Jessica Ramsey and Mallory Pike are eleven and in sixth grade and are younger than the rest of us (we’re all thirteen and in eighth grade). As junior officers, they can’t baby-sit at night (unless it’s for their own families), just afternoons and weekend days.
Like Kristy and Mary Anne (and Mary Anne and Dawn), and Stacey and Claudia, they are best friends. Mallory comes from a huge family. She has four brothers (three of them are triplets) and three sisters. Needless to say, the Pike family calls on the BSC quite a bit. In fact, that’s how the BSC members first met Mallory, who was one of the baby-sittees. But when the club needed more members, it seemed natural to turn to Mallory.
Mallory has red hair, and wears braces and glasses (although she is campaigning hard for contact lenses). She loves to read, especially horse stories, and she wants to be a children’s book writer and illustrator when she grows up.
Jessica Ramsey, on the other hand, is planning on being a prima ballerina. She’s already danced (even starred) in some productions and she takes special dancing lessons. Jessi comes from a much smaller family than Mallory, and has only two siblings — an eight-year-old sister and a baby brother. She shares Mallory’s love of reading and of horses, especially any horse story by Marguerite Henry.
Like Dawn and Stacey, Jessi and her family recently moved to Stoneybrook. Jessi had some of the same moving-to-a-new-town problems that Dawn and Stacey did, plus one. Because Jessi is black, she came up against some ignorance — in the form of prejudice. It took awhile for people to settle down and learn just how stupid their prejudices were, but they finally did.
Our other associate member is Logan Bruno (who usually doesn’t come to meetings). As a guy, Logan can bring some special skills to his BSC jobs, and has. And as Mary Anne’s boyfriend as well as a BSC member, he can always be counted on to help out. He moved to Stoneybrook from Kentucky and has a soft Southern drawl and easygoing ways. Mary Anne thinks he looks just like her favorite star, Cam Geary. I have to admit, Logan is major cute.
And that’s the BSC, except for one other VIM (Very Important Member), President Kristy Thomas. Kristy is the shortest member of the BSC, as well as one of the shortest people in her whole class at school. She’s a way casual dresser (new jeans and recently washed sneakers are her idea of dressing up), and she’s one of the few people I know who’s busier than I am. She even coaches a softball team made up of little kids, called Kristy’s Krushers.
Kristy is also the other BSC member with a large family. She has three brothers — her younger brother David Michael, and her older brothers Charile and Sam. She’s also got a stepfather, Watson Brewer, who is a real, live millionaire and a fanatic gardener. Watson met Kristy’s mother awhile ago and they fell in love (Kristy’s father left when David Michael was just a baby and they hardly ever hear from him). Not much later, Mr. Brewer and Mrs. Thomas got married. So Kristy and her family moved from the house next to Mary Anne (where they’d been bursting at the seams) to Watson’s mansion, which is across the street from our house. That’s how Kristy and I met.
Anyway, now Kristy also has a younger stepsister and stepbrother, Karen and Andrew Brewer, who spend every other month with them, plus a little adopted sister, Emily Michelle, who is Vietnamese. And when Emily came, so did Kristy’s grandmother, Nannie, to help take care of Emily and all the other things that were happening around the Thomas-Brewer mansion. And I shouldn’t forget my god-dog, Shannon. She’s named after me because I gave Kristy one of Astrid’s puppies after their wonderful collie Louie died (in fact that’s how Kristy and I really started becoming friends). There is also a fat, cranky cat named Boo-Boo, two goldfish, Karen’s rat, Andrew’s hermit crab, and an alleged ghost in the attic.
With all that going on, you can see why Kristy has to be super-organized and super-efficient!
Which is what she was being right now. She finished off her Mallomar in three quick (but efficiently chewed) bites, cleared her throat, and said, “Any new business?”
Everyone slowly shook their heads and we kept on with the business at hand — munching on the junk food.
