Hello, Mallory

  “Well,” I began, “remember that baby-sitting test I told you about?”

  Jessi nodded.

  “I flunked it.”

  “Oh, wow. That’s too bad. I’m really sorry.”

  “Me, too. But the thing is, it wasn’t a fair test. Listen to some of the questions they asked me: When does a baby cut his first tooth? What’s the difference between creeping and crawling?”

  “Huh?” said Jessi.

  “That’s what I thought. Then they asked me to explain how and when to use a tourniquet. And then they told me to draw a picture of the human digestive system.”

  “You are kidding!”

  “Nope. All I could remember was the esophagus, the stomach, and the intestines.”

  “Ew,” said Jessi. Then she added, “What else is there?”

  “Oh, the liver, the pancreas, and a bunch of other organs. But it doesn’t matter. You know what the worst part was?”

  “What?”

  “That I didn’t fit in with those girls. I thought we could be friends. After all, I know them pretty well. But I was dressed all wrong at the first meeting, and I was really nervous when I went on this trial baby-sitting job with one of the girls…. Oh, it’s just a big mess. And I don’t belong.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Jessi bitterly. “At least the only place you don’t belong is in that club. I don’t belong in this school, or even this town. Neither does my family.”

  “You mean because you’re, um …”

  “You can say it,” Jessi told me. “Because we’re black.”

  “Have people done things to you?” I asked.

  “Nope.” Jessi shook her head. “Well, a few things. Like Benny Ott shooting rubber bands at me in class. And I’ve overheard Rachel Robinson and her friends talking about me. Mostly, though, it’s what they haven’t done. The neighbors haven’t said hello to my family, haven’t introduced themselves to us, haven’t paid any attention to us. Except my dad. His company asked him to take his job, so the people he works with are okay. But, well, do you know you’re the only kid in school who talks to me? I mean, to me, not about me behind my back.”

  “I am?”

  Jessi nodded. “No one talks to Becca, either.”

  “Wow.”

  “I’m even thinking of not taking dancing lessons here. I don’t know if it’s worth it. Can’t you just imagine it? They’d hold auditions for a ballet, and I’d try out, but they’d never give me the lead, even if I were as good as Pavlova.”

  “Who’s Pavlova?”

  “This famous ballerina. You know what would happen if they did give me the lead?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Everyone would be upset that a black girl got it instead of a white girl.”

  “I guess,” I said slowly.

  “I know.”

  “What was it like where you used to live”

  “In New Jersey? Oh, really different. For one thing, there were lots of black families in Oakley. And our neighborhood was all black. Well, our street was, anyway.”

  “Where your relatives lived?”

  “Yup. Grandma and Grandpa next door. Keisha, Kara, and Billy across the street. Sandy and Molly down the block, and Raun and Isaac down the block in the other direction. Plus lots of friends.”

  “And your ballet class?”

  “Half black kids, half white kids. Well, maybe more blacks than whites. Last year, you know what?”

  “What?”

  “We put on The Nutcracker Suite and the lead parts were all played by black students. I got to be Clara.”

  “Oh, lucky!”

  “Yeah … my costume was beautiful.”

  “I bet.”

  “We have pictures.”

  “Can I see them sometime?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “You know, Jessi, you must have been really good to get the part of Clara,” I said.

  “Well, Clara’s role isn’t really the hardest. I think it’s just the most important, because the story is Clara’s dream. But I am good. Mama and Daddy say I’m crazy not to take lessons here. I mean, because of my reason. If I wanted to stop because I had too much homework or so that I could have time to try something else, that would be different. It would be a good reason. But my parents say black people and white people live in the same world so they better get along. And if I don’t take dance because I don’t want to compete with white kids, then I’m being chicken.”

  I thought about that. “Still,” I said, “it doesn’t seem fair. And it’s awful not to belong. The funny thing is, I never thought I didn’t belong until I wanted to be in the Baby-sitters Club.”

  “And I never thought I didn’t belong until we moved to Stoneybrook,” said Jessi.

