Stacey's Secret Friend

  Abby is our alternate officer, which means she has to be ready to jump into any other officer’s job if that member is not at a meeting for some reason.

  Our club secretary is Mary Anne Spier, Kristy’s best friend. Like Kristy, she’s petite, with brown hair and eyes. That’s where the comparison ends, though. Mary Anne is quiet, and she’s an excellent listener. She’s very sensitive — so sensitive, in fact, that she cries easily. She’s not particularly interested in clothing, but she has a nice casual style. Her hair is cut short. It’s a cute look for her.

  When I first met her, Mary Anne didn’t seem nearly as grown-up as she does now. That was because her father wouldn’t let her be grown-up. Her mother died when Mary Anne was a baby, so Mr. Spier was Mary Anne’s only parent. His idea of being a good dad was to be very overprotective and strict about everything, including the way Mary Anne dressed and wore her hair. She looked like a little kid, all the way up to seventh grade.

  Mr. Spier began loosening up, though, around the time he married Dawn’s mother, Sharon. Dawn (our honorary member, remember?) came to Stoneybrook with her mom and brother, Jeff, after their parents split up. Sharon had grown up in Stoneybrook before moving to California.

  Dawn and Mary Anne quickly became friends, and Dawn joined the BSC. One day, they discovered that Sharon had dated Mary Anne’s father, Richard, in high school. From that moment on, Dawn and Mary Anne were determined to reunite their parents and become stepsisters. Crazy as that sounds, they did it.

  Only, things didn’t work out exactly as they had planned. Mary Anne and her dad moved into Dawn’s wonderful old farmhouse on Burnt Hill Road, but they discovered that becoming a new family wasn’t easy. They worked their way through their problems (issues such as neatness, pets, tastes in food, and privacy). Then, just when things seemed to be running smoothly, Dawn became homesick for California. After going back and forth a few times, she finally decided to live there for good with her dad, his new wife, and Jeff (who had already returned to California).

  As you can imagine, Mary Anne was crushed. She’s been coping pretty well, though. And you know what? Through all her emotional turmoil, she never made a mistake in the club record book.

  As secretary, Mary Anne’s in charge of the record book (another of Kristy’s great organizational ideas). The record book is like the brain of the BSC. It holds everyone’s schedules, keeping track of things such as the weekends when I’ll be in the city with Dad, Abby’s soccer games, practices for Kristy’s Krushers (that’s a little-kids’ softball team Kristy coaches), Claudia’s art lessons, and so on. Every time a client requests a sitter, Mary Anne checks the book to see who is available. When we’ve decided who’ll take the job, Mary Anne records that information in the book. This way there’s no misscheduling and everyone receives a fair share of jobs.

  The book also contains important facts about our clients — addresses, children’s names, rates paid, and any special information such as allergies, anxieties, or unique house rules. Luckily for us, Mary Anne is excellent at keeping track of it all.

  Guess what. Mary Anne is the only one of us BSC members to have a steady boyfriend. His name is Logan Bruno, and he’s a club member too. Usually, he doesn’t come to meetings, but we can call him to take a sitting job if we have more work than we can handle. This makes him an associate member.

  Our other associate member is Shannon Kilbourne. She lives in Kristy and Abby’s neighborhood. When Dawn left, we asked Shannon to take her place full-time, but Shannon was so busy with activities in school that she couldn’t give enough time to the club and the jobs. So she went back to associate status, which works better for her.

  Last — but absolutely not least — are our two junior officers, Mallory Pike and Jessica Ramsey. They’re both eleven and in the sixth grade. Because of their age, they can’t baby-sit at night (unless it’s for their own siblings). But the jobs they take in the afternoons free the rest of us to work evenings, so they’re invaluable.

  They’re good sitters too. Maybe it’s because each is the oldest child in her family.

  Mallory has seven brothers and sisters! She’s smart and studious, but she has a witty way of looking at life. She wants to write and illustrate children’s books one day. I can easily see her doing that. She says she’ll never allow her photo to be shown on her books because she isn’t happy with her appearance. She dislikes her reddish-brown curls, her glasses, her nose, and her braces. She doesn’t realize that her braces will come off someday, she can wear contacts when she’s older, her nose is fine, and her hair is pretty. I bet that by the time she needs photos for a book jacket, she’ll have dozens of great ones to offer.

