You may find it hard to believe, but loud Kristy and shy Mary Anne have been best friends practically since birth. (That’s what I mean about the BSC — everyone fits together.)
Now. On to Claudia. Claudia Kishi, that is. She’s our vice-president. She’s Japanese-American and totally stunning, with silky black hair, almond-shaped eyes, and a perfect complexion. She’s got a great figure, too, despite the fact that she is a junk food fanatic. You can’t spend two minutes in Claudia’s room without her pulling a Ring-Ding or a Twinkie or a Snickers bar out of some hiding place. She’s got all kinds of art supplies, too, but those are out in the open. Claudia’s main thing (besides junk food) is art. You name it, she can do it well — painting, drawing, sculpting, jewelry making … even the way she dresses is artistic. For instance, she walked into school today wearing a bright yellow, oversize man’s jacket with rolled-up sleeves; a wide paisley tie right out of the nineteen-sixties; orange stirrup pants; ankle boots; and huge hoop earrings — and you know what? On her, it looked totally cool.
Oh, another passion of Claud’s is Nancy Drew books. She has them hidden around her room, too, because her parents don’t approve of them. They think she should be reading classics or textbooks, like her sister, Janine. Janine’s a certified genius, with one of the highest IQs anyone’s ever heard of. (She’s the kind of person who finds mistakes in the dictionary.) She and Claudia get along okay, but they couldn’t be more different. Claudia doesn’t do very well in school — probably because she always feels she can’t compete with Janine. Which is too bad, because Claudia’s really smart. Oh, well, she’ll become a famous artist someday and then it won’t matter what grades she got in school.
Claudia’s best friend is Stacey McGill, who is our treasurer. Stacey is as sophisticated as Claud, and she also has a flair for wild clothes and jewelry. They both have boyfriends sometimes, although no one steady. But that’s where the similarities end. For one thing, Stacey’s got blonde hair and blue eyes, she’s an only child, and — here’s the best part — she’s from New York City! Just like I’m a California girl at heart, Stacey’s a real New Yorker. She has a map of the city on her wall, and something called an alternate-side-of-the-street-parking calendar, with cartoons about car-parking (they’re really dumb, but New Yorkers supposedly find them hilarious). Stacey moved to Stoneybrook when her dad was transferred here (he’s a businessman) — then, when he was transferred again, she moved back to New York. But less than a year after they settled into a new apartment, her parents told her they were getting a divorce — and Stacey moved with her mother back to Stoneybrook. She could have chosen to stay in the city, but she didn’t. That was a tough decision for her, but we were thrilled when she came back.
Stacey’s life is complicated by one other thing, if you can believe it. She has diabetes. That’s a disease in which your body has trouble controlling the level of sugar in your blood. Stacey has to be on a strict diet for life (meaning no sweets) — and she has to give herself daily injections of a drug called insulin. To tell you the truth, I still don’t know how she can watch Claudia pull out candy left and right and not go totally crazy.
There are two junior officers in the BSC — “junior” because they’re in sixth grade (the rest of us are in eighth grade). You know one of them already — Mal. The other one is Jessica (Jessi) Ramsey. She and Mal are best friends. Both of them love to read and are crazy about horses. Jessi’s the oldest in her family, just like Mal, but she has only one sister (Becca, short for Rebecca) and one brother (Squirt, short for Squirt). Actually, Squirt’s real name is John Philip Ramsey, Jr., but he was really tiny when he was born, and some nurses at the hospital gave him the nickname. Becca is eight and a half and Squirt is a little over a year.
Jessi’s big talent is ballet dancing and she wants to be a pro. I have to say, she is good, and she doesn’t even get stage fright. Jessi is also the BSC’s only black member. The Ramseys are one of the only black families in Stoneybrook, by the way. Some of the people here gave Jessi’s family a rough time at first, but fortunately things have calmed down and the Ramseys are much happier.
Well, those are the club members. I’ll tell you about the club itself in a little while, so stick around!
Back in our house, Richard was putting trivets on the table. Even Mom was hard at work, setting place mats and filling a water pitcher.
Suddenly I was famished — and feeling a lot more energetic than I had when I got back from the Pikes’.
That Friday Mary Anne and I rode our bikes to our club meeting as usual. Where were we heading? Claudia’s house. Her bedroom is the official meeting place of the Baby-sitters Club for one very important reason — she’s the only one of us who has her own private telephone. (That’s also the main reason Claudia is the club vice-president.)
It was three days after my job at the Pikes’, and to tell you the truth, I had sort of forgotten about Pens Across America and the Zunis. All I was thinking about was the same thing I think about whenever I go to a BSC meeting on Friday: no school tomorrow. We also meet on Mondays and Wednesdays (5:30 to 6:00 is our meeting time on all days), but Friday meetings are my favorites. Everyone is so relaxed.
Usually.
