Good-Bye Stacey, Good-Bye

  “That’s wonderful, Charlotte!” I exclaimed. “I’m really proud of you!”

  “Thanks. Boy, remember last year when I hated school? Now it’s the funnest thing ever. And guess who my best friend is.”

  “Mmm, I give up.”

  “Valerie Namm. Valerie is the most popular girl in the whole fourth grade. And I’m really just eight. I’m only supposed to be in third grade, so —”

  “Charlotte, excuse me, honey,” said her mother from behind her. “Let Stacey inside. And let me speak to her for just a minute, okay? Then you two can talk all afternoon.”

  “Okay,” said Charlotte reluctantly.

  “Why don’t you go upstairs and find the planet chart you made,” suggested Dr. Johanssen. “I think Stacey would like to see it.”

  “Okay,” said Charlotte again, and ran up to her room.

  “Stacey,” Dr. Johanssen said, at the same time I said, “Dr. Johanssen.”

  We laughed. “Go ahead,” I told her.

  “Well.” Dr. Johanssen looked uncomfortable, as if she had something to say, but didn’t want to say it. She cleared her throat. “I heard a rumor today,” she finally began. “I heard that your family is moving. And then I drove by your house and saw the for-sale sign.”

  I sighed. “That was what I wanted to talk to you about. We are moving. I was going to tell Charlotte everything today. If that’s okay with you.”

  “Oh, it’s fine, Stacey. Thank you. You’re so responsible. And, boy, are we going to miss you.”

  “Believe me, I’m going to miss you, too,” I said.

  Dr. Johanssen reached out to give me a hug, but we heard Charlotte’s footsteps on the stairs then, so she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek instead. “Good luck,” she whispered. Then she raised her voice. “Bye, Char. I’m going to the hospital now. Daddy will be home at six.”

  “Okay! Bye, Mom!” Charlotte jumped down the last step.

  “I couldn’t find the planet chart.” She dove for the Kid-Kit. “What’s in it today, Stacey?” she asked as she carried it into the living room. This was our ritual. We always opened the Kid-Kit on the floor in the living room, Charlotte taking the things out slowly so she could examine each one.

  “Some of the same stuff and a few new things, including a new book,” I replied.

  “A new book? Oh, goody. We need one now that we’re done with The Borrowers.” Charlotte emptied the Kid-Kit and, just as I’d hoped, put everything aside except the one book she hadn’t seen before. It was called Iggy’s House, by Judy Blume. “Iggy’s House. That’s a funny title,” said Charlotte. “What’s it about?”

  “Well,” I said carefully, “it’s about a family that moves away.”

  Charlotte looked thoughtful. “The last time I moved I was two. I don’t remember it at all.”

  “The last time I moved was when I moved here. That was just one year ago. A year and a couple of months.”

  “I’m glad you moved here,” said Charlotte, settling herself in my lap, and opening Iggy to the first page.

  “Me, too. But …” (I couldn’t put it off any longer.) “I have to tell you something, Charlotte. We’re moving again.”

  Charlotte wrenched her neck around and peered at me. “What?”

  “We’re moving back to New York in a couple of weeks.”

  “You mean you’re leaving Stoneybrook? You’re leaving me?”

  I nodded. I watched Charlotte take in the awful information. She looked like she had just swallowed horrible medicine.

  Iggy’s House slipped to the floor as Charlotte put her head in her hands and began to cry.

  “I’m really sorry, Char,” I said. “I don’t want to go. But my dad’s job is changing. We have to move.” I wrapped my arms around Charlotte, and she let me hold her for several moments. Then suddenly she leaped up and started shouting. “I hate you!” she cried. “I hate you! You’re mean! I thought you liked baby-sitting for me.”

  “I do. I love it,” I told her. “That doesn’t have anything to do with the move. It’s my dad’s job, just like I told you. I wish I could stay in Stoneybrook, too.”

  For a moment I thought Charlotte was going to turn around and run upstairs to her room. Instead, she slowly crossed the room back to me. When I stood up she put her arms around my waist in a desperate hug.

