Kristy and the Middle School Vandal Read online

  Frowning, I paused.

  “How about if I keep your watch?” Cary went on.

  What a world-class weirdo, I thought, looking automatically at my watch.

  Or where my watch should have been. It wasn’t there. I actually turned my wrist over and looked up my sleeve before I realized what had happened.

  Somehow, Cary had managed to take my watch. “Cary!” I shouted, but he was gone. I heard him laughing in the hall, but by the time I got to the door, he was nowhere in sight.

  First the homework, and now my watch. I was spitting mad. I’d have to tell my teacher I’d forgotten my homework. Since I was a good student and it hadn’t happened before, it wouldn’t be a huge problem, just a major pain and an embarrassment.

  But how could I survive without my watch? I looked at it a million times a day. I am a person who is never late. My watch is the reason for that. Plus it is a fun watch, a digital, with a stopwatch, an alarm, and lap counters, plus a light. And it told the date as well as the time.

  Great, I thought angrily, stomping toward my next class. By the time I won my watch back from Cary, who knew what day and time it would be keeping. And with my luck, he’d probably set the alarm to go off in the middle of the night.

  How had he taken my watch? How had he gotten my homework? He was the sneakiest person I had ever known. Also, I had to admit, one of the cleverest. Practical jokes might drive me wild (after all, it was a practical joke that had once caused Claudia to break her leg) but Cary’s were pretty awesome sometimes. Hmmm.

  I vowed then and there that I would solve whatever mystery Cary threw my way. Solve it, and flaunt it in his face. Make him pay. It wasn’t just about the watch and the homework and all his other stupid jokes.

  Cary Retlin had finally gone too far. This was war. And I was going to win.

  I was still brooding about Cary and the Mischief Knights at the end of the day as I loaded my pack with the books and notebooks I’d need for homework that night. Brooding of this level is very absorbing. I didn’t even hear Cary beside me until he said, in a quiet, confident voice, “So it’s a deal.”

  I managed to close my locker calmly (keeping a sharp eye on its contents and on Cary). I turned to face Cary.

  “A mystery war?” I said coolly. “Yes, it’s a deal.”

  “Good,” said Cary. “I’ll leave a trail of clues for you and the members of the BSCPD. The answer to Clue Number One will lead to Clue Number Two, and so on.” He held up six fingers. “You have six school days, starting tomorrow morning, when you’ll get the first clue.” He raised two more fingers. “There will be eight clues.”

  “Piece of cake,” I said. “The Mystery War is on.”

  I was in Claudia’s director’s chair, my visor on my head, my baby-sitting colleagues around me in Claudia’s room. It was Monday afternoon, at 5:40 P.M. (assuming that Claudia’s clock kept time as well as my missing watch did). We were all there (except for our associate members). We’d just paid our weekly dues, and had booked two baby-sitting jobs. All was right with the world and the Baby-sitters Club.

  What is the BSC? It is a business that I started. A very successful business based on a brilliant idea, and sustained by a lot of hard work. No bragging here, just facts.

  It all started on the first Tuesday afternoon of seventh grade, as I listened to Mom dial number after number, trying to find a baby-sitter for David Michael on a day when I wasn’t available. Suddenly it hit me. What if Mom could dial one number and reach several reliable baby-sitters all at once?

  I called my best friend, Mary Anne Spier, who lived next door to me at the time, we called Claudia Kishi, another good friend who lived across the street (we’d all known each other since we were babies), and she called Stacey McGill, a new friend of hers who had just moved to Stoneybrook. I became the president of the BSC, Claudia became the vice-president, Mary Anne became the secretary, and Stacey became the treasurer. We decided to meet three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from five-thirty until six, at Claudia’s. (She has her own phone line, so we wouldn’t tie up the phone for other people in her family.) We let clients know they could call us during those times to set up baby-sitting jobs. Mary Anne wrote the jobs down in what became the club record book, a notebook with a calendar for our jobs (plus a list of all our clients’ names, addresses, and phone numbers, the rates they pay, and special information about their children, such as who is allergic to peanut butter, or afraid of cats).

