Kristy Thomas, Dog Trainer

  Special thanks to:

  Michelle Saunders

  Anne Aldrich

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Letter from Ann M. Martin

  Acknowledgment

  About the Author

  Scrapbook

  Also Available

  Copyright

  “Hey, Watson! Isn’t it a great day? Want some more coffee? It’s decaf, right?” It was the first Saturday in April, and it was a great day. I’d gotten up early to find Watson, my stepfather, sitting at the kitchen table, a coffee mug in one hand and what I thought were gardening catalogs spread out on the table around him.

  Watson and my grandmother, Nannie, who also lives with us, are the gardening gurus of Stoneybrook. They’d been poring over gardening books and catalogs all winter — making lists, drawing up diagrams, and throwing around phrases like “soil acidity” and “companion planting.”

  Don’t ask me what any of this stuff means. I don’t know. But it made sense that on a perfect April morning, Watson would wake up super-early to put in some extra gardening time.

  “More coffee would be nice,” he told me. “And yes, it’s decaffeinated. I am following doctor’s orders, Kristy, don’t worry.” The corners of his eyes crinkled in a smile.

  I smiled back as I poured the coffee. Watson had a mild heart attack a little while ago, so he has to watch what he eats and does. I made myself some cereal with bananas and honey, fixed a couple of pieces of toast, and sat down at the table.

  “Big gardening plans?” I inquired.

  “Yes. Nannie and I have been talking about the possibility of a water garden,” Watson answered.

  “You mean, like a pond?”

  “More like a small pool.”

  I gestured at the brochures without really looking at them. “Water gardens made easy, right?” I guessed. “Will the pool include ducks?”

  “No ducks. The pool will be too small for that. Maybe a few fish.” Watson took a sip of coffee, watching me over the rim of his cup. Then he added, “But these aren’t gardening magazines. As a matter of fact, they’re from the Guide Dog Foundation. Your mother and I are thinking of getting a dog from them.”

  Another dog! I love dogs, but my family is pretty big already.

  My name is Kristy Thomas. I’m thirteen years old and I live in Stoneybrook, Connecticut, where I go to Stoneybrook Middle School (SMS), coach a little kids’ softball team called Kristy’s Krushers, and am president of the Baby-sitters Club (more about that later).

  I’m also a member of a very large blended family. Watson is Watson Brewer. He is, as you know, my stepfather. He’s also the CEO of Unity Insurance. When he had his heart attack, it made me realize just how important he is to me, which is why I’m a little, well, bossy about his sticking to what the doctor tells him.

  But then, bossy comes naturally to me. I have two older brothers, Charlie (age seventeen) and Sam (fifteen); a younger brother, David Michael (who is seven); two younger stepsiblings who live with us part-time, Andrew (four) and Karen (seven); and a Vietnamese baby sister, Emily Michelle (age two and a half). Out of all these people, I think it’s safe to say that I’m seen as the bossiest.

  I don’t think of it as being bossy, though. I call it being organized and getting results. When I take charge, I know things are going to get done, and that they’re going to get done the right way.

  My mother is even more organized than I am, which is one of the reasons she managed to keep our family together in the tough years after my father left us, back when David Michael was just a baby. Nannie is also strong-willed — when Emily Michelle was adopted, Nannie insisted on moving in with us to help out. Also living with us are: Boo-Boo, the cranky cat; a Bernese mountain dog puppy named Shannon; assorted goldfish, and a part-time hermit crab and rat. We also have a resident ghost (or so says my very imaginative stepsister, Karen).

  With all these people and animals in the family, I couldn’t see why we would get another dog — unless it was for some very good reason.

  “Another dog?” I blurted out. “For us?”

  “Slow down, Kristy.” Watson told me, smiling. “It’s not for us. Actually, Laurel Cooper is the one who got me started on this. She’s in our public relations department. Her daughter, Deb, is twelve. She’s in the seventh grade at Stoneybrook Day School. Or will be, when she gets back to school.”

