Claudia and the Disaster Date

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Acknowledgment

  About the Author

  Also Available

  Copyright

  Dancing with a guy is not the same as going out on an actual date with him.

  Especially when the guy is Alan Gray.

  I glanced at him, half expecting to see fake green slime oozing out of his nose or something. But his nose was slime-free, to my relief.

  “Popcorn?” Alan asked. “I could buy some and you could go pick out seats.”

  I hesitated. Could I trust Alan to get popcorn that was, well, just popcorn?

  Stop it, I scolded myself. This Alan Gray was not the cornball-jokes, gross-out-humor Alan Gray. This was a different Alan.

  The real Alan. Whoever that was.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Butter?” he asked.

  I wrinkled my nose. “I’m not really crazy about movie-theater butter,” I told him. “It’s kind of yucky sometimes.”

  “Like slime,” Alan said, as if he’d read my thoughts. I felt my cheeks grow warm, but fortunately Alan didn’t notice. “Just salt, then. And sodas.”

  “Real soda,” I said. “No diet junk.”

  “A girl who appreciates genuine junk food. I like that,” said Alan.

  My cheeks grew warmer still. Alan couldn’t know it, but he spoke the truth. Beneath my artistically pulled-together exterior was the soul — or stomach — of a junk food fiend.

  There was a lot Alan and I didn’t know about each other, a lot we had to learn.

  Dates were supposed to fix that. You went on a date and learned about the person behind the artistic (or gross-out) exterior and decided whether you really liked or really couldn’t stand the real deal.

  “Claudia? Earth to Claudia …” Alan waved his hand.

  “Oh. Sorry.” I smiled. “Two seats, center aisle, coming up.” I crossed the lobby of the Stoneybrook Cinema, glancing nervously around. It wasn’t just first-date, going-out-with-Alan-Gray nerves. It was first-date, going-out-with-Alan-Gray-secretly nerves.

  I hadn’t told anyone about my Monday afternoon plans. Not my fellow members of the Baby-sitters Club (or BSC), not even my best friend, Stacey McGill. If the date went well, I reasoned, I’d tell everyone at the BSC meeting later that afternoon. If not, well, what people didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

  Or me.

  Or Alan.

  I made it into the nice, semidark theater without seeing anyone I knew. There were two empty seats just where I like to sit. I took one and put my sweater on the one next to me. Even though it was July, I knew that before the movie was over, I’d need it. The Stoneybrook Cinema is freezing in the summer and stuffy as an oven in the winter.

  I slid down and began to relax just a little. Memories of dancing with Alan came back to me. Alan had been sweet and a little awkward, clearly on his best behavior and not at all like the Alan Gray that my friends and I knew and avoided.

  My mind went further back. I’ve lived in Stoneybrook all my life and I’ve known Alan since first grade — Alan the Gross: Alan burping on pitch to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”; Alan with yellow M&M’s squinted between scrunched-up eyes at Mary Anne’s surprise Halloween party, announcing that he was Little Orphan Annie; Alan bursting out of the boys’ bathroom seconds before a cherry bomb exploded with a truly impressive BOOM. (He got suspended for that one.)

  How could I go out with a boy who had a past like that? How could he and I have any kind of future? I mean, it’s not that I’m perfect or anything. Ask my work-hard parents or my genius older sister, Janine. They don’t understand my artistic vision of the world any more than I understand how they can find any satisfaction in doing their taxes (and math homework, in Janine’s case).

  “Pardon me, but is this seat taken?”

  “Alan!” I exclaimed, straightening in my seat.

  He looked surprised. “Yeah, it’s me. You were expecting maybe …” I could almost see him thinking about making a cornball joke.

  “You,” I said hastily. I yanked my sweater away and motioned for him to sit down. “Are these seats okay?”

  “Great.” He carefully put my soda into the cup holder, handed me the popcorn and napkins, and sat down.

