Jessi and the Troublemaker Read online

  “Have a cookie,” said Claudia, who was sitting on her desk chair. “No, have two cookies. Ballet dancers have to keep their strength up.”

  I grinned and took a chocolate-chip cookie from the bag Claudia was holding out. “I thought we finished these at the last meeting.”

  “Two bags,” explained Claudia.

  Just then Stacey rushed into the room. I was surprised. I am occasionally late (and used to getting Looks from Kristy) because of dance class, but Stacey is never late.

  We all looked at her but she only said, “Sorry.”

  Claudia tossed Stacey a box of oatmeal raisin Frookies (cookies made without sugar). Stacey fished one out and started nibbling on it without saying anything else.

  Kristy gave Stacey a Look, too. Then she said, “Any new business?” letting us know that we were having a meeting, not a party.

  Everyone looked around. Kristy took a bite of the chocolate-chip cookie in her hand and chewed ferociously.

  No one said anything.

  “Okay, no new business,” said Kristy. We relaxed a little. The phone rang and Kristy answered it. “Baby-sitters Club.”

  How did Kristy know it was a client? I guess I’d better explain how the BSC works. But I’d better begin at the beginning, right?

  The beginning. When Kristy was in seventh grade, she was sitting at home one night listening to her mother trying to find a baby-sitter for her younger brother David Michael. As Mrs. Thomas made phone call after phone call, Kristy had one of her brilliant ideas. What if a person could make just one phone call and reach several baby-sitters? That way, she’d be sure of getting a baby-sitter right away, without all the hassle.

  Before you could say pas de deux (that means dance for two, roughly), Kristy had enlisted her best friend Mary Anne Spier and another good friend, Claudia Kishi. Claudia invited Stacey McGill, a new friend of hers, to join, and the BSC was off and running.

  Was it a brilliant idea? Well, it was so brilliant that in no time the four of them had more work than they could handle. That’s when Mary Anne and Dawn became friends and soon after, Dawn became part of the BSC.

  Plenty of members, right? Wrong!

  Mallory and I were the next to join, as junior officers. (We’re both in sixth grade and everyone else is in eighth grade. Until we are older we can’t baby-sit at night except for our own families, so we take care of a lot of the afternoon and weekend-day business.) And now the BSC has two associate members as well: Shannon Kilbourne and Logan Bruno.

  We’re all pretty different from one another. But as we like to point out, it’s our differences that make us such a good club. We have a lot of different talents and skills among us — enough to handle any situation that comes up.

  For example, there’s Kristy. Kristy is our president not only because the club was her idea (along with some other great ideas I’ll tell you about in a minute), but also because she is the Queen of the Organized People of Earth. She is president of the BSC, she coaches a kids’ softball team called Kristy’s Krushers, made up of kids of all ages, she does well in school, and she has a (sort-of) boyfriend, Bart, who coaches a rival softball team called Bart’s Bashers.

  Maybe being in a large family makes a person more organized (it’s one of the theories I have about large families, but I never can remember to ask Mal if it’s true). Like Mal, Kristy’s from a large family, although hers is a very different mix. She lives in a mansion with two older brothers, Sam and Charlie; her younger brother, David Michael; her mother; her stepfather, Watson Brewer (Kristy’s father left when she was just a kid and now she hardly ever hears from him); two step-siblings, Karen and Andrew, who stay there part of the time; Emily Michelle, who is adopted; Nannie, her maternal grandmother, who helps keep the house organized; one dog; one cat; two goldfish; a part-time hermit crab; a part-time rat; and a ghost.

  Okay, maybe there isn’t a ghost living in the mansion on the third floor, but you get the idea.

  Kristy grew up with Mary Anne Spier, who is the BSC secretary. Mary Anne and Kristy are both different and alike. They’re both short (Kristy is the shortest person in her class) and have brown hair, were raised for part of their lives by single parents, now have “blended” families, and have always lived in Stoneybrook. In fact, they’ve known each other most of their lives. Kristy used to live next door to Mary Anne until her mom married Watson Brewer and her family moved into his house. Then Mary Anne’s father remarried and she moved to a new house in Stoneybrook, too.

