Poor Mallory! Read online

  Kristy is the shortest kid in her class, has brown hair and brown eyes, and is the only older BSC member who doesn’t wear a bra yet. She can be bossy and has a big mouth, but we all love Kristy. She’s funny and creative and great with children.

  As I mentioned before, Claudia Kishi is the club vice-president. She and Kristy are about as different as night and day. Claudia is also outgoing, but she doesn’t have a big mouth, and she is so dibbly sophisticated and chic. She wears wild clothes like big hats; flowered vests over long shirts that belong to her father and which she leaves untucked; short black pants; and then, something just a little offbeat like penny loafers from the 1950s with white bobby socks. And her jewelry. It’s the height of dibble-dom. She makes most of it herself — ceramic-bead necklaces and big dangly earrings, but in shapes you wouldn’t expect. For example, in my ears I am allowed to wear studs or very tiny gold hoops. Period. Claudia might wear a monkey in one ear and a banana in the other. Also, one of her ears is doubly pierced, so she can wear a hoop and a stud or something in that ear, too. (By the way, Kristy does not have pierced ears and neither does Mary Anne.)

  How does Claud make her jewelry? She’s a fantastic artist, that’s how. She is really talented. She can paint, draw, sculpt, make collages, you name it. And she takes pottery classes sometimes. Claud’s other passions are eating junk food and reading Nancy Drew mysteries, neither of which her parents approve of, so Claud hides the books as well as Mallomars, potato chips, red hots, etc., all over her room.

  Claud lives with her parents and her older sister, Janine. Janine is a certified genius. This is too bad for Claudia, since, although she’s smart, she’s a terrible student — and a worse speller. Her teachers say she could make better grades if she just applied herself, but Claud says she isn’t interested. (Personally, I think that Claud is afraid to try harder because she’d find out that even if she did she still couldn’t live up to Janine.)

  Claudia is Japanese-American, and she is drop-dead gorgeous. She has this long, silky black hair, which she likes to fix in different ways. (And of course she has millions of bows and funky barrettes and stuff for it.) Her eyes are dark and almond-shaped, and her skin, despite her junk-food addiction, is perfectly clear.

  Claud’s best friend is Stacey McGill, who’s the treasurer of the BSC. Stacey is just as sophisticated and chic as Claudia, if not more so. In fact, the other day, Claudia referred to Stacey as the Queen of Dibbleness. Stacey’s family story is about as interesting as Kristy’s. She grew up in big, glamorous New York City. Then, just before she was supposed to enter seventh grade there, her father’s company transferred him to Connecticut, so Stacey and her parents moved to Stoneybrook. (Stacey’s an only child.) The McGills had been here for less than a year when the company moved them back to New York. That was hard on everyone, but especially on Claudia and Stacey. In New York, the McGills’ marriage began to fail, and before Stacey knew what had hit her, her parents announced that they were getting a divorce. Not only that, Mr. McGill wanted to stay in the city with his job, while Mrs. McGill wanted to move back to Stoneybrook. After a lot of thought, Stacey decided to live with her mother (were we ever glad!) but she visits her father in New York pretty often. Guess what. When Stacey and her mom returned to Stoneybrook, they had to find a new house to live in. That was because Jessi and her family had moved into the McGills’ old house!

  As I mentioned before, Stacey is as cool as Claud. She dresses in outfits that are just as wild, and she gets to perm her blonde hair sometimes. Plus, she likes to wear sparkly nail polish. And in her pierced ears, she often wears earrings that Claud has made for her.

  Stacey is pretty, but as far as I’m concerned, too thin. This is probably because on top of her family problems, Stacey has a severe form of diabetes. That’s a disease in which her pancreas doesn’t make the right amount of something called insulin, which controls her blood sugar. Stacey can’t eat sweets, except for controlled amounts of fruit, and she has to give herself injections (ew, ew, EW) of insulin every day. She also has to monitor her blood and eat only a certain number of calories each day. Poor Stace. Some people can control their diabetes with diet alone. They don’t have to bother with injections (EW), or blood tests, or calorie-counting. But not Stacey. She has to be very careful or she could go into a diabetic coma. My friends and I are a little worried because Stacey hasn’t been feeling too great lately. But she seems to be coping.