“Well,” said Kristy briskly, “has anybody happened to notice that Mother’s Day is coming up?”
“Whoa, that’s right!” Claudia slapped her palm to her forehead. “It’s a good thing you reminded us, Kristy. I was about to use my last dollar on art supplies, and then I wouldn’t have been able to get my mom anything decent for Mother’s Day.”
Mother’s Day, I thought. Hmmm.
“Great, Claud, but I also brought it up for another reason. I think we should plan something special like we did before.”
“Another Mother’s Day surprise,” said Mary Anne, clasping her hands.
As if on cue, the phone rang. Kristy picked it up. “Baby-sitters Club. How may I help you?”
She took down the information (one of our regular clients was calling, Mrs. Papadakis, who lives across the street from Kristy and next door to me) and told her she’d call right back. Then Mary Anne looked up our schedules in the BSC record book (in which she has never, ever made a mistake).
“Everyone is free except me,” she reported. “But it’s a Friday night baby-sitting job, so that lets you and Mal out, Jessi.”
“Someday,” said Jessi.
Mal made a face.
We all looked at each other. Then Stacey said, “Why don’t you take it, Shannon? It’s in your neighborhood.”
“True,” said Kristy. “And I’ve got Krushers practice the next morning. I wouldn’t mind having Friday night free.”
“Go for it,” said Claudia. “You need the money for Paris, oui?”
I looked at Claudia in surprise. “You take French?” I asked.
“Hai,” answered Claudia. “That’s Japanese for yes. I also know the Spanish for yes. Sí.” She shrugged. “Call me multilingual.”
“Wow, three languages,” teased Stacey. “Say something else.”
Claudia rolled her eyes and grinned. “I can understand some Japanese because my grandmother Mimi often spoke it. But I can’t really speak it. When it comes to Spanish and French, sí and oui about does it.”
“No, it doesn’t, Claud. Think of all the great food words in French,” I said.
Claud looked puzzled, then said, “French fries?”
We started laughing, and Mary Anne wrote my name into the schedule for the Papadakises and called Mrs. Papadakis back to tell her.
“Pommes frites,” I said to Claudia as Kristy was hanging up. “That’s French fries. At least, I think it is.”
“You better make sure before you get to Paris,” Claudia warned me solemnly.
“About Mother’s Day,” Kristy said loudly.
Quickly, we turned our attention back to our fearless leader. “So, here’s the deal. We once gave the parents of the kids we sit for a special free day off on Mother’s Day. Let’s do something like that.”
“Like that, but different,” suggested Mary Anne. She’d had kind of a tough time last Mother’s Day, but had finally solved her dilemma by getting her father a Mother’s Day gift. That was before he and Mrs. Schafer got married. I wondered what she was going to do now.
“I’ll have to get two Mother’s Day presents,” said Mary Anne.
That answered that question. But it didn’t answer another question. What was I going to do about Mother’s Day?
Kristy was going on, “So let’s start thinking of ideas. We can discuss it at the next meeting, and then implement whatever plan we decide on.”
I hid a grin at Kristy’s official-sounding language. Besides, however Kristy said it, I knew that, as with all of Kristy’s ideas, we’d be going full steam ahead in no time.
The phone rang again and we were kept pretty busy for the last few minutes of the meeting. In fact, we ended up staying a few minutes late and Kristy hustled me out the door after she’d adjourned the BSC meeting. We’d talked a little more about the Mother’s Day surprise, but nothing concrete had come of it.
I
had figured out one thing though. The funny feeling I’d had as I was leaving my house, when I’d teased Mom about instant gratification and tried to find her something to do, such as gardening with Tiffany, had reminded me of just what I did when I was baby-sitting: keeping the kids busy and happy.
Being around my mom these days made me feel as if I were the adult and she was the kid. And the unhappy kid, at that.
