Mary Anne in the Middle

  “Well, Mal’s inside. Jessi’s friends are really nice — and they’re telling her it’s great that she’s going away to school,” I reported.

  Claudia cringed. “How’s Jessi taking that?”

  “She’s not loving it. I hope this goes well tonight. If it doesn’t, Mallory and Jessi are both going to blame me.”

  “How did you land in the middle of all this, Mary Anne?” Claudia asked.

  “I don’t know. At first I thought I could help, but now I’m not so sure.”

  Mrs. Ramsey stepped into the hall. “Hi, Claudia, Mary Anne,” she greeted us. She addressed the group in the living room. “The pizzas are warmed up. Come on into the kitchen.”

  Claudia took hold of my arm. “Let’s go,” she said eagerly, heading for the kitchen.

  Everyone chowed down, going through three pies and three big bottles of soda very quickly. There was lots of joking and laughter. Mallory and Maritza got along especially well, talking a mile a minute.

  Then came one of those odd moments when the buzz of conversation dies down all at once for no apparent reason. The last person to stop speaking was Maritza. “Oh, she’ll get over it. My best friend acted the same way when I changed dance schools and joined Dance New York,” everyone heard her say.

  Jessi had been about to lift another slice from the last pie when she froze. Slowly, she turned to Mallory. “What are you saying about me?” she asked Mallory accusingly.

  “Nothing,” Mallory replied.

  “She was just saying that her leaving was hard on you,” Maritza said. “That you didn’t understand her decision.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to turn the friends I have left against me, Mallory.” Jessi’s voice was so cold I half expected frost to fill the air.

  “No, Jessi,” Maritza protested. “It wasn’t like that.”

  Jessi paid no attention. She continued to glare at Mallory.

  Mallory stood and faced Jessi. For a moment, they were locked in an angry stare.

  “Hey, come on.” Kristy tried to break the tension. “Why don’t the two of you just —”

  “I’m leaving,” Mallory cut her off.

  “No!” I cried.

  “I’m not staying if she doesn’t want me here,” Mallory said. She stormed out of the kitchen. I jumped up and followed her to the door.

  As she grabbed her jacket and sleeping bag I took hold of her wrist. “Stay,” I pleaded.

  She yanked away from me. “Leave me alone, Mary Anne!” she cried. “This is all your fault! If you hadn’t insisted I come, I wouldn’t be here. I’m not listening to you anymore.”

  Even though I’d expected to be blamed, I was still stunned by the force of her anger. I watched as she stormed out the front door.

  The door swung shut with a slam just as Jessi appeared in the hall. “She left? Good.”

  She turned and looked at me with troubled eyes. She didn’t say it was my fault that this had happened. But there was no doubt in my mind that she was thinking it.

  “What about Emily Bernstein?” Claudia suggested at our Monday BSC meeting. “She’s nice.”

  Kristy shook her head. “Too busy. Being editor of the school paper takes up every free second she has.”

  “Erica Blumberg?” Stacey said.

  We were trying to think of candidates to replace Mallory. Once again, Jessi and Mal were sitting on opposite sides of the room. Now, not only were they furious at each other, they were also cool to me.

  “There’s something about Erica that bugs me,” Abby said. “I can’t say exactly what it is.”

  “She thinks she knows everything,” Claudia said.

  “Maybe,” Abby agreed.

  “Okay, we’ve shot down every single suggestion anyone has made,” Kristy pointed out, frustrated. “What now?”

  Silence.

  I tried to think of anyone we’d overlooked. “Maybe we should try another sixth-grader,” I said, “since we’re replacing a sixth-grader.”

  “Jessi, Mal?” Kristy said. “Any ideas?”

  “Renee Johnson?” Jessi said hesitantly. “She’s nice, but …”

  “But what?” Kristy asked.

  “But I can’t really picture her baby-sitting. She seems a little … I don’t know … a little young for her age.”

  “She strikes me that way too,” Kristy agreed. “Forget her. I’m not sure about recruiting another sixth-grader, anyway. Remember what happened when Wendy Loesser joined for a while? It was a disaster. She just wasn’t mature enough to handle the responsibility. Mallory and Jessi are unusual. I say we go for another eighth-grader.”