  I had an idea. “Would you like to come over to my house?” I asked Charlotte. I thought it might help her to understand things. It wouldn’t help explain why we were moving, but I decided it would be better if the move were gradual. Seeing our house while it was being packed up might be easier on her than just “here today, gone tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Charlotte replied, drying her eyes. “But why?”

  “I’ll show you what’s going on over there. You might think it’s interesting. We have to pack up every single thing in the house.”

  “Where will you find enough boxes?”

  “The moving company gives us cartons. You’ll see. Some of them are full of stuff already. Come on. Let’s go.”

  I wrote a short note to Dr. Johanssen and then Charlotte and I walked hand-in-hand over to my house. Charlotte doesn’t know any kids on my street, so she rarely comes to my part of the neighborhood, which was why she hadn’t seen the for-sale sign in our yard before.

  “Your house still looks the same,” Charlotte said as we approached it.

  “From the outside, yes. Wait’ll we get inside.”

  I opened the front door. We were greeted by the sight of my mother’s backside. It was sticking out of a closet in the hallway. On the floor outside the closet was a heap of boots and shoes and gloves, a tennis racket, some tennis balls, a yardstick, a deflated football (who had that belonged to? Dad?), and a stepladder. As we approached my mother, she tossed an ancient pair of ballet slippers onto the pile.

  “Ahem,” I said. “Hi, Mom.”

  My mother jumped a mile, then straightened up, hitting her head on the coat hangers.

  “Stacey! You startled me!”

  “Sorry,” I said sheepishly. “Mom, I brought Charlotte over to show her the progress we’re making.”

  “Oh, hi, honey,” my mother said to Charlotte. “Have you ever seen such a mess?”

  Charlotte shook her head shyly.

  “Come on, Char,” I said, taking her hand. “I’ll show you my room first.”

  My room was a good place to start because not much had been done to it. I’d cleaned out a lot of stuff for the yard sale, and put some of my books into boxes, but that was about all.

  “This doesn’t look too different,” said Charlotte.

  “I know. Mom’s frantic. She keeps telling me to ‘get cracking.’ Look at my parents’ room.”

  I led Charlotte into Mom and Dad’s bedroom. The walls were bare. The tops of their dressers were bare. Their bookshelves were empty. Packing cartons and paper cluttered all of the floor space.

  “Whoa,” said Charlotte, looking at the cartons. “I hope you’re moving to another big house.”

  “We’re not,” I replied. I told her about the apartment. Then I told her about the yard sale.

  “A yard sale!” Charlotte exclaimed, brightening. “I love yard sales. We got my dresser at the Berks’ sale. It only cost seven dollars. And I got a Barbie doll and a dollhouse at a yard sale in Sheridan, and you know how much both of them cost? Just two dollars. Two dollars all together. My dad said, ‘Cheap at twice the price.’”

  I laughed. “Come on down to the basement. You can see how we’re getting ready for our yard sale. If there’s something you want, I’ll set it aside for you.”

  Charlotte was really perking up. She ran ahead of me all the way down to the basement. If I’d known she liked yard sales so much, I would have told her about ours before I told her about the move.

  “Kristy and Claudia and Dawn and Mary Anne and I are going to run the sale,” I explained to Charlotte when we reached the basement. “See? We’re tagging everything and writing down the prices. We’r
e making ads, too. In a couple of days we’re going to tape them up on all the trees around here. And in other parts of town, too.”

  “This sure is a lot of stuff,” said Charlotte, awed. She began poking through a pile of clothes. Then she saw a stack of my old games. “Oh, Boggle!” she cried. “And Operation!” Her eyes lit on a doll and then on a copy of The Cricket in Times Square. Ordinarily, I don’t give my books away, especially not hardcovers, but someone had given me a second copy of The Cricket. It looked almost new. Kristy had priced it at fifty cents.

  “Remember when we read this together?” asked Charlotte.

  “Sure I do. That was fun.”

  “Save it for me, okay? That’s what I want you to put aside.”

  “I’ll do better than that,” I told her. I peeled the price tag off the book. Then I found a pen, opened the cover, and inside wrote “Love to Charlotte, my favorite kid, from Stacey, her favorite baby-sitter.”

  I handed the book to Charlotte. “This is for you,” I told her. “To remember me by.”

  Charlotte took the book and looked at the cover fondly for a long time. Then she burst into tears.