  Two more members of the BSC are Mary Anne Spier and Dawn Schafer. Mary Anne, as I said, is the club secretary and Kristy’s best friend. Mary Anne has another best friend, though, and that’s Dawn. Like Stacey and Jessi, Dawn is a newcomer to Stoneybrook. (The rest of us were born here and grew up here.) Dawn moved to Connecticut from California in the middle of seventh grade. This was because her parents were getting a divorce, and Mrs. Schafer wanted to move back to the town in which she’d been raised — Stoneybrook. She brought Dawn and Dawn’s younger brother, Jeff, with her, and they settled into a colonial farmhouse that has an actual secret passage in it! Soon, Dawn and Mary Anne became friends, and then, guess what they discovered. They found out that Dawn’s mom and Mary Anne’s dad had been high-school sweethearts. Since Mary Anne’s mother had died when Mary Anne was just a baby, the girls decided to reintroduce their parents. And after dating practically forever, Mr. Spier and Mrs. Schafer got married — so Dawn and Mary Anne became stepsisters. And now Mary Anne, her father, and her kitten, Tigger, live in the Schafers’ farmhouse. One sad thing is that Jeff moved back to California to live with his dad. He never adjusted to life in Connecticut. He’s much happier in California.

  Although Mary Anne and Dawn are best friends, they’re pretty different people. Mary Anne is shy and has trouble showing her feelings, except when she cries, which is often. She is also very romantic and is the first BSC member to have a steady boyfriend. (Her boyfriend is Logan Bruno. He comes from Louisville, Kentucky, is nice and funny and understanding, and speaks with this great drawl.) Mary Anne’s father used to be dibbly strict with her. He even picked out her clothes, so she dressed like a first-grader. Now he’s loosened up, and so has Mary Anne. She dresses pretty well, especially since she and Dawn can trade clothes. Mary Anne is short, has brown eyes and brown hair, and looks like Kristy!

  Dawn, on the other hand, is about as gorgeous as Claudia. Our California girl has LONG blonde hair and sparkly blue eyes. She’s not shy like Mary Anne or a loudmouth like Kristy. She’s just herself. She’s very independent and dresses however she wants, which is usually casual but cool. Dawn is totally into health food, wouldn’t touch meat with a ten-foot pole, and always refuses Claudia’s candy. (This is nice for Stacey.) Dawn likes mysteries and ghost stories (so of course she loves the secret passage in her house, which may, by the way, be haunted). And she misses Jeff, her dad, and California. Luckily, though, she likes Stoneybrook and her new family.

  So — those are my friends. The ones I would turn to in a crisis. For instance, if Dad lost his job. But that, I had decided, was not going to happen.

  Apparently, my brothers and sisters had decided the same thing.

  “See you at dinner,” I said as I left for the BSC meeting. “We’re going to hear good news then, aren’t we, you guys?”

  “Sure,” replied Jordan.

  “Of course,” said Vanessa. “Dad would never get fired.”

  I rode my bike to Claudia Kishi’s house and arrived there at 5:20. BSC meetings start at five-thirty on the dot.

  “Hi, Claud!” I said as I entered her room. I sounded pretty cheerful since I had convinced myself that my family had nothing to worry about.

  “Hi,” replied Claud. “What kind of snack do you want today?”

  I went for the junkiest. “Mallomars,” I said immediately.

  “Good choice!” Claud must have been in a junky mood, too. “Now if I can just remember where I hid them …”

  “In your hollow book?” I suggested.

  “Nope. They don’t fit in there.
I’ve tried. Let me see…. Oh, yeah.” Claud opened a drawer in her desk, found a key, used the key to open her jewelry box, and produced the promised Mallomars.

  “How did you fit the Mallomars in there with all your jewelry?” I asked.

  “I didn’t. I had to take the jewelry out to make room. And I put it … Hmm. Oh, yeah. In my pencil case.”

  I was going to ask Claud where she had put the stuff that was in her pencil case, but I decided not to. Sometimes talking to Claud makes my head spin.