Things hadn’t been great around our house, true. The last few holidays had been tense and pretty perfunctory. We’d have cake on birthdays, blow out the candles, and then all disappear, for example. And sometimes, my father would arrive so late that he might as well not have shown up at all.
None of us were happy with the way things were, I guess. But how had I ended up feeling responsible for my mom?
I didn’t know, but I didn’t like it.
And that was why I wasn’t excited to be thinking about Mother’s Day surprises or Mother’s Day gifts or Mother’s Day anything at all.
Saturday morning. Hah. It was mine, mine, mine, all mine and I loved the deeply serious decision I faced when I first woke up: go back to sleep, or get up and do nothing.
Guilt-free either way.
The sound of my father’s car backing out of the garage is what woke me. I rolled over and squinted at the dial of my Dream Machine. Wow. I’d have to remember this if I ever considered being a lawyer. Getting up at that hour is for early birds and worms.
And possibly Kristy, I thought sleepily.
I wondered if our fearless leader across the street was waking up early. If she was, I wondered if she’d face the same decision I’d make, or just get up automatically and start on some project. I decided that she’d do the project thing. Kristy is so organized that even her free time is organized.
On the other hand, I feel that free time is a reward I earn for being so organized: true free time, when you don’t have to be anywhere or do anything and your tests are studied for and your homework is under control and your chores are done.
Giving one last, brief thought to Kristy and what she might suggest I do with this vast, unbroken stretch of Saturday morning free time, I yawned. Then I made my decision: I rolled over and went back to sleep.
When I awoke again, it was past ten. The house was still quiet, but it was a different kind of quiet, an empty quiet.
I can be a morning person when I have to be, but when I don’t have to be, I am a basic slug. I got up (slowly) and wandered around my room, thinking vaguely of breakfast and lunch and whether I had to get dressed. As I wandered by my bedroom window, a movement caught my eye and I realized that Tiffany was hard at work in her garden. I wondered how long she had been there and how much work anyone could possibly do in a garden, or at least in a garden the size of Tiffany’s. It wasn’t all that big.
Hmmm.
I pulled some jeans on, stuffed the shirt tail of my giant sleeping shirt into them, and wandered downstairs in search of breakfast. A note on the refrigerator door informed me that Mom had taken Maria to a swim meet. All accounted for, if not present.
Breakfast was peaceful. I toasted English muffins and got all the flavors of jam out of the refrigerator and mixed them together in different combinations on my plate. It was something I used to do when I was a kid (okay, okay, so I was playing with my food like a little kid), but no one was around and it was Saturday morning. Then I reheated a cup of coffee in the microwave with half a cup of milk and three teaspoons of sugar.
Café au lait. Coffee with milk. That’s what it’s called. I wasn’t sure how to say sugar. Sucre? But it was fun to imagine I was sitting in a Paris cafe with my friends, drinking coffee.
I made another cup of café au lait (mostly au lait) and headed out to the garden.
“Hi,” I said. “How does your garden grow?”
Tiffany sat back on her heels and looked up at me with glowing eyes. “Look! The peas are coming up, just like it said in the book,” she said. She pointed to a row of tiny pale green bean-sprout-looking things, just breaking the soil. Or I guess I mean pea sprouts.
“That’s great, Tiffany,” I said. “How long before we have peas?”
“This kind will make peas in forty days, this kind in forty-eight days,” Tiffany said. “And I put another row of the same in over there a week later so we’ll have a long pea season. I love fresh peas, don’t you?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said.
“They’re very sweet,” said Tiffany. “This kind is called sugar snap. You can eat the peas and the pod!”
I wondered if Claudia had heard of sugar snap peas, and how they would rate on her junk food chart.
“You’re turning into quite a gardener,” I said. “Mom said her grandmother used to like to garden and had a real green thumb.”
“Our great-grandmother? Maybe I inherited it from her,” said Tiffany, looking even more pleased.
“Didn’t Mom tell you that when you started working on your garden?”