  But while Kristy is like a living illustration of “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” (meaning it’s the person who speaks up who gets what she wants), Mary Anne is just the opposite. Not that she’s a wimp. But she is very shy and sensitive, someone who cries easily and has a tender heart. She is also stubborn and very strong. Mary Anne was raised by her father (her mother died when Mary Anne was just a baby) who was very strict. Some kids would have wilted under all that loving strictness (Mr. Spier just wanted to make sure, as a single parent, that he did everything right) but when Mary Anne realized she was out-growing the little kid clothes and the pigtails he made her wear, she stood up for herself. Now she can dress the way she wants (within reason, which means that she just dresses casually, like Kristy, but a little more fashionably) and she can wear a little makeup. And she was even the first of us to have a steady boyfriend, Logan Bruno.

  Mary Anne’s life has changed a lot recently, and not just because she and her father have worked out a less strict, less formal relationship. One of the big changes is that her father got remarried — to Dawn Schafer’s mom! They were high school sweethearts right here in Stoneybrook, but after graduation they went their separate ways. When Dawn’s mom returned with her family to Stoneybrook from California after getting divorced, they got back together again, with a little help from Mary Anne and Dawn. Now they all live in an old farmhouse near the edge of town, except for Dawn’s brother Jeff, who decided that he wanted to stay in California with his father. And Dawn and Mary Anne are best friends (yes, Mary Anne has two best friends).

  As you might have guessed, Dawn, our alternate officer, (responsible for filling in when one of the other officers isn’t there) is from California. And she misses it. She misses it so much that she just spent a huge chunk of time there with her father and Jeff. But now she’s back, and everyone is very glad.

  Dawn looks like an advertisement for the benefits of exercise and healthy eating. It sounds corny, but it’s true. She’s really beautiful, with long, pale blonde hair, blue eyes, and a strong, tall body (she’s got the perfect body to be a ballet dancer!). Dawn never, ever eats red meat and she hardly ever eats sweets. She’s environmentally conscious (she carries a string bag with her wherever she goes so she doesn’t have to use plastic, brings her lunch to school wrapped in wax paper or reusable containers, and rides her bike whenever she can). And Dawn is as stubborn as, well, Kristy and Mary Anne. But she’s also very mellow. Nothing seems to rattle Dawn, and she keeps a level head about almost everything — very important for a baby-sitter!

  Another pair of best friends in the BSC is Stacey McGill and Claudia Kishi.

  Stacey, who is a math whiz, is the club treasurer. She’s probably the most sophisticated of all of us. That’s partly because Stacey has diabetes. That means her body doesn’t regulate the amount of sugar in her blood, so she has to be really careful about what she eats. She can’t eat sweets and she has to give herself injections of insulin every day. Because of that, Stacey’s parents used to be really overprotective of her (sort of like Mary Anne’s father; Stacey’s also an only child, like Mary Anne) and Stacey had to convince them that she could be responsible about taking care of herself. If she didn’t, she could get really sick and even go into a coma.

  Now Stacey has a bi-state family. (We tease Dawn about having a bi-coastal family, a family on each coast.) Stacey’s mother and father got divorced and her father lives in New York, while Stacey lives with her mother in Stoneybrook.

  St
acey’s sophistication shows up not only in the super-responsible and mature way in which she usually acts, but also in the way she dresses. We are pretty casually dressed at the BSC meetings, but even if Stacey is just wearing jeans like most of the rest of us, she goes one step further into cool. For instance, today, when we were wearing sweaters and shirts, Stacey had on an oversized black sweater and a metallic gold T-shirt underneath. With her huge blue eyes and naturally dark lashes, and the shoulder length blonde hair that she keeps perfectly cut, she looked just like a model.

  Stacey and Claudia are best friends, which is not surprising, since Claudia has a sense of sophistication and style all her own. But Claudia’s sophistication and style are not big city. They’re more artistic. Claudia wants to be an artist and is really talented. She works hard on her art and has even had her own art show.