  Soon we had plenty of work and plenty of ways to spend the dues Stacey collected every Monday. We use our dues to pay my brother Charlie for gas, because he drives Abby and me to Claudia’s house for meetings (my new neighborhood is a long way from Bradford Court), to help pay Claudia’s phone bill every month, to buy new supplies for our Kid-Kits, and occasionally to pay for pizza parties.

  What are Kid-Kits? I’m glad you asked. They are the BSC’s secret weapon in the war against rainy days and general boredom. We take them to problem jobs, or just for a treat. Basically, they’re boxes we’ve decorated and filled with puzzles, toys, books, stickers, puppets, and whatever we think would be fun (Jessi’s has an office theme, for example). Some of the stuff is old — our hand-me-downs, or things our siblings have outgrown — and some of it is new. But it’s all new to the kids we sit for. And what kid doesn’t love to play with another kid’s stuff?

  When business took another jump, Mary Anne asked Dawn Schafer, who was also new to Stoneybrook, to join us as alternate officer (the person who takes the place of any officer who can’t come to a meeting). Mary Anne and Dawn had become friends, something I was not too happy with at the time, because I didn’t want to be replaced as Mary Anne’s best friend. As it turned out, I wasn’t. Mary Anne ended up having Dawn as a sister.

  Are you ready for the short version of a long story? Here goes. Dawn and her mother and brother had moved to Stoneybrook from California (after the Schafers divorced), because Mrs. Schafer had grown up here. She’d had a high-school sweetheart here, too: Mary Anne’s father! As soon as they discovered that, Mary Anne and Dawn couldn’t resist helping Mrs. Schafer and Mr. Spier get reacquainted. (Mr. Spier had been single since Mary Anne’s mom died, back when we were babies.) The next thing we knew, Dawn’s mom and Mary Anne’s dad were walking down the aisle. So Mary Anne and her dad moved into the Schafers’ house. Sadly, Dawn decided not too long ago that she needed to move back to California, because she missed her father and her brother so much. (Jeff, Dawn’s brother, never adjusted to Connecticut. He had moved back in with Mr. Schafer even before the wedding.)

  We miss Dawn a lot. (She misses us, too, although she has her own baby-sitters club out there, the We Kids Club.) Dawn, who is tall and thin and has almost white blonde hair, was the conscience of the BSC, in a way. She is very environmentally aware, which has made all of us much more careful about recycling and things like that. She never eats red meat and actually likes things such as sprouts and tofu (which aren’t so bad, I admit). And her calm, easygoing nature makes her a great baby-sitter — as well as a good friend to all of us, especially Mary Anne.

  Mary Anne and Dawn stay in touch, of course, and Dawn has come to visit once or twice. We call her our honorary member. But it isn’t the same.

  Anyway, after Dawn left, Shannon, one of our associate members (Logan Bruno, Mary Anne’s boyfriend, is our other associate member — more about him later) took Dawn’s place as alternate officer.

  This did not work, because Shannon, although super-organized, is also super-busy. She just couldn’t make all the meetings, and she couldn’t take that many baby-sitting jobs.

  And our junior officers, Mallory Pike and Jessica Ramsey, couldn’t do it, either. For one thing, they are called junior officers because they are eleven and in the sixth grade. They aren’t allowed to baby-sit at night unless they are taking care of their own siblings.

  Fortunately, Abby and Anna Stevenson moved in next door to me. We invited both Abby and Anna to join the BSC, but only
Abby accepted (Anna, a serious violinist, wanted to concentrate on her music). So Abby became the newest alternate officer and BSC member.

  Apart from the fact that we are terrific baby-sitters, we’re a very diverse group of people, as you already might have guessed. But that’s also what makes us so good — our unique combination of talents, skills, experiences, plus our excellent teamwork. Our new business these days comes from word of mouth, from our regular clients. We hardly ever have to put up fliers in the grocery store anymore.

  “Any new business?” I asked, surveying my fellow BSC members.

  No new business.

  “Any new mysteries?” I asked, only half-joking.

  Claudia sighed. “School?” she said, half-joking.

  Or maybe she was serious, even though she smiled.

  Why would Claudia Kishi, creative genius and vice-president of the BSC, call school a mystery?

