Claudia and the Bad Joke Read online

  “Where is it?” asked Adam breathlessly.

  “Fooled you!” cried Mary Anne.

  “And,” added Jessi, “this is the end of all practical jokes for the day.”

  Red-faced, the triplets, Nicky, Margo, and Claire went outdoors to play.

  And that was the last trick of the day — except for when the phone rang, and an odd-sounding voice on the other end said, “Helloo, this is Queen Elizabeth. Is Prince Charles there?”

  “Yes, he is,” said Jessi, “but he can’t come to the phone. He’s outside waxing his yacht. Good-bye.”

  Clunk.

  I couldn’t believe it. I was going home at last! The week was over. The night before, the doctor had taken my leg out of traction. I still had to stay off my feet for another week, but I would much rather have done that at home than in the hospital.

  I was tired of the hospital. My flowers were drooping, I hated the meals (Dawn had saved my life, though, by bringing me some junk food), and I wanted to sleep in my own bed again. Cathy had gone home, and a seven-year-old girl had taken her place. She slept all the time and everyone had to whisper when they came in our room.

  The doctor let me go home really, really early one morning. Dad picked me up at seven-thirty. (My parents were trying not to miss too much work.) A nurse pushed me outside in a wheel-chair, and she and Dad loaded my stuff into our car. Since I was still in my nightgown and bathrobe, this was fairly embarrassing.

  I got over it, though. As Dad drove me through Stoneybrook, I felt as if I’d been let out of prison.

  “Boy, am I glad to be going home!” I exclaimed.

  “No! Really?” teased my father. “You mean you didn’t want a few extra vacation days in the hospital? I’m sure Mom and I could have arranged something.”

  I laughed. “I won’t even mind finishing my thank-you notes, or starting all the homework I’ll have to make up.”

  “Well, we sure are glad to have you back.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  I thought Mom would already have left for work and Janine for school, but when Dad steered our car into the driveway, there were Mom, Janine, Mimi — and Mary Anne! They were crowded onto our front porch, and they waved madly when they saw the car.

  I rolled my window down. “Hi!” I called.

  “Welcome home!” they replied.

  I’ve never had so much help in my life. Everyone rushed to the car. Janine opened my door. Mom and Mary Anne tried to get me out. Dad rushed around to give them a hand. Mimi opened another door and began pulling my things out of the car.

  At last I was inside and settled on the couch in the den.

  “This is where you can stay, for the most part,” said Mom. “You’ll be downstairs with Mimi, and you’ve got the television and a phone, even if it isn’t your phone. At night, you can go up to your room.”

  “For club meetings, too,” Mary Anne added. She looked at her watch. “Gosh, I better go. I’ll be late …. Uh, stay right by the phone for a while, Claud. Okay?”

  “Why?” I asked. (As if I could go anywhere anyway.)

  “Never mind,” Mary Anne replied. She dashed off for school.

  “I’m afraid I’ve got to leave now, too, honey,” said my mother.

  “So do I,” said Dad and Janine at the same time. Before they left, Mom and Dad hugged me, and Janine gave me a stack of magazines to read. She had bought them especially for me. I knew this because the only magazines Janine reads have names like The Joy of Physics or Science, Technology, and You. What she had given me were People, Tiger Beat, Seventeen, and Vogue.

  “Boy! Thanks!” I said enthusiastically.

  My family left in a rush. Mimi and I were alone together. We looked at each other happily.

  “I hope I’m not going to be too much work for you,” I said. “I don’t want to tire you out.”

  “You not work at all!” Mimi exclaimed. “We have nice week. I know.”

  “I can get to the bathroom myself,” I assured Mimi. “Dad left my crutches right there on the floor. And last night, I practiced on them after they took my leg out of traction.”

  “Yes, fine,” said Mimi approvingly. “Oh. I have pre — pre — gift for you. A moment. I be back.”

  Mimi left the den. She returned with a paper bag in her hands. “Here,” she said. “Open.”

  I peeked inside the bag. Then I let out a screech. “Oh, thank you! A Nancy Drew book! That’s great! I haven’t read this one. Mimi, you’re the best.”

  Mimi smiled. “Now, my Claudia,” she said, “I fix breakfast. You did not have breakfast at the hospital?”