  “Maybe we’re not the problem,” I said. “Maybe everyone else is.”

  “Yeah!”

  I sighed. “But that doesn’t change things. I’m still not in the club. And I want to baby-sit. I love kids. I have seven younger brothers and sisters.”

  “Seven! Wow.”

  “And I’m good with them. I know I am.”

  “I love kids, too,” said Jessi. “Mama says I’m like Squirt’s second mother. And in Oakley my aunt Yvonne let me baby-sit for Kara sometimes. Kara’s two. And four times I got paid to baby-sit for this little kid named Chelsea. She’s three.”

  “Last summer the girls in the Baby-sitters Club ran a playgroup and they let me help them. They didn’t think I was a baby then, and I didn’t make mistakes, either.”

  I had given up searching for a worry stone. I didn’t need one now that I was talking with Jessi.

  “I bet we’re both really good baby-sitters,” said Jessi.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, sounding almost angry. Then I glanced at Jessi. I think she and I got the same idea at the same time. “Hey!” I cried. “Let’s do it! Let’s start our own baby-sitting club.”

  “Just us,” said Jessi, grinning. “The best eleven-year-old sitters anywhere!”

  “No, the best any-age sitters.”

  “Right.”

  “I know we can do it,” I said.

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “We don’t need the Baby-sitters Club.”

  “Especially if they don’t need you.”

  “Yeah.”

  When the bell rang, Jessi and I stood up together and ran to the school building. I couldn’t wait to begin our own club. I was really excited. So was Jessi. Maybe we didn’t belong with some people, but we belonged with each other.

  That afternoon, Jessi walked home from school with me.

  Claire greeted us as soon as we reached my house. She was waiting in the front yard and dashed across the lawn when she saw us. Claire goes to morning kindergarten, so she gets home a couple of hours before my brothers and sisters and I do. She’s always glad to see us.

  “Hi! Hi, Mallory!” she called. Then she stopped short and looked Jessi up and down. “Who are you?” she asked.

  Please, please, Claire, I thought. Don’t say anything embarrassing.

  Before Jessi could answer, Claire went on, “Hey, did you come to cl —”

  And all at once I knew what she was going to say. She was going to say, “Did you come to clean our house?” That was because Claire had seen only a few black people in her life. Recently, two black women had shown up when my mom called the Fast ’n’ Easy Cleaning Service in Stamford, needing help getting ready for a party.

  Before Claire could finish her sentence I jumped in and said loudly, “This is Jessi Ramsey. She’s my new friend from school. Jessi, this is Claire, my youngest sister.”

  “Hi,” said Jessi. She knelt down to Claire’s level. “You look like you lost a tooth.”

  It was just the right thing to say.

  Claire smiled a gap-toothed smile. “I did! Two days ago. And I put it under my pillow and the tooth fairy took it away — and left twenty-five cents!”

  “Wow,” exclaimed Jessi. “You are lucky!”

/>   “I keep my teeth in a box that looks like a tooth. The dentist gave it to me.”

  Claire and Jessi were still talking about teeth when Margo, Nicky, and Vanessa came home. I knew the triplets wouldn’t be far behind, unless they were staying at school for soccer practice.

  I braced myself, wondering if I’d have to field any more embarrassing questions, but the kids didn’t seem too surprised by Jessi. And she was great with them. She kept asking all the right questions.

  “Wow,” she said to Nicky. “What happened to your hand?”

  That started Nicky’s long story of his broken finger. He’d told it lots of times by then, and each time, the story grew a little.

  “The doctor said it was the worst broken finger he ever saw.”

  “Oh, Nicky, he did not,” said Vanessa.

  “Yes, he did. He said it was broken in seventeen places.”

  “Two,” I whispered to Jessi.

  “And this cast weighs twelve pounds.”

  “One,” I whispered. “At most.”

  Jessi grinned.

  “Let’s go inside, you guys,” I said. “I’m hungry.”

  We ran into our kitchen and my brothers and sisters began opening drawers and pawing through the refrigerator. They pulled out bread and baloney and mustard, Twinkies and Oreos and Yodels, apples and bananas and oranges.

