“— come to order!” I finished.
Claudia’s hand paused over the receiver. “Hmmm. I bet it’s the Kormans.”
“Uh-uh, Mrs. Prezzioso!” Jessi Ramsey said. “Yesterday she told me —”
“The Hobarts,” Stacey McGill guessed.
Rrrrrring!
Claudia picked up the receiver. “Baby-sitters Club!” she said. “Fine, thanks, Mrs. Hobart, and how was your summer?”
“I knew it!” Stacey said.
We were in business.
It was Wednesday, the second day of school. Everyone had arrived early for the meeting. Until the phone rang, we hadn’t stopped talking about the summer — who did what, who went where. If you think about that, it’s pretty funny. I mean, we’d been together a lot. Each of us knew what the others had done. We’d held meetings, baby-sat, taken trips together, you name it.
But did that stop us? No way. We just repeated everything and still laughed our heads off.
Oh, well, what good is September if you can’t reminisce about the summer?
“Uh-huh…. Okay, I’ll call you back,” Claudia said. She hung up and turned to Mary Anne Spier. “Monday after school?”
Mary Anne opened the club record book. “Let’s see, Stacey and I are free.”
“I sat for them last time,” Stacey said. “You go ahead.”
“All right,” Mary Anne replied.
Claudia tapped out the Hobarts’ number.
Efficient, huh? Everything organized, every duty taken care of. A well-oiled machine, that’s what the Baby-sitters Club is.
Okay, sorry, I’m bragging. You see, I invented the BSC. The basic idea: to allow Stoneybrook parents to fill all their baby-sitting needs with one phone call.
That’s it. Simple, huh? So how come no one else ever thought of it? Beats me. The idea popped into my head one day when my mom spent forever calling all over town for a sitter for David Michael. (My older brothers and I were busy.) She didn’t find one, and I felt bad for her. It seemed so unfair. I mean, you can find services for finding just about everything — concert tickets, taxis, flowers, food, clothes — so why not sitters?
Click. I had the idea. Mary Anne and Claudia were the first people I asked to join the club. Stacey joined soon after, and then Dawn Schafer joined. As we became busier, we took in Jessi Ramsey, Mallory Pike, Shannon Kilbourne, and Logan Bruno.
If you were keeping count, you know that meant we had nine members. But we’re down to eight now, because Dawn moved back to California. (How do I feel about that? Not great, but I’ll tell you about it later.)
First things first. Here’s how the club works. We meet three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from five-thirty (sharp) to six o’clock in Claudia’s bedroom. She’s the only member with a private phone line, which doubles as the official BSC number. Stoneybrook parents call during that half hour to set up sitting appointments.
Room. Phone. Sitters. The setup was easy. Making it work was something else. First we had to attract clients. To do that, we posted ads and handed out fliers.
Then we had to keep the clients. Would parents be turned off by too many sitters? I know I would, if I had to break in someone new each time I booked a sitter. I decided that everyone should write a description of each job in a notebook, so we could learn from one another about our clients. I invented Kid-Kits, which are boxes of our old toys, games, books, and kid-related stuff that sitters can take to jobs. I also made sure we had a strong, reliable organization with rules, officers, and recordkeeping, like a real company.
I’m the president. Basically I’m in charge of the Big Picture. I run the meetings. I dream up events for our charges. I think of ways to increase publicity. I keep my eye on the future of the BSC.
But you’ve heard enough about me. On to Claudia, our vice-president. Since we use her number, she has to answer the phone whenever clients call during non-meeting hours. That’s her only official function. Her unofficial function is extremely important. You might call Claud our Club Caterer. Junk-Food Caterer, that is.
After returning the Hobarts’ call, Claudia cried, “Time to celebrate! I have this bag of mini-Snickers …”
She hopped off her bed and scooted to the closet. Standing on her toes, she reached toward the back of her shelf, behind her hats.
She pulled out a dusty bag of candy corn.
“Ohhhhh.” She groaned. “I spent an hour looking for this last Halloween.”
“I love candy corn,” I said.
“That’s almost a year old!” Jessi remarked.
