Abby's Lucky Thirteen Read online

  Although she tried.

  I heard a chair push back. “I trust this won’t happen again,” said my mother.

  Ms. Frost said something indistinct and neutral.

  “Good,” said my mother. “Well, I’ve enjoyed talking to you.”

  I hadn’t enjoyed the talk. Not one bit. I suspected Ms. Frost hadn’t either. I knew that now, for sure, I was on Ms. Frost’s bad side.

  And that I hadn’t been any more fair with her than she had been with me.

  Great. Any way you looked at it, the situation added up to trouble. And there was nothing I could do about it.

  “This meeting of the Baby-sitters Club will now come to order.”

  With these immortal words, our fearless leader and BSC president Kristy Thomas kicked off the Wednesday afternoon meeting of the BSC at Claudia Kishi’s.

  All the regulars were there: Kristy; Claudia, the vice-president; Stacey McGill, our resident math whiz, and therefore the treasurer; Mary Anne, the secretary; me, the alternate officer; Mallory Pike and Jessica Ramsey, the junior officers. Absent were our associate members, Shannon Kilbourne and Logan Bruno. The associate members aren’t required to attend regularly, since their main function is to take jobs when we have an overflow.

  But all the rest of us have to be Present, and On Time.

  On time is five-thirty every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon. We meet for half an hour in Claudia’s bedroom, because she is the only BSC member with her own phone line. Our clients know they can reach up to nine experienced and very good babysitters by calling during those hours. And with Claud’s line, we don’t tie up anyone’s family phone.

  Every Monday, we hand over dues to Stacey. The dues are used to pay Kristy’s brother Charlie for gasoline when he drives her and me to meetings (since we live so far away from Claudia’s), for celebrations, and for supplies: from fliers, when needed to advertise the BSC, to the contents of the Kid-Kits. The Kid-Kits (a Kristy Idea) are boxes filled with inexpensive toys, games, books, puzzles, and so forth. Things we or our siblings have outgrown go into the kits, as well as new items, such as crayons and paper, from time to time. Jessi has a Kid-Kit with an office theme, including those funny little memo stick-ums that say things like “From the desk of the Boss.” When we know we’re going to be dealing with a child who is in bed with a cold, or a new client who might be difficult, or a houseful of kids and a sky full of bad weather, we take the kits along. They’re always a big hit. The kids love having new toys to play with — even our old recycled ones.

  We also write, every single meeting, in the club notebook. (Another Kristy Idea). That’s where we keep a record of who we sat for and what happened. We are all responsible for reading the notebook once a week, to keep ourselves up-to-date on what’s happening with our regular clients, and what new clients are like.

  Another club book is the record book, kept by Mary Anne (who’s never, ever made a mistake!). It contains our client list, with names, addresses, and phone numbers, plus each member’s schedule of extracurricular activities and baby-sitting jobs.

  It all sounds very professional you say? But of course.

  After all, we’re a business. A very successful one, too. Even before I joined, the BSC hardly ever had to get new business by putting up fliers in supermarkets or handing them out to potential clients. Our satisfied customers are our best advertisements, and we got all the business we needed by word of mouth.

  Whose brilliant idea was the club? Our fearless leader’s, of course. One night Kristy was listening to her mother call one baby-sitter after another, trying to find a sitter for Kristy’s little brother, David Michael. Suddenly Kristy realized how much more organized and efficient (the building-block words of Kristy’s vocabulary) it would be if her mother could just dial one number and reach several experienced and reliable baby-sitters.

  In no time at all Kristy had formed the Baby-sitters Club with her best friend, Mary Anne, who lived next door at the time, and their good friend Claudia Kishi, who lived across the street. Soon they had more business than they could handle. That’s when Stacey joined. She’d just moved to Stoneybrook from New York City with her parents. Stacey and Claudia soon became best friends. And not long after that, Mary Anne met Dawn Schafer and she became Mary Anne’s other best friend — and joined the BSC. Mallory Pike and Jessica Ramsey, who are both in sixth grade (Mallory used to be one of our baby-sitting charges), followed as junior officers. Because they are in sixth grade, they can’t take nighttime sitting jobs, except with their own families. Logan and Shannon joined as associates, to cover jobs that we couldn’t take ourselves.

