The Truth About Stacey Read online

  “We can talk about my other ideas later,” she said, “but the new one is to recruit more members—eighth-graders—for our club. That way we’ll have some older sitters, but we won’t have to copy the agency by working the way they do.” She looked around the table. “Agreed?”

  Claudia, Mary Anne, and I nodded silently.

  The Baby-sitters Club was going to increase its numbers.

  Thanksgiving vacation was not a lot of fun that year. It came just two days after the Baby-sitters Club decided to take on new members. I didn’t really mind asking other people to join our club—I figured it would be a chance to make more friends—but I didn’t like the reason we were adding members. I was hopping mad at Liz and Michelle for hurting our club.

  That was pretty much all I could think about on Thursday and Friday of Thanksgiving vacation. We had a four-day weekend, and I spent the first half of it mad at the Baby-sitters Agency.

  I spent the second half of it mad at my parents.

  For starters, they had said way back over the summer that we could go to New York for Thanksgiving, but the weekend before Thanksgiving they had suddenly changed their minds.

  “We thought it would be nice to make our first Thanksgiving in Connecticut a true old-fashioned, New England holiday,” Mom said. “I’ll cook a meal that you can eat”—I scowled—”and we’ll spend the day by ourselves. Dad will build a fire in the fireplace. We’ll just enjoy being cozy and together in our new home.”

  That didn’t sound so bad. In fact, I managed to enjoy our day. It even snowed a little. It was late the next day, when Mom and Dad told me the real reason for not going to New York, that I got angry at them.

  They had taken me to Washington Mall, which is about half an hour away from Stoneybrook. For some reason, the day after Thanksgiving is the biggest Christmas shopping day of the season. I don’t know why. But I love to shop, so I thought the excursion would be fun and would help take my mind off the Baby-sitters Agency. Kristy had told me all about Washington Mall. It’s the biggest one around, with five levels of stores, a zillion restaurants and food stands, four movie theaters, a videogame arcade, a petting zoo, and an exhibits area.

  I had taken some of the money I’d earned babysitting out of my savings account, and I left Mom and Dad to explore the mall on my own. I bought two Christmas presents—a pair of striped leg warmers for Claudia and a book about New York for Mary Anne—and a dinosaur pin for me. I planned to attach it to my beret.

  At one o’clock, I met Mom and Dad and we ate lunch in a sandwich shop. After lunch, we went to a movie. Two hours later, as we filed back into the mall, Dad said brightly, “Well, how about one more treat before we head home? We could go to that little French café on the top level.”

  “Ooh, goody,” I said.

  When we were settled, Dad with a cup of coffee, Mom with a glass of wine, and I with diet ginger ale, Dad glanced at Mom and said, “Now, honey?”

  “What?” I asked, immediately suspicious.

  “We have some news for you.”

  “What is it?”

  Mom and Dad kept looking at each other as if they couldn’t decide who should tell me the news. I knew it must be pretty important. Furthermore, I had a feeling that whatever it was, I wasn’t going to like it one bit.

  “We aren’t moving again, are we?” I asked.

  “Heavens, no,” said Mom. “It’s not bad news … exactly.”

  “You’re pregnant!” I cried. “You found out you can have a baby after all!”

  “Shhh!” said Dad. “People are turning around.”

  “Well, what?”

  Mom cleared her throat. “It’s just that we’ve scheduled the tests with the new doctor I mentioned to you a couple of weeks ago, remember?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “Stacey,” said Dad warningly, his voice rising on the last syllable.

  “Sorry.”

  “They’re going to be a little later in the month than we had thought.”

  “Near Christmas?” I asked, dismayed.

  “We’ll leave on Friday, the twelfth, and probably return on Wednesday, the seventeenth.”

  “But—but that’s five days!” I sputtered. “You said it would only be three days.”

  “Well, you’ll still miss just three days of school,” said my father. “When we found out the tests would take longer than we realized, we scheduled them over a weekend. That’s why we didn’t go to New York for Thanksgiving. Two long weekends there so close together are too many.”

  “Am I going to be in the hospital for five days?” Being in the hospital when you feel fine has to be the most boring thing in the world.

