Mary Anne and the Great Romance Read online

  Anyway, Stacey has had an interesting, but sort of tough life. For starters, she has diabetes, which is a disease in which her body doesn’t make the right amount of insulin to control the level of sugar in her blood. That might not sound serious but it can be very serious. Stacey has to give herself injections of insulin every day and stick to a controlled diet. I mean, she can only eat certain foods (NO sweets) at certain times, and she has to take in a certain number of calories every day no matter what. She also has to go to the doctor pretty often and check her urine every day. That’s gross, but it has to be done. If Stacey doesn’t do all these things, she could wind up in a coma.

  Plus, Stacey was born in New York. She lived there until the beginning of seventh grade. Then the company her father works for transferred him to their Connecticut branch, so the McGills moved to Stoneybrook. That was when we all got to know Stacey. But the McGills had only been here about a year when the company transferred Mr. McGill back to New York. What a drag. We missed Stacey a lot, especially Claudia. However, the McGills had been in the city again for only a little while when Stacey’s parents decided to get a divorce. Then the worst possible thing (for Stacey) happened. Her father stayed in New York (because of his job), but her mother bought a house back here in Stoneybrook. So Stacey had to choose where to live. Her parents said the decision was hers. Boy, was that a tough one. Stacey didn’t want to hurt either her mother or her father, plus she likes both New York City and Stoneybrook. In the end, she moved back to Connecticut with her mom — but she visits her dad a lot.

  Stacey doesn’t have any brothers or sisters or pets. She is very close to her mother, however.

  Okay, now it’s Dawn’s turn. She’s the alternate officer of our club. (More about that later.) Again, you already know a few things about Dawn. Her parents are divorced, too, her dad and brother live in California, her mother’s parents live here in Stoneybrook, Mrs. Schafer (or maybe I should say the scatterbrained Mrs. Schafer) is dating my dad, Dawn is one of my best friends, and she lives in an old farmhouse with a secret passage.

  Here’s what Dawn looks like: she has the longest, palest hair you can imagine. It’s smooth as silk and almost the color of milk. Her eyes are a bright blue, and she’s of average height and on the thin side. One thing I like a lot about Dawn is that she’s a real individual. She dresses however she pleases (my friends and I think of her style as California casual), she eats health food and no meat while the rest of us (well, except for Stacey) are cramming ourselves with junk food, and she stands up for what she believes in. She hardly ever lets other people get her down. Dawn visits her dad and Jeff when she can, but I know she misses them. Personally, I think she could do with a pet.

  The last two members of the BSC, the junior officers, are Jessica Ramsey (Jessi for short) and Mallory Pike (Mal for short). While Dawn, Kristy, Stacey, Claud, and I are eighth-graders, Mal and Jessi are sixth-graders. They’re eleven years old. They’re also best friends. And like most best friends, they’re alike in many ways, and different in many ways. They’re alike in that neither of them has divorced parents and they’re both the oldest in their families. It’s tough being the oldest, I think, and Mal and Jessi want to grow up a lot faster than their parents want them to — although they were allowed to have their ears pierced recently, so that was a good sign. They both love to read, too, especially horse stories. I think their favorite author is Marguerite Henry, who wrote Misty of Chincoteague and Stormy, Misty’s Foal, but they like Barbara Morgenroth (she wrote Impossible Charlie) and another author named Lynn Hall, too.

  Each of their families has a pet hamster.

  The differences between Mal and Jessi are, first of all, that Mal is white and Jessi is black. Second, Mal had to get braces. Then there are their families. Mallory’s is huge. She has seven younger brothers and sisters, including a set of identical triplets — boys. Jessi’s family is average sized. She has an eight-year-old sister named Rebecca (Becca for short), and a baby brother with a funny nickname. His real name is John Philip Ramsey, Jr., but when he was born, he was the tiniest baby in the hospital, so the nurses called him Squirt. Even though he’s caught up to other babies his age by now (he’s sort of walking), the Ramseys still call him Squirt.