  “You remembered napkins,” I said. When it comes to movie-theater popcorn, buttered or un, napkins are crucial to the survival of whatever you’re wearing. But not everyone agrees with me. Lots of guys and at least one girl — our fearless BSC president, Kristy Thomas — believe that jeans can double as napkins.

  “For you, anything,” said Alan, and laughed a little to show he was joking. He pulled a straw from his jacket pocket, carefully unwrapped it, and slid it into the drink.

  I was touched. I admit it. Corny jokes don’t move me, but small, corny, thoughtful gestures are a different story.

  The lights in the theater dimmed. The endless advertisements began to roll. Since we were practically the only people in the theater and since no one was sitting near us, we felt free to ignore the less-than-subtle attempts to sell us all kinds of junk.

  “I can’t believe you haven’t seen The Tsunami Monster’s Revenge,” Alan said. “It’s a great movie, even if it’s a cartoon.”

  “I’ve been wanting to see it,” I confessed. “But I couldn’t convince any of my friends to go. I love animated films. I mean, the good ones are real works of art. But my friends just don’t understand.”

  “The bad ones are the worst, though,” Alan said. “Like those really crummy cartoons that used to be on Saturday morning television, with the characters moving like robots or something.”

  “It’s true,” I agreed. “Totally lame.”

  “Are you interested in animation?” Alan asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “But I don’t think I’d be very good at it, even with the help of a computer.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being a cartoonist. I’d like to have a comic strip. That would be fun. And I do have a great sense of humor.”

  I glanced at Alan, unsure whether he was being serious.

  The movie started. I looked at the screen and looked back at Alan. He grinned at me, and I still wasn’t sure if he was joking.

  But then, I have never appreciated Alan’s sense of humor. I wondered if I ever would.

  Alan reached out. Oh, no! Was he going to try to hold my hand for the whole movie? I wasn’t sure I was ready to hold hands for that long with Alan Gray, the new or the old version.

  Then I realized that he was offering me the popcorn. Mortified (and glad he couldn’t read my thoughts), I whispered, “Thanks.” I shoved a handful of popcorn in my mouth, slid back down in my seat, and forced myself to concentrate on the screen.

  After the movie, as we walked out of the theater, Alan cleared his throat and his shoulder bumped against mine. “So,” he said. “Want to get something to eat? We could go to the Rosebud Café.”

  “It’s tempting,” I said, and I meant it. Mere popcorn and soda at a movie only stokes my junk food craving. “But I have to get to the Baby-sitters Club meeting. It’s at my house, and people notice right away if I’m late.”

  I didn’t mention that I also didn’t want to have to endure the steely-eyed glare of Kristy if I arrived even a nanosecond after five-thirty, or to have to explain where I’d been and why I was
late. Also, going to the Rosebud Café meant spending more time in public with Alan, which meant that someone might see us. I wasn’t sure I was prepared for that either.

  “I could walk you,” Alan offered.

  “No!” I said. “I mean, no, thanks. It’s way out of your way.”

  Seeing Alan’s crestfallen look, I added quickly, “I had a good time, Alan. I, uh, I … this was fun. I like hanging out with you, especially when you’re not, you know, goofing around like you do at school. I mean, I’m not trying to insult you.”

  Alan gave me a grin with more than a trace of his old cocky smirk in it. “Don’t worry,” he said. “As long as you are saying we can do this again sometime. We don’t even have to go to a movie. We could watch a softball game. Or go Rollerblading.”

  “I’d like that,” I said. I glanced down at my watch. “Uh-oh. I’ve got to run. See ya!”

  “Later,” said Alan, trying to sound supersophisticated and almost succeeding.

  I waved and raced off, not looking supersophisticated at all. As I dashed around the corner, I glanced back.

  Alan was still standing there, grinning. Who was watching me dash away — the old Alan, or the new one?

  I didn’t have time to think about it. I made a face, dodged around the corner, and booked it for my house.

  I blasted through the door of my own room and found the usual suspects: Dawn Schafer, back from California — where she lives with her father and his family — to spend the summer with her mother, Mary Anne Spier (her stepsister), and Mary Anne’s father; Mary Anne; Kristy; and Stacey.