  I knew who Deb Cooper was. My friend Shannon Kilbourne, who also goes to SDS, had told me what had happened to her. A few months ago, Deb had gotten very sick and had lost her eyesight. She had come down with something called glaucoma.

  According to Shannon, Deb hadn’t been back to school since it had happened. She also refused to allow any of her old friends to visit.

  I looked again at the brochures on the table. “You’re getting a guide dog for Deb?” I asked.

  Once again, Watson had to slow me down. “Not at all. Deb isn’t old enough to have a guide dog, even if she were ready for one. And I don’t think she is yet. Because of what happened to Deb, Mrs. Cooper had the idea that our company should sponsor a guide dog through the foundation. The more I heard about it, the more I wanted to get personally involved. So I’ve been talking to the foundation about becoming a puppy walker.”

  This time, I didn’t jump to conclusions. I finished my cereal and nodded. “A puppy walker?”

  “A puppy walker family takes a guide dog puppy and raises it from the time it is eight weeks old until it is fourteen months old. Then it goes back to the foundation for training to become a guide dog,” Watson explained.

  “Sort of like being foster parents,” I said.

  “Something like that.”

  “Cool. When do we start? What kind of puppy will we get? Do we get to choose? Do we —”

  Watson laughed out loud. “We have to be interviewed first. Someone from the foundation will be here next Wednesday, assuming that everyone in the family agrees it’s a good idea. If the foundation decides we’ll make a suitable family, we’ll go from there.”

  “I vote yes,” I offered enthusiastically. “I think it’s a great idea.”

  Just then, Nannie came into the room.

  “We’re getting another dog!” I announced.

  “So I heard,” she answered. Obviously, the adults in our family had already discussed the issue.

  “I’ll talk it over with your brothers and sisters today,” Watson said. “And we can all discuss it at dinner. Needless to say, it’s a family decision.”

  “I don’t need to talk it over. As I said, you’ve got my vote,” I reminded him.

  “I thought I might. You know what? You’re my favorite thirteen-year-old daughter,” Watson joked.

  “I’m your only thirteen-year-old daughter,” I said, blushing a little in spite of myself.

  “And I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he added lightly.

  “Me neither,” I said. Then, before we could all get way too sentimental, I asked, “If our dog is a retriever, can it go swimming in our water garden?”

  Nannie said firmly, “I don’t know what all the rules are for raising a guide dog puppy, but this rule applies to all dogs everywhere: No canines allowed in the garden!”

  “That,” I retorted, “is a doggone
shame.”

  “Tell me, tell me, tell me,” Claudia Kishi begged.

  “Not until everyone gets here,” I answered.

  “These cookies,” said Claudia, “are home-baked chocolate-chip cookies. My mother brought them home from the library fund-raiser. Her assistant made them.”

  Mrs. Kishi is the head librarian at the Stoneybrook Public Library. Her assistant’s chocolate-chip cookies were famous all over town. I held out a hand.

  “Nope,” Claudia said sweetly. “Not until everyone gets here.”

  I groaned. “Okay, I’ll swap you a clue for a cookie.”

  “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” Claudia asked.

  “Animal.”

  Claud paused. She thought hard. She said, “Shannon is going to have puppies?”

  “No! Shannon’s a puppy herself! Plus, too many people let their dogs have unwanted puppies. You know, animal overpopulation is a huge problem.”

  “All right, all right!” Claudia held out the bag. “Take one.”

  I’d just bitten into the perfect combo of chip and cookie when Mallory Pike and Jessica Ramsey came into the room.

  Claudia glanced at them, remembered their shared passion for horses, and asked me, “Is it a horse?”

  “Who’s getting a horse?” Jessi wanted to know.

  “No one,” I said.

  “I’m not pet-sitting a horse,” said Stacey McGill, who had run up the stairs behind Mal and Jessi.