  “No,” I told her. “I left too early. Oh boy, Mimi. One of your breakfasts would be great. At the hospital, all they had was, like, Wonder Bread and runny eggs. They couldn’t even make good tea. It was weak and pale. So I’m dying for one of your breakfasts. And I’m starving.”

  Mimi left for the kitchen. I lay back against my pillows. I had noticed something during the past week. Any time I was alone — when there were no doctors or nurses or visitors around me — thoughts about baby-sitting crept into my head. I had a huge problem, and I had no idea what to do about it. The thing was, I love being a member of the Baby-sitters Club. My friends might not realize that, since art is so important to me, too, and Ashley once almost talked me into quitting the club so I could spend more time on my art. But the club is a big part of my life. I knew that. So I didn’t want to drop out of it at all.

  On the other hand, the thought of baby-sitting terrified me now. Suddenly, it seemed like too many things could go wrong. And if I was afraid to sit — how could I be part of the club?

  Ring, ring!

  The phone! Mary Anne had said to stay by it. I answered it excitedly.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello,” said a man’s voice. “Is this Claudia?”

  I recognized the voice. It belonged to my homeroom teacher.

  “Hi!” I said.

  “Hi, there. This is your whole homeroom. I’ve got you on a speaker phone so everyone can hear you.”

  “Oh!” I exclaimed. “Hi, you guys!”

  My teacher must have aimed the receiver out at the class then, because suddenly I heard twenty-one voices say, “Welcome home, Claudia!”

  “Thanks,” I replied.

  Then I got to say hi to every single kid in the class, individually. I didn’t talk to most of them very long, but when Kristy got on, we had a discussion about my homework.

  “I’ll collect it for you, if you want,” she said, “and give it to you at our meetings. On Tuesday and Thursday, I’ll send it home with Mary Anne.”

  “Hey, how did Mary Anne know about this phone call?” I asked.

  “Oh, we’ve had it planned forever. We were hoping you’d come home on a weekday. We were dying to do this.”

  “I’m glad you did,” I said. “It’s too bad Mary Anne isn’t in our homeroom.”

  “Oh, I gotta go, Claud,” said Kristy suddenly. “Bye!”

  Someone else picked up the phone. “Claudia?” said my teacher again. “The bell is about to ring, so we’ll have to hang up.”

  “Thank you for calling,” I told the class. “I really appreciated it.”

  “Good-bye!” shouted the kids.

  I could hear the bell ring then, so I got off the phone. Just as I was hanging up, Mimi came into the den, carrying a tray.

  “Oh, goody. Breakfast,” I said.

  “Who was on phone?” Mimi asked.

  I told her about the call as she handed me the tray. “Oh, Mimi. This looks super!” I exclaimed.

  On the tray were waffles and bacon, orange juice and tea. Strong tea. Mimi had even put a flower in a bud vase.

  Mimi sat at the end of the couch and watched me eat.

  “You know what?” I said to her, my mouth full of bacon.

  “What, my Claudia?”

  “The doctor says I’ll have to have physical therapy after he takes the cast off. Exercises and stuff.”

&nb
sp; “I am sure you do them fine,” Mimi said. “Practice, practice.”

  “It’ll probably hurt.”

  “A little. Will hurt a little, yes. But you will do it.

  “Mimi? Were you ever scared after you had your stroke?”

  “Oh, plenty. Very scared.”

  “You know what I’m scared of?” I said. “I’m scared to baby-sit again.”

  Mimi looked thoughtful. “What is really scary,” she told me, “is to think we do not have control. Cannot keep accident from happening. Or stroke from happening.”

  “Well, I know one way to have a little control. I won’t baby-sit. Then I won’t be exposed to kids and their toys and tricks.”

  “Is that what really want?” asked Mimi.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “You must think over,” said Mimi solemnly. “Very important. You have any ideas, you need any help, you come to me, my Claudia.”

  “I know. I know I can do that. Thanks.”

  When I had cleaned my plate, Mimi took the tray away. She returned a little later with a cup of tea for herself.

  Mimi looked at her watch. “Oh! Claudia! I put on TV. Time for Wheel of Fortune!”

  I’d forgotten about Mimi and Wheel of Fortune. She’d started watching the daytime reruns of the show last summer when she was recovering from her stroke. I’d thought they might be helpful. (The word games improved her reading and vocabulary.) Mimi had gotten hooked.