  Anyway, the other club members were arriving. By 5:29, Stacey was in Claud’s desk chair — backward, facing into the room, her arms draped over the rungs. Mary Anne, Dawn, and Claudia were sitting in a row on Claud’s bed, leaning against the wall. Jessi and I were seated cross-legged on the floor, working on a paper-clip chain. And Kristy, ready to start the meeting, was sitting in Claud’s director’s chair, wearing a visor, a pencil stuck over one ear, with the club notebook open in her lap.

  As the numbers on Claudia’s digital alarm clock changed from 5:29 to 5:30, Kristy cleared her throat. Then she said, “Attention! This meeting of the Baby-sitters Club will now come to order.”

  As you might have guessed, Claud’s bedroom is the official headquarters of the BSC. We meet there three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from five-thirty until six, and we take job calls from people who need to line up baby-sitters. How do people know about our meetings and that they should call us at those times? Because we advertise. Maybe I better explain things a little.

  The original idea for the Baby-sitters Club was Kristy’s. She got the idea back at the beginning of seventh grade, just after Stacey had moved to Stoneybrook. In those days, Kristy’s mom had not yet married Watson Brewer, the Thomases still lived on Bradford Court across the street from Claudia and next door to Mary Anne and her dad, and Kristy and her older brothers were responsible for baby-sitting for David Michael after school. But of course an afternoon came when Kristy, Sam, and Charlie were all busy, so Mrs. Thomas had to phone for a baby-sitter and she had to make a lot of calls because no one seemed to be available.

  Mom is wasting her time, thought Kristy. And that’s when she got her great idea. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if her mother could make just one call and reach a lot of sitters at once? So Kristy invited Mary Anne and Claudia to form the Baby-sitters Club with her. The first thing the girls decided, though, was that they really needed at least four members, so they asked Stacey to join the club, too. Stacey and Claudia had met in school and were already becoming friends.

  After the girls decided when they were going to meet, they had to decide where to meet. The answer was obvious: in Claudia’s room, because she has not only her own phone, but her own phone number. And then the club members began advertising. They even placed an ad in the Stoneybrook News. And during their very first meeting people called them needing baby-sitters. (Well, actually one person needed a dog-sitter, but that’s a long story.) Anyway, by January of that school year, the BSC was getting so much business that when Dawn moved to town, the girls invited her to join the club. Then, at the beginning of eighth grade (sixth grade for Jessi and me), Stacey moved back to New York. So Kristy, Claudia, Mary Anne, and Dawn asked Jessi and me to join the BSC. Of course, when Stacey returned to Stoneybrook after her parents split up, we let her right back in the club. Now the BSC has seven members and that’s plenty. Claud’s room is getting crowded!

  As president of the club, Kristy runs our meetings (quite officially). She also thinks up ways to keep the club efficient — and creative. For instance, the club record book, the club notebook, and Kid-Kits were all Kristy’s ideas. (The record book is Mary Anne’s department, so I’ll describe that later.) The notebook is like a diary. It’s where we write up each and every job we go on. This is something of a pain, but we all agree that it’s necessary and helpful. See, each of us is responsible for reading the notebook once a week. That way we find out what happened on our friends’ sitting jobs. We learn how they solved baby-sitting problems, and we keep up with the children our club sits for regularly. It’s always useful to know if a kid has developed a fear, is having trouble at school, or anything else that’s new or unusual. Then there are Kid-Kits. I just love mine. When Kristy got the idea for Kid-Kits, each of us made one. We found cardboard cartons, decorated them with paint, fabric, and other art supplies belonging to Claudia, then filled the boxes with our old books, toys, and games from home, as well as some new, store-bought things, such as coloring books, Magic Markers, construction paper, and stickers. When we go on sitting jobs, we sometimes take the Kid-Kits along. Children love them! They don’t even care that half the toys are old. There’s just something appealing about playing with toys that are new to them. I have to brag a little here and say that the Kid-Kits have helped make us pretty popular baby-sitters! Anyway, you can see why Kristy, with her big ideas, is such a good president for our club.

  Claudia is the vice-president mostly because three times a week her room is invaded for club meetings, and her junk food is eaten. But she also gets stuck taking calls that, for one reason or another, come in while we’re not holding a meeting. Then she has to schedule those jobs herself.

