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“Put to sleep,” Bart repeated. “Wow. If we ever had to do that to Twinkle …” Bart’s voiced trailed away. Then, “Kristy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember when Jackie — is that his name? — ran into the catcher’s cage that time? Well, I apologize for what the Bashers said to him. I apologize for what they said to all your kids. I found out later that they’d been mean, but I was getting too worried about the Krushers to notice it at the time. All I could think about was our game.”

  “That’s okay,” I replied. “Maybe your kids gave my kids a little backbone. Besides, Jackie is a walking disaster. I can’t tell whether he’s just accident-prone, or if he lives in another time zone or something.”

  Bart laughed.

  After that, I guess neither one of us could think of anything to say, because we were pretty quiet for awhile. I felt embarrassed and began casting around in my mind, trying to dredge up some subject to talk about with Bart. But what? My family? My school? Or I could ask him a question. I could say, “So, do you have any pets besides Twinkle?” or “What’s your school like?” or “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” “Do you like me?”

  I had just settled on the school question, which seemed like a safe one, when Bart said, sounding very nervous, “Um, Kristy, I have a question to ask you.”

  “Okay,” I replied. Was Bart going to ask if I liked him?

  “I was wondering…. I mean, I know the last couple of weeks have been sort of difficult for us, but now we’ve both admitted that we’re competitive, and we have one game behind us and we survived it….” (What was Bart leading up to?) “So … how about another game between the Krushers and the Bashers? Say, in two weeks?”

  “Okay,” I replied, feeling a little let down.

  “Wait,” Bart went on. “Only on one condition.”

  “On one condition?”

  “Yes. That in between games we act like something other than rival coaches.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, how about like friends? Or … maybe we could go out sometime. To a ball game or something. Would that be okay with you?”

  I didn’t pause for even a split second. “Sure!”

  “Good,” Bart replied. We both smiled.

  We had reached our neighborhood, and pretty soon Bart would leave me at the end of my driveway. I wished our walk home didn’t have to end, even though I was dead tired — but probably not as tired as the Krushers. I’d seen Gabbie nearly asleep in her father’s arms as the Perkinses left the playground. And Andrew had looked ready for a nap.

  “Well?” said Bart.

  There we were, at my driveway.

  “Well … I guess I’ll be seeing you soon,” I said.

  “Before the game,” replied Bart firmly.

  “Great! Maybe you’d like to meet my friends sometime. I think you’d like them.”

  “Okay…. Can I come to a meeting of the Baby-sitters Club?”

  “Do you want to be a baby-sitter?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll introduce you some other time. Meetings are serious.”

  “Deal,” Bart said. Then he grinned. “See ya … Coach!” He turned and started home.

  I watched Bart walk away. Then I turned around. I saw Watson gardening in the front flower bed and I ran to him.

  “Hi!” I called.

  Watson looked up from his work. “Hi, there. We didn’t get to talk after the game. But I wanted to tell you that it was terrific, of course. I knew it would be, win or lose.”

  “You did? How’d you know that?” I stood at the edge of the garden and watched Watson turn peat moss into the soil.

  “Because you were the Krushers’ coach. That’s how I knew.” Watson straightened up. The gardens are his domain. He’s totally happy when he’s gardening.

  “Thanks, Watson,” I said. If he hadn’t been covered with peat moss, I think I would have hugged him. Instead I blurted out, “Bart wants me to go to a ball game with him. He wants us to be friends.” Or maybe more than friends, I thought. But it was a pretty scary thought. Was I ready to be more than just friends with a boy?

  “Wonderful,” said Watson, smiling.

  “I better go inside,” I said. “I have a few calls to make.”

  I ran into our house. Suddenly, I was bursting with excitement and energy. I found Mom and told her all about Bart. Then I called Mary Anne, Dawn, and Claudia and told each of them about Bart.

  Then I made a fourth phone call. “Hello?” I said. “Is Jackie there?”

  “This is Jackie.”

  “Hi, it’s Kristy Thomas. I just wanted to tell you how proud I am of you. You played well today. And you were very brave to go back in the game after your, um, accident.”

  “Wow! Thanks, Coach. You called just to tell m — Oops!”

  CRASH!

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “A lamp,” replied the walking disaster. “I just broke a lamp.”

  Some things never change.

  * * *

  Dear Reader,

  Jackie Rodowsky made his first appearance in book #10, Logan Likes Mary Anne. I had so much fun writing about him that I wanted to write a book featuring him. It was also time for Kristy to have another one of her great ideas, and so she organized Kristy’s Krushers, her very own softball team.

  Book #20 marked an important change for me. It was the last BSC book that Brenda Bowen edited. I had worked with Brenda since the beginning of the series. Now it was time for her to move on to other things. So a new editor took over. Her name is Bethany Buck (why do all the BSC editors have the initials BB?!), and she’s worked on the series ever since. I should have called book #20 Good-bye, Brenda! Hello, Bethany!

  Happy reading,

  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 © 1989 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 978-0-545-53517-5

 

 

  Ann M. Martin, Kristy and the Walking Disaster

 

 

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