Kristy and the Secret of Susan Read online

  Claudia makes some of her own jewelry — ceramic earrings and pins, papier-mâché bracelets, that sort of thing. Claud can draw, paint, sculpt, make pottery, you name it. I’m glad she’s good at art because she’s terrible in school, although she’s smart. For some reason, school is just hard for Claud, and she doesn’t like it. She gets only average grades and she’s the world’s worst speller. Unfortunately, her sister, Janine, is a genius. She’s so smart that even though she’s a high-school student she gets to take courses at the local community college. For pleasure, Janine reads stuff like Atomic Theory or The History of Law-making in America. Claud reads Nancy Drew books, but her parents don’t approve of them, so she has to hide them in her room.

  Books aren’t the only thing she hides. Claudia is also a junk-food addict, something else her parents disapprove of. So there are bags of chips and candy, and packages of Twinkies and Oreos hidden in her room, too. Opening a drawer in Claud’s room, or going after something that’s rolled under her bed, can be a surprising experience.

  Claudia’s best friend is Stacey McGill, and the two of them are alike in a lot of ways. Stacey is also very sophisticated, quite pretty, and extremely cool. She’s as funky a dresser as Claud — short, tight pants, push-down socks, the whole bit. Every now and then she gets her hair permed, and, of course, she’s got pierced ears.

  Claudia and Stacey are boy-crazy.

  However, Stacey’s home life is different from Claud’s. And if you think my family, or Mary Anne and Dawn’s family, is interesting, you should hear about Stacey’s. Stacey, whose full name is Anastasia Elizabeth McGill, was born and raised in New York City. No wonder she’s so sophisticated. Then, just before she began seventh grade, the company her father works for transferred him to their office in Stamford, Connecticut, so the McGills found a house in Stoneybrook and moved here. They’d only been here a year when the company moved Mr. McGill back to New York. None of us could believe it, but the McGills had to go. Then, they’d been in NYC again for less than a year when Stacey’s parents got separated and then divorced. Mr. McGill stayed in NYC with his job, but Mrs. McGill wanted to come back to Connecticut. Poor Stacey had to choose where to live. She decided on Stoneybrook and us and the BSC, thank goodness, but she visits her dad in New York a lot.

  Another thing about Stacey is that she has diabetes. That’s a disease in which her pancreas doesn’t make enough of something called insulin, so her blood sugar level gets out of control. Stacey has to give herself injections (ew, ew, ew) of insulin every day, and also stay on a strict no-sugar diet. Otherwise, she could get really sick. She could even go into a coma. It must be hard for her to have to turn down Claud’s junk food all the time.

  Guess what. When Stacey and her mom moved back to Connecticut, they couldn’t move into their old house. That was because Jessi had moved into it! Jessi Ramsey and Mallory Pike are the two younger members of the BSC. They’re best friends, eleven years old, and in sixth grade at Stoneybrook Middle School. The rest of us are in eighth grade.

  Like Stacey and Claudia, Jessi and Mal are alike in many ways and different in many ways. They’re each the oldest kid in their families, and they think their parents treat them like babies. I guess it is hard being eleven. I remember wanting so badly to be more grownup when I was their age, but Mom didn’t start really letting me grow up until I was twelve. Anyway, Jessi and Mal have campaigned hard to be allowed to do more things, and their parents did let them get their ears pierced (just one hole in each ear). However, Mal then had to have braces put on her teeth, and she wears glasses and isn’t allowed to get contacts, so she’s not feeling particularly pretty these days, even with her pierced ears.