  “Mom,” I said as my mother watched the chaos, “this is Jessi. She moved into Stacey McGill’s house.”

  My mother looked just a teeny tiny bit surprised, but she held out her hand and shook Jessi’s. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” she said.

  “Thanks,” replied Jessi. She sounded both pleased and surprised.

  “Help yourselves to a snack,” offered Mom.

  I glanced around the kitchen. Nicky was awkwardly lathering mustard onto baloney slices, rolling them up, and biting into them, making the mustard ooze out the other end. Margo was untwisting Oreos, scraping out the filling, and saving it in a pile to eat after she’d eaten the cookie parts. Claire was a sticky mess from a banana, and Vanessa was grinning at everyone with an orange peel stuck in her mouth.

  “We’ll eat upstairs,” I told my mother.

  She nodded understandingly.

  Jessi and I each took an apple and a cookie and went to my room.

  “Oops,” said Jessi as soon as we were sitting on my bed. “I better call Mom and tell her where I am.”

  She called her from the phone in the hall and then came back into my room. “You sure do have a lot of books,” she said, looking around.

  “They’re Vanessa’s and mine. She shares the room with me. That shelf is hers, this one is mine,” I told her, pointing.

  Jessi stood in front of my shelf. “Horse stories,” she murmured. “Fantasy, mystery. I see lots of books I’d like to borrow. You and I could switch back and forth forever. It would be like having our own library.”

  “Yeah!” I said. “I like that idea.”

  Jessi sat next to me on the bed. “So,” she said, “how do we start a baby-sitting club?”

  “Well, let me tell you how the other club works. We can sort of copy it. The girls meet three times a week from five-thirty until six. And the people they sit for know they meet at those times, so they call during the meetings and say when they need sitters. The good thing is that when people call — the baby-sitters call them clients — they’re almost guaranteed a sitter, since they’ve reached four people at once. Somebody is bound to be free.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Jessi.

  “So the sitter takes down the information about the job; you know, how many kids they’ll be in charge of, how old they are, how long the parents will be away, stuff like that. Then Mary Anne Spier — she’s the secretary — looks in their appointment book to find out who’s free, and when they figure out who’s going to take the job, they call the client back with the information.

  “They get millions of jobs that way. They’re always busy. The parents around here really like them,” I added wistfully. No matter how hurt I was, I still wanted to be part of the Baby-sitters Club.

  “Hmm,” said Jessi. “Well, I don’t see why we can’t do that, too. There seem to be lots of kids around here. The Baby-sitters Club can’t handle everything.”

  “You’re right about that. That’s why they asked me to join. They need someone to replace Stacey, I mean, really need someone.”

  “Well … let’s get to work!” said Jessi. “First, we’ll pick out a name for our club. I think the Baby-sitters Club is a dumb name. It’s too plain. It’s like naming a restaurant The Restaurant.”

  I giggled. “Yeah. Those older girls don’t have any imagination. We could call our club … um …”

  “Yeah. We could call it … um …”

  We found that it wasn’t easy to think of a better name.

  “How about Sitters United?” suggested Jessi.

  I shook my head. “Nah … How about, um, Sitters Incorporated?”

  Jessi shook her head. “Nah. Boring … Hmm … Hey, how about Kids Incorporated?”

  “Yeah!” I cried. “That’s great! It sounds really cute. It’s catchy.”

  “Much catchier than the Baby-sitters Club.”

  “Right.”

  “Now what?”

  “Well, the other girls are always advertising themselves. Last year they put an ad in the newspaper, and every now and then they print up fliers and stick them in people’s mailboxes, just to remind them of the club.”

  “Okay. Let’s make fliers…. How do we do that?”

  I thought for a moment. “My brother has a toy printing press that really works. I bet he’d let us use it.”

  “Great.”

  I leaned out into the hall and yelled, “Hey, Byron!”

  “The triplets aren’t home from school yet, Mallory,” my mother called.