  “But we’re out of eighth-graders,” Stacey reminded her.

  Kristy sighed. “What if we don’t replace Mallory?” she suggested. “Maybe the rest of us could pick up the extra jobs. We’d earn more money and it wouldn’t be that hard.”

  “That might work,” Claudia agreed.

  “It might,” Abby said.

  I thought so too, and nodded.

  My gaze wandered around the room as I looked for everyone’s reaction. We all seemed in favor of it. But when my eyes landed on Mallory, I bit down on my lip.

  Her face wore an expression I can’t even describe. It was as if she’d just been slapped and couldn’t yet believe it had really happened. I suppose it was somewhere between stunned and grief-stricken. “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  She looked at me and seemed unable to speak for a moment.

  “Mallory? What?” Claudia said. Now everyone in the room was aware of her distress.

  When she finally spoke, after another minute, her words came out in a small, choked whisper. “You don’t need to replace me?” Her next statement was much louder. “I mean so little to this club that you don’t even have to replace me?”

  “It’s not that,” Kristy protested. “We can’t find anyone to replace you.”

  “You’re irreplaceable,” Abby seconded.

  “You should feel good about that, not bad,” Jessi said. Although she said it in a grouchy voice, I was awfully happy to hear Jessi say something — anything — halfway nice to Mallory. For the first time since the sleepover, I felt a drop of hope that they might be friends again.

  “Oh, sure,” Mallory replied. “I feel wonderful that you don’t need to replace me at all. That makes me feel really great.”

  “We’ll know you’re gone,” I said. “We’ll really miss you. But there’s no sense bringing in someone who won’t do a good job or won’t fit in.”

  “I guess,” she grumbled.

  At that moment the phone rang. Kristy answered. “Oh, hi, Mrs. Fellows. Yes. We’re making lots of decorations…. This Saturday? Just a minute.” She covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “Will we be ready to bring our decorations to Stoneybrook Manor by next Saturday?”

  We all nodded.

  “We’ll be ready,” Kristy told Mrs. Fellows. “Sure, I’ll hold.” While she waited for Mrs. Fellows to return, she covered the mouthpiece and spoke to us. “I was wondering, could we throw a holiday party for the residents that day? I thought it would be fun.”

  This was the first I’d heard of throwing a party. It sounded like a good idea, though. Everyone else thought so too, and agreed enthusiastically.

  When Mrs. Fellows came back on the line, Kristy cleared the party plan with her. “Great! I think they’ll love it too,” she said.

  “We can put together a party by then, can’t we?” she asked us after she hung up.

  “Sure. We’re the BSC,” Abby said with a laugh. “We can do anything.”

  “Oh … I didn’t think anyone would mind,” Kristy said.

  “We have a little money left in the treasury,” Stacey said. “I’m not sure it’s enough, though.”

  “We’ll manage,” Kristy said confidently. “My mother went on a huge shopping spree last week at Cost Club. Our basement is jammed with paper plates and paper cups and napkins. I bet she’d let me have what we need.”

/>   We all began talking at once about what we had at home that we might be able to donate to the party. Only Mallory sat silently, seeming to study her hands. I wondered what she was thinking. Had it occurred to her that this party was the last BSC event she would be part of, at least for a long while?

  Three more sitting jobs came in during the meeting. Two were for the following Saturday afternoon. The first was Mrs. DeWitt. I asked her if we could take the kids to the Stoneybrook Manor party. “We’ll all be responsible for them,” I assured her. She thought it was a great idea. The next call came from Mrs. Hobart. She also agreed to let us bring Mathew, James, and Johnny along, and mentioned that Ben would probably like to help out too.

  “That gives me an idea,” Kristy said after I hung up with Mrs. Hobart.

  “Why is that not surprising,” said Abby.

  “No, seriously,” Kristy continued. “Why don’t we invite some of our clients to come with their kids — especially the ones who worked on decorations?”