  Claudia’s smart and talented, but she and school do not get along. Somehow, teachers don’t appreciate Claudia’s “creative” approach to things such as spelling. Claudia has to work really hard to be an average student (at least, an average student grade wise) at SMS. The Kishis even have a rule that someone in the family has to help Claud with her homework every night.

  That’s tough, especially since Claudia has an older sister, Janine, who is a genuine genius, but Claudia doesn’t let it get to her. She works on her art and keeps her strength up with a truly artistic collection of junk food hidden around her room for BSC meetings and emergencies, such as homework questions. Claudia also really loves Nancy Drew books. Since Claud’s parents sort of equate Nancy Drew and junk food for some reason, Claudia keeps her collection of Nancy Drew books hidden around her room, too. You might reach behind other books on her bookcase and find a Nancy Drew and a candy bar.

  Claudia’s style is unique. She doesn’t often wear jeans, but she was wearing them today — only she’d cut patterns in the legs of the jeans (which were major faded) and was wearing leopard tights underneath so that they showed through. She was wearing her black Doc Martens with yellow shoelaces, and she’d used matching shoelaces to pull her hair back into a long, thick braid. Her earrings were a pair she made herself, out of little yellow feathers and black beads. And she was wearing a black and yellow striped flannel shirt buttoned up to her throat, with another pair of shoelaces made into a sort of bow tie.

  Nobody but Claudia could wear something like that and look so truly fantastic, not even Stacey. If Stacey looks like a fashion model, Claudia Kishi, with her perfect skin and brown eyes and long hair, sometimes looks like a star. It’s awesome.

  Claudia is the BSC vice-president, and her room is where we hold our meetings, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon from five-thirty until six. Claudia is the only one of us with her own phone line, so we can take clients’ phone calls and set up appointments without tying up the phone for the whole family.

  You’ve already met Mallory Pike, so you know she wears glasses and comes from a big family. Mallory has red hair and freckles and braces (at least they are the clear plastic kind). The braces come off in two years, and meanwhile, Mallory is working on convincing her parents to let her get contact lenses.

  Mallory is a junior officer, like me. Like Kristy, she also has other official duties. Mallory is the secretary of the sixth-grade class at SMS. And like Claudia and me, she has a career planned as a writer and is already working hard toward the goal. Mal even took two weeks off from the BSC to write a story not too long ago, and won the contest for Best Overall Fiction in the Sixth Grade.

  Mallory and I are both different and alike: She’s from a big family, I’m from a smaller one. We love to read, especially horse stories. We have English, lunch, gym, and science class together. But unlike Mary Anne and Kristy, who look sort of alike, we don’t look alike at all. Mal is shorter than I am, and not athletic, and she has glasses and red hair and pale skin with freckles, while I am tall and thin (a dancer’s build) and have black hair and brown eyes and brown skin. (But I do have glasses, just for reading).

  Mal was one of the first people I met when my family moved to Stoneybrook from Oakley, New Jersey, after my father’s company transferred him to a new job. I thought at first I was going to hate being at SMS, not only because it can be so tough being a new kid in class, but also because I was the only black student in the sixth grade and one of about six black students in all of SMS. Pretty weird. But after I met Mal and joined the BSC, I stopped feeling like the new girl in school and decided I wasn’t going to hate SMS and Stoneybrook after all.

  So that’s everybody — except Shannon and Logan, our associate members. Associate members don’t have to come to meetings. But they are on call for jobs we can’t fit into our schedules, and to help out, for instance, when Dawn visited her father and brother in California, or when Mallory was sick with mononucleosis, or when Claudia broke her leg because of a practical joke that one of the kids she was baby-sitting for played, or … well, you get the idea.

  Shannon lives across the street from Kristy, but she doesn’t go to SMS, she goes to Stoneybrook Day School. She’s a super-serious student and involved in a lot of after-school activities, such as French club and astronomy club. Shannon and Kristy really disliked each other when they first met. Kristy thought Shannon was a complete snob. But they worked things out and Shannon even gave Kristy and her family a puppy, when her dog Astrid, a Bernese mountain dog, had a litter of puppies. So Shannon and Kristy might even be sort of related — through their dogs!