  Also, while both Jessi and Mal like to read (and, I might add, make endless gum chains), Jessi wants to be a professional ballet dancer one day, and Mal wants to be a writer and illustrator of children’s books. They’re both very talented. You should read some of Mal’s stories. And you should see Jessi dance. She takes lessons at a special school and has performed on stage in front of hundreds of people.

  One final difference between the girls: Mal grew up in Stoneybrook, and Jessi’s family moved here from New Jersey not long ago. There are very few blacks in Stoneybrook, which has been hard on Jessi, but she’s adjusting. And so are some of the people who originally gave the Ramseys a hard time.

  So there you have it. Those are the members of the BSC. Now you know all about Kristy and Dawn and me and the rest of us.

  * * *

  I stopped daydreaming. Dawn handed me the phone and I talked to Kristy for fifteen minutes. By the time we hung up, I could tell she felt better.

  Good. I’m one of her best friends, and what are best friends for?

  “Okay! I’m here! The meeting can start now!”

  Kristy Thomas never just arrives — she makes an entrance.

  It was a Baby-sitters Club meeting day and Kristy was the last to arrive. You’d think she’d always be the first, and I’m sure she’d like to be, but since she moved across town, she depends on Charlie, her oldest brother, to drop her off at our meetings and pick her up later. (We pay him for this service.)

  Our meetings are held in Claudia’s bedroom because she’s the only one of us with her own phone and personal phone number. This is important to us, because otherwise, we’d have to rely on some grown-up’s phone, and I know we’d always worry about tying it up, or else we’d have to wait while the grown-up was on the phone, and then our clients would call us and get a busy signal.

  Confused? I guess I better explain how our club works. See, three afternoons a week (Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays) we meet from five-thirty until six o’clock. Our clients know we meet then, and they call us when they need a baby-sitter. Then I check our record book to see which one of us is free, and we call the client back to tell her (or him) who the sitter will be. That’s the beauty of the club. With seven possible sitters, someone is bound to be available, so our clients are never disappointed.

  How do our clients know when we meet? Because we advertise, that’s how. We send out fliers. When we first started the club, we even placed an ad in the local paper. By now, we’ve got a reputation as responsible, reliable, fun baby-sitters, so news of our club also spreads by word of mouth.

  As you know by reading this far, each of us has a special job in the club. Kristy is our president because she’s the one who came up with the idea for the club in the first place. Back at the beginning of seventh grade, she and her older brothers were responsible for taking care of David Michael after school or any evening when their mother was busy. But there came a time when Kristy’s mom (I never know whether to call her Mrs. Thomas or Mrs. Brewer now) needed a sitter and neither Kristy nor her brothers were free. So Mrs. Thomas (that was her name then) got on the phone to try to find a baby-sitter. Kristy watched her make call after call without any luck — and that was when her great idea was born. Wouldn’t it be terrific, she thought, if her mom could dial one number and reach a whole bunch of eager sitters? So she got together with Claudia, Stacey, and me and we started the Baby-sitters Club. It caught on quickly, and when Dawn moved here, we asked her to join, because we had so many clients. Then the club grew even more, and Stacey moved away, so we replaced her with both Jessi and Mal. But, of course, when Stacey returned, we let her right back in the club.

  Anyway, Kristy’s main responsibilities are to run the meetings and to keep thinking up good i
deas — like Kid-Kits. Kid-Kits are boxes (we each made one) that we decorated and then filled with a few of our old games, toys, and books, and new items like coloring books or stickers or crayons. Then we sometimes take the Kid-Kits with us on a sitting job. Our charges love them. There’s just something intriguing (to a little kid) about toys that aren’t your own. And Kristy seemed to know that. That’s one reason she’s such a good club president — even if she can be too bossy. She also makes us keep a club notebook in which we have to write up every job we go on. Most of us don’t like doing this, but we have to admit that it’s helpful to see how our friends handle baby-sitting problems, and to know what’s going on at the homes of the people we sit for.

  Claudia is our vice-president, mostly because we use her room as our club headquarters and tie up her phone three times a week.