  Jessi and Mal both love to read, especially horse stories by Marguerite Henry. Beyond that, they’re quite different. Jessi’s passion is ballet, and boy, is she good. She takes special classes at a dance school in Stamford, where she had to audition just to get in, and she has danced lead roles in productions before hundreds of people. Mal’s passions are writing and drawing, and she thinks she’d like to be an author and illustrator of children’s books when she grows up. Jessi comes from an average-sized family — her parents, an eight-year-old sister named Becca, and a baby brother nicknamed Squirt — while Mal comes from a huge family. Her parents have eight children! Mal has four brothers (three of them are identical triplets) and three sisters. Another difference is that Jessi is black and Mal is white. This doesn’t matter to them, or to any of us in the BSC, but Jessi’s skin color bothered a lot of people in Stoneybrook, I’m ashamed to say. The Ramseys’ neighbors gave them a really hard time at first, although they’ve calmed down now. They’ve found that there’s not a thing to dislike about the Ramseys.

  Oh, I forgot one other similarity between Jessi and Mal. Each of their families has a pet hamster!

  Okay. So now you know the members of the Baby-sitters Club. A meeting was about to begin. I put on my visor, sat down in Claud’s director’s chair, stuck a pencil over my ear, and called the meeting to order.

  As president of the BSC, I feel it is my duty to run our meetings professionally and in a businesslike manner. We have done that since the club first started. How did the BSC begin? Well, it began because of David Michael, really. See, back at the start of seventh grade, when Mom and Watson weren’t even talking about getting married, my mother and brothers and I still lived on Bradford Court, next door to Mary Anne and across from Claudia. In those days, Sam and Charlie and I were responsible for taking care of David Michael after school until Mom came home from work. We took turns. But, of course, an evening came when we realized that none of us was free to baby-sit for him the next day, so Mom had to find another sitter on short notice. It wasn’t easy. I remember we were eating pizza for dinner that night, and I sat there with my slice, watching Mom make call after call. Nobody was available — and Mom was wasting a lot of time on the phone.

  That was when I got my greatest idea ever. Wouldn’t it be neat if Mom could make just one call and reach a whole lot of sitters at once? As soon as I could, I told Mary Anne and Claudia that I’d thought of a business we could start. We could form a baby-sitting club and meet several times a week. Then people could call us during those times and reach three responsible, reliable sitters. (We were already baby-sitting a lot in our neighborhood.) With several people at the other end of the phone, the caller was bound to find an available sitter.

  My friends thought this was a great idea, too, but they also thought three people weren’t enough. So we asked Stacey, who was just getting to know Claudia then, if she wanted to join, and she said yes! A few months later, when Dawn moved to Stoneybrook, our club was doing so much business that we asked her to join, too. Then when Stacey had to move back to New York, we couldn’t do without her, so both Jessi and Mal joined the club. And then Stacey returned to Stoneybrook. We welcomed her back into the club, of course. As an original member and a good friend, we’d never have turned her away. Plus, we needed her. I think, though, that with seven members plus our two associate members, Logan and Shannon, the BSC is finally big enough.

  Here’s how our club operates. The seven members meet three afternoons a week — Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from five-thirty until six. Our clients call us at those times to line up baby-sitters. They know they’ll get one. It’s unlikely that every single one of us plus Logan and Shannon would be busy.

  How do clients hear about our club and know when and how to reach us? Because we advertise. Before we even started the club, we distributed dozens of fliers in our neighborhood, and we even placed an ad in the Stoneybrook newspaper. Now we send out fliers occasionally, but we don’t really need to. News of our club spreads by word of mouth, plus we have as much business as we can handle.

  Every member of the club (except for Logan and Shannon) is an officer.

  I am the president. This is mostly because I thought up the club in the first place, and also because I’m good at solving problems, running the club, and thinking
up new ideas. For instance, I decided that we should keep a club notebook. It’s sort of like a diary. In it, my friends and I write up every single job we go on. Then, once a week, we read the recent diary entries to see what went on when our friends were baby-sitting. Nobody (except Mallory) really likes to write in the diary, but we all agree that reading it is helpful. We find out what’s going on with the kids we take care of, and how our friends solve sitting problems.