  This afternoon, Buddy and Suzi Barrett learned a business lesson. Unfortunately, it was sort of a hard lesson, but in the end everything worked out okay. Better than okay, even. (I wish I could be more specific right now, but I can’t.)

  The reason Dawn couldn’t be more specific was that I would read the diary, and Dawn had had an idea for my party, which, of course, she didn’t want me to find out about.

  Anyway, Buddy and Suzi had come up with what they thought was a great way to earn some money. They’d gotten the idea when they saw the ads for Stacey’s yard sale. The thing was, busy Mrs. Barrett didn’t want to be around when Buddy and Suzi put their plan into action. She left the project for when I was baby-sitting. (She did pay me extra for my trouble, though.)

  This is what happened with the Barretts and poor Dawn. It started when Mrs. Barrett asked her two older kids, eight-year-old Buddy and five-year-old Suzi, to clean their rooms. Not just to clean them up, but to clean them out. Of course, this caused hysteria. No kid likes to clean anything up or out, especially a bedroom. But then Buddy saw the signs for our yard sale and got an idea. He asked his mother if he and Suzi could sell the junk they didn’t want, instead of just throwing it out. Mrs. Barrett decided that was all right with her, but asked the kids if they could wait until Thursday afternoon to hold their sale. That was when Mrs. Barrett would be at work. (Mr. and Mrs. Barrett are divorced, and Mrs. Barrett has a part-time job). It was also the day Dawn would be baby-sitting.

  It was just like Mrs. Barrett not to mention this to Dawn beforehand. Mrs. Barrett is nice but too busy. She’s always forgetting to tell us baby-sitters important things. (I will say, though, that she’s much, much more responsible than she used to be. At least, after she sprang this surprise project on Dawn she told her she’d pay her fifty cents per hour extra for her trouble.)

  Dawn had to be at the Barretts’ house right after school that day in order for Mrs. Barrett to get to her job on time. When she was let inside, she was greeted by an exuberant Buddy and Suzi, a mountain of old toys in the living room, Marnie Barrett (who’s only two) squawking in her high chair, Pow (the Barretts’ bassett hound) making a mess with dog kibble on the kitchen floor, and Mrs. Barrett dashing for the back door, calling over her shoulder, “You know where the phone numbers are, Dawn. Oh, by the way, I told Buddy and Suzi they could hold a sidewalk sale today. Back at six! Bye, kids!”

  “Wait a sec!” Dawn cried, chasing after Mrs. Barrett. “What are they selling?”

  “All the stuff on the living room floor!” Mrs. Barrett closed the door to the garage after her.

  Dawn opened it again. “Is the stuff priced?” she asked.

  “No. You can help them with that.” Mrs. Barrett climbed into her car.

  Dawn ran to the window and knocked on it. “What are we going to set up the stuff on?”

  “Oh. There’s a card table in the closet in the front hall.” She started the car.

  “What shall I do with Marnie?” Dawn shouted.

  “Put her in the playpen. It’s folded up in the rec room. Have fun!”

  Mrs. Barrett backed out of the garage.

  “Oh, brother,” Dawn said under her breath. She ran back to the living room. Buddy and Suzi were nearly hysterical with excitement.

  “It’s sidewalk sale day! It’s sidewalk sale day!” they kept shouting as they jumped around their pile of toys.

  “Let’s get started, Dawn!” cried Buddy.

  “Wait a sec,” said Dawn. “Just a minute. Okay?” She put Pow’s kibble away and sent Pow outside. Then she lifted Marnie out of her high chair. “Poor Marnie-o,” she said. “You’re wet. And I bet you’d like to play outside, wouldn’t you?”

  “No-no,” replied Marnie, but she was smiling. She answers every question with no-no.

  Dawn changed Marnie and put her playpen in the front yard near the sidewalk. Then she helped Buddy and Suzi set up the card table and lug all their stuff out to it. At last she plopped Marnie in the playpen with a few toys and a graham cracker.

  “Okay, guys,” she said to Buddy and Suzi. “I guess you’re in business.” But she knew their sale was doomed from the start.

  “What do we do first?” Suzi wondered.

