Stacey's Choice

  The next two people to arrive at Claud’s were Jessi Ramsey and Kristy Thomas. They didn’t arrive together, though, because Kristy lives in a different neighborhood from the rest of us. Jessi (short for Jessica) is Mallory’s best friend. Jessi and Mal are both junior members of the BSC, since they are eleven and the rest of us are thirteen. Here is something interesting: Jessi lives in my old house, the one I lived in the first time I moved to Stoneybrook. When my family left, Jessi’s moved in. The Ramseys came to Stoneybrook at the beginning of this school year when Mr. Ramsey’s company transferred him. Jessi’s family consists of Jessi, her parents, her Aunt Cecelia, her younger sister Becca (short for Rebecca), her baby brother, Squirt (whose real name is John Philip Ramsey, Jr.), and their hamster, Misty. (You already know most of who’s in Mal’s family — her parents, a hamster named Frodo, and those eight kids!)

  Although Jessi and Mal are similar in that they’re both the oldest kids in their families and feel that their parents treat them like infants anyway, their main interests are fairly different. They enjoy reading, especially horse stories, but Mal hopes to write and illustrate children’s books one day, while Jessi dreams of being a professional ballerina. Actually, Jessi is well on her way. I’m pretty sure her dream is going to come true. Jessi has taken dance for years and now dances en pointe. (That means “on toe.”) When she moved to Connecticut she was even accepted at a special dance school in Stamford, which is the nearest big city. She takes classes there in the afternoons and has already danced the lead in several of her school productions. I really admire Jessi’s talent and determination.

  Like Mary Anne and Dawn, Jessi and Mal are another pair of best friends who look nothing alike. Jessi is black with deep brown eyes, and usually wears her hair up or pulled back for dance class. Mal is white with red hair, blue eyes, and freckles, and wears glasses and braces. Even though the braces are the clear kind that hardly show up, Mal doesn’t feel very pretty and wishes desperately for contact lenses. Her parents say no, though. They also say no to most of the trendy clothes she wants to wear. (So do Jessi’s parents.) Mal and Jessi are lucky to get by looking like sixth-graders, let alone fashion plates.

  Finally, let me introduce you to Kristy Thomas, BSC president, creator, and founder. I think Kristy has the most interesting and unusual family of any of us, although it didn’t start out that way. The Thomases began as a nice, regular family — mother, father, Kristy, and her three brothers. Kristy’s brothers are Sam (of course) who is fifteen, Charlie who’s seventeen, and David Michael who’s seven. Shortly after David Michael was born, Mr. Thomas walked out on the family, leaving Kristy’s mom to raise the kids by herself. She did a great job, managing to keep the house on Bradford Court (Kristy used to live next door to Mary Anne) and to hold her family together. Then, when Kristy was in seventh grade, her mother met and fell in love with a man named Watson Brewer. By the summer, they had gotten married and Watson, who’s a millionaire, had moved the Thomases across town into his mansion. That was when Kristy’s family began to change. Watson became her stepfather, and his children from his first marriage (Karen who’s seven and Andrew who’s four) became her stepsister and stepbrother. Then her mom and Watson adopted a little girl from Vietnam. Her name is Emily Michelle and she’s two and a half. To help care for Emily, Kristy’s grandmother moved in. And to round out the family are the pets — Shannon, David Michael’s puppy; Boo-Boo, Watson’s cat; and two goldfish belonging to Karen and Andrew. What a household!

  Kristy Thomas is a real character. She is outgoing, outspoken, and full of energy and ideas. Pretty different from Mary Anne, her only best friend, except for looks. Kristy and Mary Anne could pass for sisters, but they sure don’t dress alike. Kristy, who loves sports, dresses for comfort alone; almost always in jeans, a turtleneck shirt, sneakers, and maybe a sweat shirt and a baseball cap.

  Kristy likes sports and children so much that she combined the two interests and started a softball team for little kids. The team is called Kristy’s Krushers. Through coaching, Kristy met the coach of a rival team, Bart’s Bashers. Now she and Bart Taylor go out sometimes, but Kristy would probably kill me if she heard me refer to Bart as her boyfriend.

