Kristy and the Middle School Vandal

  Contents

  Title Page

  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

  Acknowledgment

  About the Author

  Also Available

  Copyright

  June had not come too soon. (If I were a poet, I’d add something about the moon here, too, right?)

  But a poet I’m not. The president of a small business, yes. A thirteen-year-old eighth-grader at Stoneybrook Middle School, yes. A major sports fan, true. The coach of a softball team for kids, also true. Not a poet, though. And there was no moon, yet. At least, not much of one. It was the first weekend in June, and the full moon was a couple of weeks away.

  But maybe the moon did have something to do with the events that followed. A long time ago, some people believed that the full moon could make you crazy.

  Of course that’s not true. But some pretty unusual things did happen at SMS, all in the time that the moon was getting fuller and fuller….

  On that Sunday afternoon of the first weekend in June, though, I wasn’t thinking about the moon or poetry. What was I thinking about? Final exams, and summer. It was time to make plans. Time to get organized. Summer was almost here, and I didn’t want to be caught unprepared.

  I’m a very organized person. Anyone who wanted to describe me, Kristy Thomas, would say, “She is organized. To the max.” I consider this a compliment. I don’t even mind being described as bossy, which is another adjective that’s often applied to me. I like being in charge. That way, I’m sure everything gets done, and done the right way the first time. (In case you can’t tell, I have very strong opinions about how things should be done — and organized!)

  I also think that being bossy makes people forget that I am the shortest person in the eighth grade at SMS. Being short doesn’t bother me (except that, sportswise, it doesn’t hurt to be on the taller side) but my parents and my two older brothers are not short, so I figure I’ll grow. Meanwhile, since I’m outspoken and occasionally loud, people don’t make the mistake of overlooking me.

  My family is larger than your average family. I’m not talking about height or weight, I’m talking about numbers. I’ve always been in a larger-than-average family. My father walked out on us when my younger brother, David Michael (who is seven), was just a baby. That left my mother, David Michael, me, and my two older brothers Sam and Charlie (who are fifteen and seventeen now) in what you might politely call a rough spot. (Only I don’t feel very polite when I think about it.) We lived in a little house on Bradford Court. Although times were hard, we became very close as a family. I really admire the way my mom hung in there, working hard, telling us the truth but preventing us from worrying. We all did our share to help keep things going smoothly. Gradually our situation improved.

  Then Mom met Watson Brewer. And fell in love. And got married.

  We moved to a mansion.

  Amazing true story, right? Watson is a real live millionaire. So now we live in a huge place with a separate room for each of us, plus rooms for Watson’s two kids, Andrew (age four) and Karen (age seven) from his first marriage (they stay with us during alternate months); our adopted sister Emily Michelle, a toddler who was born in Vietnam; and our maternal grandmother, Nannie, who came to help out after Emily Michelle arrived. Then there are our Bernese mountain dog puppy, Shannon; our cranky cat, Boo-Boo; and assorted other pets (including goldfish and hamsters). There’s even a ghost who has his own room on the third floor.

  Okay, maybe not a ghost. Karen believes that the spirit of one of her ancestors, Ben Brewer, lives up there. But then, Karen has a very vivid imagination.

  See? Big house, big family, big potential for disorganization and chaos if you’re not willing to Speak Up and See That Things Get Done.

  In the spirit of getting things done, I decided to put up the hammock in the backyard, and settle in for the afternoon. I would take my books out there, do some studying, and make plans. I found the hammock and lugged it outside.

  Nannie and Watson, who are both gardening fanatics, were already out back. They were surveying the impatiens, which filled a whole flowerbed in one corner. Nannie had on a big hat, and overalls that were liberally smeared with dirt and grass stains, especially around the knees. A pair of gardening gloves stuck out of one pocket. She was holding a gardening catalog open and pointing to something on the page.