  The person who’s really in charge of scheduling, though, is Mary Anne. As secretary, that’s one of her main jobs. Also, she’s in charge of the record book. The record book is where we keep track of our clients, their addresses and phone numbers, the rates they pay, how much money we earn (that’s actually Stacey’s department), and — most important — our schedules. Every time one of our clients calls, Mary Anne opens the record book to the appointment pages and checks to see who’s free to take the job. Poor Mary Anne has to remember an awful lot of things, such as when Jessi has ballet classes, I have orthodontist appointments, or Kristy has a Krushers practice. But Mary Anne is organized and precise (she has neat handwriting, too), and she’s great at the job. No one could do it better than she does.

  As club treasurer, Stacey records the money each of us earns. (This is just for our own information. We don’t divide up our earnings or anything.) She also collects dues from us each Monday. The dues go into the club treasury (a manila envelope), and Stacey doles it out as needed: to pay Charlie Thomas to drive Kristy to and from club meetings now that she lives on the other side of town, to help Claudia pay her phone bill, to buy supplies for the Kid-Kits when things run out or get used up, and for fun things such as club parties or sleepovers! Stacey is a very good treasurer. She’s a whiz at math, and she loves money, even if it’s really club money. Sometimes we even have a little trouble getting her to part with it. But in the end, she always does.

  Dawn is our alternate officer. Her job is to be able to fill in for anybody who might miss a meeting. In other words, she has know how to schedule jobs, keep track of money, etc. She’s like an understudy in a play. Since most of us don’t miss meetings very often, though, she doesn’t usually have anything special to do, so we let her answer the phone a lot.

  Jessi and I are junior officers, which simply means that we’re too young to take nighttime jobs, unless we’re sitting for our own families. But we’re still a big help to the club. Taking on a lot of afternoon and weekend jobs frees the older members for the nighttime ones.

  Guess what. Technically, there are two other club members. I haven’t mentioned them yet because they don’t come to meetings. They’re our associate members, and they’re people we can call on to take a job if none of the rest of us can take it. Believe it or not, that does happen sometimes. Our associate members are Shannon Kilbourne, a friend of Kristy’s (she lives across the street from Kristy), and … Logan Bruno, Mary Anne’s boyfriend! He’s a terrific baby-sitter.

  Our Wednesday meeting was underway. I found that, for short periods of time, I was able to forget that bad news might be waiting for me at home. I tried to concentrate on the meeting.

  “Any club business?” asked Kristy.

  “Jenny Prezzioso’s going to be a big sister!�
� announced Dawn. I could tell she’d been holding that secret in for a long time, probably since Monday night when she had sat at the Prezziosos’.

  “Mrs. Prezzioso is going to have a baby and you didn’t even tell me?” exclaimed Mary Anne. (Mary Anne is the only one of us who tolerates Jenny very well. Jenny is a four-year-old spoiled brat. I wondered how she would react to being a sister and having to share everything — including her parents.)

  “It was worth keeping the secret to see the expressions on your faces,” Dawn said. “And guess what. The Prezziosos already know what the baby will be. Mrs. P. had a test done. The baby’s going to be a —”

  “Wait! Don’t tell!” I cried. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I want to be surprised.”

  “Me, too,” said everyone except Mary Anne.

  “I’ll tell you at home tonight,” Dawn said to her stepsister.

  “Okay,” agreed Mary Anne.

  The phone rang then and Dawn answered it. “Hello, Baby-sitters Club…. Oh, hi! … For a whole month? … Oh, okay. I’ll check with Mary Anne and call you right back.” Dawn hung up the phone. “That was Mrs. Delaney,” she said. (The Delaneys live in Kristy’s ritzy new neighborhood, right next door to Shannon Kilbourne. There are two Delaney kids — Amanda, who’s eight, and Max, who’s six. Kristy used to call them the snobs, since they were so bossy and mean when the club first began sitting for them, but now she’s changed her mind. She can handle the Delaneys.) “Mrs. Delaney wants to go back to work,” Dawn told us, “so she’s taking a refresher course in real estate. She needs a sitter on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from three-thirty till five for the next month.”

  “Boy, that might be hard to schedule,” said Mary Anne, looking at the appointment pages in the record book. “No, wait. You could do it, Mal, and so could you, Kristy.”