  Kristy’s big ideas are what led to the creation of the BSC. The members of the Baby-sitters Club, which is really a business, meet three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons from five-thirty until six. Because we advertise, parents know they can reach us at those times, so they call then to line up sitters for their kids. Kristy came up with the idea for the club when she realized how hard her mother sometimes had to look to find a sitter for David Michael (if Kristy or Sam or Charlie couldn’t watch him). Her mother would have a much easier job if she could make one phone call and reach a whole bunch of available sitters. One of them would certainly be free to take the job. That’s what our club does, and it runs smoothly and efficiently. As president, Kristy sees to that. Claudia, vice-president, lends us her room, her phone (she has a private line), and her hidden snacks three times a week. Mary Anne schedules our sitting jobs in the club record book and also keeps up-to-date the information we store there: our clients’ names, addresses, and phone numbers, the rates they pay, and so forth. As treasurer, I collect dues from the members each Monday and dole it out as needed — for instance, we pay Charlie Thomas to drive Kristy to and from meetings, and help Claud with her phone bill. Dawn’s job, as alternate officer, is to take over the duties of anyone who can’t make a meeting. And Jessi and Mal … well, they don’t have actual duties. Junior officer means they can’t sit at night, unless they’re watching their own brothers and sisters, but they take on a lot of the daytime jobs, which frees us older members for the evening jobs.

  To help the club work even more effectively, Kristy came up with three more great ideas. One was the club notebook in which each club member must write up every sitting job she goes on. Then the rest of us are responsible for reading it once a week. This is a good way to keep up with the lives of the children we care for, and to find out how our friends handled sitting problems. The second idea was Kid-Kits. She invented the idea of decorating an ordinary cardboard carton and filling it with her old games, books, and toys, plus some new things such as art supplies, and bringing it with her on sitting jobs. Now we each have a Kid-Kit — and we have become very popular sitters! The third idea was to sign up two extra club members as associates. The associate members don’t attend meetings. They’re reliable sitters we can call on if a job happens to come along that none of us is available to take. That doesn’t happen often, but when it does, we’re extremely grateful for Shannon Kilbourne (a friend of Kristy’s who lives in her new neighborhood) and Logan Bruno who is … Mary Anne’s boyfriend!

  * * *

  Kristy seated herself in Claud’s director’s chair, adjusted her visor, and kept her eyes on the digital clock, our official club timepiece. When the numbers changed from 5:29 to 5:30, Kristy rapped a pencil on the arm of the chair and announced, “This meeting of the Baby-sitters Club will now come to order. Will the treasurer please collect the weekly dues?” Kristy turned her attention to me.

  Grudgingly, everyone handed me a dollar, which I dropped into the BSC treasury (a manila envelope). I was dumping out the contents of the envelope so I could count the money, when the phone rang. Our first job call of the day. Jessi lunged for it.

  “Hi, Mrs. Barrett!” she said a moment later. “Sunday? I’ll call you right back.”

  Mrs. Barrett, a regular client of the BSC, lives near the Pikes and has three children. Mary Anne checked the appointment pages in the record book and scheduled Dawn for the job. Then Jessi called Mrs. Barrett back to tell her who’d be sitting for Buddy, Suzi, and Marnie.

  After that, I finished counting the treasury money and we answered a few more calls. Finally things calmed down. During a moment of silence, Mal said, “Guess what the latest project at my house is?” Then she told everyone about the mail-order craze.

  Dawn began
to laugh. “You know what I did once? I found this great offer in a magazine. For a dollar forty-nine I got twelve cassettes.”

  “Twelve!” exclaimed Jessi.

  “Yeah. But I didn’t realize that by doing that, I’d joined a cassette club. Every month another cassette arrived in the mail and I was supposed to pay almost full price for each one. I never had enough money. Finally I had to ask Dad to get me out of the club.”