  “Darn,” I said. “We need to use his printing press. For something really important. Do you think he’d let us?”

  “We-ell,” said Mom. She likes to let us kids solve our own problems, so she doesn’t barge into situations that don’t concern her. But at last she said, “That printing press has been stuck up in the attic for over a year now. Byron never uses it, so I’ll give you permission. If he gets upset, he can get upset with me.”

  “Oh, thanks, Mom!” I cried.

  I retrieved the printing press from the attic and brought it into my room. “Here it is,” I said to Jessi. “Now we just have to figure out how to use it.”

  “And what to say on the fliers.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I replied. “Right. Well, I guess we say when we’re available to sit.”

  “After school,” said Jessi. “Weekends.”

  “How about at night?”

  Jessi shook her head. “I don’t think I’m allowed to.”

  “Me neither. Unless I’m sitting right here at home.”

  “I wonder if anyone will really hire us. We are only eleven.”

  “I’m sure they’d hire us if we sat together. Two baby-sitters for the price of one.”

  “Yeah!” cried Jessi. “And that’s what we should put on the fliers!”

  So we did.

  Setting up the printing press wasn’t easy. The first flier read: Two sitters for eht brice of one. But we kept working. When we had a good flier we ran off thirty copies. We paid Nicky and Vanessa twenty-five cents each to put the fliers in the mailboxes on our street and on Jessi’s.

  While they were doing that, I said, “Let’s make a few phone calls. It can’t hurt to tell people what we’re doing. I could call Mrs. Barrett. She lives right down the street and has three kids. I know them really well. And I could call Jenny Prezzioso’s mom, and maybe Jamie Newton’s mother.”

  We had just finished our phoning when we heard a knock on the door. Mom stuck her head in the room. “Is this the headquarters of Kids Incorporated?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I replied, wondering what was coming.

  “Well, I’d like to hir
e you for Saturday afternoon.”

  “Okay, great,” I said calmly.

  Jessi and I waited until Mom had left before we began screaming and jumping up and down. “Our first job!” I shrieked. “Our first job!”

  Kids Incorporated seemed to be off to a good start.

  Uh-oh, you guys. I smell trouble. I mean, there is trouble and by now we’re all aware of it, since I’ve called you. But just so we have it on record, I’ll write up the incident here in our notebook.

  As you know it started when I went to the Barretts’ house to sit for Marnie and Suzi. (Buddy was off visiting his dad.) The girls were fine, as usual. Sometimes, they can be a handful, but they’re never really bad. Anyway, after I had discovered Suzi taping diapers around table legs, I decided it was time to go outside and take a walk. We put Pow on his leash and had gotten as far as the Pikes’ house when I saw it: Trouble …

  Dawn’s sitting job at the Barretts’ house was on a Saturday afternoon — the same afternoon that Mom had hired Jessi and me to sit for my brothers and sisters. I didn’t know just what had happened on Dawn’s job until a few weeks later when I read her notebook entry and asked her some questions. This is what I found out:

  Dawn arrived at the Barretts’ at two o’clock. The house was looking neater than usual because Mrs. Barrett had finally found a woman to help her with the cleaning. For a long time she’d been trying to juggle a job with being both mother and father to Buddy, Suzi, and Marnie. (The Barretts are divorced.) She hadn’t had enough time to do anything right, so when Dawn first met them, their house was a mess and the kids were a worse mess.

  But now things are better. Mrs. Barrett has become more organized. Before she left that day, she even remembered to tell Dawn where the emergency numbers are, that Marnie would be getting up from her nap around two-thirty, and that Suzi had a slight earache and needed medicine at three o’clock.

  The afternoon started off quietly. Dawn and Suzi (who’s four) built a playground out of Legos for Suzi’s stuffed animals. They were just putting on the finishing touches when Dawn heard Marnie calling from upstairs. Sometimes when she wakes up from a nap, she cries. Other times, she talks or sings. That afternoon she was calling, “Hi-ho, hi-ho, hi-ho!… Grape juice. Grape juice, please?… Hi-ho, hi-ho, hi-ho.”