  I think we’ll be seeing photos of Jessi in print one day too. That’s because she’s an incredibly talented dancer. She studies ballet and has already performed in several professional productions.

  Jessi looks like a dancer. She’s lean and graceful. She wears her black hair pulled back from her face the way dancers do. And she dresses like a dancer. Leotards are her trademark.

  Jessi’s family consists of her mom; her dad; her aunt Cecelia; her younger sister, Becca (eight), and the baby, John Philip Ramsey, Jr., also known as Squirt. (He’s not yet two.) The Ramseys moved to Stoneybrook because Jessi’s dad was transferred to Stamford (the nearest big city). There aren’t very many other African-American families in Stoneybrook, though, and unfortunately, not all of the Ramseys’ new neighbors were friendly at first. That was dealt with, though, and now the Ramseys have lots of good friends.

  So that’s the BSC. At five-thirty, we were assembled in Claudia’s room. The conversation I’d begun about Tess was still going. “So what if she’s strange,” Claudia said. “I’m sure some people think I’m strange because of the way I dress.”

  “I hate to break this to you, Claudia,” Abby said, “but you are strange.”

  Claudia threw a bag of M&M’S at her. “Oh, thanks a lot,” she said, laughing.

  “Seriously, though,” Abby said. “You look like you know what you’re doing. Tess looks like she picks her clothes out in the dark, or as if her closet exploded and some of the clothes just happened to land on her.”

  “So what if she’s not into style?” Kristy commented.

  “Hey, I’m not saying it makes her a bad person. She’s just strange, that’s all,” Abby replied.

  “Speaking of strange,” Mallory began, “has anyone noticed that my brother Nicky is acting very strange?” (Nicky is a third-grader.)

  “I’ve noticed,” Mary Anne agreed. “Remember when I sat at your house with you last Saturday and Nicky was having secret phone conversations with someone all night? Did you ever find out who he was talking to?”

  “Jackie Rodowsky,” Mallory told her. “He calls Jackie Rodowsky every second, and they whisper.”

  “Strange,” Mary Anne said, opening the record book. “I wonder what they’re up to.” She checked the book. “Claudia, you’re sitting for the Rodowskys this week.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” Claudia volunteered as she passed around a bag of popcorn.

  “Good,” Mallory said. “I’m dying to know.”

  The next morning, I was at my locker when I looked up and noticed Tess walking down the hall. It would have been impossible not to notice her. She was wearing a hot pink sweat outfit with frilly lace around the collar and sleeves. Her large size, combined with the heavy black-rimmed glasses, made the outfit look … wrong. Way wrong.

  I could see kids staring at her as she passed, but she seemed happily unaware of their astonished glances. “Hi, Stacey,” she greeted me. “I’ll see you this afternoon. I have some ideas on how to fix that poor creature I bashed up yesterday.”

  “Great,” I said. “See you then.”

  Tess walked away and Alan Gray tapped me on the shoulder. “Did she call me a poor creature?” he asked with a smirk.

  “Not you, Alan,” I replied, closing my locker, “the school mascot Barbara and I were worki
ng on yesterday. She accidentally stepped on it.”

  “Well, she accidentally dumped a tub of papier-mâché on my head,” he said. “She’s a walking menace. A gigantic, neon pink walking menace.”

  “I saw what happened,” I told him. “She didn’t dump it on your head. She bumped into you and it spilled. It was just a little accident.”

  “Little?” Alan cried.

  “Oh, give me a break, Alan. It looks like you survived the horror.”

  “Barely,” he grumbled.

  “It’s not like Tess Swinhart was out to get you.”

  “Swinhart!” he exclaimed. “Is that really her name? It should be Swine-heart! She looks like a huge pig in that pink outfit.”