  “Once,” began Kristy, “I saw this ad on TV. The announcer said you could order this great collection of fifties and sixties rock ’n’ roll songs by the original artists. You know what happened? The cassette arrived, but it turned out to be a collection of the old songs performed by a new group called the Original Artists. What a rip-off! I thought I was going to be hearing music by the Drifters, Buddy Holly, the Chiffons, and Gladys Knight and the Pips.”

  “I can’t wait to see what’s going to start arriving at my house,” said Mal. “My brothers and sisters may be surprised.”

  The phone rang then and we scheduled a job for Mary Anne with the Kuhn kids. Then we scheduled another job. In the lull that followed, I said, “Well, I have some news.”

  “Good news?” Claud wanted to know.

  “Yup. My dad called this afternoon. He’s being given a huge raise and a promotion in his company. He’s going to become a vice-president. And his company is honoring him with a dinner.”

  “Awesome,” said Dawn.

  “I know. I can tell Dad is really pleased. And he invited me to come to New York and be his date at the dinner. It’s a week from Friday. I’m going to spend the weekend in the city. Dad’s getting tickets to a play and everything. Oh, and he told me to buy a new outfit.”

  “That’s fantastic!” exclaimed Claud. “Hey, let’s celebrate. Let’s go shopping on Saturday. We’ll all come with you, Stace, and help you choose an outfit, and then we can eat downtown.”

  “We could go to that new place,” added Mary Anne.

  “Ye Olde Ice-Cream Parlour?” said Kristy. (She pronounced “olde” like this: oldie.)

  Mary Anne giggled. “Well, it looks like ye ‘oldie’ ice-cream parlour, but I think it’s called the Rosebud Café. And it serves more than just ice cream.”

  “Whatever it’s called, let’s go there,” said Claud. “I peeked in the windows the other day and the ice cream and sundaes look amazing.”

  “Sounds great,” I replied, even though I would have to celebrate with a boring old diet soda. “Can everybody go?”

  “Yes!” said Claud, Kristy, Mary Anne, and Dawn.

  But Jessi shook her head. “Special dance class.”

  And Mal, looking pained, said, “Visiting my grandparents for the day. You guys better go anyway, though. You don’t have much time to get a new outfit, Stace. You can’t waste Saturday.”

  Which was how our Saturday shopping excursion and celebration was planned.

  On Saturday morning I slept late and woke up leisurely, which is the perfect way to start any weekend. I reached for my clock radio and turned it toward me. Five minutes to nine.

  “Morning, Mom,” I mumbled as I groped my way into the kitchen.

  “Morning,” she replied.

  I sat at the table, surprised to see only my place set. “Did you already eat?” I asked.

  My mother shook her head. “I’m not hungry this morning, but I’ll fix you something. What do you want?”

  I ate toast and fruit, and Mom and I talked about the weekend. At nine-thirty I said, “Whoa, I better get dressed. Mary Anne and Dawn are going to be here soon.”

  Before I knew it, Mr. Spier had pulled up in front of my house and I was clambering into the backseat of his car with my friends. Ten minutes later, we were being dropped off outside Bellair’s Department Store. Kristy was waiting for us. Dressed in jeans, a bulky red sweat shirt, and sneakers, she was sitting on a bench, reading a copy of Sports Illustrated.

  “Hi, you guys!” she called. “Charlie dropped me off early. Where’s Claud?”

  “On her way, I guess,” I replied. “Her mom has to work today. She was going to drop Claud here before she went to the library.” (Mrs. Kishi is the head librarian at the Stoneybrook Public Library.)

  At that moment a horn honked. Mrs. Kishi, who was slowing to a stop, waved to Mr. Spier as he pulled into the traffic. And Claud scrambled out of her mom’s car.

  “We’re all here!” she exclaimed. “Okay, let’s hit the stores. ’Bye, Mom!”

  Kristy waited until both Mrs. Kishi and Mr. Spier had disappeared from view. Then she said, “Ah. Parent-free.”

  We invaded Bellair’s first.

  “Which department?” asked Mary Anne.

  “Dresses,” I replied.

  Kristy groaned.

  “Well, where do you want to go?” asked Claud.

  “Sports.”

  “To look for a dress for Stacey?”