  Kristy is a small person (the shortest person in the eighth grade at SMS) with big ideas and bulldozer effectiveness. She Gets Things Done. Sometimes she is less than tactful. Some people even call her bossy. But I think that the people who call her bossy are mostly just not comfortable with a girl being so sure of herself.

  Since I am outspoken and self-confident myself, and since Kristy and I don’t always agree, it means we clash sometimes. But I admire Kristy’s style. I think the world needs more Kristys.

  When Kristy came up with the idea for the BSC, she was living in a small house packed to the roof, practically, with her family: her mother, her two older brothers, Sam and Charlie, and her younger brother, David Michael. Her father had walked out on her family when David Michael was just a baby, and things hadn’t been easy.

  Then Kristy’s mother fell in love and got married — to a millionaire! They all moved to his house, which is a real, live mansion, where they have plenty of room.

  Then their family became even bigger. Watson’s two children from his previous marriage, Karen and Andrew, stay there a lot, of course. Plus Watson and Kristy’s mom adopted a Vietnamese orphan, a baby they named Emily Michelle. After that, Kristy’s maternal grandmother, whom everybody calls Nannie, came to live with the family to keep an eye on things and help out. Add to that a Bernese mountain dog puppy, a cranky cat, some goldfish, a hermit crab, and I-don’t-know-what-other assorted pets, and a resident ghost (at least, that’s what seven-year-old Karen Brewer believes is living in a room on the third floor), and you can see why Kristy has to be organized and efficient.

  Kristy’s best friend, Mary Anne Spier, is also organized and efficient, and pretty short herself. Like Kristy, she has brown hair and is a casual dresser (although Kristy’s standard uniform, jeans and a sweater or sweatshirt, wins the most-casual award hands down). And like Kristy, Mary Anne is part of a blended family. But they are also very, very different in many, many ways.

  They grew up together on Bradford Court (where Claudia still lives), but while Kristy was surfing the churning waters of a big family, Mary Anne was an only child, and a half-orphan. Her mother died when Mary Anne was a baby, and her father, to make sure that he wouldn’t be an overindulgent parent, went in the opposite direction and was very strict. He even made Mary Anne wear little girl clothes and pigtails long after she was ready to start checking out a new look. I don’t mean red lipstick and talon fingernails — just no pigtails, for example, and getting to choose her own clothes, such as jeans instead of dresses.

  Maybe her dad’s overprotectiveness is part of the reason Mary Anne is so painfully shy and so sensitive, too. I’ve never seen this, but I understand that even commercials on television can make her cry. Amazing.

  The other side of Mary Anne’s sensitivity is that she is a very good listener, and more than any of the rest of the BSC members, she is able to pick up right away on what other people are feeling. This makes her a super friend, and an excellent baby-sitter.

  Because of Mary Anne’s responsibilities in the BSC, she was at last able to prove to her father that she could handle a little more responsibility for her own life. Her father began to relax. He even let Mary Anne adopt her first pet, a kitten named Tigger. I should also mention that Mr. Spier was (and is) cool about Mary Anne’s boyfriend, Logan Bruno.

  So I guess you could say both
father and daughter started growing up and doing fine.

  And that’s not all that happened. When Dawn and her brother and mother moved to Stoneybrook, they were moving back to Mrs. Schafer’s hometown from California, where Dawn’s parents had just gotten a divorce. And Dawn and Mary Anne discovered that once upon a time in high school, Mrs. Schafer and Mr. Spier had been sweethearts.

  Mary Anne and Dawn did a little cupid work and before you could say “Here Comes the Bride” Mrs. Schafer and Mr. Spier had gotten married and had moved into the Schafers’ old farmhouse.

  So now Mary Anne has a larger family, and a haunted house of her own, just like Kristy’s (yes, some people believe that a secret passage that Dawn discovered in the old farmhouse is haunted). But then Dawn’s younger brother, Jeff, decided to move back to California to live with his dad, and Dawn missed them so much that she moved back, too.