  “Ahem.” Kristy cleared her throat and looked pointedly at her watch.

  “I’m not late,” I said. “The clock on my desk says five-thirty exactly.”

  At that moment, the numbers rolled over to 5:31.

  Kristy intoned, “This meeting of the BSC will now come to order,” and it did.

  I fell across the bed. “Whew.”

  “Where’ve you been?” asked Kristy, being her typical blunt self.

  “Lost in the dark,” I said lightly, sitting up. It was true. I’d been in a dark movie theater, totally lost in the film.

  “It’s summertime. It won’t be dark until about nine,” Kristy said.

  “What happened to you?” I said, cleverly changing the subject. Kristy was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, as well as a large Band-Aid on one knee, a smaller one on her elbow, and quite a bit of dirt down one side of her body.

  “A slide at home plate,” she said impatiently.

  “What?”

  “Kristy was at the park, playing pickup softball with some of the girls from the SMS team,” Mary Anne explained.

  “Oh. Did you win?”

  “I beat the throw at the plate,” Kristy said. “But the other team won, more or less.”

  “More or less?” I was keeping Kristy from asking more questions by peppering her with questions myself.

  “It was a friendly game. We weren’t really keeping score.” She paused, then couldn’t help adding, “But my team was rallying when we left.”

  Before Kristy could resume her cross-examination of me, I bounced over to my closet, opened it, and pulled out my winter boots from the back. In the left one, I found a bag of candy corn. From the right one, I extracted a small can of mixed nuts and a bag of cheese-filled pretzels. I handed the mixed nuts to Kristy to open and forked the cheese pretzels over to Stacey, who is diabetic and can’t eat much sugar.

  Ripping open the candy corn, I popped a few in my mouth. Then I stuck two of them onto two upper teeth and leered. “Dracula,” I said. “Get it?”

  “That is so Alan Gray,” Kristy said, catching me by surprise.

  “What do you mean by that?” I demanded. I wondered if I was blushing.

  “Only he’d probably have put them up his nose, not all that long ago,” Mary Anne said. She smiled at me. “Don’t you remember the time he got a fireball stuck in his nose in second grade? His father had to come get him and take him to the doctor to get it out. Alan was screaming like crazy.”

  “The fireball of snot,” said Kristy, smiling at the memory.

  I didn’t smile. I decided just to ignore it. Maybe if I did, people would begin to forget about Alan’s besmirched past and focus more on the new, improved version. I mean, everybody had noticed that he wasn’t his old self these days.

  Dawn and Stacey were both laughing. “I wish I’d moved to Stoneybrook sooner,” Stacey said.

  “Are you sure about that?” Dawn asked. She picked up a pretzel nugget, examined it suspiciously, then bit into it. Her expression said it was okay, but not great. Dawn is not a junk food fan, even of “healthy” junk food like pretzels.

  The phone rang and caught us all by surprise. In the summer, especially in July, business is slow. Most of our clients are away on vacation or the kids are at camp.

  Kristy fielded the call, then Mary Anne pulled out the appointment book and noted the sitting arrangements. After calling the clients back, Kristy hung up the phone and said, “So why were you almost late to the meeting, Claudia?”

  “Well,” I said, thinking fast, “I’m going to be working at the library. Starting tomorrow.”

  This didn’t answer Kristy’s question, but it distracted the BSC prez and everyone else. I was pleased with my skills of evasion.

  “A real job?” Mary Anne said.

  “For pay. Erica Blumberg and I are going to be helping Ms. Feld in the kids’ room.” My mom is the head librarian at the Stoneybrook Public Library, but Erica and I had gotten the job fair and square through Ms. Feld.

  “Decent,” said Dawn.

  Mary Anne smiled and said, “Are mysteries included?”

  I smiled back. “I don’t know, but you never can tell.” Mary Anne was referring to the time she worked as a volunteer in the children’s room and got all of us involved in solving a mystery there. A very hot mystery.