  She switched on the TV and we settled into the show.

  “Spin wheel! Spin wheel!” Mimi would cry. “No, don’t guess now!”

  Mimi and I played along. If we had been contestants, we would have won a lot of prizes. Well, a few anyway. Oh, all right, Mimi would have won prizes. Then we watched Gilligan’s Island and I Love Lucy. I read my Nancy Drew for awhile. After lunch, Mimi and I watched soap operas.

  If I could just forget about the baby-sitting problem, I thought, having a broken leg wouldn’t be bad at all.

  My cast was a work of art. No kidding. Now that I was out of traction and could reach it, I couldn’t keep my hands (or my Magic Markers) off of it. It was just too tempting a drawing surface. I know you’re supposed to let your friends sign your cast — and I was going to do that — but those big white spaces seemed to me to be jumping up and down, screaming, “Color me! Color me!” Huge areas of my cast were solidly covered with designs and sketches.

  On the day of the first club meeting after I came back from the hospital, I lounged on my bed, waiting for my friends and illustrating my cast. A few minutes before, Mimi had watched me climb the stairs to my room. She wouldn’t let me do it with the crutches unless someone else came with me (she thought it was dangerous), so I had figured out a way to back up the stairs on my bottom. It looked really stupid, but it was safe.

  Downstairs, I heard the front door open and a squeal as someone (probably Mary Anne) greeted Mimi. Then I heard footsteps on the stairs and finally Mary Anne appeared.

  “Hi!” I greeted her. “I thought it was you.”

  “Hi!… Can I sign your cast?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, goody. I’ve got a really cute autograph.”

  Mary Anne took one of my pens and carefully wrote:

  I cry,

  I laugh,

  To think you want

  My - graph!

  While she was working on that, the rest of the club members arrived. Jessi was the last one, as usual. She has a busy schedule in the afternoons, and she dashed in just as Mary Anne capped her pen, and Kristy said, “This meeting will now come to order. I move that we all sign Claudia’s cast and welcome her back.”

  Everyone dove for my Magic Markers (except Mary Anne).

  “Mary Anne,” I said, “I think we could use some refreshments. Look under my bed and see what you can find.”

  Mary Anne disappeared, then returned triumphantly with one large bag of pretzels and two small bags of M&Ms.

  “Kristy, that’s mean!” Dawn suddenly exclaimed, leaning over to read what Kristy had written on my cast. “Listen, you guys. It says, ‘God made the rivers, God made the lakes, God made Claudia … well, we all make mistakes.’”

  Jessi and Mal started to giggle. “That’s not mean!” said Jessi. “It’s funny.”

  “No, it’s mean,” cried Dawn, but she was laughing, too.

  So were Kristy and a dust-covered Mary Anne.

  “Autographs are dumb,” Mal announced.

  Everyone was talking and laughing and arguing. How could I decide not to be part of such a great group of people? I must be crazy. But I was pretty sure I was going to have to leave the club. I would tell my friends whenever the time seemed right.

  “Order, order!” cried Kristy. “This is a meeting, everybody, not a party. Come on. We have business to take care of.”

  We settled down. I was stretched out on my bed. Dawn was at my feet, still doodling on my cast. Mary Anne, who usually sits with us on the bed, sat with Mal and Jessi on the floor, since I was taking up so much space. And Kristy, of course, sat in the director’s chair, her visor in place. “Okay, Dawn,” she said, waving her pen around as she spoke, “how’s the treasury? Are we in good shape?”

  “We’re fine … but Claudia owes dues from when she was in the hospital.”

  I blushed. The thing was, I didn’t want to pay dues if I was going to drop out of the club.

  “Are you broke?” Dawn asked. “If you are, don’t worry about it. You can make up for it next week.”

  “No, it’s not that,” I said uncomfortably. “It’s, um, it’s … “I was hoping the phone would ring then and let me off the hook (get it?), but no such luck. “See, I did a lot of thinking in the hospital,” I began. “And, well, you know how important my art is to me. I really want to be an artist when I grow up. Or maybe a clothes designer. So I thought, what if I had broken my arm or smashed my hands when I fell? What if I had hurt myself so badly that I couldn’t draw or paint anymore?”