  Watson, standing next to her, looked thoughtful. He wore a big hat, too, and ancient khakis that were decorated in “early garden,” just like Nannie’s overalls. He was wearing his gloves, and he was leaning against a pitchfork.

  Emily Michelle, in a flowered sunbonnet and a tiny pair of Oshkosh overalls, was squatting by a patch of dirt, digging holes with the help of Shannon the puppy. This was, I knew, Emily Michelle’s garden. She dug lots of holes in it, and pulled up everything that actually managed to grow there. Everyone has a different idea of what a garden should look like, I guess.

  Including Watson and Nannie. Nannie lifted her hand and pointed to another flowerbed, still buried under straw from the winter. Watson didn’t seem to agree with whatever she’d said. He turned a page of the catalog, nodded at it, and gestured toward the same patch of straw. Now it was Nannie’s turn to look thoughtful.

  Serious botanical decision taking place, I realized.

  I grinned. They didn’t even notice me.

  Just as Sam and Charlie and David Michael had barely noticed me when I’d gone to the garage to dig out the hammock. Three pairs of feet had been protruding from under Charlie’s old clunker of a car, looking like some human version of the three bears: big, middle, and little. I said hello to the feet. Someone answered from under the car, a muffled “Hi, but don’t talk to us unless it is an emergency” sort of sound.

  I wrestled the hammock into place and settled in. I picked up my math book, opened it, and sighed. I wished I was a math whiz like Stacey McGill, who is the treasurer of the BSC. But no such luck. It takes hard work for me to make good grades in math.

  Still, I wasn’t the only one sweating the numbers that afternoon. Mom was in the study, doing some work she’d brought home from the office.

  At least I could do my work outdoors.

  I settled down.

  Two seconds later, two of my friends, neighbors, and fellow BSC (that’s Baby-sitters Club) members, Shannon Kilbourne and Abby Stevenson, walked into the yard.

  “Oh, gee,” I said in mock dismay. “I was studying.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Abby. Abby can be a little brusque sometimes. She’s the newest member of the BSC. She and her twin sister Anna and their mom moved to Stoneybrook (which is in Connecticut, by the way) from Long Island not long ago. They live down the street.

  Shannon lives across the street. She goes to a private school, Stoneybrook Day, and keeps a pretty full schedule of after-school activities. I don’t see her as much as I’d like to. So I was extra pleased to see her that afternoon, excuses not to do homework aside.

  “I was going for a run,” said Abby. “Then I saw Shannon, and we decided to go to the park. She’s going to take Astrid, and we thought you might like to bring her daughter, Shannon.”

  If that sounds confusing, it isn’t meant to be. Astrid is Shannon’s Bernese mountain dog, who is a show dog. She had puppies awhile back, not too long after our collie, Louie, died. We were all very sad
(and we still miss Louie — no dog in the world could replace him or erase his memory), and we weren’t really sure we wanted one of Astrid’s puppies when Shannon offered us one. But when we saw the puppy, how could we resist?

  David Michael named the puppy Shannon, in honor of Shannon-our-neighbor-and-friend.

  Nodding in the direction of Emily Michelle and her canine gardener’s helper, I said, “I think Shannon has other plans for the afternoon.”

  We all laughed.

  I swung around sideways and Shannon and Abby scrunched themselves into the hammock on either side. We began to rock gently back and forth.

  “Did you hear about Brad Simon?” asked Abby.

  “There’s more?” I asked.

  “No — I mean, I just wondered if you had heard anything else. I figured you would if anybody had.”

  “Who’s Brad Simon?” asked Shannon. “Is he smart? Is he cute?”

  “No, and no,” said Abby vehemently. She filled Shannon in on the details. Brad is an SMS student who’d recently been caught stealing the answers to tests (he’d had a student job in the office where the tests are copied) and selling them as “study guides.”

  Abby had unwittingly bought one, and had gotten suspended because of it before everything was straightened out. After that, Brad had been suspended. And now, just before the end of school, he’d been suspended again, this time for much longer. No one seemed to know what the story was, only that he was the second SMS student to receive a long suspension. Troy Parker, another eighth-grader, was also on a long suspension.