  “A horse?” I heard my best friend, Mary Anne Spier, say from the hallway, in a faintly alarmed voice. “We’ve got a horse-sitting job?”

  “A horse-sitting job?” Abby Stevenson followed everyone else into the room and fell back across Claudia’s bed. “Does that mean we have to sit on the horse? Nah. We don’t sit on babies, even though we’re baby-sitters.”

  “Feeble,” I told Abby, who makes the worst puns and jokes in the entire universe. “This is how rumors get started. There is no horse. But there is a dog. And I’ll tell you all about it as soon as this meeting of the BSC comes to order.”

  “So call it to order,” said Abby. “I don’t know how much longer we can hold our horses.”

  As everyone (but Abby) groaned, I glanced at the clock on the desk. Five-thirty on the nose. “This meeting of the BSC is now in session,” I announced.

  Claudia, Mary Anne, Stacey, Mal, Jessi, Abby, and I are the seven main members of the Baby-sitters Club. I founded the club awhile ago, before Mom married Watson. The brilliant idea for the club came to me one Tuesday night as I sat and listened to Mom call one baby-sitter after another trying to find someone to watch David Michael. What if Mom could make just one little phone call, I thought, and reach several baby-sitters at once?

  I enlisted Mary Anne, who lived next door to me at the time, and Claudia, who lived across the street. Together with Stacey, we started the club.

  The idea was such a good one that we quickly expanded. Now the club has more than doubled its original size to include not only seven regular members but also two associate members (who don’t have to attend our meetings) and an honorary long-distance member who lives in California. We’ve been so successful that we have more than enough business from regular clients, who call us often, and new clients to whom our regular clients recommend us.

  We meet three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons from five-thirty until six. Clients know they can call us at that time to schedule sitting jobs. Mary Anne, who is our secretary, keeps our record book. She enters all our scheduling information (such as Jessi’s weekly ballet lessons) and our baby-sitting jobs into it. She has never, ever made a mistake.

  We also have a BSC notebook, in which we write up what happens on each job. Every BSC member is responsible for keeping the notebook up-to-date. Some of us, like Mal, enjoy writing about the sitting jobs. The rest of the members think it’s a big pain. But we all enjoy reading it, and it helps keep us on top of what’s going on with our BSC charges. We also use the notebook as a reference when we have problems on similar jobs — it’s useful to see how other BSC members have handled the same type of experiences.

  We collect dues every Monday. That’s Stacey’s department. She’s our treasurer. We use our dues for incidental expenses, such as Claudia’s phone bill (she’s the only BSC member to have her own private phone line, which is why we meet at her house and one of the reasons she’s our vice-president), gas money for my brother Charlie (who gives Abby and me rides to our meetings), the occasional pizza party and special project, and additions to our Kid-Kits.

  Kid-Kits, as I have said many times, are our secret weapons in the war on kid boredom and fear of a new baby-sitter. We each have our own box with kid-friendly items — old toys, puzzles, games, and books, plus stickers, markers, and more. We usually take the Kid-Kits along on jobs with new clients because they are great icebreakers, or when we sit for kids who are maybe a little stir-crazy from bad weather or illness.

  My Kid-Kit is small, but it’s packed with fun things. In many ways, this reflects who I am. I’m the shortest person in the BSC, which is not surprising, since I’m the shortest person in the eighth grade at Stoneybrook Middle School. Even Jessi and Mallory, who are in the sixth grade, are taller than I am. I have medium-length brown hair, pale skin, and brown eyes. I wear jeans and sneakers almost all the time.

  Jessi and Mallory are junior members because they are eleven years old and can’t baby-sit at night during the week, unless they’re sitting for their siblings. Jessi and Mal are best friends. In addition to their love of horses, they also share a love of mysteries and of Marguerite Henry books (which are mostly about horses).

