Mary Anne is petite like Kristy, with large brown eyes and short brown hair. Her clothing is nice but kind of standard, not wildly fashionable or anything.
From what I hear, though, it’s a real improvement over what Mary Anne had to wear until seventh grade: pigtails and little-girl clothes. That was her dad’s rule back then, and Mary Anne had no mother to help convince her dad that she was growing up because her mother had died when Mary Anne was a baby. Ever since, her dad had tried to be super-parent. Her father’s notion of excellent parenting was to have rules for everything. Strict rules.
But then … true love came to Mary Anne’s rescue. True love for her father, that is. The former love of his life, Sharon Schafer, blew into Stoneybrook from California, just after she’d been divorced.
Her two kids blew into town on the same wind from the West Coast: Dawn and her younger brother, Jeff. (Actually, they arrived on a jet with their mother, but that doesn’t sound nearly as poetic.)
Mary Anne and Dawn met at SMS (Stoneybrook Middle School, where most of us are students). They couldn’t have looked more different. Dawn is tall and willowy, with long, white-blonde hair and a casual but trendy way of dressing. And there was little Mary Anne (she is short), still sporting pigtails and penny loafers. Despite this, they became instant friends. (Coolness points for Dawn, for looking beyond Mary Anne’s clothes and hair.)
One day, while paging through Dawn’s mother’s old high school yearbook, Dawn and Mary Anne discovered that their parents had once been boyfriend and girlfriend. They instantly hatched a plan to get them back together. After all, Dawn and Mary Anne liked each other so much as friends, wouldn’t it be even greater to be sisters?
So they thought. You know the saying, “Be careful what you wish for because you might get it”? Well … they got it. And it wasn’t exactly the paradise they had had in mind.
Richard, Mary Anne’s dad, and Sharon, Dawn’s mom, married, and they all lived together in the old farmhouse Dawn’s family had been living in, on Burnt Hill Road. (Jeff wasn’t there anymore; he’d gone back to California to be with their dad.) I don’t think blending two families is ever easy. In their case, it was complicated by several factors. One was food. Dawn and her mother adore health food. Mary Anne and her father aren’t crazy about it. Sharon is sloppy. Richard is neat. Sharon couldn’t stand Tigger, Mary Anne’s kitten. And Mary Anne and Dawn overdid the sister thing at first. They started out in the same bedroom, and ended up in separate ones.
Before too long, though, the Schafer-Spier bunch had worked out most of the kinks and were chugging along as a pretty harmonious group. Richard was feeling so happy and secure that he took a good look at all his rules and let Mary Anne grow up. That’s when she started dressing her age.
So anyway, things seemed to be working out for everyone. But then Dawn decided that she missed California and her dad too much. She decided to move back there full-time. Major trauma for Mary Anne, who’d grown incredibly close to Dawn.
Luckily, Mary Anne had her friends in the BSC. She and Kristy were still really tight. (They grew up as next-door neighbors.) And Mary Anne has a devoted boyfriend, Logan Bruno.
I suppose I could also give her coolness points for having a boyfriend. No one else in the group has a steady one. Stacey used to, but they broke up. Does having a boyfriend really have anything to do with being cool? I’m not entirely sure about that. I think being single and on your own is equally cool.
Anyway, Mary Anne has Logan and he’s nice. He’s down-to-earth, plays sports, and has an easygoing style. He’s even a BSC member. (I hear he’s great with kids.) He doesn’t usually come to meetings, but if there is an overflow of work we call him. In BSC terminology, that means he’s an associate member.
Our other associate, Shannon Kilbourne, lives near Kristy and me. Shannon’s sweet and smart with piles of curly blonde hair. Her brains (she’s in the Honor Society at her school) and her nice personality definitely rate high on the Abby Cool-Meter.
