California Girls! Read online

  We were right.

  Claud emerged from the den looking teary-eyed, so we surrounded her and moved into my room.

  “What happened?” asked Stacey. She and Claud sat next to each other on my bed, and the rest of us draped ourselves around the room.

  “Terry said he would miss me forever and never stop thinking of me,” said Claud, wiping her eyes with the back of one hand.

  I saw Jessi, Mal, and Mary Anne gape.

  “That is so romantic.” Mary Anne looked as if she were going to faint.

  I thought of something then and tiptoed out of the room, leaving my friends to talk to Claud. I walked down the hall and knocked on Jeff’s door.

  “Yeah?” he said. (I could see light under his door, so I knew he wasn’t asleep yet. I hoped he would be in the mood for a talk.)

  “It’s Dawn. Can I come in?”

  “Sure.”

  I opened the door to the absolute mess that Jeff calls his room. In most ways he’s neat and tidy, but his room looks like a pigsty. However, Jeff swears it’s an organized pigsty. “Quiz me,” he’d said once. “Ask me where anything is and I can find it in five seconds.”

  Well, that was too good a challenge to turn down. “Your math book,” I said.

  Jeff unearthed it from a pile of junk on the floor. “Four seconds!” he announced triumphantly.

  I tried a few other things, and he beat his four-second record.

  Anyway, I now picked my way through the stuff on Jeff’s floor (which, by the way, Mrs. Bruen is not allowed to move or even touch).

  “Jeff?” I said. “I want to talk to you for a minute.”

  “Okay. What about? Am I in trouble?”

  “Nope. I want to talk about Carol.”

  Jeff rolled his eyes.

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” I said. “Neither of us has been very fair to Carol. We haven’t given her a chance.”

  “Dawn, you don’t live out here,” said Jeff, as I tried to clear a spot for myself on his overflowing bed. “You’ve only seen her for two weeks. I see her almost every day.”

  “I know that. But in the two weeks, my feelings about her have changed. I started off disliking her, too.” I tried to explain to Jeff how I’d thought Carol was pushing to be our friend or our big sister. “But when Stacey was in the car accident, I saw Carol completely differently. She really is an adult, Jeff.”

  “She’s not our mother,” he said, picking at a corner of his pillow.

  “No. And she never will be. But if she and Dad get married, I think it will be okay. I really do.”

  Jeff just shrugged.

  “All I’m saying is to give her a chance, okay?”

  Jeff paused. “Okay,” he replied at last.

  “Thanks … Jeffie,” I said, using my baby name for him.

  Jeff hit me over the head with his pillow, so I whacked him with a foam rubber baseball bat. Then, giggling, I fled his room.

  * * *

  The next morning, our household was up early, and Mrs. Bruen arrived early, too. She fixed us a huge breakfast.

  “Heaven knows what time they’ll feed you on that plane…. Or what they’ll feed you. Eat up here, girls. I’ll fix whatever you want.”

  And she did. By the time we were leaving for the airport, we were stuffed.

  Also, by the time we were leaving for the airport, Carol had arrived, and she came with us. By now I thought of her as one of the family. I would have been surprised if she hadn’t come with us.

  At the airport, there was the usual flurry of checking tickets and luggage. We had a lot more bags to check than we’d had in New York. This was because some of us had bought an awful lot of souvenirs. Stacey, for instance, had bought a gigantic Porky Pig somewhere. (Stacey can imitate Porky’s voice perfectly.) And Terry had apparently given Claud a big present, although she wouldn’t say what it was. (We suspected it was a stuffed animal.) Then there were Jessi and Mary Anne. They had bought little things wherever we went: anything that said California or Universal Studios or Magic Mountain or whatever on it. They decided to check some of these things and to bring others with them on the plane. (This turned out to be a good idea, since the movie was so boring.)

  At any rate, we were soon standing around our gate, waiting for our plane to be announced. We were both excited and sad. We wanted to see our families again, but we weren’t quite ready to say good-bye to California. And I wasn’t ready to say good-bye to Dad or Jeff.

  Or Carol.

  But soon it was announced that boarding would begin.

  My friends and I looked at each other. “I guess this is it,” said Jessi.

  “Thank you, Mr. Schafer,” rose a chorus of voices.

  Except for mine. I just put my arms around Dad and began to cry. “I don’t want to leave you,” I managed to say.

  “I don’t want you to leave me, either,” he replied. “This is an awful way to live. But we have to make the best of it. You know you’ll be back again soon. You could even take a Friday and Monday off from school and come out for a long weekend. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Then I turned to Carol and gave her a quick hug. After that, I turned to Jeff. “No hugging,” he whispered fiercely. “Not in public.”

  “All right.” But I leaned over and whispered to him, “Remember what I said. Give Carol a chance.”

  Jeff nodded.

  And a few minutes later, my friends and I were on the plane. We found our seats — seven across again — and settled in. Mary Anne immediately fastened her seat belt. Before she could tell the rest of us to do the same, we fastened them ourselves.

  Z-O-O-O-O-M. We took off. Orange juice was served. The peanuts started coming around (kicking off Stacey’s barfing fear). We found out what the movie was, rejected it, and got bored.

  Then Jessi and Mary Anne started bringing out some of their souvenirs.

  “Look!” said Jessi. She held up something like a back scratcher, but with an alligator’s (a crocodile’s?) head at one end. When you squeezed the other end, the mouth opened and closed.

  “Now, what are you going to do with that?” Mal asked Jessi.

  “Give it to you,” Jessi replied. “It’s a souvenir for you. You ought to have at least one from our trip.”

  * * *

  Hours later (it seemed like days later), the plane landed. The BSC members hurried out of their seats.

  “Come on, you guys. We’re here!” I cried.

  We worked our way into the terminal as fast as we could without stampeding everybody, and suddenly — there were our families. Our parents and brothers and sisters and even some grandparents were there.

  “Hello! Welcome back!” they cried.

  I saw my mom and flew into her arms. “Oh, I missed you,” I said.

  “I missed you, too, honey.”

  We looked at each other with tears in our eyes. “Boy, is it good to be home,” I told her.

  So that’s our story. Did you ever think that a lottery ticket could cause all this — a trip, a boyfriend, surfing, dyed hair….

  By the way, we did a great job choosing Mallory’s hair color. We’ve been home for a month now, so of course her hair is growing out, and you can’t see a difference at all. Here’s what Mal has to say about this: Whew!

  Well, the Jack-O’-Lottery has reached another all-time high. At the next BSC meeting, I’m going to suggest chipping in and buying seven more tickets. They say lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but who knows? If we won, maybe we could all go to New York and stay at Stacey’s father’s apartment!

  About the Author

  ANN MATTHEWS MARTIN was born on August 12, 1955. She grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with her parents and her younger sister, Jane.

  There are currently over 176 million copies of The Baby-sitters Club in print. (If you stacked all of these books up, the pile would be 21,245 miles high.) In addition to The Baby-sitters Club, Ann is the author of two other series, Main Street and Family Tree. He
r novels include Belle Teal, A Corner of the Universe (a Newbery Honor book), Here Today, A Dog’s Life, On Christmas Eve, Everything for a Dog, Ten Rules for Living with My Sister, and Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life (So Far). She is also the coauthor, with Laura Godwin, of the Doll People series.

  Ann lives in upstate New York with her dog and her cats.

  Copyright © 1990 by Ann M. Martin.

  Cover art by Hodges Soileau

  Interior illustrations by Angelo Tillery

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  First edition, December 1990

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-63082-5