  “That will make it a bigger party, and we’ll need more stuff,” Stacey pointed out.

  “We can ask the parents to bring something,” Kristy countered. The Great Idea Machine was now operating at full force. “And it will show Stoneybrook Manor residents that their neighbors care about them.”

  “All right! Let’s bring in a marching band and a flying Santa!” Abby cried.

  Although Abby was clearly kidding, Kristy’s eyes lit up. “That’s a great idea!” she cried.

  “It is?” said Abby.

  “Yes! We could have the kids sing holiday songs! And maybe we could get a Santa too,” Kristy explained.

  “Sure, why not?” Claudia agreed. We became so excited about our party plans that no one made a move to leave at six o’clock.

  No one, that is, except Mallory. I was the first to notice she was gone.

  “I saw her leave the room but I thought she was just going to the bathroom,” Stacey said.

  I walked into the hall and saw that the bathroom door was ajar and no one was there. I went downstairs to the front hall closet and checked for Mallory’s jacket. It was gone.

  “She didn’t even say good-bye,” I said as I returned to the bedroom.

  “You know,” Kristy said, “things with her are bad. We should do something to let her know we care.”

  “Like what?” Stacey asked.

  “I’m not sure, but something. Everyone think about it.”

  We all nodded. Even Jessi.

  I’d felt bad when I thought Mallory and Jessi were mad at me. It didn’t dawn on me that maybe there was a positive side to the situation. At least it took me out of the middle of their fight.

  I should have appreciated it while it lasted. Because by Tuesday, both of them had forgotten they were angry with me.

  Mallory waited for me at my locker that morning. The first words out of her mouth weren’t Hi, or How are you this morning? They were, “Jessi is driving me crazy. I can’t believe I was ever friends with her. Can you?”

  “Of course I can,” I answered. “She’s great. I felt the same way she does when I found out Dawn was leaving.”

  “You didn’t act the same way, though — like an idiot! You might have been sad but you didn’t try to ruin Dawn’s life.”

  “We had some pretty bad fights before she left,” I reminded Mal. “If we hadn’t patched things up before she went to California, I don’t know if we’d be friends today. Once you have all that distance between you, it’s not so easy to make up. You should do it while you’re still in Stoneybrook.”

  There. I’d said it. I didn’t know how much more direct I could possibly be.

  “But Jessi isn’t the person I thought she was,” Mallory said.

  Aaugh! I was losing my patience! Had she heard me at all? “Mallory,” I said. “Don’t you remember how you acted when Jessi went away to Dance New York? You weren’t exactly cheerful about it.”

  “That was different.”

  “It wasn’t! It was exactly the same.” I was so frustrated I wanted to shake her.

  At that moment, we both spotted Jessi coming toward my locker. “See ya,” Mallory said abruptly. Before I could object, she was halfway down the hall.

  Wearing a disgusted expression, Jessi arrived at my locker. “What did the deserter have to say?” she asked.

  “She was talking about you,” I informed her. “That’s all she ever talks about. She’s all you ever talk about. Why don’t you quit talking about each other and start talking to each other?”

  “You don’t have to get mad about it,” Jessi said. “It’s our problem, not yours.”

  If it wasn’t my problem, why did it feel as though it were? I suddenly realized why. “It is my problem,” I told her, “because the two of you keep putting me in the middle.”

  “We do not.”

  “Yes, you do, by talking to me about each other.”

  “If you don’t want to listen … just don’t,” said Jessi, sounding a little offended.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to listen, it’s that I want you to patch it up.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible. I still can’t believe she stormed out of my party. I’d better head for homeroom. ’Bye.”

  Jessi walked away and I ran into Abby. “You look as if you’re ready to explode,” she observed.

  “I’d like to crawl into my locker and not come out until this thing between Jessi and Mallory is over,” I said.

  Abby took my arm and led me along. “Come on. Just forget about them for a while.”

  The joy of forgetting them stretched into the afternoon. Mallory had to have a checkup for her new school, and the triplets were at a friend’s house. That meant I could sit for the rest of the Pike kids by myself.