  Because to Claudia, it is. She naturally aces art, but most of the other subjects do not bend to Claudia’s rules of creativity. Such as spelling. To Claudia, the alphabet consists of twenty-six letters that are meant to be arranged in as many different ways as possible. Naturally, her teachers don’t agree.

  Neither do Claud’s parents, especially since Claudia’s older sister Janine is a real, live, tested-and-proven genius who makes perfect grades and takes college classes, even though she is still in high school.

  Claudia demonstrates her creativity everywhere. She is one of the coolest dressers around, and she’s always creating amazing outfits. They’d probably look weird on some people, but on Claudia, with her long black hair, dark eyes, and creamy skin, every look is a great one. Today she was wearing pink jellies, white ankle socks with pink hearts around the edges, and majorly baggy white overalls, cut off just below the knee, over a tie-dyed pink, green, and yellow T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She had a ring on every finger and one on each thumb, including a heart-shaped mood ring, a ring with a little bell on it, a ring that looked like a cat winding around her finger, a baby ring with her birthstone in it, and a ring she’d made herself out of clay and beads. Her hair was pulled back into three braids, which were tied together at the bottom with a pink and green ribbon. She had on her peace-symbol earrings, too, and a button that said, “Jerry Garcia Lives” in black script against a tie-dyed background that matched her T-shirt. She’d made the button herself in art class.

  Claudia stepped over to her bookcase and removed several books with gold and silver award emblems on their covers. These were books her mother, the head librarian at the Stoneybrook Public Library, had urged Claudia to read. Claudia had read — and liked — some of them, but her favorites were the books hidden behind the award-winners: Nancy Drews. And behind the Nancy Drews were what Claudia Kishi was now after: junk food, in this case, Jujubes. She handed these around to us, then reached behind her dresser and untaped a bag of pretzels, which she gave to her best friend, Stacey McGill.

  Claud’s parents don’t want her to eat sweets, but she hides them in her room and eats them anyway. Stacey can’t do that. She’s diabetic. She has to watch what she eats very, very carefully, monitor her blood sugar constantly, and even give herself insulin injections every day. But while she and Claudia don’t have junk food or schoolwork in common (Stacey is a math whiz and she does very well in her other subjects, too), they do share a passion for fashion. Stacey, an only child who grew up in New York City and now lives here with her divorced mom, is deeply into fashion. She loves to shop, and she and Claudia can spend hours discussing their best colors and what they are going to wear to school the next day. But while Claudia’s look is wildly original, Stacey’s is more New York sophisticated.

  Stacey is tall and thin and blonde, with blue eyes and dark eyelashes. One of Stacey’s best colors is black — a New York City thing, I guess — and today she was wearing black leggings, side-zippered flat black ankle boots with pointed toes, a silver-threaded T-shirt dress that stopped at mid-thigh, and heart earrings. Her fluffy blonde hair was pulled back with a twisted black and silver headband. She looked extremely pulled together, and a bit more, well, mature and sophisticated than the rest of us, which is more or less true, most of the time.

  My best friend, Mary Anne Spier, is the secretary of the BSC. Like me, Mary Anne is short (although not as short as I am!). She has brown hair and brown eyes. And like me, she can be stubborn. But unlike me, she is very quiet, sensitive, and shy. Mary Anne is an only child. Worried that he might do something wrong as a single parent, her dad was extra careful and extra strict. He even chose the clothes Mary Anne wore until recently, when (with the help of the BSC) she convinced him that she was growing up and could handle a little more responsibility.

  Now Mary Anne does her own shopping (she has a sort of cool, preppy look. Personally, I prefer jeans, a T-shirt or turtleneck, and sneakers, a combination which some unenlightened people refer to as my “uniform.”) But if I had to shop and all that stuff, I’d shop for clothes like Mary Anne’s.

  Mary Anne was the first person in the BSC to have a steady boyfriend: Logan Bruno, one of our associate members.

  Mary Anne never lets her relationship with Logan interfere with BSC business, though. She’s very organized. As keeper of the BSC record book, she has never ever made a mistake. She’s a terrific friend, too. Her sensitivity makes her a good listener. She doesn’t speak without thinking, as I frequently do. She knows how easily her own feelings get hurt, and she doesn’t want to do that to other people.