  “So what’s going on?” asked Shannon, intrigued. “Sounds like a mystery.”

  Abby said, “Either that, or the teachers are just extra cranky, so they’re recommending meaner suspensions.”

  “You’d think that having the end of school around the corner would make them happy,” observed Shannon.

  I shook my head. “It’s not that. It’s next year’s teachers’ contract. Watson and Mom were talking about it last night at dinner. The teachers and the school board are still negotiating. Nobody can agree on salaries — or anything else, Watson said — and everybody is being stubborn.”

  “No contract, maybe a teachers’ strike, maybe no school next year,” said Abby. “Don’t tell Claudia, though. We don’t want to get her hopes up.”

  We all laughed. Claudia Kishi, who is the vice-president of the BSC, and in whose room we hold meetings, is Not Into School. She prefers art, junk food, Nancy Drew mysteries, and possibly even having her teeth filled, to going to school.

  “They’ll work something out,” said Shannon.

  “You know what else is getting on the teachers’ nerves?” Abby remarked. “The Mischief Knights.”

  Shannon already knew about the Mischief Knights, a group of anonymous kids who liked to pull pranks and leave their mark in red chalk or red pencil. Pretty harmless stuff, such as rigging the school’s speaker system to play the national anthem at top speed, so that it sounded as if a bunch of mice were squeaking it, or sending anonymous notes to Mary Anne and Logan in what looked like each other’s handwriting. And why? All because, according to Cary Retlin — a new kid at SMS who is, I am pretty sure, one of the ringleaders of the MKs — “Complications make life more interesting.” Puh-lease!

  “Cary Retlin. There’s someone I’d like to catch,” I said thoughtfully. The BSC members had been special targets of his from day one. He had broken into our lockers and switched our books, as well as sent us on wild goose (or penguin) chases when we’d tried to solve mysteries.

  “What you need to do, Kristy, is catch Cary red-handed,” Abby said. “Get it? Red chalk, red —”

  Shannon and I groaned. “We get it!” I cried. “Stop her, Shannon, before she puns again.”

  “Are you calling me a punhead?” asked Abby.

  I groaned a second time and pretended I was about to fall out of the hammock. Abby has a wild sense of humor. She loves jokes, and she makes the absolute worst puns in the universe.

  Suddenly, Shannon stood up and dragged Abby to her feet. I almost fell out of the hammock for real.

  “ ’Bye, Fearless Leader,” said Abby. (That’s what she calls me sometimes. Also Madame President and King Kristy. Abby can take it and dish it out. Fortunately, so can I.)

  “ ’Bye, Punhead. ‘Bye, Shannon,” I said.

  They waved and left.

  I picked up my math book with a sigh. Soon, I told myself, summer would be here and I could go to the park anytime I wanted. I began to study, but before long I realized that I wasn’t giving math my full attention. I was more interested in some other problems that wouldn’t add up. Such as what was going on at school. Mischief Knights on the rampage, teachers talking about strikes, students on mysterious suspensions….

  I sensed trouble ahead at SMS.

  Social studies. Now there’s a class with a mystery name. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it would be about manners. How to dance. How to eat caviar or something.

  But of course, it’s not. Which is too bad, because there are some people at SMS who could definitely use a course in manners. For instance Pete Black, who is president of the eighth-grade class. Pete’s manners have improved since he was elected, but he went through a bad bra-snapping stage not too long ago. And Cokie Mason and Grace Blume, the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of bad manners, spoiled, rude, and always ready to be rotten. And Alan Gray, who is the most disgusting boy in our class. I once poured Yoo-Hoo down his shirt in fifth grade. He was lucky that’s all I did.

