Claudia and the New Girl Read online

  “You don’t know?” I exclaimed. Us baby-sitters think to ask parents a lot of questions, such as whether any of the children has food allergies and where the first-aid kit is, but I’d never bothered to ask about the key to the bathroom.

  Shea looked at me, teary-eyed. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Oh, Shea. No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound angry. It’s just that I don’t know how to help Jackie.”

  “I do,” said Shea, brightening.

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. It’s simple. Go in through the window.”

  “But, Shea, we’re upstairs,” I reminded him.

  “I know. All you do is get on the doghouse roof, then get on the toolshed roof, then get on the porch roof and you can open the bathroom window from there. Want me to do it?”

  “No, thanks. I better be the one,” I said grimly. “I hope the bathroom window isn’t locked, too.”

  Five minutes later, I was standing on top of the doghouse. Archie and Bo (the dog) were watching me. Shea was inside so he could talk to Jackie. As I struggled to hoist myself onto the toolshed, I thanked my lucky stars I was wearing blue jeans, and decided to wear jeans to the Rodowskys’ from then on.

  “Yea!” cried Archie as I walked unsteadily across the toolshed roof and began the last leg of my trip.

  When at last I was standing by the bathroom window, I prayed silently, Please let it be open.

  It was. “Thank you,” I said as I crawled into the bathroom.

  “For what?” asked Jackie.

  “I didn’t mean you,” I told him.

  I unlocked the bathroom door. Shea was still standing patiently in the hallway. Now what? I thought, eyeing Jackie with his hand down the drain. All at once I had an idea. It was a good idea, and it also made me appreciate the Baby-sitters Club Notebook a whole lot more than I ever had. I’d just remembered reading about how Mary Anne and Logan Bruno had once gotten Jackie’s hand out of a mayonnaise jar.

  “Shea,” I said, “could you run into the kitchen and get me some margarine? Oh, and also call Archie inside.”

  “Sure,” replied Shea. In a moment he returned with Archie and a tub of margarine.

  I rubbed a healthy, greasy amount around Jackie’s hand and the edge of the drain. “Now pull your hand up very slowly,” I instructed him.

  He did, and after adding a few more glops of margarine, his hand was free.

  “Whew,” I said.

  “Whew,” said Jackie.

  “Whew,” said Shea and Archie.

  “Why don’t we go outside?” I suggested. Somehow, the Rodowskys’ yard seemed much safer than the inside of their house.

  “Okay,” agreed the boys. So as soon as we’d cleaned the margarine off Jackie, we went into the front yard. The front yard was closer to the street, but there wasn’t much room to play in the backyard, what with Bo’s house and the toolshed and all.

  “What do you want to play?” I asked the boys. They couldn’t agree on anything, so I said, “Do you know Red Light, Green Light?”

  Three red heads shook slowly from side to side.

  “Okay, it’s easy,” I told them. “You guys stand here.” I lined them up on one side of the yard. Then I ran to the other side. “I’m the policeman. When I turn around and close my eyes, I’ll say, ‘Green light.’ Then you start sneaking up on me. But don’t go too fast. Because when I say, ‘Red light,’ I’m going to turn around again and open my eyes. And anyone I see moving has to go back to the beginning. The first one to sneak all the way over here and tag me is the winner and gets to be the new policeman. Got it?”

  “Got it,” said Shea.

  “Got it,” said Jackie.

  “Got what?” asked Archie.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Let’s start the game and see what happens. If you don’t understand the rules, stop and tell me, okay?”

  Archie nodded.

  “Now remember,” I went on. “I’m the policeman, so you have to do what I say.” I turned my back and closed my eyes. “Green light!” I shouted.

  I heard rustlings as the boys snuck toward me.

  “Red light!” I spun toward them as I opened my eyes. Shea and Archie, both about a third of the way across the yard, were standing stock-still in running position, as if they’d been on a videotape and someone had pushed the pause button on the VCR. But Jackie, who was slightly ahead of them, was still moving. When he tried to freeze, he lost his balance and fell over. “Okay, back to start,” I told him.