I’m dying to tell you what happened at this meeting, but first let me explain a few things about the club. Actually, club is sort of the wrong word for it, because it’s really a business (but I guess “Baby-sitters Company” would sound kind of strange). When Kristy thought up the idea for the club we were all in seventh grade. Back then, B.W. (Before Watson), Kristy and her two older brothers used to take turns baby-sitting for David Michael. One day, when none of them could sit, Mrs. Thomas called to try to find an outside sitter … and called … and called, but no one was free. She was on the horns of a dilemma (sorry). Well, that’s when something clicked inside Kristy’s mind. Wouldn’t it be great if a parent could dial one number and reach a whole bunch of baby-sitters!
The Baby-sitters Club was born. Right away, Kristy got Mary Anne, Claudia, and then Stacey to become the first members. They decided on the meeting times, when people could call and line up a sitter. Then the four of them could fill the jobs, and everyone would be happy. To get customers, they put an ad in the Stoneybrook paper and distributed fliers throughout their neighborhoods. Well, the rest is history. Kristy’s great idea caught on like crazy. When I moved to Stoneybrook that January, they had so much business they couldn’t wait to take in a new member (lucky me). Before long, there were two associate members — Logan Bruno and a friend of Kristy’s named Shannon Kilbourne. (They’re strictly backup people we call on if we’re all busy.) Jessi and Mallory became our junior officers when Stacey moved to New York — and they stayed in the club even when Stacey moved back (once a club member, always a club member).
Kristy, as I said, is the club president. She runs the meetings and constantly comes up with new plans and ideas — like a summer play group; a special Mothers’ Day event, when we took the kids to a carnival as a gift to our clients; and, of course, Kid-Kits. They’re boxes filled with our old games, books, toys, coloring books, paper, and crayons. Each of us has one, and we take them on our jobs sometimes. Let me tell you, kids love them.
Kristy also thought up the idea of the club notebook. That’s our official diary. We have to write about every single job we take — and read all the other entries. It’s how we keep track of our kids’ likes, dislikes, new habits, things like that. It’s also a record of how each of us has dealt with baby-sitting problems. Writing in it is not my favorite thing to do, but I realize it helps keep us prepared.
I mentioned already that Claudia is our VP. To be honest, she doesn’t do a whole lot at the meetings, but it is her phone, and we do eat all her junk food, so it is only right that she should be an officer.
Mary Anne is our secretary. She’s in charge of the club record book (not to be confused with the notebook I just mentioned). The record book is a list of clients’ names, addresses, and phone numbers, a rec
ord of how much money we make, and our weekly sitting schedule. You can imagine what it’s like to keep track of that for seven girls, what with Claud’s art classes, Jessi’s dance lessons, and Mal’s orthodontist appointments (just to name a few problems). I’ll tell you, it makes me dizzy just to look at the book, but you know what? Mary Anne has never — I mean never — made a mistake. She keeps track of it all in her tidy handwriting.
As treasurer, Stacey handles the money. She’s one of these people who can add and subtract numbers in her head like a calculator, so she’s perfect for the job. At every Monday meeting, she collects club dues from us. Yes, dues. We all grumble about it, but we understand how necessary it is. The money goes to group expenses, like helping out with Claud’s phone bill, paying Charlie for driving Kristy to and from meetings (Watson’s mansion is pretty far away), buying new things for the Kid-kits, and (if there’s any left over) a club pizza party or sleepover now and then. Stacey is very thrifty. She keeps track of every penny and hates to spend it unless it’s absolutely necessary.
I like being the alternate officer. I’m sort of an understudy. If someone can’t make a meeting, I get to take over her job. For a while, when Stacey moved to New York, I was the club treasurer. But I’m not a math genius, so I was happy to return the job to her when she moved back. So far I’ve filled in for just about everyone.
Our two junior officers, Mal and Jessi, aren’t allowed to take late sitting jobs unless they’re at their own homes. So they do a lot of the daytime sitting, and that frees the rest of us up at night.
Okay, now you know all there is to know about the club. Finally I can tell you about our meeting.
Mary Anne and I arrived early that day. Claudia greeted us at the door to her room with her hair in a ponytail on top of her head, held up by a huge barrette in the shape of a bone, like Pebbles in The Flinstones. It made her hair bounce when she moved. She was even wearing a Pebbles-type outfit — a pink, off-the-shoulder blouse with huge polka dots and a ragged bottom over black tights. On anyone else it would have looked dumb or babyish, but on Claudia it looked cool.
As we walked into her room, her clock read 5:23. There were a few schoolbooks on her bed — all closed — and a huge pad of paper where she had been sketching some abstract drawings of a half-human, half-horse (at least that’s what it looked like).
“Have you tried these, Mary Anne?” Claud said, reaching under her pillow to pull out some new kind of dark-chocolate caramel.
“Nope,” Mary Anne said.
“Have one,” Claud offered. Then she lay flat on her stomach and pulled a big bag of pretzels from under her bed. “These are for you, Dawn.”
She didn’t have to twist our arms. We each got into position on Claud’s bed — sitting cross-legged, leaning slightly forward, and chewing. That’s how we sit in most of the meetings. (Stacey and I switch off sometimes — one of us sits in Claudia’s desk chair, with the chair backward and our chin resting on the top rung.)