“So? Sugar doesn’t spoil.” Claudia ripped the bag open. “Ahh, it still has its full flavor bouquet.”
Well, I just lost it. I fell off my director’s chair, laughing.
Claud’s funny. She is also the thinnest junk food addict in the whole world. You’d think she was one of those models who eat dandelions and organic swampgrass (or whatever) all day. Claudia doesn’t have any zits, either, despite all the chocolate. She has gorgeous, almond-shaped eyes and deep, raven-black hair. She’s second-generation Japanese-American, by the way, which means her grandparents immigrated to the United States.
Mr. and Mrs. Kishi are super-strict about healthy foods. If they knew what Claudia really ate, forget it. They’d have a heart attack. Cookies, candy, chips, pretzels — Claud could open a store in her room. But you’d never know it, because she hides it all so well. She also has to hide other terrible, forbidden things: Nancy Drew books. Yes, Claud’s addicted to them, too, and yes, her parents disapprove of them. They would rather Claudia read only the classics. (Personally I think this is dumb. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with Oliver Twist and stuff, but my life would be miserable without sports books.)
Unfortunately, Claudia’s older sister, Janine, sets a bad example. She’s brilliant student. Claud isn’t, by a long shot. Her grades are mediocre (and her spelling is horrible). My scientific theory is that Claudia actually does have the Kishi genius genes. They just took a wrong turn — tripped over the junk-food-loving DNA or something — and ended up in the “art” part of the brain. Claudia has a magic touch with anything artistic — drawing, jewelry-making, sculpting, painting. Even fashion. She puts together outfits from stuff she buys at tag sales and thrift stores. She picks junk you think she’d never wear. But she does, always in some incredibly cool, funky combination.
Claudia is one of my two oldest friends. The other is Mary Anne. We all grew up on the same street.
Mary Anne also happens to be my best friend. We even look somewhat alike. She’s also short and has brown hair and brown eyes. Like me, she was raised by a single parent, her dad. (Mrs. Spier died when Mary Anne was a baby.) The similarities end there, though. For one thing, she hates sports. For another, she’s shy. And she cries at the slightest thing. She actually wept reading a Dr. Seuss book to Andrew Brewer. (Absolutely true. It was The Lorax.) Her boyfriend, Logan Bruno, keeps saying she should wear a raincoat to sad movies.
Since Dawn Schafer moved away, Mary Anne’s been especially sad. They’re not only stepsisters, but they brought their parents together. When Dawn moved to Stoneybrook from California (with her brother and divorced mom), she and Mary Anne discovered that Mrs. Schafer and Mr. Spier had been high-school sweethearts. So the two girls played matchmaker, and it worked! Having siblings changed Mary Anne’s life. She’d been an only child, and her dad had raised her with all these strict rules. (He went overboard, trying to be a perfect parent.) Marriage loosened him up a lot, and now Mary Anne’s allowed to dress and act her age.
Mary Anne is a great club secretary. Her job is to maintain the record book. When a call comes in, she needs to know exactly who’s available. (That means keeping track of all our conflicts — ballet classes, art lessons, doctor appointments, after-school activities, blah blah blah.) Then she helps assign the job, making sure everyone does a roughly equal amount of work. She carefully records each job on a master calendar. In the back of the book, she keeps an up-to-date cl
ient list: addresses, phone numbers, rates paid, and any special information about the kids.
(Can you imagine doing all that and not going crazy? Mary Anne enjoys it.)
Our club treasurer is Stacey McGill, mainly because she actually likes math. Every Monday she collects dues. She makes sure we contribute to Claudia’s phone bill and give my brother Charlie gas money for driving me to meetings. Also, she sets aside funds for our special events, which occasionally include pizza parties for ourselves.
Stacey always looks great. She’ll show up at school in a wild outfit you never saw before, and the next month it’ll be on some model on the cover of Seventeen. It’s amazing how she does that. She also has curly, golden-blonde hair and a smile right out of a TV ad.
