Boy-Crazy Stacey

  The second the lifeguards showed up, the kids (except for Byron, of course) dashed into the water. I sauntered after them, supposedly to keep an eye on them, but really as an excuse to say hello to Scott. He greeted me with, “Hey there, princess.”

  I thought I might pass out.

  “Hi,” I said. “Was yesterday your day off?”

  “Sure was. I used it well, too.”

  I added that bit of information—Monday is Scott’s day off—to my mental list of things I knew about him. I wished the list were longer.

  Then I leaned casually against the lifeguard stand, almost as if I was posing. I glanced across the beach to see if Mary Anne was watching. But she was busy. Claire, Margo, and Vanessa, already dripping wet, were crowded around her, asking her to help them with something. And to my surprise, the guy mother’s helper was leaning over behind Mary Anne, giving her a hand.

  I didn’t have time to think about that, though. Right then, things started happening pretty quickly.

  First, a couple of the other girls showed up. “Hi, Scott,” they said.

  “Do you kids know Stacey McGill?” he asked.

  Kids! He had called them kids! He must have thought I acted older than they did!

  That was all the girls needed to hear. Scowling, they edged around to the other side of the lifeguard stand. “Hi, Bruce,” said one, giggling.

  “Hey, beautiful,” replied Bruce.

  More giggling.

  I had Scott to myself again.

  I looked back at our towels. Mary Anne was alone.

  I was just about to check around for Claire and Margo when it happened.

  “SHARK!” yelled a terrified voice from out in the waves.

  In one second, Scott and Bruce were on their feet, binoculars to their eyes. Then they put the binoculars down, glanced at each other, nodded, and began whistling people in.

  FWEEEET! “Everybody in! Everybody in!”

  FWEEEET! “Outta the water!”

  Then Scott blew three short fweets and signaled to the guards down the beach, while Bruce signaled to the ones up the beach.

  I’ve never seen people move so fast. Those in the ocean staggered out. Those on the beach ran to the water’s edge. Frantically, I tried to round up the Pikes. I gathered Byron, Jordan, Nicky, and Vanessa in a matter of seconds.

  “Mary Anne!” I yelled, spotting her caftan and baseball cap. “Where are the rest of the kids? We have to make sure they haven’t … I mean —” I didn’t want to say, Haven’t been eaten alive by some relative of Jaws.

  “I’ve got Claire and Adam.”

  “Oh, no! We’re missing Mallory and Margo!”

  “No, you’re not. Here we are,” said Mallory, running up to me, pulling Margo along.

  “Oh, thank goodness.”

  Mary Anne and I counted the Pikes about five times before we were satisfied that they were all safe and sound.

  “I want to see the shark!” cried Nicky, jumping up and down.

  So did I. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s walk down the beach, away from this crowd.”

  Mary Anne and the other kids followed us. When we had a little space, we held our hands to our eyes, blocking the glare of the sun, and stared out to sea.

  “I think I see something!” exclaimed Byron.

  “Where?” we all asked.

  He pointed. “See? Sort of over to the left?”

  I could make out a faraway shape, but it looked like a seagull bobbing on the waves.

  Later, Adam swore he could see five fins circling around, but nobody else saw them. At last we gave up. We walked back to the lifeguard stand.

  The crowd was dispersing. Scott and Bruce were back on duty. I saw a good opportunity to ask Scott a question.

  “Hi,” I said to him, leaning against the base of the stand and squinting up.

  “Hi, love.”

  Love! Scott had called me love! Of course, he meant his love.

  When I recovered, I managed to say, “So were there really sharks?”

  “It looked that way. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

  “I’ll say.”

  Scott wiped his brow. “It’s going to be a hot one.”

  “So you want a soda or something?” I asked eagerly.

  “You bet, love. That’d be great.”

  I was off in a flash. I didn’t even remember to tell Mary Anne where I was going. I grabbed a soda out of the Pikes’ fridge, ran back across the sand, and handed the ice-cold can to Scott.

  He held it against his forehead. “Oh, wow. That feels great,” he said. Then he popped open the can, tipped his head back, drank half the can without stopping, and handed it to Bruce. Bruce finished it off practically in one gulp.

