Soon Dawn and Mary Anne became friends at school. Then they discovered that Mary Anne’s dad and Dawn’s mom had been high school sweethearts. Can you believe it? So, of course, the two of them decided to get Mr. Spier and Mrs. Schafer back together. It worked like a charm. They fell in love all over again, got married, and that’s how Dawn and Mary Anne ended up as stepsisters.
Oh, one more thing. I told you Mary Anne and Logan Bruno were dating. Well, Dawn is now dating Logan’s cousin, Lewis. Sort of. It’s hard to call it dating since he lives in Louisville, Kentucky. But they write each other and, as Dawn says, they definitely have a strong friendship.
There are two more members of the BSC: Claudia Kishi, vice-president, and Stacey McGill, treasurer. They are also best friends. Claudia is Japanese-American and drop-dead gorgeous. And artsy. She makes her own earrings and tie-dyes her own T-shirts. Claudia can put together strange combinations of clothes — like one of her father’s old shirts over tie-dyed tights, with a big belt and a funky vest — and look like she stepped out of a fashion magazine. She’s not a great student, but she more than makes up for it in talent. Her parents think she just needs to apply herself to her schoolwork, but I think part of her problem is that her older sister, Janine, is a major brain. I mean, we’re talking genius. I think Claud figures that since Janine has taken care of the brains category, she’ll concentrate on art. And boy, does she ever. Pottery, drawing, painting, sculpting — you name it, Claud can do it.
She does have one flaw. She’s a junk food addict. At every BSC meeting you can count on Claudia to have a bag of red hots, Mallomars, or potato chips for us to chow down. All of us except Dawn, who turns up her nose at candy, and Stacey, who can’t eat sweets.
Stacey is diabetic, which means her body is unable to process sugar. She has to give herself these shots (ew, ick) every day. Stacey is also the ultimate in cool. She used to live in New York City, so she is very sophisticated. Claud calls her the Queen of Dibbleness, which is our word for ultra cool. Stacey perms her thick blonde hair and wears sparkly nail polish and earrings that Claudia designs. She’s very pretty but a little on the thin side. That probably has a lot to do with her strict diet. Can you imagine always having to count calories and monitor your sugar intake and give yourself injections? I couldn’t do it. No way. But Stacey seems to manage all right and stay cheerful about it, too.
So those are my friends. The people who have helped me through the crises in my life — like when my dad lost his job. They’ve also shared my successes — like when I won the award for Best Overall Fiction at Young Author’s Day at school. Now I couldn’t wait to tell them about horseback riding lessons at Kendallwood.
It was five-twenty by the time I reached Claud’s house. I didn’t even ring the doorbell but raced upstairs to her room. Kristy was already leaning back in the director’s chair, her visor on her head and a pencil over one ear. Claud was rummaging through her desk drawers, looking for a bag of candy kisses that she’d snuck into her room when her mom wasn’t looking. Jessi had arrived a minute ahead of me and was just taking off her jean jacket.
“Jessi!” I could barely keep from shouting. “It’s happened. My dream has come true!”
Jessi blinked at me, mystified. “You won a million dollars?”
“No.” I chuckled. “Look.” I thrust the brochure into her hands, and while she read it, I said excitedly, “Well, not my whole dream. I mean, I don’t have my own private horse and stables and riding lessons. But this is the next best thing.”
Kristy leaned forward in her chair while Claudia stopped her candy search to stare at me. I tried to explain. “See, Jessi and I decided we wanted to be just like Sara Crewe, who is really Shirley Temple in the movie called The Little Princess.”
“This is going over my head,” Kristy said, turning to Claud. “How about you?”
Claud shrugged. “She’s totally lost me.”
I realized I wasn’t making any sense. So I took a deep breath and tried once more. “Jessi and I want a horse. We also want to take riding lessons. Well, I got this brochure that says Kendallwood Farm is offering riding lessons. They’re just on the edge of town and” — I pointed to the price — “they’re not too expensive.”
Jessi’s brown eyes shone as she raised her head and grinned at me. “I’m going to sign up for lessons, too.”