  I bit back the smile about to form on my lips. I didn’t want to give Alan the satisfaction of laughing at his dumb joke. Lame as it was, though, the joke had a point. Tess did have a slightly upturned nose. And when she was dressed in pink like that …

  “Swine-heart the Destroyer,” Alan rambled on. “Pig on a rampage. She could be a new comic-strip villain, able to turn into a wild boar at will. Swine-heart versus the X-Men. Swine-heart demolishes the Fantastic Four!”

  Rolling my eyes, I left Alan at the lockers and walked toward my homeroom. I had no idea what a big mistake I had just made.

  Armed with Tess’s last name, Alan decided that the idea of Swine-heart the Destroyer was the funniest thing anyone had ever come up with, and he was determined to share it with all of SMS.

  The idea spread fast. By second-period Cokie Mason handed me a note to pass to David Gabel, who sat on the other side of me.

  The note was folded just once, and I saw the top sentence. It said: “Swine-heart, the Pigpen Years.” I flipped it open and saw it was a crudely drawn comic about “The evil Swine-heart as a piglet.” The little pig wore glasses like Tess’s.

  This isn’t funny, I wrote on the top of the comic and handed it back to Cokie. She made a disgusted face at me. (Cokie and I have never liked each other anyway.) She scratched out my comment and then handed the note to the kid behind me, who passed it to David.

  As class went on, David sent the stupid comic on to another kid, who handed it on to another. I was thankful Tess wasn’t in the class.

  She turned up unexpectedly in my English class, though. “I’d like you all to meet Tess Swinhart,” Mr. Fiske said. “She’s been reassigned to this class.” He turned to Tess. “You can take that empty seat at the end of the aisle.”

  The seat was behind mine. I smiled at Tess as she sat down. “How come you were transferred?” I whispered, swiveling around in my seat.

  “They had put me in remedial English,” she replied. “But I don’t need that kind of work. I’m fine in regular English.”

  “Why did they think you needed remedial English?” I asked.

  “Because my old school is —”

  Mr. Fiske cleared his throat loudly, and I turned around in a hurry. He began his lesson on medieval poets with a poet named Chaucer whom everyone had been wild about back then.

  It was not my favorite area of English. I could barely understand the way the language was spoken back then. And the poem, called The Canterbury Tales, was about different people telling different stories — not exactly fascinating stuff. At least it didn’t fascinate me.

  “Now, class,” Mr. Fiske said toward the end of the period, “you will have two weeks to work on a project that represents some aspect of medieval culture. It may be anything you choose. I want each of you to pick a partner and work in pairs.”

  I groaned and slumped in my seat. Such torture!

  Tess tapped me sharply on the shoulder and I turned around. “Want to be partners?” she asked.

  “I … I guess so,” I replied.

  She smiled broadly and I noticed that she had a small space between her two front teeth. “What about castles?” she said.

  “What about them?” I asked.

  She made an exasperated face. “For our project! I know a lot about castles. A whole lot. We could build one.”

  “We could?”

  “Sure. Easy.”

  All I could imagine was building some big castle and Tess accidentally falling on top of it the day it was due. “That sounds good,” I said without much enthusiasm. At least she had an idea, which was more than I had.

  “Terrific,” Tess said. “This is going to be a blast. I adore the Middle Ages.”

  She adores the Middle Ages? Oh, well, everyone’s different. I certainly had never met anyone who adored the Middle Ages, though.

  “I’ll see you at lunch,” Tess said, heading for the door.

  As she stepped outside, someone in class made a loud oinking sound. I turned to see who’d done it. It was impossible to tell, though. All I could see were the smirking faces of five boys and a couple of girls seated in the far corner of the class.

  Barbara, Tess, and I had planned to meet in the lunchroom that afternoon to rebuild our jaguar. I’d tried to talk Claudia into coming, but today was the day of her sitting job at the Rodowskys.

  As I neared the cafeteria I saw something that made me stop a moment. Tess was standing outside the doors, talking to Clarence King and some of his pals.

  This spelled trouble to me.

  Clarence, who insists on being called King, is not my favorite person. (He once gave Logan Bruno a terrible time, just for being a BSC member.) I wondered what he was up to with Tess.

  I started walking again, quickly. Tess probably needed my help, and the sooner I reached her, the better.