“Five thirty-one! Forgive us! Forgive us! We tried! Really!” A girl with thick, curly auburn hair threw herself to her knees in front of Kristy, her hands clasped together. Her glasses slid down her nose as she begged Kristy to give her a break. “I was walking Pow and he ran after a cat,” Mallory Pike explained. “Jessi was with me.”
“He waddled after the cat, really,” amended Jessica (Jessi) Ramsey, the tall, dark-skinned girl who’d come sliding into the room along with Mallory. “Pow doesn’t actually run.”
Pow is Mallory’s fat basset hound, and it’s true, I’ve never seen him exactly speed anywhere.
“Waddled … whatever,” Mallory conceded. “We still lost a minute going after them.”
“Next time, start walking him a minute earlier,” Kristy told them. “You can’t plan on everything always going right.”
“Okay, okay,” Mallory said, settling down on the floor next to Jessi. Mallory and Jessi are best friends and, at eleven, are the youngest members of the club. (The rest of us are thirteen.)
Jessi’s coolness comes from her natural elegance and the confident, graceful way she moves. She’s studied ballet forever and she’s super talented. Her dad takes her to ballet class in Stamford (that’s the city nearest to Stoneybrook) every week.
Mal’s coolness comes from her wit (the girl really whips off funny lines sometimes) and her talent as a writer and artist. Her goal is to be an author-illustrator of kids’ books. Kids are something she certainly knows about since she’s the oldest of eight.
“Let’s start,” Kristy opened the meeting. “I have something I want to talk to you all about. But first, does anybody have any new business to —”
She was cut short by the ringing of the phone.
Claudia was closest, so she snapped it up. “Baby-sitters Club. Oh, hello, Mrs. Papadakis.”
Maybe this would be a good place to explain how the club works. We call it a club, but it’s really more like a business. Kristy thought of it one day when her mother was making a zillion phone calls, trying to find a baby-sitter for Kristy’s younger brother. It occurred to Kristy that it would be great if her mom could call one number and reach several qualified sitters. With that in mind, she rounded up her best friends and started the club.
We meet here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from five-thirty (sharp!) to six o’clock. Clients call us here to arrange baby-sitting jobs. (We meet here because Claudia has her own phone line, so we don’t tie up anyone’s family phone.) The person sitting nearest the phone answers, takes the information, and then says she’ll call the client back. We decide who can take the job, then let the client know.
It sounds simple, but it takes some organization to make it run smoothly. That’s why we each have jobs, or offices.
Kristy is president. She keeps things organized and comes up with the big ideas. One of her first ideas was that we should write down our baby-sitting experiences in a club notebook. Every time we go on a job, we have to write about it. The notebook becomes a resource for us. It’s loaded with the most up-to-date information about our clients — who just started potty training, who’s suddenly afraid of the dark, who’s on a vegetable strike.
Claudia is vice-president. She’s really more like a hospitality chairperson. As I said earlier, she provides her room, her phone, and plenty of snacks. She even makes sure there are always healthy snacks available for Stacey.
Stacey is treasurer, because she’s so good at math. Her job consists mostly of collecting and keeping track of the dues we pay every week. Paying is a drag, but we need the money to help with Claudia’s phone bill, to pay Charlie to drive Kristy and me to Claud’s house, and to buy supplies.
One of the things we buy supplies for are our Kid-Kits (another Kristy idea). Kid-Kits are decorated cardboard boxes, filled with little toys, stickers, books, art supplies, and any other fun stuff we can think of. We sometimes bring them on sitting jobs, and they can really come in handy.
Mary Anne is our secretary.
In my opinion, she has the most important job of all. She keeps track of the club record book, which holds our master schedules. After a client calls, Mary Anne consults the record book to see who’s available to take the job. She records everybody’s commitments there. For example, my soccer practices (during the season), my allergist appointments, and so on. If I make an appointment to have my hair trimmed, I tell Mary Anne, and it goes into the book because it means I’m not available for baby-sitting at that time.
There’s other important information in the book, too. It contains the addresses and phone numbers of all our steady clients. It tells us what we need to know about the kids (for example, special medications or special rules). It even lists how much each client pays.
