Claudia and the New Girl Read online

A new worry came to me. Ashley would be there and she’d see the laughers, too, only she’d probably join them.

  I shook my head. What a mess.

  A murmur in the crowd made me stop worrying. The front door was opening. People were streaming inside.

  My heart began to beat as loudly as a train running down a track. I could feel it pumping in my throat.

  “I think I’m going to faint,” I said to Stacey.

  “Oh, Claud, you are not,” she replied. Nevertheless, she reached out her hand and I grabbed it. We entered the exhibit like two little kids on their first day of kindergarten.

  My family, my friends, and I stood in a group and looked around. The new art gallery was lovely. It was all carpeted and quiet, and everything was gray or white — so as not to distract from the art that was on display. Usually, I guessed, paintings would be hung on the movable partitions that divided the gallery into rooms, but now our sculptures stood proudly on brown pedestals. I could see about twenty in the room we had entered. The rest must be in other rooms. Ms. Baehr had said about sixty pieces were on display.

  Still gripping hands, Stacey and I began walking from sculpture to sculpture. Some of them were hard to see because of the crowd, but we waited patiently or stood on tiptoe until we could get a glimpse of each one. I was determined not to miss a thing.

  “Look! There’s something by Mary Drabek!” exclaimed Dawn. “She’s in my math class.”

  “Hey, she got a third-prize ribbon!” said Kristy, wiggling her way closer to the sculpture.

  “This is very impressive, honey,” my mother said to me. “I think the new gallery is wonderful. You should be proud to be in its first exhibit.”

  I nodded my head. I was afraid to speak. Where was my sculpture of Jackie? I didn’t hear any laughing….

  Stacey and I had finally dropped hands. Soon I got separated from my family and the club members, so I wandered around by myself. I made a complete tour of the first room and didn’t find Jackie.

  I entered the next room.

  The first piece I saw was a boxing cow by John Steiner. It hadn’t won an award.

  The next piece was Fiona MacRae’s. It was the stag she’d been working on. The second-prize ribbon was attached to it.

  I passed a rabbit, two little girls holding hands, a man reading a newspaper, and a baseball player.

  And then I reached a small crowd of people. They weren’t laughing so they couldn’t have been looking at Jackie. I edged closer, squeezing between a man who smelled of tobacco and a woman with a baby in a Snuggli. There on a brown pedestal was Ashley’s fireplug. The blue first-prize ribbon hung jauntily in front of it.

  I was amazed. Somehow, Ashley really had managed to make that hydrant come to life. And the judges must have appreciated what she’d done.

  “It’s an animated inanimate object,” I heard a voice explain.

  Ashley.

  There she was.

  Our eyes met.

  I smiled. “Congratulations,” I mouthed to her.

  Ashley nodded at me and then smiled back.

  I left the room. Suddenly, I wasn’t very interested in finding my sculpture. I didn’t care where it was or whether anyone was laughing at it. Maybe I should have listened to Ashley more. Maybe I really could have learned from her.

  But just at that moment, I heard an excited squeal behind me.

  “Claudia!” Kristy cried. She had grabbed my arm and was jumping up and down. “Come see what I found!”

  Kristy led me into a third room. Then she picked up her pace and pulled me straight through it, nearly knocking a bunch of people over.

  “What is it?” I exclaimed, half-annoyed, half-amused.

  “It’s … this sculpture!”

  In front of me was Jackie. Kristy had been the first of us to find it. Right away, I noticed two things: No one was laughing at it, and a green ribbon had been fixed to the pedestal.

  “You got an honorable mention!” said Kristy.

  “For a work-in-progress,” I marveled.

  “You would have won first prize if you’d finished,” someone spoke up behind me.

  It was Ms. Baehr.

  “I would have?”

  She nodded. “The judges were very impressed.”

  “You’ll have to tell Jackie,” said Kristy.

  “I’ll say.”

  The next half hour was one of the most exciting I’ve ever known. My parents and sister and Mimi and Mary Anne and her dad and Dawn and Stacey all crowded around to look at and exclaim over the half-finished sculpture of Jackie. Then a Stoneybrook News photographer took a picture of all the winners, even the three of us who just got honorable mentions. She said that the photo and an article about us and the gallery would appear in the paper a few days later.