  As I glanced absently around the room that Monday morning, considering other candidates for a class in manners, my gaze fell on Cary Retlin. Not all of the above rude dudes are in my class, but Cary was definitely present, front and center and looking not one bit like a Mischief Knight. He actually appeared to be paying attention.

  Ha, I thought.

  Then I felt the teacher’s eyes on me and tried to look as interested as Cary. As a matter of fact, I do like social studies. We just happened to be studying a sort of boring part.

  I wasn’t called on, but I concentrated on paying attention anyway. Paying attention in class, even during the boring parts, saves time when it comes to studying for tests later. The things teachers like to talk about are the things that usually show up on tests. At least, that’s my theory.

  At last the bell rang. I slapped my book shut and shoved it into my pack. Math next. My backpack has lots of compartments, and I have a system for it. I put my homework in one of the outside compartments, my notebooks in order in another, and then add my books to a third compartment as I need them during the day. I’d gotten my math book from my locker before social studies. So all I had to do was pull out my math homework and …

  And …

  And where was my math homework? I riffled through the pages in the outside “homework” compartment. I didn’t see it among the other homework assignments. But I was sure I had put it there, and I was almost dead certain it had been on top when I’d zipped that section up.

  I was about to panic when I spotted something crumpled at the very back of the homework compartment. I pulled it out.

  Crumpled. Not neat. But definitely my math homework assignment.

  I let out a sigh of relief and began to smooth it out on my desk. I froze, my hands flat on the paper.

  There were the questions, all right. But where were the answers? The ones I had written in so carefully the night before?

  Gone. Every single one. I jerked the paper up and held it close to my eyes in disbelief. I could see the faint pencil smudges where the answers had been.

  Someone had erased them. But who? And how?

  The “who” answered itself. In the lower right-hand corner, in red pencil, were the letters “MK.”

  The mark of the Mischief Knights.

  My head snapped up just as Cary lowered his to zip his own pack and slide quickly out of his seat. He almost made it to the door. But I caught him.

  “You did this
, didn’t you?” I demanded, stepping in front of him.

  A couple of people looked at us curiously, but they kept going.

  Cary looked down at the paper I was holding, then up at me.

  “You erased the answers on my math homework, didn’t you?”

  Cary smiled. He didn’t answer.

  “You think it’s funny? It’s not funny, Cary,” I said sharply. “It’s low. Despicable.”

  Cary arched one eyebrow.

  “But why am I surprised?” I asked. “After all, you and your Mischief Knights are the ones who are always interfering in our BSC investigations. The only mystery is, that you haven’t realized that nobody’s impressed.”

  “Investigations,” said Cary, rolling the word off his tongue mockingly. “Oooh. Do you make citizens’ arrests, too?”

  “We solve mysteries,” I snapped, “which is more than you’ve ever done.”

  “Really?” said Cary, arching his eyebrow again.

  “Is there something wrong with your eyebrow?” I asked, pretending I’d just noticed. “Do you have a twitch or something?”

  That got to him. He lowered his eyebrow and his cheeks reddened slightly. He said, “The Mischief Knights — whoever they may be — could probably solve any mystery they wanted to long before the BSC even had a clue. Personally, I know I could solve any mystery before you could say ‘Sherlock Holmes.’ ”

  “Ha,” I said.

  “Well then,” answered Cary, barely skipping a beat. “I hereby challenge you to a mystery.”

  That stopped me. I looked at Cary suspiciously. “Is this some kind of a joke?”

  “Nope.” Cary shook his head, keeping his eyebrow lowered. “This is the deal. I create a mystery. You and the baby-sitter detective squad solve it.”

  “What’s in it for me? For the club?”

  “I back off. No more jokes. No more, um, mischief.” Cary grinned. “From me, anyway.”

  I wanted to punch him. But I remained nonviolent, considering the idea.

  I decided it wasn’t a joke. I decided that it was worth it. “Deal,” I said. “Your mischief days are almost over.”

  I started to push past Cary, but he stopped me. “What about me? What if I win?”