  We all still stay in touch with Dawn, though. I’ve met her a few times, and I like her. She’s very easygoing. For example, in California, she helped start a West Coast BSC, the We ♥ Kids Club. But it has only a few rules, and isn’t nearly as organized as the BSC (see Kid-Kits and notebooks, plural, above).

  Dawn is very different from Mary Anne, too. She is tall and thin and has long, pale, blonde hair, blue eyes, and two holes in each earlobe. She’s a surfer, but she doesn’t have an extreme tan. That’s part of her healthy attitude. She doesn’t eat red meat and hardly eats sugar (she calls it poison). She is not only well informed about how important it is to take care of the environment, she is passionate about it.

  Claudia, who is the vice-prez, both because she is one of the charter members and because she has her own phone, thinks that health food is poison. At every meeting, she provides the club with a mostly not-health-food selection of junk food, from Twinkies to Pop-Tarts to Double Stuf Oreos. As an athlete, I have no objection to this. You need your carbohydrates, right?

  And most of the other BSC members don’t either, except maybe Stacey, Claudia’s best friend (you’ll see why in a minute). Anyway, Claudia’s position on health food may not be exactly fashionable, but Claudia herself is a knockout. She’s an artist, and possibly an artistic genius. Her eye for color and design extends to what she wears. She puts together outfits that most people couldn’t even think of, and ends up looking as if she stepped out of one of the most cutting-edge fashion shows in the world.

  Like today, when the predominant look was jeans and pullovers and Nikes, Claudia was in leopard-print tights, black ankle boots with fuzzy yellow slouch socks, black bicycle shorts, a yellow leotard, and this teeny, tiny fuzzy sweater with cap sleeves that was black with big yellow buttons. Her earrings were leopards: On one side a leopard looked as if it was coming through her earlobe toward you. On the other side, you could only see the back of the leopard, disappearing into her earlobe, as if her earlobes were these weird leopard cat doors.

  She’d crinkle-braided strands of her black hair, and tied the crinkled parts at the top with knots of yellow ribbon.

  Totally impressive. In fact, a work of art.

  The only thing that Claudia can’t make into art is schoolwork. It just doesn’t interest her. She has trouble with rules: spelling rules, math rules, writing rules. I believe creative people live by different rules, and it isn’t exactly fair to expect them to think the way non-creative people think. But what can Claudia do? Until she’s a rich and famous artist and can hire accountants and bankers and secretaries, she’s got to struggle through, which is exactly what she does. Her parents even check her homework every night.

  Claudia mystifies them, I think. Especially since her older sister is a regular genius in things like math and science. It’s only recently they’ve begun to appreciate how cool it is to have two such different and amazing kids.

  But her parents will never understand Claud’s love of Nancy Drew books. They think of Nancy Drew as the written equivalent of junk food, which is a mystery, Claudia says, that even Nancy Drew herself will never solve.

  If Claudia is creatively stylish, Stacey is classically in style. Some people in the BSC feel that Stacey is the most sophisticated of the club. She is definitely elegant. She’s tall and slender, with blonde hair and a sort of New York City way of always keeping an eye on things, watching her back, if you know what I mean.

  Stacey, who is an only child, moved to Stoneybrook from big old NYC with her parents when her father was transferred for his job. Then her father was transferred back to New York. Soon after, when her parents got divorced, her father stayed in the city and Stacey and her mother moved back to Stoneybrook for good.

  Although I am not New York City sophisticated, I do feel as if I understand at least something about Stacey that the others don’t. Because like me, Stacey has health problems.

  Mine are asthma and allergies. Stacey has diabetes. That means that her body can’t handle sugar well and she could get very sick, even go into a coma, if she doesn’t watch what she eats all the time. No chocolate or candy. No pigouts. And she has to give herself shots of insulin every day to regulate the sugar in her blood.

  For that reason, Claudia’s junk food hiding places, which are located all around her room, from hollow books to coat pockets, always produce healthy junk food, too. Along with Sugar Frosted Flakes and Twinkies and Double Stuf Oreos, she’ll hand out pretzels, Frookies (cookies sweetened with fruit juice instead of sugar), popcorn, and even apples and oranges.