“We could do it together.” I squeezed her arm happily. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”
A slight frown crossed Jessi’s brow. “Of course, I’ll have to talk to my parents first.”
“Oh, me too,” I said. “But they’ll say yes. They just have to.”
“All in favor?” Kristy lifted her pencil like a gavel.
Jessi and I smiled at each other and shouted, “Aye!”
“Opposed?”
Claudia looked under the bed as a joke and shook her head. Kristy tapped her pencil on the desk. “Then it’s settled. You’ll both take horseback riding lessons.”
At that moment the numbers on Claudia’s digital clock switched from 5:28 to 5:29. The door opened and Dawn and Mary Anne rushed into the room, followed by Stacey. They called hellos to everyone and took their seats. Jessi and I dropped onto the floor at the foot of the bed as the clock numbers switched to five-thirty — and the meeting began.
I barely remember it because all I could think about was riding lessons at Kendallwood. The phone rang quite a few times as people called to arrange for sitters. In between calls, Stacey collected our dues, which she put in a manila envelope. Mary Anne diligently recorded the jobs in the record book as they were arranged.
I landed a job sitting for Nina and Eleanor Marshall on Wednesday afternoon; Stacey got a weekend job with the Arnold twins; and then Kristy, Jessi, Claudia, and Dawn each booked jobs. But I have to admit I wasn’t paying any attention by that time. I was still thinking about the thoroughbred in the brochure. I pictured myself perched on his back, looking elegant in my red riding coat, hunt cap, and long black boots.
Before I knew it, it was six o’clock and Kristy was waving her hand in front of my face. “Yoo-hoo, pardner!”
“Pardner?” I repeated, blinking my eyes in confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“Mal has returned to the planet,” Kristy cried triumphantly. Then she put her hands on her hips and said, “I’ve only been calling your name for the last three minutes. Where’ve you been?”
“Sorry,” I said, blushing. “I guess I was daydreaming about riding.”
“Well, in case you haven’t noticed,” Kristy said, pointing to the clock, “the meeting’s over. Time to saddle up your horse and head back to the corral.”
Kristy grinned at the rest of the club members, who began to laugh. Even though the joke was on me, I think I was the one laughing the hardest.
Ding-dong!
I pressed the bell at the Marshalls’ house Wednesday afternoon, and the door swung open before the ringing had stopped.
“Mallory! Hooray! You’re here.” Four-year-old Nina Marshall stood smiling in the doorway. “Come on in, but be careful not to step on Blankie.”
“Blankie” was a huge grayish baby blanket that was draped over Nina’s arm and was being dragged on the floor beside her. The edges were frayed where the satin border used to be. I realized that the blanket had once been pale blue, but lots of use and probably hundreds of washings had given it the faded gray color.
“Hi, Mallory,” Mrs. Marshall called from the kitchen. “I’ve just put two pot pies in the oven for the girls for dinner. They’ll be done around five o’clock. Eleanor is taking a nap but she should be getting up any time now.”
“How are her ears?” I recalled that Eleanor had suffered from ear infections when she was younger. I’d had to give her medicine for them many times.
“They’re just fine.” Mrs. Marshall smiled, pleased that I had remembered to ask. “I think now that she’s two, we’re past all that.”
I watched Nina cross into the den, dragging Blankie behin
d her. She called over her shoulder, “Come play Barbies with me, Mallory.”
Mrs. Marshall smiled at her daughter and then turned back to me. “Nina just started preschool,” she said in a confidential tone of voice. “The children attend three times a week, and today was her second day.”
“Oh? How’d it go?” I remembered watching my brothers and sisters go off to their first days at school, and how scared and excited they had been.
Mrs. Marshall pursed her lips. “I can’t really tell. Normally, she’s very talkative, but she’s kept awfully quiet about this.”
“Come on, Mallory!” Nina called from the den.
Her mother chuckled. “You two have a good time. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
I waved good-bye to Mrs. Marshall and, after checking to make sure Eleanor was still sleeping soundly upstairs, joined Nina in the den. She had laid two Barbie dolls and a pile of clothes on the floor.