Like Dawn and me, Stacey’s a child of divorced parents. She grew up in New York City, until her dad’s job moved him to Stoneybrook. Then, after she’d joined the BSC, the company moved him back to NYC (that was when we took in Jessi and Mal). When her parents split, Stacey was given the choice of living with her dad in New York or with her mom in Stoneybrook. Stacey is crazy about the Big Apple. She thinks it’s the center of the world. But she chose Stoneybrook, because that’s where her absolute best, loyalest, most high-quality friends are (ahem).
You know what amazes me? Stacey does not touch the sweets at a BSC meeting. True, she’s not allowed to, since she’s a diabetic, which means her body doesn’t metabolize sugar (she even has to inject herself every day with a drug called insulin). But still, the temptation! I’d be a basket case. She’s perfectly happy with pretzels and chips.
Stacey, by the way, is earning her way back into the BSC. You see, I had thrown her out. Honest. She’d been missing meetings and switching jobs at the last minute, and treating the other members badly, just because she wanted to spend more time with her boyfriend, Robert Brewster. Anyway, she finally came to her senses and asked to rejoin. I said we’d experiment for a while, play it by ear. So far, fortunately, she’s been behaving just fine.
Every BSC member I’ve discussed so far is thirteen years old and in eighth grade. Jessi and Mallory, whom we call our junior officers, are eleven and in sixth. They are best friends, and both are horse fanatics. They’re also the oldest kids in their families, and they love to moan about how their parents still treat them like babies. (For one thing, neither of them is allowed to take evening baby-sitting jobs, except for their own families.)
Jessi is African-American. (You would not believe how prejudiced some Stoneybrook people were when her family moved to town. Honestly, it was disgusting.) Her parents are not divorced, and she has an eight-year-old sister named Becca and a baby brother named Squirt. Jessi, by the way, is a great ballerina. Even I can tell, and to me watching ballet is about as much fun as eating lima beans.
Mallory is Caucasian, and her family is humongous (eight kids altogether, including boy triplets). She has thick brownish-red hair and glasses, and she loves to write and illustrate her own stories. It’s probably the only way she can have some peace and quiet in her house.
The BSC includes two associate members, Shannon Kilbourne and Mary Anne’s boyfriend, Logan. Shannon’s blonde and blue-eyed and really energetic. She goes to a private school called Stoneybrook Day, where she is involved in lots of extracurricular activities. Logan’s kind of a jock. He’s on the Stoneybrook Middle School football, baseball, volleyball, and track teams. He has curly blondish-brown hair and a cute smile. Neither Logan nor Shannon is required to attend meetings or pay dues, but we depend on them for overflow jobs, and we ask them to fill in for absent members.
Shannon, for instance, once filled in as a regular member when Dawn left for a long trip to California. I was kind of hoping she’d do it again now. But I wasn’t holding my breath. Shannon had called earlier to say she had to miss the meeting. When I’d hinted about Dawn, Shannon had listed all her after-school plans for the semester.
Rrrrrrring!
“Hello, Baby-sitters Club,” Claudia said. “Uh-huh…. Okay, Dr. Johanssen, I’ll call you back in a second.” Click. “Saturday, three to five?”
“Um, you’re all clear, Stacey,” Mary Anne replied.
“Fine,” Stacey said.
The phone rang again before Claudia could reach for the receiver. “Hello, Baby-sitters Club.”
The meeting went on like that for almost the whole half hour. It wasn’t until 5:49 that I asked, “Any new business?”
“Yeah,” Claudia said. “I move we get me a phone with a headset or something. My arm’s tired.”
“I move we ask Shannon to be a regular,” Stacey suggested. “We need her.”
“I thought she was coming today,” Mary Anne remarked.
“She called me and said she couldn’t make it,” I informed them. “Today was the first meeting of the astronomy club.”
“Astronomy?” Mallory said.
“Otherwise known as the space cadets,” Claud replied, popping a Milk Dud in her mouth.
“Uh, guys, I hate to say this, but I don’t think she’ll be able to take Dawn’s place,” I announced.
“Ugh,” Stacey murmured.
“What about Logan?” Jessi asked.
Mary Anne shook her head. “He has football practice every day. But he said he’d try to take a few more weekend jobs.”
“Uh-oh.” Claudia chanted in a robotlike voice: “Warning. Warning. Baby-sitting overload. Please send cloning equipment.”
