom? We could use the money that’s in the bank.”

  “We do have a savings account,” Mom answered, “but there’s not a whole lot in it. We’ll run through it pretty quickly trying to pay the mortgage and other bills every month, and putting food on this table for ten people. Besides, the money is supposed to be a college fund for you kids.”

  My brothers and sisters and I looked at each other.

  Finally Jordan said again, “Dad’s not going to get fired.”

  “Yeah, we don’t know that, Mom,” I added. I looked at my watch. “It’s after three-thirty. In fact, it’s almost four. Don’t you think Dad would know by now?”

  Mom shrugged. “Not necessarily.”

  “But his job is important,” said Vanessa again.

  “The company has other lawyers,” Mom countered, “and they’re all a lot older than your father. Look, I don’t want Dad to get fired any more than you do. I’m just preparing you for what might happen, for what we might hear when Dad comes home tonight.”

  “If Daddy got fired,” Claire began thoughtfully, “what would — what would change? I’m not sure …”

  “We would have to be very careful with our money,” said Mom. “We couldn’t buy extras or go on trips. And your dad would stay at home and look for a new job. He wouldn’t be happy about that,” she added.

  “Why not?” asked Margo.

  “Because looking for a new job, especially when you’ve been fired, is not easy. Dad will have to hear people say no to him a lot. He might start applying for jobs that are below the level of the one he’s got now, and people still might say no. He’ll call companies and hear other people say that there aren’t any jobs at all. It would be like going over to your friends’ houses and hearing each one of them say they don’t want to play with you.”

  “Ooh,” said Claire softly. That had hit home.

  Margo looked as stricken as Claire.

  “Anyway,” said Mom, getting to her feet, “this might not happen. Your father may walk through the door tonight as happy as a clam. But I want you to be prepared if he doesn’t.”

  “Okay,” said my brothers and sisters and I.

  I retreated to my room. I needed to think. In terms of “extras,” what would those things be that we couldn’t buy anymore? New clothes? What would happen if we outgrew our old clothes? Hand-me-downs only last so long. And I’m the oldest. There’s no one in our family to hand clothes down to me. When we went to the grocery, what could we buy? We probably wouldn’t be able to buy ice cream or cookies or any fun stuff. Would we have to get food stamps? I had always heard about food stamps but I wasn’t sure what they were or how they worked — just that they were supposed to help people “stretch their food dollars.”

  I wanted desperately to talk to Jessi. I always call my best friend when a crisis arises — or when something good happens. But Jessi had said she was sitting for Charlotte that afternoon. The members of the Baby-sitters Club (I’ll explain about the BSC later) try not to call each other when we’re working. We take our sitting jobs seriously.

  But I decided that this was an emergency.

  I went into Mom and Dad’s bedroom, sat in the flowered armchair, and dialed the Johanssens’ number.

  Jessi answered the phone professionally. “Hello, Johanssens’ residence.”

  “Hi, Jessi. It’s me,” I said.

  “Mal, what’s wrong?” (My voice must have given away my feelings.)

  “Mom’s really worried,” I told Jessi. “She and Dad are pretty sure that Dad’s going to get fired today.”

  “Fired? Lose his job? Your father?” (I guess I don’t need to point out that Jessi was shocked.)

  “Yeah,” I said. I explained to Jessi what was happening at Dad’s company. Then I added, “I’m really sorry to interrupt you while you’re baby-sitting.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” Jessi answered. “Charlotte’s doing her homework. She doesn’t even need help.” (Charlotte is very bright. She skipped a grade in school and is still at the top of her class.)

  “I’m just so worried,” I told Jessi. “It’s bad enough to lose your job. But it’s especially bad when you have eight kids, a wife — and a hamster — to support.”

  “Listen, I know this is easy for me to say, but try not to worry. Maybe your dad won’t lose his job.”

  “That’s what I keep hoping,” I answered. Then I sighed. “Oh, well. I’ll let you go. I’ll see you at the meeting.”

  We hung up and I went to my bedroom and flopped on my bed. I was hoping for privacy, which meant I was hoping Vanessa would stay out. Since we share a bedroom, I can’t force her to stay out, but sometimes Vanessa can tell when I want to be alone, and then she stays away without being asked.

  Anyway, I seemed to have the room to myself, so I closed my eyes and thought of Jessi and my other friends, all members of the Baby-sitters Club. If Dad really did lose his job, I had a feeling I would need my friends. I would need them to stick by me, and I was pretty sure they would. We’ve stuck together during other bad times, like when Claudia’s grandmother died, and when Stacey’s parents got divorced.