  “No, to look for a new baseball cap for me.”

  “Let’s look for Stacey’s outfit first. That’s the most important thing today. The dinner is in less than a week.”

  We rode the elevator to the second floor, Kristy bringing up the rear. But before we were halfway to Junior Dresses, we passed a jewelry counter. Not costume jewelry, fine jewelry.

  Claud stopped. She leaned over and peered at a necklace displayed on a swatch of blue velvet. “Oh, my lord,” she whispered.

  “What?” replied Dawn, turning around.

  Claud pointed at the counter. “Guess how much that necklace costs,” she managed to say. She was still whispering.

  We all leaned in for a look.

  “What’s it made of?” asked Dawn.

  “Sapphires and diamonds, I think.”

  “Sapphires and diamonds? Four hundred dollars?” guessed Dawn.

  “Four hundred?” Try a thousand,” said Kristy.

  “Try four thousand,” said Claud. “It costs four thousand dollars.”

  “You could buy a car for four thousand dollars,” I exclaimed. “Couldn’t you? … Well, maybe not.” I answered my own question. “But still …”

  We had spread out and were gazing at the other jewelry on display.

  “Here’s a cheap pin. Just six hundred dollars,” I said, giggling.

  “Are you interested in it?”

  I found myself looking into the humorless eyes of a salesclerk. “Um, no,” I answered. “Thanks anyway. Come on, you guys.”

  We dragged ourselves away from the jewelry and finally (after stopping to look at hair accessories and knee socks) wound up in Junior Dresses.

  “Here’s a nice one,” said Mary Anne. She held out a plaid dress that maybe a grandmother would look okay in, but not me.

  I shook my head.

  Dawn pointed to a floral-print dress.

  I shook my head. “I need something wild.”

  “Not too wild,” Mary Anne cautioned. “Not for a dinner with your dad.”

  “I’ll find something,” I said confidently.

  We wandered through Bellair’s for nearly an hour. Claud bought a pair of black-and-white checked leggings. Mary Anne bought a hair ribbon. Kristy made fun of a two-thousand-dollar brooch.

  “Where now?” asked Dawn as we were leaving the store.

  “The Merry-Go-Round,” I replied.

  “They don’t sell clothes.”

  “I know. I want to look at the jewelry.”

  So we wandered around in the Merry-Go-Round for awhile. Dawn bought a pair of fat silver hoop earrings. I bought a pair of dangly blue shell earrings. Kristy said, “I forgot to look at the baseball caps!”

  “Now where to?” asked Dawn.

  “Maybe we should have asked someone to drive us out to Washington Mall,” said Mary Anne. “It has a lot more stores to choose from.”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “But not … Zingy’s.”

  “Zingy’s! That’s all punk stuff. You won’t find anything in there for a fancy dinner with the people in your father’s company,” said Mary Anne.
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  Claud grinned at me. “She might,” she said.

  “I like to think of myself as the Sherlock Holmes of fashion,” I added. “No problem too tough to solve. I’ll put together the perfect outfit at Zingy’s. Trust me. It’ll be perfect for me and my dad.”

  In all honesty, I didn’t expect to find quite such a challenge at Zingy’s. Putting together the perfect outfit there took a little longer than I’d planned. But I did it. (I think I drove the saleswoman crazy in the process, though.) By the time I left I was carrying a shopping bag in which were folded a hot pink (fake) silk jacket which fell to my knees, new black leggings, pink-and-black socks, and a black body suit. I planned to wear the outfit with black flats, and to dress it up with some jewelry and maybe a couple of barrettes in my hair.

  When Claud saw me in the final combination of clothes (standing next to a chair piled high with discarded jackets, pants, tops, and socks), she drew in her breath. “You look fabulous. It is the perfect outfit,” she said.

  Twenty minutes later we were leaving Zingy’s. I was lugging the shopping bag, Claud was carrying a bag full of cloth headbands, Dawn was carrying another pair of earrings, and Mary Anne was carrying a package of scented pens which had been on display near the cash register. Kristy had bought nothing. “Zingy’s doesn’t carry baseball caps,” she complained.