  Grumbling, Jackie took his time returning to the opposite side of the yard. When he was ready, I closed my eyes and called, “Green light!” again. Almost immediately, I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Winner!” I announced in surprise. Who had reached me so quickly? I opened my eyes.

  Ashley Wyeth was at my side.

  “Ashley!” I exclaimed.

  The three Rodowsky boys, who didn’t know whether to stop or go, all lost their balance and toppled to the ground.

  I giggled, but Ashley was looking at me strangely.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Baby-sitting,” I replied. “We’re playing Red Light, Green Light. What are you doing? I mean, what are you doing here?”

  “I live next door.” Ashley pointed to the house to the right of the Rodowskys’.

  The Rodowsky boys had recovered their balance and abandoned the game. They crowded around Ashley. I guess they’d never seen anyone wearing a long petticoat and workboots. Not anyone from the twentieth century, anyway.

  “Why do you have to baby-sit?” Ashley asked me.

  (The boys looked somewhat hurt.)

  “I don’t have to,” I replied. “This is my job. I love sitting.” I told her about the Baby-sitters Club and how it works and the kids we sit for.

  “What do you do in your spare time?” I asked Ashley.

  “I paint. Or sculpt,” she replied.

  “I mean, what do you and your friends do? Well, what did you guys do in Chicago?”

  “Just … just my artwork. That’s really all that’s important to me. I had one friend, another girl from Keyes. Sometimes we painted together. The only way to develop your talent is to devote time to it, you know.”

  I listened to Ashley with interest. She must know what she was talking about, being from Keyes and all. Maybe, I thought, I should set aside one afternoon a week just for my art. No distractions, no interruptions. I bet Ashley did that — and more.

  “The baby-sitting club must take up a lot of your time,” said Ashley.

  “It does,” I answered proudly. “The club’s doing really well.”

  “But when do you have time for your sculpting?”

  “Whenever I make time,” I replied. Was Ashley saying I wasn’t serious enough about my art?

  Ashley frowned slightly at Archie, who had wrapped his arms around my legs and was blowing raspberries on my blue jeans. Suddenly I felt embarrassed and sort of … babyish. I unwound Archie and stepped away from him.

  “I,” I said, “spend plenty of time on my art. In fact, I’ve decided I have enough time to enter something in the sculpture show.”

  Ashley smiled. “Good,” she said. Then she started to walk away.

  “Hey, don’t you want to stay for a while?” I asked her.

  “Well, I do. I mean, I’d like to talk. But —” (she paused, eyeing the Rodowskys as if they were ants at a picnic) “— not right now.”

  And then she left.

  I thought about Ashley for most of the rest of the afternoon. She seemed so grown-up. She was serious and she set goals for herself and then went right ahead and worked toward them. That was how I wanted to be — serious and grown-up, just like Ashley. As I rode my bike home from the Rodowskys’ that day, I decided two things: I would let Ashley help me with my sculpture, since she had offered. And I would not let her see me play any more stupid outdoor games when I sat at the Rodowskys’.

  One of the very nicest things about the Baby-sitters Cl
ub is how it has made good friends out of the five members. A year ago, we were all split up. Mary Anne and Kristy, because they were a little immature and were already best friends anyway, always stuck together. And when Stacey moved to town, she and I were so much alike (and so different from Kristy and Mary Anne) that we became best friends immediately. The four of us hardly ever hung around together, except at meetings. We even ate lunch with different groups of friends. Then Dawn moved to Stoneybrook. She became Mary Anne’s friend first, but once she joined the club, she was sort of friends with all of us and would go back and forth between our crowds in the cafeteria.

  This year is different, though. Right off the bat, the five of us club members started eating together and going places together and generally being a group (even though we’ve got non-club friends). It’s just expected that when that bell rings before lunch period, we’ll all run to the cafeteria, and the first one down there will save our favorite table.

  So when Ashley Wyeth caught up with me in the hallway on my way to the cafeteria the day after I’d sat at the Rodowskys’ and said, “Let’s eat lunch together, Claudia,” I wasn’t sure how to answer her. I didn’t want to desert my friends.

  Finally I said, “Do you want to sit with my friends and me? The members of the Baby-sitters Club always eat together.”