  “That sure hit the spot, honey,” said Scott.

  I was dying. I was dying!

  After lunch that day, Mary Anne and I stood at the water’s edge. I alternately tried to coax Byron into the water (he staunchly refused, saying he didn’t want to be eaten by a shark) and found excuses to talk to Scott. Every time I did, I noticed Mary Anne giving me dirty looks.

  Well, could I help it if Scott needed a sandwich and then another soda? I’m sorry if she thought she had her hands full, but it wasn’t my fault Adam dumped a bucket of water over Byron, or that Nicky disappeared for ten minutes. It turned out he’d gone back to the house without telling anyone, but Mary Anne panicked. She was just going to have to learn to cope with things like that.

  At five o’clock, Scott and Bruce climbed down from their stand. Mary Anne called the Pike kids out of the water. “I think we should take them inside,” she said to me. “Mallory and Jordan look kind of burned. And I know Claire’s tired.”

  “Okay, you start,” I told her. “I want to talk to Scott for a minute.”

  “Stacey,” she said impatiently, “there are two umbrellas, ten towels, a set of Tonka toys, buckets, shovels, card games, suntan lotion, and beach bags to pack up.”

  “Well, you’ve got eight kids to help you,” I pointed out. “Besides, I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “You’re getting paid as much as I am,” said Mary Anne in a huff, “and I’m doing all the work.”

  Since she was sunburned, I forgave her.

  Anyway, the guy mother’s helper turned up to give her a hand. I realized that he had helped her look for Nicky earlier, too. So what was she complaining about?

  While Mary Anne rounded up the Pikes, I watched Scott get ready to leave. Then I followed him as he and Bruce dragged the stand back to the dunes.

  “Well,” I said after a moment, “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  The lifeguard Jeep was driving up the beach to pick them up.

  “Just a sec, Stacey,” said Scott. “Hey, man, you go on to the Jeep,” he told Bruce. “I’ll be right there.”

  Did Scott want to be alone with me?!

  Scott flashed me his hunk grin. Then he lifted his whistle from around his neck and handed it to me by the chain. “You sure were a lifesaver today, princess,” he said. “Thanks a lot. I want you to have my whistle.”

  I held it with shaking hands.

  “Well,” said Scott softly. “I better go. See you tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. Tomorrow. Definitely. Hey, and thanks, Scott. This is really special.”

  I watched Scott run across the beach to the Jeep and vault inside without opening the door.

  I knew he had meant to say more to me, but was too shy. Boys get that way sometimes. Anyway, he didn’t need words to tell me what he meant. I already knew.

  Scott was in love with me!

  Thursday

  Dear Kristy,

  Today the weather was awful. Stacey and I must have been out of our minds: We took the kids to the miniature golf course. But guess what? We had a great time. Sometimes I think that eight kids aren’t any harder to take care of than two or three. The Pikes argue and tease, but they also help each other out.

  Love,
br />   Mary Anne

  P.S. Stacey is being a real pain. She really is.

  P.P.S. (Don’t ever show this card to her.)

  I guess we should have expected at least one rainy day while we were in Sea City, but the weather had been so nice that somehow we didn’t. So we were all kind of shocked when we woke up on Thursday, shivering in our beds, to find a misty, gray sky and cool, damp air. It wasn’t actually raining, but it was certainly no beach day. In fact, by nine-thirty the beach was still deserted and we realized that the lifeguards weren’t even going to go on duty. Why couldn’t this have happened on Scott’s day off? I wondered.

  “I think,” said Mr. Pike at breakfast that morning, “that today would be a good day to go to Smithtown.”

  “Oh, Dad, please. No. Not Smithtown,” said Jordan, amid groans from his brothers and sisters.

  “What’s Smithtown?” asked Mary Anne.

  “It’s a dumb old town that’s supposed to look like the seventeen hundreds or something,” said Adam.

  “I always wear a frown when I go to Smithtown,” added Vanessa.

  “You’ve only been there once, honey,” her mother pointed out.

  “Once was enough,” Byron whispered to Adam.