I picked up one of the dolls and set it on my lap. “How about if we pretend that Barbie is going to her first day of school, just like you did?”
Nina blinked her blue eyes at me and shrugged. “Okay, if you want.”
“Sure. School can be fun.” I chose a pair of red-and-white-striped tights and a long top made of sweat shirt material for my doll. (Claud would have been proud.) As Nina dressed her Barbie, I asked gently, “Have you had fun at school, Nina?”
Nina shrugged once more. “I don’t know.”
I tried another question. “What did you and your friends do today?”
Nina was busy putting a long sequined gown on her doll, so she didn’t look up when she said, “I don’t have any friends.”
I walked my doll across the carpet to her and pretended to make her talk. “Oh, Nina, you’ll have lots of friends. It’s only your second day of school.”
Nina walked her doll toward mine. “It doesn’t matter what day it is,” she said. “I won’t ever have any friends.”
Hmm. “Gosh, Nina, don’t you like the kids at school?” I made Barbie say.
Nina walked her Barbie doll to a big pink plastic car and put her inside it. “Some of them. But they don’t like me.”
“Oh, I bet that’s not true.”
“It is so.” This time Nina’s lower lip stuck out in a pout that looked like she was dangerously close to tears. “They don’t like me or Blankie.”
“Blankie?” I pushed my glasses up on my nose and looked at the drab old blanket that lay across Nina’s lap. “You take Blankie to school?”
Nina nodded vigorously. “Blankie goes everywhere with me.”
I could just imagine Nina dragging that big old faded blanket to school and what the other kids must have thought about it. I asked in my gentlest voice, “Do the kids tease you?”
“Maybe.” Nina’s voice was barely audible. She picked up the blanket and held one frayed corner against her cheek and the other part under her arm, as if she were protecting it.
I knew how much Nina liked her Blankie, but I also knew how cruel kids can be. I tried to suggest some solutions to her problem.
“Blankie is such a big blanket. Have you thought about taking a different blanket to school with you? One that’s smaller?”
Nina’s eyes widened in horror at the idea of a substitute. “No, I want my real Blankie. He goes everywhere with me.”
“Maybe you could take Blankie to school but leave him in your cubby.”
“No, he’d be lonely.” She hugged the blanket even closer to her, as if she thought someone might try to steal it from her.
I hated to admit it, but I was stumped. It looked like Nina and her blanket would never be separated, so I gave up trying. Anyway, at that moment I could hear Eleanor in her crib upstairs.
“Nap done!” she shouted from her room. “Mommy! Nap done!”
I placed my doll back in her case and stood up. “I’ll get Eleanor and then why don’t the three of us go outside and play?”
Nina’s face brightened in a sunny smile. “That sounds like fun.” She returned her doll and the clothes to their case and began busily putting them in her wicker toy chest.
Eleanor was standing in her crib when I reached her room. Her hair was sticking out in all directions and she had that big-eyed look of surprise that little kids have when they first wake up.
“Hi, Eleanor,” I said, smoothing her hair. “It’s me — Mallory.”
She tried to repeat my name but what came out sounded more like “Mow-ee.”
I lifted her out of her crib and, as I changed her diaper, asked, “Would you like to go outside and swing?”
She rubbed the sleep from her eyes with the back of her fist and grinned. “Outside. Swing.”
Nina and Blankie met us at the back door and the three of us went outside. The Marshalls had set up a swing with a slide in their backyard. Eleanor made a beeline for it as soon as I opened the back door. Nina followed right behind her, still clutching the big gray blanket.
Eleanor stood by the swing and held out her arms to me. “Up. Please.” I lifted her into the swing and we watched as Nina and Blankie made their way up the steps of the slide. The blanket was so big that Nina could hardly hold onto the railing as she climbed.
“How is Blankie going to go down the slide?” I called as I gave Eleanor a gentle push in the swing.