  Another of my ideas was that we should each make a Kid-Kit. Kid-Kits are boxes that we decorated with paint and felt and sequins and things, and filled with our old games, books, and toys, plus some new items such as sticker books, crayons, and drawing paper. Children just love playing with the stuff in the Kid-Kits. For some reason, other people’s toys are always more interesting than theirs. And happy baby-sitting charges mean happy parents who are apt to call the BSC again with more jobs!

  Claudia is the vice-president of the club. She’s the only one of us with a phone in her room and her own phone number. This is an ideal situation. If we had to use some adult’s phone, we’d feel that we were tying it up. Plus, nonbaby-sitting calls would come in and interrupt our meetings. We think it’s only fair that Claud be the VP, since we invade her room three times a week, use her phone, and eat her junk food.

  Mary Anne is the club secretary. She has the biggest, most complicated job of any of us. As secretary, it’s up to Mary Anne to keep our club record book (don’t confuse that with the notebook) up to date. In the record book is all the important club information — names and addresses of our clients, the money we earn (recording that is really Stacey’s job), and most important of all, the appointment pages. On those pages, Mary Anne schedules every single sitting job we go on. In order to do that, she has to know all of our schedules — when Mal has orthodontist appointments or I’ve got a Krushers game or Jessi has ballet classes. So far, Mary Anne hasn’t made a single mistake. She’s amazing.

  Stacey is our treasurer. Since she loves money and is a math whiz, this is the perfect job for her. Every Monday, Stacey collects our club dues and adds it to the treasury (which is a manila envelope). Then she doles out money whenever it’s needed, usually for four things — new items for the Kid-Kits, to help pay for Claud’s phone bill, to pay Charlie to drive me to and from meetings, since I live so far from BSC headquarters now, and to buy supplies for occasional club treats such as pizza parties or sleepovers. Stacey loves collecting the money and hates parting with it.

  Dawn is our alternate officer. This means that if any club member has to miss a meeting, Dawn can take over her job for her. She’s like a substitute teacher: She has to know what everyone does. When Stacey moved back to New York for that short time, Dawn became the treasurer. But she gladly gave up the job when Stacey returned. She’s not nearly as good at math as Stacey is.

  Jessi and Mal are junior officers. They don’t actually have jobs. “Junior officer” means that they’re only allowed to baby-sit after school or on weekends. They can’t sit at night unless they’re sitting for their own families. They are a huge help to us older members, though. Since they take on after-school jobs, they free the rest of us up for evening jobs.

  Then there are our associate members, Logan and Shannon. As I mentioned before, they don’t come to meetings. They’re just reliable sitters we can call on if a job is offered to the BSC that none of the rest of us can take. Believe it or not, this happens from time to time. (In case you’re wondering, Shannon Kilbourne is a friend of mine. She lives across the street from me in my new neighborhood. And she’s the only one of us club members who doesn’t go to Stoneybrook Middle School. Instead, she goes to a private school.)

  And that’s how we operate our club.

  * * *

  “Order! Order, please!” I called.

  My friends stopped talking. Claudia turned away from the window, which she’d been about to peer out of again.

  Everyone was sitting in her usual place. I was in the director’s chair, as I mentioned; Jessi and Mal were sitting on the floor, leaning against Claud’s bed; Claud, Dawn, and Mary Anne were sitting in a row on the bed, leaning against the wall; and Stacey was sitting backwards in Claud’s desk chair, her arms draped over the top rung. (Sometimes Stacey sits on the bed and Dawn sits in the desk chair.)

  Since it was Wednesday and not Monday, Stacey didn’t have to collect dues. So I asked, “Any club business?”

  Six heads shook from side to side.

  We waited for the phone to ring.

  We’d lined up three jobs when, at 5:50, the phone rang for a fourth time. I answered it. “Hello, Baby-sitters Club.”

  “Hello,” said an unfamiliar voice. “My name is Mrs. Felder.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Felder,” I said. “This is Kristy Thomas. I used to live around the corner from you.” (Even though I didn’t really remember Mrs. Felder, maybe she remembered me.)