  Ashley thought that over. Then she said, “Let’s sit by ourselves. You don’t always sit with them, do you? Besides, what are you going to talk about? Baby-sitting?”

  “Not necessarily,” I replied. “We talk about lots of things, like boys and school dances and … and … stuff.”

  “Well, we need to discuss art,” said Ashley.

  “You and me?”

  “Who else around here knows as much about sculpture as we do?”

  I felt extremely flattered.

  “We have an art show to enter,” Ashley reminded me. “We have to figure out what the subjects of our sculptures are going to be. I’d like to help you, if you want help.”

  Did I want help from a person who’d studied at Keyes? I thought. Of course I did. “Oh, thanks. That’d be great,” I told her. “But don’t you mean who the subjects will be?”

  Ashley smiled and shook her head.

  Mystified, I pushed open the double doors at the back of the cafeteria.

  Ashley headed toward a table by the windows that overlooked the playing fields, but I pulled her in the opposite direction. “I have to talk to my friends for a sec first,” I told her. Then I paused. “Are you sure you don’t want to sit with them?”

  “I just don’t think we’d get anything accomplished,” Ashley replied. “Time is valuable — if you want to become a great artist.”

  “I guess so.”

  My heart began to pound. How would the club members react when one of us “defected”? It wasn’t like I was sick or had to do makeup work in the Resource Room or something.

  I led Ashley over to the Baby-sitters Club’s table, where Kristy and Mary Anne were just settling down with trays. They’d bought the hot lunch, and as usual, Kristy was making comments about it. “I know what this looks like!” she was exclaiming, indicating the pizza-burger. “It looks like … remember that squirrel that got run over?”

  Next to me, Ashley was turning green, so I said hastily, “Hi, you guys.”

  “Oh, hi!” said Mary Anne. She pulled a chair out for me. “Dawn and Stacey are buying milk. How come you’re late?”

  “Well,” I replied, stalling for time. “It’s … Do you guys know Ashley Wyeth? She’s the new g — I mean, she’s new here. And she’s in my art class. And, um, we’re going to eat together today because we have to discuss something, this project,” I said in a rush, not even giving anyone a chance to say hello.

  Ashley slipped her arm possessively through mine.

  “Oh,” replied Kristy, shifting her eyes from Ashley and me to her tray. “Okay.”

  Mary Anne looked away, too, but didn’t say anything.

  Neither did Ashley. Finally I just said, “Well, um, see you guys later.”

  “Yeah. See you,” said Kristy.

  As Ashley and I made our way across the cafeteria, I began to feel angry. Why, I thought, shouldn’t I have a new friend? Was there some law that said I had to eat lunch with Kristy, Mary Anne, Dawn, and Stacey every day? No, of course not. They had no right to try to make me feel like I’d committed a federal crime or something.

  “Hey,” I said suddenly to Ashley as we set our books on an empty table. “Aren’t we forgetting something?”

  “What?” asked Ashley. She swept her hair over her shoulders, and I could see her earrings. Sure enough, six altogether. Two gold balls and a hoop in one ear. A seashell, a real feather, and a dangly flamingo in the other. Pretty cool.

  “We forgot our lunches,” I said, grinning.

  Ashley broke into a smile. “Oh, yeah.”

  We left our things on the table and went through the lunch line. I never bring my lunch to school, but I refuse to buy the revolt-o hot lunch. I usually eat a sandwich instead. Ashley bought a yogurt and an apple. Health food. She and Dawn would probably get along great, since Dawn only eats stuff like fruit and granola and vegetables. It was too bad Ashley didn’t seem to want to get to know my other friends.

  When we returned to our table, Ashley said, “So, have you thought about what you want to sculpt?”

  “No,” I replied. This wasn’t quite true. I had thought about it, but I’d been hoping Ashley would have some good ideas, since she was such an expert. “Do you have any ideas for your project?”

  Ashley shook her head. “Well, I mean, there are plenty of possibilities. I just haven’t narrowed them down. But I have a great idea. I read that there’s a new exhibit opening at Kuller’s Gallery.”

  Kuller’s was the other gallery in Stoneybrook, the old one.