“We go down together.” Nina lay the blanket across the slide, then sat in the middle of it and wrapped herself up as if she were in a sleeping bag. “It makes you go real fast.”
She was right. Nina whizzed down the metal slide and rocketed off the bottom, landing (luckily) in a soft mound of grass. Then she untangled herself from the blanket and raced for the swing next to Eleanor’s.
“How is Blankie going to get on the swing with you?” I asked.
“Easy.” Nina folded the blanket into a long shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders so that she looked like a football player with padding around her neck. Then she backed toward the swing and sat down.
“That’s amazing,” I said. Nina had obviously had a lot of practice with Blankie, and it was easy to see how tough it was going to be for her to leave her “friend” at home.
The timer went off in the kitchen and I clapped my hands together. “Chow time!”
Eleanor, Nina, and Blankie (I was now starting to think of Blankie as a third person) raced for the back door of the house. The kids took up their positions around the kitchen table, with Blankie sitting in his own chair this time, next to Nina. I served them their pot pies, and they were still eating when Mrs. Marshall came home.
As she looked through her wallet, I cleared my throat, all set to tell her about Nina’s possible trouble at school. But then I noticed the clock in the hall. I only had five minutes to get to the BSC meeting! (Did I tell you how strict Kristy is about starting on time? She absolutely hates it when any of us is late.) I decided I’d have to talk to Mrs. Marshall about Nina’s Blankie problem another time. I ran all the way from Rosedale, where the Marshalls live, to Claud’s house on Bradford Court.
It’s a good thing I did get there on time because the phone started ringing nonstop the moment our meeting began. Every single member of the BSC booked a job. In fact, we were so busy we even had to call one of our associates to see if he could take a Wednesday afternoon job. Mary Anne volunteered to make that call.
“I’ll phone Logan,” she said, already dialing his number. “I don’t think he’s busy on Wednesday.”
“You never know,” Claud teased. “He may have a date or something.”
Mary Anne stuck out her tongue at Claudia, but before she could say anything, Logan answered the phone. While Mary Anne made arrangements with him to take the Wednesday afternoon job, Jessi whispered to me, “Have you talked to your parents yet about riding lessons?”
I shook my head. “Tonight’s the night. I’ve been working on a strategy.”
“Strategy?” Jessi raised one eyebrow.
“Sure. I can’t ask about something as import
ant as riding lessons without having worked out the details first. Dad will ask a lot of questions, and I have to be ready with answers.”
Jessi grinned and shook her head. “Mal, you amaze me. I was just planning to ask my parents straight out.”
“That might work, too.”
Mary Anne had hung up the phone, and now Kristy was making an announcement about buying new items for our Kid-Kits, so I quickly whispered, “No matter what happens tonight, I’ll call you.”
“Right!”
Dinner at the Pike house can be pretty crazy at times, and Wednesday night was no exception. Nicky and Margo started a kicking war under the table, which ended with Margo in tears and Nicky banished to the other end of the kitchen. The triplets kept spooning mashed potatoes into their mouths and showing me what that looked like. I wanted to yell at them, but I had to keep a cool head. Tonight was the night I planned to ask my parents about taking riding lessons.
My mom had just finished wiping up Claire’s spilled milk when my sister knocked her glass over again. I leaped to my feet and cried, “I’ll clean it up this time, Mom. You stay there.”
“Thanks, Mallory.” My mother leaned back in her chair with a sigh of relief. “Now isn’t that nice?” she asked the table in general. “Life would be a lot easier around here if you all followed your sister’s example.”
My father, who’d seemed totally oblivious to everything that had been going on during dinner, looked up from his roast beef. “I think Mallory wants something.”
Sometimes I’d swear my dad can read minds. I didn’t think I had been that obvious.
“Every time Mal gets extra helpful,” my father continued, “it means she’s about to ask for something,” he said to my mother.
I thought back to the time I had asked to get my ears pierced and remembered that I’d done a major cleanup job that night, too.
“Okay, you caught me,” I admitted. “But what I want to ask is really important to me. Probably the most important thing in the world — so I want you to be in a good mood.”