  “I think you should sort of arrange the stuff on the table,” replied Dawn. “You know, fix it up so it looks like a real store, all nice and neat, and like you’d want to buy something. And arrange it so people can find what they’re looking for. Put all the games in one pile, all the trucks together, that sort of thing.”

  The Barretts busied themselves with their wares while Dawn played “Where is Thumbkin?” with Marnie.

  “Okay,” Suzi said a few minutes later. “All finished. Where are our customers?”

  They watched a few cars drive by.

  “You need a sign, I think,” said Dawn.

  So Buddy made a sign on a piece of construction paper that read:

  He hung it on the front of the table.

  A few more cars drove by. One of them slowed down so the driver could read the sign, but then it sped up and went on.

  “Try shouting,” suggested Dawn.

  The next time a car approached Buddy yelled, “Toy sale! Toy sale! Buy our toys!”

  Suzi yelled, “Hey, slow down! Stop! … STOP!”

  The driver smiled and waved but didn’t stop.

  “I think the problem is that no one knew about the sale ahead of time,” said Dawn.

  “We told the Pikes about it,” Buddy informed her. And at that moment, three of the Pike kids showed up.

  “You want to buy something?” asked Suzi hopefully, hopping from one foot to the other.

  “Sure,” replied Vanessa Pike. “I’ve got fifty cents.”

  “We don’t have any money,” said Claire, speaking for herself and Margo. “We just want to look.”

  The Pikes looked over the toy selection. Finally, Vanessa said, “I think I’d like to buy that tow truck. I could give it to Nicky for his birthday. How much is it?”

  “Two dollars,” said Buddy.

  “Five cents,” said Suzi.

  “How much?” asked Vanessa.

  The Barretts shrugged. They turned to Dawn for help.

  “I think you should charge ten cents,” Dawn told them. (She’d had a lot of experience pricing things lately.)

  “Ten cents?!” cried Buddy.

  “It’s used,” Dawn pointed out. “And it’s just a little truck.”

  The ten-cent truck was the only sale the Barretts made that afternoon. By five o’clock, they were bored and disappointed, and Dawn thought they ought to close up shop. When the last of their toys had been carried back inside, Dawn decided to tell Buddy and Suzi how our yard sale was being organized. She didn’t want to sound like an I-told-you-so person, but she thought it might help them to know about the benefits of advertising and plann
ing ahead. Then she even told them that they could set up a booth at my yard sale.

  The Barretts were ecstatic, but it turned out that they were actually more interested in the fact that I was moving than in the sale.

  “Will you miss Stacey?” Buddy asked Dawn.

  “I sure will,” she replied. “All her friends will. We’re going to give her a big party before she leaves.”

  “A party! Can we come?” asked Suzi.

  It was that simple question — Can we come? — that gave Dawn the idea my friends had been looking for. Suddenly, Dawn knew just what kind of party to throw me. When she left the Barretts’ that evening, she ran home and phoned Kristy right away.

  “I’ve got it!” she cried. “I thought of a special, meaningful, wonderful party for Stacey.”

  “Thank goodness,” said Kristy. “I was really getting worried. Tell me!”

  “Well, it involves children,” Dawn began, and then she explained her idea.

  “Fabulous!” Kristy exclaimed when Dawn was finished. “I’ll call Mary Anne, you call Claudia. Then the four of us better get together without Stacey sometime soon. Maybe tomorrow before the club meeting.”

  “Perfect,” said Dawn. She was smiling when she hung up the phone, and she knew Kristy was, too.

  On Saturday morning I woke up with butterflies in my stomach. I’m not sure how it’s possible to feel nervous while you’re asleep, but that must have been what was happening, because when I opened my eyes, the butterflies were already there.

  It was yard sale day.

  I jumped out of bed excitedly. I could see, even without raising the shade, that the sun was shining. My friends and I would just have died if it had been raining and we’d actually had to hold the sale on the rain date.

  It was 7:30. The sale was to be held from 10:00 until 4:30. Claudia, Kristy, Mary Anne, and Dawn were going to come over at 8:30 to set everything up. For an hour I raced around the house, getting dressed, eating breakfast, checking on a million things. My parents thought I was going to give myself a heart attack.

  “Relax, slow down,” said Dad.