  “You’ll spend a lot of time at this doctor’s clinic,” replied Mom, “but you’ll be an outpatient…. Look, in the evenings we can have fun. And we’ll have Sunday free. We can visit your cousins and go Christmas shopping—”

  “And,” said Dad, grinning, “I got tickets to the Sunday performance of Paris Magic.”

  “Paris Magic!” I cried, momentarily forgetting doctors and clinics. “You’re kidding! I can’t believe it! Oh, thank you!” Paris Magic was a musical I’d been dying to see.

  “And we’ll go to Rockefeller Center and look at the Christmas tree,” Mom went on. “Think of it, Stacey. Christmas in New York. You always liked the city best at that season.”

  “I guess,” I replied, returning to earth. Tickets to Paris Magic didn’t make up for what Mom and Dad were doing to me. “So what does Dr. Werner think of … what’s the name of the new doctor?”

  “Dr. Barnes,” said Dad.

  “What does Dr. Werner think of Dr. Barnes?”

  “She doesn’t know about Dr. Barnes yet,” replied my mother.

  “Mo-om, I’d like to check with Dr. Werner first.”

  “Stacey,” said Dad. “You are not in charge here. Your mother and I make the decisions.”

  “Decisions about me, my body.”

  “That’s what parents are for,” he said wryly.

  “So what’s so special about Dr. Barnes?” I asked. “Why do we have to see him … or her?”

  “Him,” said Mom. “He’s a holistic doctor.”

  Holistic … holy? “A faith healer?” I squeaked. “You’re taking me to a religious person for a miracle?” Mom and Dad had considered some pretty desperate things over the months, but nothing like faith healing.

  “Stacey, for pity’s sake. No,” said Dad. “Calm down. Holistic medicine deals with the whole body, with a person as a whole, made up not just of physical parts, but of mental, emotional, environmental, nutritional—”

  “I get it, I get it,” I muttered, embarrassed.

  Dad drained his coffee, Mom sipped her wine, and I stirred my soda with the straw.

  “Well,” said Dad at last, “we just wanted you to know what to expect. And to keep those days open for our trip.”

  “What about my schoolwork?” I asked.

  “We’ll talk to your teachers before we leave. Maybe you can bring some of your homework with you and do it at the clinic,” said Mom. “Then you won’t be too far behind when we return.”

  I nodded. “I think this is very unfair,” I said softly.

  My parents sighed in unison. “Well, we’re sorry, honey,” replied Mom. “But this is the way things are.”

  On Saturday afternoon, I baby-sat for Charlotte Johanssen. It was my first job in over a week. I knew that her parents were using the agency in the evenings because then they didn’t have to worry about being home early. I hadn’t seen Charlotte since the Big Brother Party. I brought the Kid-Kit with me as I had promised, and we began reading The Cricket in Times Square.

  When the Johanssens came home, I waited until Dr. Johanssen had paid me before I finally asked, “Could I talk to you? Please?”

  “Of course, Stacey,” Charlotte’s mother replied. “Let’s go in the den.”

  We walked across the hall and Dr. Johanssen closed the door behind us. “What’s up
? Are you feeling all right?” she asked.

  “That’s just the trouble. I’m fine. But Mom and Dad want me to see another new doctor in New York. He’s going to do all these tests at his clinic. We have to go away for five days.”

  Dr. Johanssen shook her head in sympathy.

  “He’s a holistic doctor. Dad explained what that means.” I giggled. “I thought it meant he was holy—a faith healer.”

  Charlotte’s mother didn’t smile, though. She looked at me sharply. “Holistic. A clinic? Do you know the doctor’s name?”

  “Dr. Barnes.”

  Dr. Johanssen groaned. “You weren’t too far wrong, Stacey. Dr. Barnes calls himself a holistic doctor but he practically is a faith healer. At any rate, I don’t think he’s much more than a quack. He just happens to be getting a lot of publicity now. He’s a fad doctor. And he’s giving good holistic doctors a bad reputation. I don’t know him personally,” she added, “I’ve just heard about him.”