“Hey,” I said, “we’ve been in this situation before. We were fine.”
“Yeah, but we were fine because of Shannon,” Jessi said.
“Shannon will still sit,” I reminded her. “She just can’t attend meetings.”
“So we’re still short a full member,” Stacey said.
“We could turn down a job or two if we have to,” Mallory suggested. “There’s no law against that.”
I glared at her.
“Oops,” she squeaked. “Maybe there is.”
The room fell silent for a moment. Finally Mary Anne said, “What about finding a new member, Kristy?”
I knew someone would suggest that.
Just the thought of it made me dizzy and a little sick. Our last few attempts to take in new members had been total disasters. The Baby-sitters Club could not afford to have a dud. It could ruin our reputation.
“Let me think about it,” I said.
Rrrrrrring!
“Hello, Baby-sitters Club,” Stacey said. “Saturday? I’ll check and call back.”
Gulp.
Stacey gave me an impish smile and sang, “I hope you’re thinking fa-ast.”
Wednesday night I dreamed we took an alien into the BSC. She looked normal whenever she arrived at a client’s house. But after the parents left, her skin would glow green and she’d take the kids for rides on her spaceship.
The kids loved it. The parents never suspected a thing. Neither did the BSC, until the new member started firing lasers at Claudia’s bedroom.
I woke up shivering.
Dreams are supposed to reflect your deepest fears. Was I, Kristy Thomas, born leader and decision-maker, afraid of the idea of a new BSC member?
You bet.
When Stacey brought up the subject during our Friday meeting, I told her I was still thinking.
Well, I was, but it sure wasn’t the only thing on my mind. The Krushers were another. Our practice that afternoon had been atrocious. The World Series was to begin the next day, and the kids were super-nervous and not concentrating. At one point Jake Kuhn swung his bat too hard and somehow beaned himself on the head. Jackie Rodowsky collided with Matt Braddock and gave him a fat lip. Nina Marshall managed to walk off with third base while no one was looking and lost it somewhere. (Yes, lost the base.) Then one of our old softballs fell apart, and David Michael spent most of the practice pulling out the stuffing.
You know what the worst part was? Bart stopped by toward the end of practice. He watched for awhile and said, “We could postpone it a week.”
/> I don’t even want to tell you what I said.
The third thing on my mind was the mystery of my new neighbors. I figured the family would have moved in by the first day of school, but they hadn’t. If they had been in the house, I would have seen them.
They didn’t show up the second day, either, or the third. Each day on the way to school and on the way home, I peeked at the house they were supposed to move into. The workers’ trucks were still in the driveway, but no minivan or station wagon. (I don’t know why I assumed they’d have a minivan or a station wagon. I just did.)
By Friday I was starting to worry. But I figured they were delayed a week, maybe because of one of the parents’ jobs. So I vowed to keep my eye out for the new family all weekend.
Believe it or not, I felt a little angry. Where were they? Who did they think they were, making me run over to their house in vain all the time? With all I had to think about?
I know. I was being ridiculous. Still, you have to admit, it was pretty weird. I mean, as far as I know, parents do not love keeping their kids out of school unless absolutely necessary.
I could understand it if the house were a mess. But it wasn’t. It looked pretty good. Beautiful, really. The workers had put in a dark, carved-wood front door. Plus they’d added a humongous porch with a swing. Plus a chimney and a U-shaped driveway and new wood shingles and a small side extension with a bay window.
In comparison, Mrs. Porter’s house (the one between ours and the phantom family’s) was looking worse and worse. To begin with, it’s a dark, old, run-down Victorian. You expect tortured howling to come out of the attic gables at night. Mrs. Porter herself looks like a witch. I’m not saying this to be mean. It’s simply true. Her hair is gray and frizzled, the tip of her nose has a wart, and she always dresses in black. My stepsister, Karen, calls her Morbidda Destiny. (Karen’s convinced she’s a witch.)
I was suddenly afraid the family had taken one look at what was next door and fled.
Sorry. Mrs. Porter is a very nice person. I was just in a mood.
On the way home from the Friday BSC meeting, I noticed Ms. Steinert on the lawn of the mystery twins’ house.