  Mallory and Jessi are another pair of best friends in the BSC. Like Mary Anne and me, or Stacey and Claud, they have their similarities and their differences. Both of them like horse stories, particularly stories by Marguerite Henry. Both of them are talented, and have already decided what they want to do with their lives.

  Mallory’s talents are writing and drawing. She wants to be a children’s book writer some day. Mallory works on her writing all the time. She’s even had a job helping an author who lives here in Stoneybrook, and she’s won an award for her work. Mallory’s the one who is more or less in charge of the BSC mystery notebook, keeping it updated and so forth. (We started the mystery notebook not long ago to help us keep track of clues and suspects whenever a mystery comes our way.)

  Jessi’s talent is dance. She’s won parts in ballets such as The Nutcracker and Coppélia — she’s really good. Jessi takes special ballet classes after school two days a week, and gets up every morning at 5:29 to practice on the barre her dad installed for her in their basement.

  Mallory is also the oldest of eight siblings, including brothers who are triplets. She has brownish-red hair, pale skin and freckles, and wears glasses. Mallory’s medium in height and build, has been known to carry her father’s old briefcase instead of a backpack, and is a casual dresser, like me.

  Jessi, on the other hand, has the lean and graceful look of a ballet dancer. She frequently wears her black hair pulled back in a dancer’s bun, and uses leotards as a fashion basic. She has brown skin and dark brown eyes.

  Like Mal, Jessi is the oldest kid in her family, but she only has one younger sister and a cute baby brother whom everyone calls Squirt. And like me, Jessi has a relative who lives with her family and helps keep things organized — her Aunt Cecelia.

  Abby is probably the most independent of all of us. Mrs. Stevenson spends long hours at her office, and traveling to and from Manhattan. So Abby and Anna make up a lot of their own rules as they go along. (When the twins were nine, their father was killed in a car accident. Abby doesn’t talk much about that.)

  Abby has shoulder length, thick, very curly dark brown hair, and brown eyes that are almost black. She’s medium height. She wears glasses sometimes, or contacts, depending on her mood. While she is comfortable in sweatpants and a sweatshirt, or ripped jeans and high-tops, I have seen her in more stylish clothes, too.

  Abby also has severe allergies and asthma. As she puts it, “Life makes me sneeze.” Life includes dogs, dust, kitty litter,
most dairy products, feathered pillows, shellfish, and tomatoes. Stress and hay fever season make the allergies worse. Abby always carries a prescription inhaler with her, in case she has a bad asthma or allergy attack. She once had a terrible asthma attack while baby-sitting and had to go to the hospital, but she took it all in stride. She doesn’t like to talk seriously about any of this (though she jokes about it plenty), and she insists that she will outgrow her allergies.

  Abby’s a good friend to all of us, but not really best-friend close to anyone. She’s a loner in some ways. But she is outgoing and very sure of herself. She is a major jock and true soccer fanatic. She helps me with the Krushers, the little kids’ softball team I coach, and she’s good at it. We’ve had our share of clashes, though. Abby just won’t back down, even when I know I’m right.

  Shannon, the only member of the BSC who doesn’t go to SMS, is an eighth-grader at Stoneybrook Day School. She’s an associate member of the BSC, which means that she doesn’t have to come to meetings, and only takes overflow jobs that the regular members can’t fit in. She has thick, curly blonde hair and high cheekbones. In school, she wears a uniform (which horrifies Claudia and Stacey, naturally), and out of school she is your basic preppy. Shannon takes school very seriously. She makes practically straight A’s. And as I mentioned, she is involved in an amazing number of after-school activities, from French Club to the debate team, which is ranked pretty high in our state. Plus she’s the only eighth-grader in her school’s astronomy club.

  Our other associate member is Logan Bruno. Logan is a cute guy from Kentucky who, Mary Anne thinks, looks like her favorite star, Cam Geary. I don’t know about that, but I’ll admit he’s cute. He has brown hair and blue eyes, and he’s not too tall. He’s funny and good-natured, and although he is a jock, he doesn’t act like one. Plus Logan is a good baby-sitter as well as a talented athlete. He and Mary Anne are a well-matched pair.