  “But you didn’t,” Mallory pointed out sensibly.

  “But I could have,” I said.

  “What are you getting at?” asked Kristy, with narrowed eyes.

  “I’m getting at … I … I-want-to-drop-out-of-the-club,” I said in a rush. “Baby-sitting is too dangerous.”

  “Claudia!” everyone cried. “You can’t do that!”

  The phone did ring then, but we didn’t all dive for it, like we usually do. Kristy picked it up after glaring at me for a moment and arranged for Dawn to sit for the Perkins girls. Then she turned to me. She looked as if she was about to let her mouth go on a rampage, but Mary Anne jumped in ahead of her.

  “Claud,” she said, “we understand that you must be scared. Your accident was awful. But it wasn’t caused by baby-sitting.”

  “Of course it was,” I told her.

  “No. It was caused by Betsy Sobak. And not even on purpose. You know she didn’t mean for that to happen.”

  “It did happen, though.”

  “Claudia, we don’t want to lose you,” said Dawn. “Are you absolutely sure you want to drop out of the club?”

  “No,” l told her. “But I’m pretty sure.”

  “Look,” said Kristy, “you can’t baby-sit for awhile anyway, can you?”

  “Not unless I get a walking cast,” I said, “which might happen. But I don’t think I’d be much good on crutches.”

  “All right, then. Instead of dropping out of the club, why don’t you see how it feels not to sit for awhile? Maybe you’ll miss it a lot.”

  I thought about that as a few more job calls came in. I passed around the pretzels and M&Ms. I chewed and thought some more.

  “Okay,” I told the club members at last, “I won’t decide right away. But I want you to know that I’m thinking about it.”

  “That’s fair,” said Kristy.

  “Darn old Betsy Sobak,” muttered Dawn. “Look what she’s caused.”

  “You know, I thought I was prepared for any
thing,” I said. “Before the swing broke that afternoon, Betsy had already gotten me with a dribble glass, a fake ice cube with a fly in it, and pepper gum.”

  “Oh, you were lucky then,” said Mallory. “After you guys went to the hospital, I got to see Betsy’s room. It’s, like, a joke warehouse in there. She’s got a rubber chicken, glow-in-the-dark lizards, a giant cockroach, plastic ants, a squirting hair ribbon, an exploding cigar, and a fake bloody tooth.”

  “I suppose we have McBuzz to thank for all of that, whoever McBuzz is,” I said.

  Mallory nodded.

  The phone rang again and Mary Anne picked it up. As she spoke, she kept raising her eyebrows and making faces at us. At last she said to the caller, “I’ll get right back to you.” She hung up. “That,” she told us, “was Mrs. Sobak. She needs another sitter.”

  “Boy!” I exclaimed. “If I were Mrs. Sobak, I wouldn’t have the nerve to call us again. Her daughter nearly killed me.”

  Dawn rolled her eyes. “She didn’t nearly kill you.”

  “Besides,” added Mallory, “when I met Mrs. Sobak, I sort of got the impression that she doesn’t think Betsy misbehaves. She just thinks she’s kind of … well, she called her high-spirited. And I — Oh! Oh, my gosh! Have I ever got an idea!” Mallory suddenly cried. “Kristy, if I’m free, please can I take the job with Betsy? See, there’s been a lot of practical joking going on in my house —”

  “Tell me about it,” said Jessi.

  “So I know a lot of tricks now myself,” Mallory finished up. “And I could borrow some stuff from the triplets.”

  “You mean, you’d play jokes on Betsy?” exclaimed Kristy.

  Mallory nodded. “Bad idea?”

  Kristy frowned. “I don’t know about that, Mal. Playing tricks on a little kid …. I just don’t know. It seems sort of mean. On the other hand …” Kristy’s voice trailed off and I could tell she was thinking — hard. “You were certainly patient with Betsy, Claud,” she said at last.

  “Yeah, and look what she did to her,” Mallory chimed in.

  “I know, I know,” said Kristy, and her eyes were beginning to gleam. “Well, maybe that would work. Obviously, we have a problem and we have to do something about it. I suppose we could declare a practical-joke war on Betsy Sobak. An unofficial one, of course. I mean, we can’t tell her about it. But maybe it would teach her something. Mary Anne, is Mallory free to take the job?”