  “Hi, Kristy,” she replied warmly. “I’m calling because I heard how wonderful your baby-sitting business is. And I’ve got a daughter, Susan. She’s handicapped — autistic actually — and she’s been living at a special school, but now she’s home for a month, waiting to be transferred to a new school. I don’t work, but I’d like a break from Susan three afternoons a week if possible. Just for a couple of hours each time so I can get out and go to the store, that sort of thing. Do you think any of you would be able to take on a job like that?”

  “I’ll have to check,” I told Mrs. Felder. “I’ll call you right back.”

  I hung up the phone and explained the job to my friends.

  “Gosh,” said Mary Anne, “that’s going to be tough, scheduling-wise.”

  “What did you say is wrong with Susan?” asked Jessi.

  “She’s autistic. I think that’s the word Mrs. Felder used. But I’m not sure what it means.”

  “Is it like Down’s syndrome?” asked Claudia.

  I shrugged.

  “Well, anyway,” said Mary Anne, “Kristy, it looks like you’re the only one of us who could sit for Susan three times a week for a month. You don’t have any lessons or anything, and if you went to the Felders on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, you wouldn’t even have to cancel a Krushers practice or the sitting jobs you’ve already got lined up.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Charlie has to drive me over here for meetings on those days anyway. Maybe he could do it right after school instead of at five-thirty. Then he could pick me up at the regular time. Let me call Charlie.”

  So I did, and he said he could work that into his schedule. Then he added, “For a small additional fee, of course,” but it turned out he was only kidding.

  “Well, this is good news,” I told my friends. “I can’t believe we scheduled this so easily. Mary Anne, pencil me in for Susan for the next month, and I’ll call Mrs. Felder back.”

  I dialed the Felders’ number. “Hi,” I said. “This is Kristy Thomas again, president of the Baby-sitters Club. I’m happy to tell you that I will be Susan’s sitter for the next month. We worked out all the details.”

  Mrs. Felder didn’t sound as happy as I’d expected. In fact, all she said was, “That’s fine. But I think you better meet Susan before you make a final decision about the job, okay?”

  “Okay,” I replied uncertainly.

  We decided that I would go to the Felders’ on Friday before the next BSC meeting. What kind of child was Susan? I wondered. Why did Mrs. Felder think I might not want to sit for her? I was dying of curiosity.

  Not far from Susan Felder lives a family, the Braddocks, with a deaf boy named Matt. Jessi once had a long-term sitting job for Matt and his sister, Haley — just like the one I was about to begin (maybe) with Susan. I remember Jessi saying how nervous she was the first time she rang the Braddocks’ doorbell. What would Matt be like? she’d wondered. She knew he communicated using sign language. Would Jessi be able to learn enough sign language to talk with him? Would he be difficult to sit for? How would he react to a stranger?

  Now
I knew how Jessi had felt. Charlie had just dropped me off at the Felders’, calling out the car window that he would pick me up after the BSC meeting. He had driven away, and now I was standing on the Felders’ front stoop, my finger poised to ring the bell.

  What would Susan be like? All I knew of her was what I had seen when she’d been out walking — a reluctant-looking little girl who made strange gestures and movements. And I knew she’d gone to a “special” school. But what kind of school exactly? Mrs. Felder had hinted that I might not want the job once I met Susan.

  I had looked up “autistic” in the dictionary. I couldn’t find the word, but I had found “autism.” The definition said something about childhood schizophrenia, acting out, and withdrawal. That was no help. Then I looked up “schizophrenia,” but I was more confused than ever. The definition mentioned “withdrawing from reality.” For heaven’s sake, I am always withdrawing from reality — every time I daydream. And my stepsister, Karen, believes in ghosts and witches, but there’s nothing wrong with her. I would have to wait and see what Mrs. Felder said.

  I rang the doorbell.

  I could hear a piano playing. It stopped when the bell rang. A few moments later, Mrs. Felder was at the door.