  As secretary, my job is to keep the record book (not to be confused with the notebook) in order and up-to-date. The record book is where we record all important club information, such as our clients’ names, addresses and phone numbers, and information about the children. Probably the most important pages in the book are the appointment pages. That’s where I keep track of everyone’s schedules — Jessi’s dance classes, Mal’s orthodontist appointments, Claud’s art lessons, etc. — as well as our baby-sitting jobs. When a call comes in, it’s up to me to check the schedule, see who’s free for the job, and help decide who should take it if more than one person is available. It is a very important job and I am proud that I have never once made a scheduling mistake.

  Stacey, the treasurer, has the job of collecting our club dues each week. No one likes to part with her money, even though it goes toward good things — new items for the Kid-Kits, Claud’s monthly phone bills, Charlie’s fee to drive Kristy to the meetings, and fun things such as club slumber parties. Stacey also records the money we earn on jobs (she does this in the record book), but this is just for our own information. We don’t divide up the money. Each of us gets to keep whatever we make.

  Stacey is practically a genius at math.

  As I said, Dawn is the club’s alternate officer. That means that she gets to take on the job of any officer who can’t make a meeting for some reason. (She’s dying to be the president one day, but Kristy has never missed a meeting.) When Stacey went back to New York for that year, Dawn became the treasurer, but she happily took over her old job when Stacey returned. Dawn doesn’t care much about math and numbers, even if the numbers represent money. She’s a very good alternate officer and, like the rest of us, she’s a good baby-sitter, too.

  Jessi and Mal, our junior officers, don’t have actual jobs. Junior officer means that they’re not allowed to baby-sit at night yet, unless they’re taking care of their own brothers and sisters. But they’re a great help to us because they can handle lots of the afternoon and weekend jobs, which frees us older sitters up for evening jobs.

  Even so, there are times when calls come in for jobs that, for one reason or another, none of us can handle. When that happens, we call on our associate members. There are two of them. They don’t come to meetings, but they’re responsible baby-sitters who can back us up so that we don’t have to disappoint any of our clients by telling them that we can’t provide them with a sitter. One of the associate members is a friend of Kristy’s in her new neighborhood, Shannon Kilbourne. Guess who the other associate member is — Logan Bruno!

  I guess that’s really all you need to know about our club. As you can see, Kristy has planned it well and keeps it running smoothly.

  * * *

  As soon as Kristy had dashed into club headquarters, she plopped down in Claud’s director’s chair (that’s where she always sits), exchanged her collie cap for her president’s visor, and stuck a pencil over her ear.

  “Are we all here?” she asked. “Oh, no. We’re not. Dawn’s missing.”

  It was only 5:25. Kristy is a stickler for starting meetings on time. That’s both good and bad. It’s good because it’s responsible and because you always know you have exactly until 5:30 to get to Claudia’s room. Kristy won’t start a meeting early. On the other hand, she won’t start a meeting a second late, which is the bad part. As soon as Claudia’s digital clock, our official timepiece, turns to five-thirty — boom, the meeting starts, whether you’re there or not. And if you come in late, Kristy usually isn’t happy, although she won’t be mean to you or anything, unless it’s, like, the fifth time in a row that you’ve been late.

  We waited for Dawn. Kristy sat in her chair, reading through the club notebook.

  Stacey was perched backward in Claud’s desk chair, facing into the room, her arms resting on the top rung. She was examining her nail polish, which was pale pink with iridescent sparkles in it.

  “I’ll have to redo my nails,” she was saying. “Three of them are chipped.”

  “I don’t know why you bother with polish,” I said. “It’s such a pain. You have to worry about it all the time.”

  “I know,” replied Stace, “but it makes my hands look great!”

  Claudia and I were sitting on her bed, leaning against her wall. (When Dawn arrived, we’d move over to make room for her.) Claud’s leg was propped up on a pillow. She broke it awhile back and in certain weather, usually before it rains, her leg hurts her a lot. The doctor said it might always do that.

  Claudia has a good attitude about it. “I’m probably more accurate than that weather forecaster on Channel Four,” she’s always saying.