“Any calls?” I asked. Sometimes clients forget when our meetings are and call us at odd hours.
“Nnrrrp,” Claudia said with her mouth full.
We immediately started giggling, and I could feel a lump of pretzel starting to go up my nose, which made me giggle even more. That made Mary Anne giggle more. Claudia put her hand over her mouth and made some strange snorting noise that she obviously couldn’t help.
Wouldn’t you know it was at that moment that Kristy walked in. “What happened?” she said innocently.
Well, you know about giggling. Once you start, everything seems funny. We were rolling on the bed now, and Kristy looked like she was ready to commit us. She shook her head and climbed into Claud’s director’s chair.
Before long, Stacey arrived, then Jessi. By that time, we were pretty much under control, chatting and munching. Stacey sat in the desk chair, exactly the way I described. Jessi sat on the floor, leaning over and touching her toes, with her chin practically resting on her knees — and talked to Stacey as if she were in the most comfortable position in the world. It hurt just to look at her.
At 5:29, I could see Kristy’s eyes glue themselves to the clock. The instant it turned to five-thirty, she called out, “Order!”
As we quieted down, Kristy looked at the door. “Anyone know where Mallory is?”
We all shrugged.
“Orthodontist appointment?” Kristy asked Mary Anne.
Mary Anne checked the record book and shook her head. “Not till next week.”
Kristy was the only one who seemed upset. I mean, everyone’s human — once in awhile, just about each one of us is late.
But just try telling that to Kristy.
She let out a big sigh and said, “Okay, I have an idea for something to put in the Kid-Kits. Stacey, could you check how much money we —”
That’s when Mallory came in. Now, usually when someone shows up late, she sort of quietly slips in and sits right down, mumbling “sorry” or something. But Mal didn’t do that. She just stood there for a second, her brow wrinkled and her mouth in a frown. Right away we knew something was wrong.
“Mal?” Mary Anne said with concern. “Are you all right?”
Mallory gave a distracted nod. “I’m fine. Didn’t you guys hear what happened?”
Six totally blank faces looked back at her. “No, what?” Stacey asked.
“You know the pen pals’ school, in New Mexico?” she said.
We nodded.
“It burned down.”
That was the last thing anyone expected to hear. We just stared at her, as if she had just said, “The grass is purple,” or something else you couldn’t respond to.
“What?” Kristy finally said.
“Vanessa got a letter from her pen pal,” Mal said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “There was a fire at a gas station near the school. It sort of went up like an explosion and then it spread.”
“That’s horrible!” I said.
“Was anybody hurt?” Claudia asked.
Mal shook her head. “Not seriously. But the school was destroyed, and so were some homes.”
No one knew what to say. I only knew the Zuni kids through baby-sitting with the Pikes. Yet somehow, I couldn’t keep my stomach from knotting up. I had listened to all the letters and, in a way, I felt that those kids were my friends, too.
“Vanessa was really upset,” Mallory added, “and so were the triplets. I had to calm them down. That’s why I was late.”
“Wow,” Stacey said in a low voice. “I wish there was something we could do.”
“Maybe there is,” I said.
Mallory looked at me hopefully. “What?”
I didn’t know the answer to that question.
But I was determined to find it.
It was a Friday night, but it sure didn’t feel like it.
Usually Friday night dinner is one of the most fun times in our house. It’s the beginning of the weekend and everyone’s in a good mood. Sometimes there are no more leftovers and no one wants to cook, which means getting pizza or Chinese food or something. Mary Anne and I usually chatter about five miles a minute. When we’re not talking, we’re shoveling in food or laughing (I know this makes us sound like pigs, but we’re actually neat about it).
After the BSC meeting that night, though, it was another story. Richard had picked up some vegetarian Mexican food on his way home from work, and instead of wolfing it down happily, we were all kind of quiet and lost in our thoughts.
At least I was. I was thinking about those kids in New Mexico. Mary Anne was probably thinking about them, too, but knowing her, she was also wondering why I was so quiet. Mom and Richard knew something was wrong, and they were trying hard to make cheerful conversation.
It was Mom who broke the ice. “Dawn,” she said, “did something happen at school?”
I took a deep breath. Then I told her about Pens Across America, Conrad White, Rachel Redriver, and Sha’la’ko. I described our meeting and Mal’s news about th
e fire. Mom listened patiently, nodding with concern. “How awful,” she murmured after I’d finished.
“Maybe they didn’t have a good sprinkler system,” Richard added.
To be honest, that seemed like a pretty strange reaction, but I didn’t say so. “I guess not,” I replied with a shrug.
“I know how Dawn feels,” Mary Anne said. “It just seems so … unfair.”
“It is,” I agreed. “They’re really nice kids, Mom — and they work so hard, and they don’t have much money …”
“The Pikes are really upset about it,” Mary Anne added. “Mal says her brothers and sisters were almost crying. It’s like something happened to their best friends.”
Mom gave us both a sympathetic smile. “It is unfair,” she said. “But the important thing is that no one was seriously hurt. And they’ll rebuild whatever was destroyed.” She shrugged. “Life goes on.”