  This was nice, but it wasn’t total heaven.

  “Listen to this poem I’ve written,” Vanessa demanded as soon as we came into the house after I’d picked up the kids from school. She pulled a sheet of paper out of her backpack and began to read from it. Claire, Margo, and Nicky sat at her feet to listen.

  “ ‘Mallory, oh, Mallory,’ ” she began reading dramatically. “ ‘How could you go away from me? / Were things in this house so rotten, / That you would go and leave us forgotten? / Mallory, oh, Mallory, / Do you need to be so free? / Was life at SMS so bad / That you would go and leave us sad? / Mallory, oh, sister dear, / Your mind’s made up, and I fear / We won’t see you very soon. / It’s as if you’ve flown to the moon.’ ”

  Claire sniffed as tears slid down her cheeks.

  “I like that part about the moon,” Margo commented.

  “Thank you,” Vanessa said somberly. “I like it too.”

  “It’s a good poem,” Nicky agreed, nodding sadly.

  This was beginning to sound like a funeral. I had to do something. “Listen, kids, you’re looking at this all wrong,” I said, wiping Claire’s cheeks. “Mallory loves you all very much. She’ll always be your sister. And she’s not going to the moon. You’ll see her on holidays and on vacations. I bet your parents will even take you to visit her sometime.”

  “Do you think so?” Nicky asked. He sounded interested. “That might be cool.”

  “Sure. And you know how much Mallory loves to write. I bet she’ll write home a lot. You can phone her too.”

  “When you say it, it doesn’t sound so bad,” Margo admitted.

  “It won’t be that bad,” I assured her.

  “Does this mean I should write a new poem?” Vanessa asked.

  I laughed. “You could try to write one that says something like, ‘ ’Bye Mallory, we love you and we’ll miss you.’ ”

  “That’s not very poetic,” Vanessa protested.

  “I know, but you’re the poet, not me. Think of something more like that.”

  She gazed down at the poem in her hand. “ ‘Mallory, oh, Mallory, we will all be missing thee,’ ” she murmured. She looked up again. “I hate when they say ‘thee’ in a poem. But they always do it.
At least in the old poems they do.”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something that works,” I said.

  Vanessa nodded and headed for the stairs. “I’m going to go to my room to work on it right now.”

  Margo jumped to her feet and joined her sister. “I’ll help you.”

  Nicky looked at me. “Do you think she’d like a card that said, ‘Come back soon’ or something like that?” he asked.

  “I think she’d love it.”

  “I want to make one too,” Claire said.

  “Okay, I’ll help you.”

  Nicky, Claire, and I sat around the kitchen table and worked on our cards. In less than an hour, Mr. Pike came through the front door. Mallory was with him, home from the doctor’s office.

  Vanessa and Margo thundered down the stairs at the sound of Mallory’s return. “Mallory, we’ve written you a poem,” Margo cried eagerly.

  I stopped drawing and listened.

  “ ‘Mallory, oh, Mallory,’ ” the girls read in unison. “‘If we had a salary, / We would spend it all / In Washington Mall / To buy a gift to show / That we love you so. / And though we say, “Don’t go,” / We want you to know, / That we wish you well / More than words can ever tell.’”

  “That was beautiful,” Nicky whispered to me.

  I smiled at him. Then I waited for Mallory’s reaction. She sniffed loudly. “Thanks, you guys,” she said in a voice choked with emotion.

  Nicky pushed his chair back and bolted from the table, waving his card. “Me too,” Claire said, scooting out of her chair with her card.

  I followed them into the living room. I arrived in time to see Mallory engulfed in hugs from her sisters and brother. Mr. Pike was standing on the stairs, watching his kids. He looked over their heads at me and smiled.

  After another round of hugs, he clapped his hands. “Okay, kids, let’s surprise your mother and have dinner ready when she comes home. First I want you all to wash up.”

  The kids ran off in several directions toward the various sinks in the house.

  “You talked to them, didn’t you?” Mallory said, radiant. She didn’t wait for my reply. “Thank you so much,” she said and hugged me.