  I guess I should tell you about my friends, so you’ll know the kind of people I’m talking about. I’ll start with Jessi, since she’s my best friend. Jessi and I are alike in lots of ways. First of all, we’re both eleven. We’re the two youngest members of the BSC. Everyone else in the club is thirteen and in eighth grade at Stoneybrook Middle School. Jessi and I are also both the oldest in our families, although Jessi doesn’t have nearly as many brothers and sisters as I do. She just has Becca (short for Rebecca), who is eight, and her baby brother, Squirt, whose real name is John Philip Ramsey, Jr. Jessi and I feel that, although we’re the oldest in our families, our parents still treat us like babies sometimes. Our friend Claudia says eleven is a hard age because your parents can’t decide whether you are a baby or not. For instance, our parents did let us get our ears pierced, but Mom and Dad won’t let me get contacts yet, so I still have to wear my glasses, which I hate. Plus, I wear braces on my teeth. They’re the plastic kind, which don’t look too bad, but I don’t think I’m particularly attractive these days. Hey — if Dad loses his job, maybe the dentist will have to remove my braces! (I knew that was a mean thought, but it just goes to show how badly I want to get rid of my metal mouth, which is what the kids at school call it, even though it’s really a plastic mouth.)

  Anyway, Jessi and I both like to read, especially horse stories, and especially the ones by Marguerite Henry. And I love to write and draw pictures. I keep a journal in which I write down my innermost thoughts and feelings. I write stories, too, and illustrate them. Someday I hope to become an author and illustrator of children’s books. Jessi likes to write, too, and recently I convinced her to keep a journal like mine. But her passion is dancing. Jessi is a ballerina. She dances en pointe (that means on toe), and she takes lessons at this special school in Stamford that she had to audition just to get into. She has performed onstage lots of times and has even had leading roles, or whatever they’re called in ballet.

  One difference between Jessi and me is our skin color. She’s black and I’m white. This doesn’t matter to us or to our BSC friends, but it’s been hard to ignore since, when the Ramseys first moved here, some people were not very nice to them. For reasons I haven’t figured out entirely, they didn’t want another black family in our community, which is almost all white. (Jessi is the only black kid in the entire sixth grade.)

  Let’s see. What else about Jessi? She’s pretty (I think), she has long eyelashes, and long, long dancer’s legs. She’s a good student. And she lives with her parents, her brother and sister, and her Aunt Cecelia, w
ho helps run the house since both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey work.

  Okay. On to the other BSC members. The president of the club is Kristy Thomas. (Jessi and I are junior officers, since we’re still too young to baby-sit at night.) Kristy has the most incredible family. (Or as she would say, the most dibble family. Dibble is short for incredible. My friends love to make up words. Another word meaning dibble is distant. The opposite of dibble and distant is stale!) Kristy’s family is as big as mine, but all mixed up. Kristy lives with her mom; her two older brothers, Charlie and Sam; her little brother, David Michael; her stepfather, Watson; her adopted Vietnamese sister, Emily Michelle; and her grandmother, Nannie. Every other week, Watson’s children, who live with their mother here in Stoneybrook, come to stay for the weekend. They are Karen and Andrew (seven and almost five) and they’re Kristy’s stepsister and stepbrother.

  The way Kristy acquired this family is that her father walked out right after David Michael was born, leaving Mrs. Thomas to raise four kids. In those days, the Thomases lived across the street from Claudia Kishi (BSC vice-president) and next door to Mary Anne Spier (BSC secretary and Kristy’s best friend). Mrs. Thomas worked hard, finally began to date (to Kristy’s dismay), and soon met Watson Brewer, whom she fell in love with — and married! Watson is a millionaire and has a huge house (okay, it’s a mansion) on the other side of town, so he moved the Thomases from their cramped house into his gigantic house. Kristy adjusted pretty well, considering she didn’t like Watson at first. But she’s used to her new neighborhood and expanded family.

  Kristy is a tomboy who loves sports. She even coaches a softball team called Kristy’s Krushers. It’s for kids who are too young or too scared to join Little League. Kristy dresses in a sort of tomboyish way, too. She usually wears jeans, sneakers, a turtleneck, and — in cool weather — a sweater. She likes this old baseball cap with a picture of a collie on it. I guess I have to say that, although Kristy’s mother and stepfather would probably let her wear anything she wants, Kristy just doesn’t care that much about clothes. She’s a little less mature than her eighth-grade friends, although she does sort of have a boyfriend named Bart, who coaches a rival softball team — Bart’s Bashers. (Bart lives in her neighborhood but goes to a private school. Kristy and us BSC members go to public school.)