  “I think it’s a watercolor exhibit, but we ought to go check it out. I always get really inspired when I’m at a show.”

  “But we need ideas for sculptures,” I said, “not paintings.”

  “You never know what might strike you, though.”

  I paused just long enough so that Ashley jumped back into the conversation with, “Oh, Claud, you have to go with me. Nobody else will appreciate the show the way you will.”

  I beamed. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go. Just as long as I’m home by five-thirty. I’ve got a meeting of the Baby-sitters Club.”

  I didn’t get home until 5:45. At five o’clock I’d started saying things to Ashley such as, “I better leave soon,” and, “I really better go.”

  But every time I said something, Ashley would pull me over to another painting, saying, “Just look at this one, Claud. You have to look at this one.” She was so intense. I think she barely heard what I was saying.

  I must admit, I got much more out of a show when Ashley was along than I did by myself. She made me look at paintings in different ways and see things in them that I wouldn’t have noticed by myself. And she listened, really listened, to anything I had to say about the watercolors.

  So I had a hard time leaving. I was just enjoying appreciating the art. I knew my other friends would never get so much out of an exhibit. They didn’t enjoy art the way Ashley and I did.

  At quarter of six when I finally ran into my bedroom, I found the club meeting in progress.

  “You guys started without me!” I exclaimed accusingly.

  “Hello yourself,” said Kristy. “Of course we started without you. The phone began ringing. What did you expect? That we’d tell everyone to call back later — after Claudia got here? We weren’t sure you were coming at all. Where were you?”

  “Ashley and I went to an exhibit at Kuller’s.”

  At the mention of Ashley’s name, my friends exchanged glances.

  “How come you didn’t call to say you were going to be late?” asked Kristy. “That’s a club rule, you know.”

  “I was trying to get here,” I said. “I ran the whole way home. I l
eft the exhibit late. It was just … Ashley and I were having such a good time.”

  “How good a time?” spoke up Stacey, and I thought she looked a little pale. “As good a time as when you and I go to the mall?”

  “Stace, I don’t know,” I said, forcing a laugh.

  The phone rang, and we stopped our discussion to take a job. And then two more.

  “What did I miss?” I finally dared to ask. “I mean, at the beginning of the meeting.”

  “Three calls,” replied Kristy. “On the appointment pages, it looked like you were free for a couple of them, but we couldn’t be sure. Stacey and Mary Anne took them instead.”

  I nodded. That was fair. And anyway, it was a rule. If you were going to be late to a meeting and didn’t tell anyone about it first, you lost privileges. Still, I didn’t like the way being left out felt.

  Or the way Stacey was looking at me.

  Uh-oh, you guys. I had some trouble with Jeff today and it affected my baby-sitting, so I guess you should know about it. I was sitting at the Perkinses’, and Myriah and Gabbie were being as good as gold. In fact, they were entertaining themselves really well. They had a messy project going, but it was in the bathroom, and Mrs. Perkins said it was all right because it would be easy to clean up. The three of us — Myriah and Gabbie and I — were having a great time. Chewbacca wasn’t even bothering us. And then the phone rang….

  What you need to know about Dawn’s younger brother Jeff is that ever since school started this year, he’s been having problems. He’s been saying he misses his father. See, the reason Dawn moved to Stoneybrook last January was that her parents had just gotten a divorce, and Stoneybrook is where Mrs. Schafer grew up. Her parents, Dawn’s grandparents, still live here. So Mrs. Schafer moved Dawn and Jeff back to her home-town. Mr. Schafer stayed in California.

  At first, things seemed okay. I mean, Dawn didn’t like the cold Connecticut winter, but she made friends and joined our club, and Jeff made friends, and Mrs. Schafer found a job and even started dating. Then at the end of the summer, Dawn and Jeff flew back to California to visit their dad. Maybe Jeff got homesick or something. Who knows? Anyway, he’s become a real handful. He’s been saying he misses Mr. Schafer and that he doesn’t want to live with Dawn and their mom anymore. And he’s been getting into trouble in school. So that’s what had been going on in Dawn’s life at the time she took the job babysitting for Myriah and Cabbie Perkins.