Tiffany shook her head. “She just told me to be careful not to dig up the roses. As if I couldn’t see a bunch of big, thorny rose-bushes! Sometimes Mom treats me like a little kid.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said.
Picking up her trowel, Tiffany said invitingly, “You want to help? I’m digging manure in for tomato plants. Tomatoes are heavy feeders and need lots of nourishment.”
“Manure? Um, no thanks,” I said. “Maybe some other time.”
“Okay.” Tiffany went back to her gardening. As I left, I heard her begin to whistle tunelessly.
The sun felt good on my face. I sat on the back step while I finished my coffee and watched Tiffany work. Rule #2 about free time (right after rule #1, Do Nothing) is that free time feels even better if you are doing nothing and watching someone else work. Rule #2A is that the work has to be work you don’t feel guilty about not doing yourself or helping to do.
I enjoyed rules #1-2A until the sun was high overhead and I heard Mom’s car pull into the driveway. I got up and went into the kitchen and began to rinse my cup and breakfast things to put into the dishwasher.
“How’d it go?” I called.
“Maria’s team won,” said my mother’s voice and a moment later she appeared in the kitchen door.
“Another victory for SDS Junior Swim Team,” I said. “Where’s Maria? I want to hear a splash-by-splash.”
“Maria’s freestyle relay came in third in one of the events,” said my mother. “She and her teammates decided to stay after the meet and get some extra practice in. Something about faster starts.”
“Oh,” was all I could think of to say.
“Anybody call?” asked Mom.
Was she thinking about my father? I shook my head. It was hard to read my mother’s expression.
“What about some lunch?” she said. “Watching all that swimming made me hungry.”
“I’ve been goofing off all morning,” I confessed. “And I’m hungry, too.”
We made sandwiches and salads and Mom went out to get Tiffany. A few minutes later she returned, looking puzzled.
“Tiffany said she can’t leave her garden right now.”
“Won’t,” I said. “She’s really into it.”
Mom smiled. “She is, isn’t she? It’s nice to be so involved in something.”
I wondered if Tiff wasn’t getting a little too involved in her garden, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, I poured out some seltzer and lime for Mom and some cola for me.
We ate in silence for a little while. Then Mom said, “Have some salad, Shannon. It’s good for you.”
“I don’t want any, thanks,” I said.
“Why don’t you like salad?”
“I do like salad,” I said, beginning to feel annoyed. “But I don’t want any right now. I had breakfast just a little while ago.”
“It’s important for a growing girl to get her vitamins,” Mom said. She picked up the salad bowl and scooped some salad out onto my plate. “And you shouldn’t have slept so
late.”
“Hey,” I protested, stung by the criticism. “It’s my free time. I work hard and I earned it and I can spend it sleeping late if I want to!”
“And I don’t work hard?” retorted my mom, her lips getting thin.
“I didn’t say that,” I answered.
“Eat your salad.” Maybe ordering me around was Mom’s idea of hard work.
“No, thank you,” I said, shoving the salad to one side with my fork. I must have pushed it a little more energetically than I meant to, because some of the salad fell off the plate and scattered on the table.
“Shannon!” said my mother.
“It’s not my fault!” I could hear the whine in my voice and I began to get really steamed. I couldn’t believe it. She was treating me like a child and I was starting to act like one, which made me even angrier. At least I didn’t say, “You started it.”
“Fine,” snapped my mother. “Don’t eat your salad.”
“I won’t,” I snapped back.
We finished lunch in angry silence.
I cleared off the table (rattling the dishes more than I needed to, I confess) and my mother picked up her purse from the table by the door.
“I’ve got some errands to do,” she said. “Do we need anything from the grocery store?”
“Salad dressing,” I said before I could stop myself.
My mother’s lips tightened, but she didn’t say anything. She just left.
And left me feeling like a jerk.
What had just happened? I couldn’t figure it out. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. When had Mom gotten so picky? So touchy? Oh, well.