  “I just wanted to welcome you to SMS, Babe,” he was saying as I came into hearing distance. He emphasized the word “Babe” and his friends grinned. “I’ll be seeing you, Babe.”

  Tess smiled and nodded as they walked away. But I winced. Babe — as in the movie (and book) about the talking pig. I knew that was the joke.

  “He seems pretty nice,” Tess commented.

  “Not really,” I replied sourly.

  She looked confused. “He’s not?”

  “He called you Babe!”

  “I know, it’s not politically correct to call someone a babe. That’s true,” Tess conceded. “I suppose I should tell him not to call me that.”

  “Definitely. Tell him that.” Tess had missed the insult entirely. She had no idea half the school was busy making pig jokes at her expense. And I didn’t want to be the one to tell her.

  Maybe it would all blow over in a day or so. Maybe she’d never realize what was going on and her feelings wouldn’t be hurt. I hoped so, anyway.

  “Come on,” I said, pushing the swinging door to the cafeteria. “Barbara’s probably inside waiting.”

  I was right. Barbara was there with the pieces of the jaguar spread out on a table. “Hi,” she greeted us. “I’ll be right back. I’m going to the art room for the other stuff we need.”

  Tess and I began arranging the pieces. Tess dug into her backpack and pulled out a large spool of wire mesh. “What’s that for?” I asked.

  “I was thinking that if we wrapped the frame in the mesh, it would hold together better and not be quite so fragile,” she replied. “The papier-mâché would be easier to lay over this wire too. It will have more to cling to.”

  “Brilliant!” I cried, and I meant it. Even Claudia hadn’t thought of that. “Where did you find the mesh?”

  “I bought it,” she said as she unrolled the stuff. “I bought these wire cutters too. We’ll be able to cut it to fit.”

  “You didn’t have to do all that,” I said.

  “Sure I did.” She began cutting a section of mesh. “I wrecked it, didn’t I? It’s my fault.”

  “It was an accident,” I said.

  “Accident is my middle name lately. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Suddenly I’m so clumsy.”

  “It’s probably the new place. You don’t know where anything is yet.” I thought about the easy way I moved around SMS. I knew every turn, every doorway by heart. It took time to fee
l that familiar in a place, though. I’d moved around from place to place enough to know that. “What was it like at your old school?” I asked.

  “Oh, it was great,” she replied, looking up from her work. Behind those awful glasses, her eyes were bright. “I had the best friends. We were always doing wacky things. Like, once, in art class, we carved an entire fleet of yellow wooden ducks and set them afloat in the river. You should have seen the boats going crazy trying to avoid them.”

  I laughed, picturing the scene.

  I suddenly felt very sorry for Tess. She wasn’t so bad. In fact, she was pretty nice. She just needed some smoothing out. A few fashion tips wouldn’t hurt either.

  I wondered if I could help. If she didn’t look like such an oddball, maybe the kids wouldn’t make fun of her.

  “Your school was by a river?” I asked.

  “Yes, it was one block away from the —”

  “I found everything,” Barbara called, staggering through the door under a pile of rags, wood, newspapers, papier-mâché powder, and sponges.

  “Here, I’ll help you.” Tess hurried to Barbara’s aid.

  We spread everything out and set to work. Tess’s wire mesh made the job so much easier than it had been the first time around. As we worked, I thought of a subtle way to drop a fashion hint to Tess.

  “Barbara, you know my friend Mallory, don’t you?” I asked.

  “I think so. Yeah,” Barbara replied. “She’s that cute sixth-grade girl with the curly hair and glasses.”

  “Right. Well, she just hates wearing glasses. She’s dying for contact lenses. Her parents have always said no. They think she’s too young. But it seems like lately they’re close to changing their minds. Do you know any good places that sell lenses?”

  Actually, I knew where kids went for contact lens prescriptions. I just wanted to work in a hint to Tess. Her looks would improve so much if she ditched those awful glasses.

  Barbara named several eye doctors she knew of, plus a couple of places in the mall that did lens fittings. As she spoke, I stole glances at Tess to see if any of this interested her.