Mary Anne is unbelievably organized. I don’t think she has ever made a mistake. She’s awesome, really. I couldn’t do her job, that’s for sure.
I might have to, though. Someday. That’s because I’m the alternate officer. That means I have to learn everyone’s job and be ready to jump in if anyone’s sick or away or leaves the group.
So far I’ve been alternate president and alternate treasurer. (I didn’t like being the treasurer, but I did enjoy being the president. I guess Anna is right. Maybe I am a take-charge type.)
Jessi and Mallory are called junior officers. They’re not allowed to baby-sit at night (unless it’s for their own siblings). The work they do in the afternoons and on weekends frees the rest of us to take night jobs, though.
So that’s the club — who we are and how we work.
And, let me tell you, we were working at this meeting. No one got a chance to chat much because the phone never stopped ringing.
That was okay by me. I was kind of off in my own world. Scoliosisland, you might call it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Was my spine really crooked? It couldn’t be. It didn’t feel crooked. I was an athlete, after all. How could I have a crooked spine?
That woman must have made a mistake. She had to have.
But what if she hadn’t?
During the meeting, I nodded and smiled and went through the motions of being there. I even accepted a baby-sitting job. But all I could think of was scoliosis.
After awhile, I began to wish for a break in the phone calls. I wanted to talk about the health check. Had anyone else received a note? Did they know about scoliosis? Did they know anyone who had it? What would happen to me if I did have it?
There was no letup, though, and the time zoomed. Before I knew it, it was six. Everyone else was in a hurry to leave.
“Kristy,” Mary Anne said, stopping at the door. “Wasn’t there something you wanted to talk about?”
“I had an idea,” she replied.
“Uh-oh,” Claudia teased, laughing.
“An idea to sort of break up the winter blahs,” Kristy continued. But she must have seen how eager everybody was to leave. “It can wait until the next meeting,” she said.
That was all the permission everyone needed to hurry off to whatever else she had to do.
I wasn’t as happy to leave. Without the distraction of the meeting I could worry about scoliosis full-time. And all I had to look forward to that evening was going home and breaking my news to Mom.
“Abby, what’s wrong?” Anna asked me the moment she walked through the front door. She set her violin case on the floor and stared hard at me. I sat slumped desolately on the couch, my legs sprawled in front of me. “What’s happened? You look awful!” she said.
“You’re lucky you went on a field trip today,” I mumbled.
“It was really good,” Anna said, her face brightening as she peeled off her parka. Then she frowned. “What’s that have to do with anything?”
“Thanks to your trip, you didn’t get … a note,” I said ominously.
“A note?” Anna repeated in bewilderment. She pulled off her woolen hat and fluffed her hair. She’d just come from her violin lesson and was probably still thinking in terms of musical notes.
I was now dying to talk to someone about this. All the way home Kristy and Charlie had yakked a mile a minute about the big basketball game coming up at Stoneybrook High. Charlie was psyched about it, and somehow it didn’t seem appropriate to cut in and say, “Guess what? I may have scoliosis,” so I kept my mouth shut.
“What kind of note do you mean?” Anna asked.
“A note — you know, a piece of paper with writing on it,” I said, more irritably than I’d meant to. This whole thing was putting me in a horrible mood.
Just then, Mom came in the front door. In one gloved hand she clutched her worn, overstuffed briefcase. The New York Times was tucked under her other arm. “Wow! It’s growing colder out there,” she said with a shiver. In an instant, her sharp dark eyes darted between us, and she saw that something was up. “What’s going on?” she asked.
I had the note clutched in my hand and I thrust it forward. “This!” I said. “This is what’s going on.”
Putting her briefcase and newspaper down on the coffee table, Mom took the note. She read it quickly, scowling in concern. “All right, well … we’ll have you tested right away,” she said calmly when she was done reading.