  Claud shifted uncomfortably on the bed. “Anyone hungry?” she asked.

  Since it was nearly dinnertime, we all were.

  “There are some M and Ms in a box under my bed, and a package of crackers under the desk,” she told us.

  “We’ll get them!” said Jessi and Mal at the same time. They were sitting on the floor and were within easy reach of the food and didn’t want Claud to have to get up.

  Jessi scrambled for the crackers and Mal peered under the bed.

  “Which box?” Mal asked, and sneezed, adding, “It’s dusty under here!”

  “Sorry,” said Claud. “Um, the M and Ms are in the woodcut supplies box — I think.”

  Mal found a box labeled WODCUT SUPPLISE. (What did I tell you about Claudia’s schoolwork? She couldn’t spell properly if someone offered her a million dollars.) Mal opened the box, pulled out a new bag of plain M&M’S, and passed them around.

  Everyone took some except Stacey.

  “The crackers are for you,” Claud told her.

  “Thanks, but I can’t have them. The doctor wants me to be stricter than usual about snacks. I can’t eat until dinner. Dawn’ll want them, though.”

  Stacey was right. When Dawn blew in at 5:29, she made a grab for the crackers. “I’m starving,” she announced.

  And then Kristy got the meeting underway. We took care of club business and waited for calls to start coming in. The first one came precisely at 5:35. The next one was at 5:38. We (well, I) became very busy scheduling jobs while the others took turns answering the phone.

  At 5:51 came a call that Mallory answered.

  “Hello, Baby-sitters Club,” she said. There was a pause. Then, “Hi, Mrs. Arnold! How are you?”

  Mrs. Arnold is the mother of identical twins, Marilyn and Carolyn. Mal had once had a steady but short-term job with the twins while their mother took on a fundraising project for Stoneybrook Elementary School. The twins had started out as terrors, but wound up as very different little girls — much sweeter and nicer once people began to see that they were individuals, not two of a kind. Anyway, now Mrs. Arnold was working on another school project and would need a regular sitter for several weeks. We couldn’t provide her with one regular sitter, but we did manage to get her a sitter for every afternoon when she would need one. Guess who got most of the jobs? Me!

  “Hmm,” said Mallory thoughtfully when she’d hung up the phone. “I wonder what the twins are like now. We haven’t sat for them much lately.”

  If only we had
. I might have been a little better prepared for what was to come.

  Ding-dong.

  I rang the Arnolds’ bell and waited for the sound of four feet running to the door. Marilyn and Carolyn used to hate baby-sitters because nobody, including sitters, could tell the twins apart. But since the girls are different now, they like sitters.

  However, only one pair of feet dashed to the door. Marilyn’s. As soon as she opened it, I recognized her. Here’s why. Up until the girls were eight years old, their parents were so thrilled with the idea of identical twins that they insisted on dressing Marilyn and Carolyn in exactly the same outfits every day, right down to their jewelry. And their hair was styled the same way. Furthermore, they were given the same toys. And they still share a room with identical furniture on either side. Carolyn’s half of the room looks like a mirror image of Marilyn’s half. It used to be that the only difference between the girls is that Marilyn takes piano lessons (Carolyn is tone deaf), while Carolyn likes science.

  Those two things haven’t changed, but a lot of others sure have. When Mallory was sitting for the twins she saw how miserable they were. The kids at school couldn’t tell them apart, so they called both of them “Marilyn-or-Carolyn.” Even Mallory couldn’t tell them apart unless they wore their name bracelets. What no one knew (because the girls just weren’t mature enough to figure out how to tell their parents) was that Marilyn and Carolyn desperately wanted their own, personal, separate identities. Marilyn wanted to grow her hair out. Carolyn wanted hers cut. Neither one liked the frilly clothes their parents chose for them. Marilyn wanted simpler clothes, Carolyn wanted trendier clothes. Furthermore, Marilyn was the more dominant twin. She’s kind of like Kristy. But Carolyn was more outgoing — like Claudia or Stacey.