  “Smithtown,” said Mr. Pike, “is a very nice restored colonial village. There are stores and houses, a church, a blacksmith shop, craftspeople….”

  “Really?” said Mary Anne. That was just the kind of thing that would interest her.

  “But you kids don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” said Mrs. Pike.

  “Oh, thanks, Mom,” said Mallory. “Are you and Dad going to go anyway?”

  Mr. and Mrs. Pike looked at each other. “Why not?” said Mr. Pike. “Can you kids find something to do today?”

  “Oh, sure,” I replied. “No problem.”

  (Mary Anne looked disappointed.)

  So a little while later, Mr. Pike gave Mary Anne and me some money and he and Mrs. Pike drove off.

  An hour after that, we were all bored silly. I’d written to my parents and my friend Laine in New York, and was tired of writing. There was no TV in the house, and the kids had already read, colored, and tried to invent a game of tag they could play indoors without breaking anything. Mallory had been up on the third floor,

  watching the angry ocean from the window seat, but was tired of it. Every suggestion Mary Anne or I made was met with a bored “nah.”

  “Well,” I said. “It’s not actually raining. We could go into town or to the boardwalk.”

  “Yay!” cried the kids.

  “If,” said Mary Anne, “you promise to wear jackets or sweatshirts.”

  “We promise.”

  It wasn’t easy, but the ten of us agreed on one thing we all wanted to do: play miniature golf.

  It was late morning when we reached Fred’s Putt-Putt Course. Because of the weather, a lot of other people had had the same idea we’d had, and Fred’s was kind of crowded. There was a short line of people waiting at almost every hole.

  The kids were undaunted.

  “Come on. Let’s get our putt-putt clubs,” cried Byron.

  “I want a five-iron,” said Nicky.

  “Silly,” said Mallory, smiling. “You get putt-putt clubs according to your height. There are no five-irons or anything.”

  “Silly-billy-goo-goo,” added Claire.

  I rolled my eyes.

  When we were all equipped with our golf clubs, we lined up at the first hole. The par was four. That means the average person needs four strokes to hit the ball through the moving arms of a windmill, around a corner, and into a little sunken cup.

  Claire insisted on going first. Twenty-seven strokes later, her ball was in the cup. There were nine more of us to play. The people behind us, a man and a woman, began to look impatient.

  “Mind if we play through?” asked the man. “There are just the two of us. It’ll only take a few minutes.”

  “No,” cried Margo. “It’s my turn! I want to go next!”

  “Margo —” I said.

  “That’s all right,” the man said to her. “You go on.”

  After Margo had tried eleven times to get her ball through the windmill, I thought the man would turn purple. Jordan told her she could pick it up and carry it to the other side.

  “You go on through—sir,” I said when Margo was finished.

  “Thanks,” he said with relief. He and the woman sped through expertly.

  The older kids were somewhat better players. Mallory actually got her ball in the cup in the suggested four strokes. Even Mary Anne and I couldn’t do that.

  “Hey, you’re good!” I said to Mallory.

  “It was beginner’s luck,” muttered Byron, who’d taken twelve strokes.

  The second hole looked a little easier. At the top of a short green ramp sat a clown’s face with a blinking red nose. You were supposed to hit your ball into the clown’s mouth, and it would come out of one of three holes on the other side. If it came out of the middle hole, you could get a hole in one—which is just what Nicky got.

  “A hole in one! A hole in one!” he shrieked. “I did it! I never got a hole in one before.”

  Several people nearby smiled at him.

  Adam had just scored an embarrassing ten on the clown hole. Nevertheless, he punched Nicky affectionately on the shoulder. “Good going, little bro,” he said.

  Nicky beamed.

  The people behind us—a family, now—were beginning to get that look that the man and woman had had earlier. I called Mary Anne and Mallory over to me. “I think,” I said, glancing nervously at the impatient family, “that we better split into three groups and play separately. Otherwise, we’re likely to get killed.” After much discussion, Mallory agreed to play with the triplets, Mary Anne took Nicky and Vanessa, and I took Claire and Margo.