  “I knew it, I knew it,” I moaned.

  “Now, don’t worry. Dr. Barnes isn’t going to harm you, from what I’ve heard. He won’t touch your insulin, and if he changes your diet, it will be only slightly. What he is going to do—I can practically guarantee this—is recommend all sorts of expensive programs and therapies designed to make your life as positive and fulfilling and healthy as possible. He’ll tell your parents that this will enable you to rid your body of the disease.”

  “What kinds of therapies?” I asked.

  “Oh, everything. He’ll tell your parents to send you to a psychologist or psychiatrist. He’ll give you an exercise program, start you on recreational therapy. He may even recommend that you change schools so you can get individualized instruction.”

  “No!” I cried.

  “There’s nothing really wrong with any of those things. It’s just that—well, it’s my belief that no special program is going to rid your body of diabetes.”

  I stood up. “Of course not! Are they crazy? How is a psychiatrist going to change my blood sugar? Dr. Johanssen, you have to help me. Help me get out of this.”

  “Stacey, I’d like to, but I don’t feel I can step in here. I barely know your parents.”

  “But you know me, and you’re a doctor.”

  “Yes, but I’m not your doctor.”

  “Please?”

  Dr. Johanssen rose, too. She put her arm around me. “Let me think, hon. I can’t intervene directly, but before you leave for New York I’ll—” She paused. “I promise I won’t let you go to New York without doing something. I just need to think. Fair enough?”

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  On my way home that afternoon, I vowed that I would not let Dr. Barnes put me on any of his programs. But I had only two weeks to figure out how to stop him.

  For years, my parents have watched me go off to school wearing unusual clothing and accessories.They’ve let all sorts of things go by them unmentioned: the dinosaur on my beret, red sneakers covered with beads and glitter, leg warmers covered with footprints, plastic butterflies in my hair. For two weeks in New York I even wore red lace gloves with no fingertips.

  But they’d never seen anything quite like what Kristy made the members of the Baby-sitters Club wear to school the Monday after Thanksgiving vacation. Even I was embarrassed. And poor Mary Anne looked as if she’d rather be stranded on a desert island with no hope of rescue.

  Kristy had been busy during vacation. She’d made each of us a sandwich board to wear to school. The part that went over our fronts said JOIN THE BEST CLUB AROUND. The part that went over our backs said, in the block design Claudia had thought up for our flyers: THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB.

  “Put these on, ” said Kristy when we met on the street in front of my house. She was already wearing hers.

  “Now?” I asked.

  Kristy nodded.“We’re going to look for new club members today and we might as well start on the way to school. Plenty of kids will see us.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of, ” whispered Claudia.

  I shrugged. Then I put my notebook down.“Well, I’m ready.”

  Kristy helped me fit one of the ad boards over my head. I adjusted the strings on my shoulders. Then we helped Claudia and Mary Anne with theirs. Mary Anne’s cheeks were burning bright red.

  “Okay, let’s go, ” I said. I waved self-consciously to my parents, who were standing at the front door.

  We marched off to Stoneybrook Middle School. All along the way, kids stopped and stared.

  “I hope I don’t see Trevor, ” Claudia murmured to me.

  Trevor Sandbourne is Claudia’s boyfriend. Sort of. He had taken Claudia to the Halloween Hop, and once they had gone to the movies. I could understand why she didn’t want Trevor to see her.

  “I know, ” I replied.“I hope we don’t see Pete. Or Sam.”

  “Oh, no. Oh, no!” Claudia suddenly cried.

  “What? Is it Trevor? Pete?”

  “No. Look.” Claudia pointed down the road behind us.

  I turned around. A school bus was heading our way, loaded with high school students. They hung out of the windows and called to us as the bus passed by.

  “Hey, hey!”

  “Whoooo! The Baby-sitters Club!”

  “Hey, girls, give me your number! I might need a sitter!”

  Kristy held her head high and kept walking, looking straight ahead.

  “I’m dying, I’m dying, ” I whispered to Claudia. But I told myself that if I felt like a fool, it was for the sake of the club. And the club was worth it.

  We reached school fifteen minutes before the first bell.