  I went on. “Anyway, you remember Miss Ellway?”

  “Of course,” said Mary Anne. “The assistant children’s librarian.”

  “Well, Mom promoted her, so she doesn’t work in the children’s room anymore. Until Ms. Feld hires a new assistant, Erica and I are going to fill in.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Kristy commented. “And the children’s room has story hours, right? So this is your chance to really boost their entertainment value, make it more than blah, blah, blah, show the illustration, turn the page. I mean, think of the props you can make, Claudia. Or you could get little kids to help you make the props for the stories. It’s a perfect combination of your artistic talents and baby-sitting skills. Have you spoken to your mother about funding art supplies?”

  I had to laugh and I wasn’t the only one. Kristy was in her take-charge mode. “I’ve thought about that,” I said. “But I haven’t had a chance to talk to Mom. I’m going to call Erica tonight to do some brainstorming, and then after I see how things are set up, I’ll bring it up with Ms. Feld or my mom.”

  Not only is my mom the head librarian, she’s an extreme bibliophile, a word that means “she loves books.” And boy, does she ever. But not just any books — what she calls good books.

  My favorite books — anything Nancy Drew — do not count as good books in my mother’s opinion. I keep a couple on my shelves with my other books, but I stash the rest along with my junk food and only indulge when my mother won’t notice.

  The Nancy Drew section at the library was, in my humble opinion, pretty limited. But I had a job there now and the rest of the summer to work on the situation.

  “It’s a great idea,” Stacey said.

  “We could help, if you ever need it,” Dawn said. “I have a very free schedule and I think Mary Anne does too.”

  She glanced at Mary Anne, who nodded.

  “Count me in,” Kristy added.

  “I’ll count you all in,” I promised.

  We fielded one more phone call, then gossiped about this and that (Alan’s name did not come up, to my re
lief). Soon it was time to go. Kristy adjourned the meeting, and she, Mary Anne, and Dawn strolled out.

  Stacey stayed in her place on my bed. She kept her eyes on me as I tidied up a little, shoving a book into place on the bookshelf, putting a rubber band around the top of the candy corn before returning it to its hiding place.

  “More pretzels?” I offered.

  She shook her head, not blinking, not speaking. I cinched up the pretzels and put them away. I put what was left of the mixed nuts in the drawer of my bedside table, in case I was overcome with malnutrition in the middle of the night.

  Stacey still hadn’t spoken. She was getting on my last nerve.

  “What?” I demanded. “What?”

  “So where were you this afternoon?”

  I took a deep breath. “Okay, okay, I confess,” I said. “I was out on a … date.”

  I said the last word very softly.

  Stacey sat upright. “Did you say date? With who? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I answered the last two questions with two words: “Alan Gray.”

  “Alan Gray? Fireball-snot Alan Gray? Again?”

  “That was second grade,” I said. “I’m sure you weren’t perfect in second grade either.”

  Stacey gave a little gasp of laughter and said, “True. I’ll tell you a secret — it wasn’t a fireball and it wasn’t my nose.”

  “What — ”

  “It was gum. In my ear. I was trying to make earplugs.” She shook her head. “I had to get most of my hair cut off. And it was about two days before the class picture. You should see it.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “Sounds like you were a fashion victim.”

  “It wasn’t my best look,” Stacey agreed wryly.

  We were quiet for a minute. Then Stacey said, “You know, Claud, if you want to go out with Alan, he really must have changed.”

  “He has,” I said. “He’s thoughtful and considerate and … and he never makes those corny jokes. At least, he didn’t today.”

  I went on to tell her about the big, secret date. “I just couldn’t tell all of you, all at once,” I concluded. “It was too hard. I couldn’t have stood Kristy’s teasing.”

  “Teasing? That’s putting it mildly,” Stacey said. “If you start going out with Alan, it’s going to be hard for Kristy and a few other people at SMS to take. They’re still shocked that you danced with him in public.”