  Logan Bruno is a Southerner, and Mary Anne’s boyfriend. Like Mary Anne, he’s tough-minded and independent (he got some teasing for being a “boy baby-sitter” but he didn’t let it get to him). When he’s not playing baseball and being involved in other sports, he comes to meetings occasionally and he’s a great baby-sitter. And while I don’t think he looks just like the movie star Cam Geary, as Mary Anne does, I do think he’s pretty cute.

  Back to the club. We were having a busy day. The phone would start ringing almost the moment we hung it up, and Mary Anne was kept busy scheduling appointments in the club record book. The record book contains clients’ names, addresses, phone numbers, rates paid, special information we might need, and all the schedules of baby-sitting jobs. Mary Anne is in charge of the entire record book except for Stacey’s treasury section. (And she’s never, ever made a mistake in scheduling.)

  Meanwhile, the rest of us were passing around the BSC notebook, writing in it, and reading the new entries. The club notebook helps us keep up with our clients (someone’s going through the terrible twos, someone else has developed an allergy) as well as gives us insight into how to handle difficult situations that might come up. We grumble, but we all keep up with reading and writing in the notebook.

  I’d just finished reading about Jackie Rodowsky’s latest disaster, involving a rug, a bowl of goldfish, and a boiled egg — Jackie is one of our favorite kids, but trouble follows him wherever he goes — when I heard Kristy say, “That’s great Mrs. Roberts. Yes. Yes, we’ll call you right back.”

  “Mrs. Roberts?” I asked as she hung up the phone. “Danielle’s mother?”

  Kristy nodded with a big grin on her face. “Yup. She’s wondering if anyone would be interested in sitting with Danielle, and Greg, of course, next Wednesday afternoon. Now who would want that job? Mary Anne, can you check the record book and see who’s free that day?”

  “Kristy!” I said indignantly, before I realized she was teasing, and then we all started laughing.

  Everyone knew about Danielle, from when I worked at the Kids Club. She’d been a member of the Kids Club, but before I started volunteering, she’d had to go into the hospital for treatment for leukemia. When I finally met her, she’d just gotten out of the hospital. She was a skinny kid with huge brown eyes wearing a scarf on her head that didn’t quite hide the fact that the chemotherapy treatments she’d had in the hospital had made her lose her hair. She was also wearing a T-shirt that said, “Bald is Beautiful.”

  See? Who couldn’t find a
kid like Danielle truly cool?

  I’d even helped make one of Danielle’s two wishes come true. She’d always wanted to visit Disney World, so I put her family in touch with an organization called Your Wish Is My Command, which tries to grant the wishes of kids with serious illnesses.

  And Danielle and her mother and father and six-and-a-half-year-old brother Greg all got to go to Disney World for three whole days!

  But I couldn’t help Danielle with her other wish: to graduate from elementary school. There was no guarantee that Danielle would ever get cured, or even get better. There was no guarantee what would ever happen. And in fact, when I’d ended my work at the Kids Club, just after Danielle returned from Disney World, Danielle had to go back in the hospital for more tests and treatments.

  Danielle spent a lot of time in the hospital. But now she’s in remission. These days, Danielle doesn’t look so skinny and she’s full of energy. Her hair has grown back (in a different color, sort of red) so she looks just like an ordinary kid with a short haircut.

  Danielle is nine, a year older than Becca and Char, but she doesn’t say “almost” ten when you ask her how old she is. She says nine and she says it proudly, as if she’s achieved a special goal.

  And she has.

  You see why Kristy’s teasing made me indignant? Of course I wanted to be the one to sit with Danielle and Greg!

  Mary Anne flipped through the pages of the record book. “Hmmm,” she said. “You might be able to work it in, Jessi.”

  “I guess you’d better take the job, then,” said Mal, giving me a friendly poke on the shoulder.

  I rolled my eyes, but I was grinning, too, as Kristy picked up the phone to call Mrs. Roberts back.

  The BSC had a new client — one of the neatest kids I knew.

  When I arrived at the Robertses’ house, I heard Danielle shriek, “I’ll get it! It’s Jessi!” A moment later the door opened wide and Danielle stood there, grinning from ear to ear.