  Mallory is shorter than Jessi. She has reddish-brown hair and pale skin with a dusting of freckles. She wears glasses and has braces, to her eternal despair. Like me, she’s casual about her clothes. She wants to be a writer and illustrator of children’s books and has already had a job working for Henrietta Hayes, a famous author who lives right here in Stoneybrook. Mal has also won an award for her writing. We’re sure we’ll see her name on a bestseller list someday.

  One of the reasons Mal is such a good writer is because she’s got a million good stories to tell. In her very large family Mallory is the oldest of eight siblings. When you have that many brothers and sisters, including triplet brothers, wild and crazy things can (and do) happen. Not only has this given Mal lots of material for stories, but it has given her lots of experience staying calm when the unexpected happens — an invaluable trait in a baby-sitter.

  Jessi’s the oldest in her family, but she has only one younger sister and one baby brother. Jessi has dark brown eyes, brown skin, and black hair that she often wears pulled into a dancer’s knot at the nape of her neck. She has a dancer’s strong, graceful build, which is a good thing, since she wants to be a professional ballet dancer.

  Jessi is very serious about her dancing. Not only does she take ballet lessons twice a week with a special teacher, but she also gets up at exactly 5:29 every morning to practice at a barre her family has set up for her in the basement of their house. Even her fashion choices reflect her love of ballet. She often wears one of her many leotards with a pair of jeans.

  Another set of best friends in the BSC are Claudia and Stacey. They share a keen fashion sense, but Stacey’s style is more magazine-sleek, while Claudia tends toward the funky and the far-out. Both Stacey and Claudia are tall, slender knockouts, but they look very different.

  Stacey is blonde, with blue eyes and pale skin. Even though it was April, she wasn’t wearing spring colors at our meeting. She had on black jeans, a black cropped cotton sweater, and soft, scrunchy ankle boots. The color made her blue eyes look dramatic, and her earrings, which were tiny coils of gold braid, finished the outfit. Even to my inexperienced eye she looked sophisticated and smashing.

  Plus, she looked as if she were slightly older than the rest of us. She isn’t, but in some ways she’s more worldly and a bit more grown-up. Part of this is because she’s fr
om New York City originally. (Her parents are divorced and her father still lives there. She visits him often.)

  Stacey is also diabetic. Because of this, her parents were super-overprotective of their only child, and Stacey has had to work hard to convince them that she could be responsible about managing her condition. This means that she has to be very careful about what she eats (no sugar or sweets, or she might get really sick), and she has to give herself insulin injections regularly (ouch). It’s a big responsibility, but one that Stacey seems to take in stride, accepting it as something that’s no more remarkable than her amazing math abilities.

  Yes, math abilities. I’m good at math, but Stacey loves it. She actually enjoys books about economics, and can work out compound fractions, for example, in her head.

  Claudia, on the other hand, is not a math whiz. In fact, she’s a pretty mediocre student, so much so that her parents try to go over her homework with her every night. From time to time she also works with tutors at school.

  Her total lack of industry in the grade grind mystifies Claudia’s parents (don’t forget, her mother is a librarian). It doesn’t help that Claudia’s older sister is a genius who takes classes at the local college even though she’s still in high school.

  Claudia’s a genius too, but a rarer sort of genius. She’s an artist and she sees the world not in numbers or words, but in colors and shapes and textures. Even junk food, one of Claudia’s passions (she keeps supplies of it hidden around her room and provides us with nourishment at our meetings), has furnished material for her artwork.

  As an artist, Claudia is often her own best canvas. Today she was wearing spring on her sleeves, almost literally. Her ensemble included a giant Hawaiian print shirt worn over hot-pink bicycle shorts, hot-pink-and-lime-green socks, and an ancient pair of formerly black Doc Martens that she had painted in swirls of electric color. She’d knotted a pink plastic flower into each shoelace and had pulled her hair back with another pink plastic flower. Her earrings, which of course she’d made herself, were dangling sprays of tiny pink, green, and yellow beads.

  If it sounds blinding, it was. But on Claudia, with her perfect skin, dark almond-shaped eyes, and straight black hair, it was also stunningly right.