  All that night people kept congratulating me. Even my sister, who wants to be a physicist and whose head is usually in the clouds, said, “This must be most rewarding for you. You’re among very talented company.” And Mimi hugged me to her and said, “I love you, my Claudia.”

  The next day I was sitting with my friends in the cafeteria. We were back to our regular old lunch routine. Kristy and Mary Anne had bought the hot lunch, Dawn had brought a health food lunch from home, and Stacey and I had bought sandwiches.

  Kristy was saying, “You know the smell of sneakers after gym class? And you know the smell of Cuthbert Athlete’s Foot Creme? Well, if you mixed those smells together, wouldn’t they smell just like this pot roast?” and Mary Anne was practically gagging, when I glanced up and saw Ashley walk by our table with her tray. She was alone as usual, looking for a place to sit.

  I’m not sure what got into me, but I jumped up and ran to her. I touched her arm. “Ashley?”

  “Yes?” she replied, turning around. “Oh … Claudia.”

  “Um, I was wondering. Do you have someplace to sit? I mean, would you like to sit with my friends and me?”

  “With you?” Ashley glanced at the members of the Baby-sitters Club who were, of course, watching us curiously. “Well …”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. I knew perfectly well that Ashley and I would never be best friends. And I knew she would never understand my interest in baby-sitting. I would never understand how she could think only of art. But we did have things in common. I felt that we could be friendly. I wanted to give it a try, at least.

  I pulled Ashley over to our table. “Go ahead. Sit down,” I said.

  Ashley did, somewhat reluctantly.

  Kristy scowled at me, and I knew why. Ashley looked just plain weird in her outfit — a long knitted vest over an even longer shirt which she was wearing tails-out over a skirt that didn’t match either the vest or the skirt. And there were those hiking boots again.

  But the first thing Ashley did when she sat down was sniff at her lunch and say, “You know what this meat smells like?”

  “Old sneakers and athlete’s foot creme?” suggested Kristy.

  “Well, I was going to say turpentine, rubber cement, and acrylic paint,” replied Ashley. “I guess that’s pretty much the same.”

  Kristy grinned. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  And then we began to laugh. All of us. Afterward, Ashley and I got into a discussion about sculpture, and my friends listened. Then my friends and I got into a discussion about babysitting for kids who don’t like baby-sitters, and Ashley listened.

  When lunch was over, we left the cafeteria together.

  After that day, Ashley sometimes sat with us but often sat alone. Either way, it was okay. She and I had become sometimes friends, and that was okay, too. Like Jackie Rodowsky’s accidents, those things just happened — sometimes.

  * * *

  Dear Reader,

  In Claudia and the New Girl, we get our first close look at Claudia’s passion for art. When I was growing up, art was a very important part of my life. I took after-school art classes starting when I was five. From kindergarten through high school, I thoroughly enjoyed art, and looked forwar
d to any class I was taking. And I was very lucky to have a lot of good art teachers. Like Claudia, I enjoyed all aspects of art — painting and drawing, sculpting, making mosaics, and jewelry-making.

  As an adult, I still enjoy creative activities, my favorites being sewing and needlework, like Mary Anne. One reason I enjoy both writing and art is that I find they are great ways to express yourself.

  Happy reading and drawing,

  Ann M. Martin

  * * *

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANN MATTHEWS MARTIN was born on August 12, 1955. She grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with her parents and her younger sister, Jane.

  There are currently over 176 million copies of The Baby-sitters Club in print. (If you stacked all of these books up, the pile would be 21,245 miles high.) In addition to The Baby-sitters Club, Ann is the author of two other series, Main Street and Family Tree. Her novels include Belle Teal, A Corner of the Universe (a Newbery Honor book), Here Today, A Dog’s Life, On Christmas Eve, Everything for a Dog, Ten Rules for Living with My Sister, and Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life (So Far). She is also the coauthor, with Laura Godwin, of the Doll People series.

  Ann lives in upstate New York with her dog and her cats.

  Copyright © 1988 by Ann M. Martin.

  Cover art by Hodges Soileau

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  First edition, 1996

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-53259-4