  “Okay, now spread out, ” Kristy instructed.

  “You mean we have to do this alone?” cried Mary Anne.

  Kristy nodded.“Yes, ” she said firmly.“Walk around outside the building where kids can see you as they arrive at school. If anyone asks you questions, tell them about the club. Make sure they know they get to keep all the money they earn. And especially try to get some eighth-graders interested. Tell them the first meeting they’ll attend will be on Wednesday.”

  We separated then, and I wandered around by the main entrance to the school. Every single kid stared at me as he or she went by. Some pointed at the sign, then turned to speak to friends. A few laughed at me. But only three kids asked any questions.

  “What’s the Baby-sitters Club?” each one wanted to know. I explained. I even told them about some of the kids we sat for.

  “You ought to meet Charlotte Johanssen, ” I said to one girl (who, unfortunately, was a sixth-grader).“She’s such a great little kid. She loves to be read to.”

  “You read to her?” said the girl incredulously.“Gosh, when I baby-sit, I use the time to watch TV.”

  “You do?” I said, just as incredulously.“What do the kids do while you’re watching? Watch with you?”

  She shrugged.“Sometimes…. I don’t really care.”

  “Oh….” She was not right for our club. I was glad she didn’t ask any more questions.

  The second kid, a boy, said, “You have to go to three meetings a week? I don’t think I could fit that into—into my schedule.”

  The third kid was an eighth-grade girl who hated Liz Lewis. Perfect!

  I told her about Charlotte.

  I told her about David Michael.

  I told her about Jamie.

  I told her about Claire and Margo Pike and Nina and Eleanor Marshall. Then I told her about the meetings and the notebook.“It sounds like too much work, ” she said, and left.

  The bell rang. The Baby-sitters Club walked into school together—Claudia, Mary Anne, and I—taking our sandwich boards off as we went.

  Kristy was grinning.“How did you guys do?” she asked.

  “Terrible, ” I muttered.

  “Rotten, ” said Claudia.

  “Awful, ” said Mary Anne.“How come you’re smiling?”

  “Because I have good news!” announced Kristy.“But we won’t disc
uss it in school. I’ll tell you everything at our meeting this afternoon…. And put your signs back on. Wear them in the halls and the cafeteria today.”

  “In the cafeteria! How are we supposed to eat with these things on?” asked Claudia crossly.“We can’t sit down.”

  “Well, at least wear them in the lunch line.”

  “Oh, fine, ” grumbled Claudia, but she joined Mary Anne and me in placing the signs back over our shoulders.

  I went to my locker, put my lunch away, and got out the books I’d need for the morning. Then I rushed off to English class. On the way, I passed Pete Black.

  I nearly fainted.

  Between math class and advanced French (I was in the advanced class because in my school in New York we had been given French lessons since kindergarten), I passed Pete again.

  He didn’t look at me. Had he really not seen me, or was he embarrassed by the sign?

  It didn’t matter, because at lunchtime, when I approached our table in the cafeteria, still bravely wearing the sign, Pete looked up and smiled at me.“Let me help you take that thing off, ” he said. He lifted it over my shoulders.

  “Embarrassed to be seen with me while I’m wearing it?” I asked.

  Pete grinned.“Nah…. Well, maybe a little. But it takes guts to do what you’re doing.”

  “Want to be in the club? We could use some boys.”

  Pete coughed.“Me? Take care of little kids?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “I—I wouldn’t know what to do.”

  “Well, never mind. It’s okay.”

  We turned to our lunches. Pete is very serious about food. We’d been eating for about five minutes when I noticed that his face was turning red.

  “Hey, what’s wrong? Are you all right?” I thought he might be choking.

  Pete swallowed.“Yeah, sure. I’m fine. But I have to ask you something.”

  “Okay.”

  “What I was wondering is … do you want to go to the Snowflake Dance with me?”

  “That’s not until December, is it?”

  “This is December. It’s December first.”

  “Oh, wow! You’re right.” I was really flattered. Even if it was December, the dance was still almost three weeks away. And Pete was already asking me.“I’d love to go, ” I told him.“Thanks.”