I couldn’t believe she wasn’t more upset about this. She acted as though this were the same as having the car fixed or the boiler repaired. In fact, she’d been more upset the week before when the car started making a strange thumping noise. Maybe she hadn’t read the whole thing. “Mom, did you —” I began.
“I got one, too,” Anna interrupted me.
My jaw dropped.
It didn’t seem possible. How come she wasn’t more upset?
Anna rummaged in her backpack and pulled out the note.
“But … but …” I stammered. “How? You weren’t even there.”
“They tested everybody in the orchestra at the end of school, when we got back from the trip,” Anna explained. “Since we’re twins, I guess it makes sense that we both have it,” she added.
How could she be so calm?
Mom took off her coat and hung it up. “I’ll have to ask around for someone to recommend a good orthopedist,” she said, as if she were thinking out loud. “I’ll call Dr. Hernandez. Perhaps he can recommend someone in the area. If I can’t get a local recommendation, maybe we’ll take you to someone in the city.”
Mom is an executive editor at a big publishing house in New York City. She commutes every day. In many ways, she seems more comfortable in the city than here in Stoneybrook. She knows her way around better and knows more people there.
“Why aren’t you guys more upset?” I cried, tossing my hands up in the air. “What does this mean? I never even heard of it before! What does it do to your back? How did this happen?”
Mom sat down next to me on the couch, and put her fingertips together thoughtfully. “I don’t know a lot about it, Abby,” she said. “I know it’s not all that uncommon, and it’s better to detect the problem when you’re young, and that the treatment is usually successful.”
“What’s going to happen to us?” I asked anxiously. “What does treatment mean?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe you’ll have to wear a brace,” she replied.
“A brace!” I shrieked.
All I could envision was a horrifying image of myself sitting miserably with my head and arms sticking out of a sort of gleaming metal cage. Anna, too. We would clank together as we struggled to move.
Hot tears jumped to my eyes. “A brace!”
“Calm down, Abby,” Mom said mildly. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. The note simply says to have you tested. So that’s what we’ll do. In the meantime, I’ll try to track down some information so we can learn more about this.”
“But we obviously have it,” I said. “If just one of us received the note then … well … then maybe there would be a chance.”
“We’re not doomed,” Anna said, shaking her head. “You’re so overdramatic sometimes, Abby.”
“Overdramatic!” I yelped. Hones
tly, sometimes I can’t believe Anna is my twin. We are so not alike in some ways. “You just found out you might have scoliosis and you’re not even upset,” I pointed out. “I call that weird. Being upset is the normal reaction.”
“Normal for you maybe,” Anna countered.
“Yes, because I’m a normal person,” I shot back.
“I’m normal,” Anna said, sounding offended.
“Girls!” Mom interrupted sharply. “That’s enough. You’re both normal, just different.”
The same but different. That’s Anna and me exactly. We look alike, yet we don’t dress alike or wear our hair alike. Our personalities are different, but sometimes we are the same in the strangest ways. (We both like the same movies, for example. Once we both bought my mother the exact same pair of earrings for her birthday without even discussing it. Things like that.)
And now, apparently, we were the same in a new way. We both had scoliosis.
I looked up at Anna, standing by the coffee table. Strangely enough, I realized I was almost glad she’d gotten a note too. It made me feel less alone.
She must have been feeling the same thing, because she said, “We’ll get through it together, Abby. Don’t worry.”
I forced a little smile. “Okay, twin,” I said. “You’re right. We’ll get through it together.”
“Any new business?” Kristy asked at our BSC meeting on Wednesday.
“I have some,” I said. “I can’t be here next Monday.”
Kristy scowled. “Why not?” If you miss a meeting, Kristy expects you to have an extremely good reason.
I did.
“Anna and I have an appointment with an orthopedist in the city,” I explained. “Dr. Hernandez recommended him. Normally you have to wait longer for a visit to this doctor, but he’s seeing us as a favor to Dr. Hernandez. We have to go on Monday, because that’s when he can squeeze us in.”