  These are things Claudia wouldn’t have to hide from her parents. But she stashes them away with the rest of the junk food just the same.

  Mallory, like Kristy, is from a large family. She has seven brothers and sisters, including triplet brothers. She is the oldest in her family, which means that she has plenty of baby-sitting experience. And like Kristy, she isn’t easily rattled.

  I think Mallory is pretty cute. Like all her brothers and sisters, she has brown hair, although hers is more reddish brown than any of theirs. And she has pale skin and big brown eyes. But to Mallory’s eternal despair, she has glasses and braces. She’s working on persuading her parents to get her contact lenses. The braces, she realizes, are something she is going to have to wait out.

  Mallory wants to be a children’s book writer and illustrator some day. She’s definitely the person whose Kid-Kit has the most and the coolest children’s books.

  Jessi, like Stacey and me, moved to Stoneybrook from somewhere else. Jessi lives with her parents, a younger sister, Becca, a younger brother, Squirt, and her aunt who helps keep things running smoothly, just as Nannie does for Kristy’s family.

  Like Kristy and Mary Anne, and Stacey and Claudia, Mal and Jessi have much in common with each other. They both love horses and reading, particularly horse stories and mysteries (but not horror stories). But Mal is not particularly athletic, while Jessi is planning on being a prima ballerina someday. Both are pursuing their goals already. Mal has won a prize for her fiction writing, and Jessi, who studies ballet in special classes after school, gets up every morning at 5:29 A.M., one minute before her alarm goes off, to practice ballet at the barre her family has set up for her in the basement.

  Physically, they are very different, too. Today, Mal was in the jeans and sweater mode, a variation of what Kristy, Mary Anne, and I were wearing. The rust brown sweater Mal had on made her pale skin look creamy and brought out the red in her hair. She looked nice, but basic, if you know what I mean.

  Jessi, who is taller than Mal, has black hair, brown skin, and dark brown eyes. She is slender where Mal is more sturdy-looking. Today she had her hair pulled back into a dancer’s knot at the nape of her neck. She was wearing a loose rose-colored turtleneck, a jean skirt, tights, and pale pink warmup leggings with her flat shoes. Even though we were just at a club meeting, she was sitting very upright, looking poised and graceful. You could tell she was a dancer.

  A diverse group, as one of our teachers might say.

  A very cool group, is what I would say.

  In between calls, w
e complained about homework, gossiped about school, discussed club business, and munched out on the goodies Claudia kept passing around.

  Naturally, I talked about my Bat Mitzvah.

  Claudia and Stacey wanted to know if I’d decided what I was going to wear yet.

  Kristy rolled her eyes in disgust.

  Mary Anne laughed. “You’re going to have to dress up too, Kristy. You can’t go to Abby’s Bat Mitzvah party in jeans.”

  Kristy made a hideous face, only half-kidding.

  “Listen,” I said, “the clothes thing is the least of my worries. All of our relatives are showing up for this. People I haven’t seen since I was a baby. Some of them are staying with us, but Mom’s already reserved rooms at the Strathmoore Inn for people, too.”

  “Wow,” Mary Anne breathed. “Like a wedding.”

  I nodded. Anna and I were hoping that our Long Island friends would be able to come, too. But, if you can believe it, our good friend Morgan was having her Bat Mitzvah the same weekend.

  “Plus, I have younger cousins who are coming, too. So I was wondering if the BSC could help me out. I mean, Mom is going all out and cooking a huge Shabbat dinner on Friday night and then we’re going to the synagogue for services. But the younger kids can’t come. So …”

  “This is a job for the BSC,” declared Claudia with a grin. “I mean, you can’t leave lots of kids of different ages to roam free. Or even to just watch television.”

  Mallory nodded. “Television wars,” she said wisely.

  “What?” Jessi wondered.

  “Well, everyone is always fighting over the remote control in our house,” explained Mallory. “The triplets are monster channel surfers. And my parents say it is driving them crazy, that everyone is spending too much time in front of the television set.”

  “That’s amazing,” said Jessi. “My parents have been complaining about Becca becoming a television head, too. I mean, every time any of her friends come over, that’s all they seem to do.”