  We lined up at the third hole, which had a royal theme and was called “Old King Cole Hole.” Mallory and the triplets played through first, and went on to the fourth hole. A half hour later, they were waiting in line for the eighth hole, Mary Anne’s group was playing the sixth hole, and Claire was taking her thirty-seventh stroke at “Old King Cole.”

  “Claire … dear,” I said as sweetly as I knew how.

  “What, Stacey-silly-billy-goo-goo?”

  But before I could finish (and I hadn’t even been sure what I was going to say), Margo interrupted.

  “You know what I think?” she said. “I think we should make a limit. You can’t hit the ball more than twenty times. Twenty is it. If you get to twenty, your turn is over.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Great suggestion!

  But Claire was frowning. “What if my ball isn’t in the cup yet?” she asked.

  “Twenty would be a better score,” I told her. “Remember, you don’t want a lot of points. The person with the fewest points is the winner.”

  “Well, okay,” said Claire.

  The twenty-stroke limit made a big difference. Even so, by the time Mallory and the triplets were finished, we were only on the tenth hole, and Mary Anne was on the thirteenth. We let the older kids leave to look in stores, if they promised to stay nearby and not cross the busy main drag. When Mary Anne and Nicky and Vanessa finished, they joined the others.

  Then it was just me, Margo, Claire, and the putt-putt course. We were on the fourteenth hole. There were four more to go—five if you counted the “nineteenth” hole, which was really just a fancy way to return your ball to the rental shop.

  On the fifteenth hole, Claire dropped her putt-putt club on the green. “I’m tired of this, Stacey. I don’t wanna play anymore.” (She had just found out that her score was over two hundred.)

  On the sixteenth hole, Margo did the same thing.

  I didn’t care. I was very tired of miniature golf, myself. “Okay,” I said. “We just have to return our balls.”

  I led the girls to the nineteenth hole. Mallory had explained how it worked. You hit your ball up a ramp, it disappeared over th
e top, and ran down a chute back to Fred.

  Thwack! My golf ball disappeared.

  Thwack! Margo’s ball disappeared.

  Thwack! Claire’s ball disappeared.

  Then, ding, ding, ding! Whoop, whoop, whoop! The second Claire’s ball sailed into the chute, lights flashed, bells rang, sirens wailed. Fred came rushing out of his shop.

  “Congratulations!” he exclaimed. “Somebody has just won two free games here!”

  “Me! Me! Oh, it was me!” Claire cried, jumping up and down.

  “You’re the lucky five-hundredth person to return your golf ball this week.” Fred handed Claire two tickets for free putt-putt.

  “Oh, please, Stacey, can Margo and I play again right now?” asked Claire.

  I looked at the lines of people and “Old King Cole” and the swinging putt-putt clubs.

  I was beginning to get a headache.

  “Claire,” I said, “you can use your tickets on the next rainy day.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But you know what, Stacey? You’re a silly-billy-goo-goo.”

  “You know what, Claire? You are, too.”

  Claire slipped her hand in mine, and she and Margo and I went off to find the others.

  Sunday

  Dear Mary Anne and Stacey, You will not believe what happened while I was taking care of David Michael, Andrew, and Karen this morning. It was a baby-sitter’s nightmare. It all began when Watson told us he wanted his car washed. This is a warning, you guys. Never, never, ever, ever, EVER let little kids wash a car by themselves. This should be a Baby-sitters Club rule….

  Kristy Thomas had been getting an awful lot of mail from Claudia and Dawn and Mary Anne and me—at least three postcards every day. And finally Mary Anne and I got a letter from her.

  Believe it or not, we were all baby-sitting. Back in her old neighborhood in California, Dawn was sitting for some of the families she used to sit for. Claudia and her family had traveled to an isolated mountain resort. Although it was quiet—the perfect place for Mimi to recover from her stroke—a lot of other families were staying there, too. Claudia had sat for a couple of them.

  Of course Kristy was in baby-sitters’ heaven. She was the only club member left in Stoneybrook, so she had all our clients to herself. But her most memorable baby-sitting job during the two weeks we were apart was not for another family, but for her very own stepsister and stepbrother, six-year-old Karen and four-year-old Andrew, and her little brother, David Michael.