Mal wears glasses and has braces and red hair. She likes to draw and write and would like to be a children’s book writer and illustrator someday.
Jessi’s family is a good bit smaller than Mal’s — average size, with her parents, her aunt Cecelia, an eight-year-old sister named Becca, and a baby brother named Squirt. And her passion is ballet. She’s good, too. She takes special classes at a dance school in Stamford, where you have to audition just to get in. She’s already danced lead roles in performances before hundreds of people.
Another difference is that Jessi doesn’t have braces or glasses or red hair. She is black, with black hair and brown eyes. This doesn’t matter to Mal or to any of us, but some people in Stoneybrook, I am ashamed to say, were bothered. The Ramseys’ neighbors gave them a hard time in the beginning. Luckily, they’ve settled down now.
And that’s the Baby-sitters Club. I looked around at everyone and cleared my throat. It was exactly 5:30. “The meeting will come to order,” I said.
“See? You even talk like a class president,” Stacey pointed out.
Just then the phone rang. I picked it up. “Hello, Baby-sitters Club.”
It was Mrs. Newton. I took down the information about the sitter she needed and told her I’d call her right back.
“Mrs. Newton needs someone next Monday from three-thirty until five. She’s taking Lucy to the pediatrician for a checkup.”
Mary Anne flipped the club notebook open.
“Stacey, you’re already scheduled for the Marshalls. And Mal, you and Jessi are down for —”
“I know. My family.” Mal’s mother always wants more than one baby-sitter because those seven kids are definitely a handful.
“I’ve got an art class,” Claudia said.
“Krusher practice,” I said, reluctantly. Jamie is one of my favorite baby-sitting charges, and we’re all crazy about Lucy, too.
“That leaves Dawn and me,” said Mary Anne. “Dawn, if you’d rather —”
“No. You take it, Mary Anne. I need some free time, and a Monday is good for that.”
“Don’t forget our BSC meeting,” I pointed out.
Dawn flashed a smile at me. “How could I forget?”
The phone rang again, and Mary Anne picked it up. It was the Papadakises, who live in my neighborhood. After we’d arranged for a sitter — Dawn this time — we had a lull.
“Did you see the notice about the class play?” asked Claud. She was alternately eating Oreos and sweet ’n’ sour gummy bears. It made me go all pucker-mouthed just to watch.
“Mary Poppins,” I said. “Disgusting.”
“I used to love Mary Poppins,” said Mary Anne diplomatically.
“Used to is the operative phrase here. I can’t believe it! I think we should do something real.”
“Definitely,” said Dawn. “Mary Poppins is a little babyish. Now if it was A Raisin in the Sun….”
“Or what about Our Town? Or The Glass Menagerie? I mean, why don’t we have any say in this? School is supposed to be challenging! Not … not Mary Poppinsish!” I said.
“Well, I just want to work on the scenery. Maybe you could do it, too, Mal?” Claudia put in.
“You know,” I said, really working up steam. “The play committee could use the talent we have at SMS, too. Like Jessi —”
Jessi laughed. “This sounds like a speech, Kristy.”
“Yeah,” said Stacey. “A candidate’s speech.”
I stopped. “You honestly think I should run?”
“You should do what you want to do,” Mary Anne said firmly.
Was Mary Anne trying to tell me something? If she was, I wasn’t listening. At least not then.
I looked around the room. If I ran, I would have a head start. I had Team Kristy right there — the Baby-sitters Club. I knew I could count on my friends.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I hearby officially announce my candidacy for class president.”
“All right!” cried Stacey.
“Awesome,” said Dawn.
“That’s great, Kristy,” said Mal.
“Dues and treasurer’s report, please,” I said suddenly to Stacey, switching back to the BSC meeting. I’d had so much to think about, I’d almost forgotten.
We all groaned, but we each handed over our dollar apiece. “That makes us seven dollars richer,” reported Stacey. “We were getting low,” she said after giving us the grand total.
The phone rang. As Mary Anne answered, Mal looked around at us.
“I was thinking of running for office, too,” said Mal. “For secretary of the sixth grade.”
“Way to go,” I said, but I have to admit, I was thinking more about my own campaign.
Mal went on. “I don’t know. Maybe not. Probably no one would vote for me.”
“You have my vote,” said Jessi.
“You’ll do great, Mal,” said Mary Anne loyally.
Mal blushed a little, but she didn’t look entirely convinced.
I glanced at my watch. It was 6:00. “Uh-oh. Time to go. Charlie will be here any minute to pick me up.” (We pay him out of our dues to drive me to and from BSC meetings.)
“Kristy for president!” sang out Claudia.
I had to admit, it sounded pretty good.
Jamie was excited. And that’s an understatement.
“Do you see anything?” he asked me for about the thousandth time.
“Not yet,” I said.
Today was the day his bike was being delivered. There was a good chance it would arrive before his mother returned from her meeting. I hoped so. Jamie’s enthusiasm was contagious. I was excited myself.
Jamie went down to the end of the driveway and peered both ways. He came back. “I don’t see anything yet.”
“A watched pot never boils, Jamie.”
Jamie wrinkled his nose. “What does that mean?”
That stopped me. I’d heard it all my life, but I’d never explained it to anyone. “It means, well, it means that if you keep looking for something to happen, it’s not going to. Like if you were watching a pot of water, waiting for it to boil, it would never boil. Or it would seem like it was never going to, because all you were doing was standing there watching it.”
Jamie looked even more confused than I sounded. Luckily, just then I heard Lucy through the open front door of the house.
“Come on,” I said.
Jamie followed me reluctantly into the house, looking back over his shoulder every step of the way. I would have let him stay outside, but I didn’t want him racing out to the street to watch for the bike while I wasn’t with him.
“We’ll go back outside,” I promised. “You can help pick out a toy for Lucy to play with.”
“She likes anything,” said Jamie. But he came along behind me.
Lucy is the best baby. She is sooo cute. And smart. She’d just let out one little experimental sort of wail, to get my attention. When I got to her room she was making urgley-smiling sounds.
“Urgley-urgley to you.” I smiled at her and reached down and picked her up to check if she needed changing. Fortunately, she didn’t.
Jamie picked up a soft bright cloth bunny with embroidered eyes and long embroidered eyelashes.
“Hurry,” he said.
We’d just reached the front hall when we heard the sound of the truck pulling up.
“My bike’s here!” Jamie screeched, and he took off.
Sure enough, the delivery man was lifting a big box out of the back of the truck.
“Newtons’?” he asked.
“I’m Jamie Newton,” Jamie told him. “That’s my bike.”
I signed for the bike, and settled Lucy in her playpen in the yard while Jamie wrestled with the cardboard.
We peeled the bike free and stepped back to admire it. Only it almost fell over. Jamie’s face fell. “It’s supposed to have training wheels.”
“Wait a minute. It does. Look, here they are, wrapped separately.” I studied the sheet of instruc
tions that had come with the bike. “It looks like all you have to do is screw them on.”
Jamie didn’t seem any happier. “I don’t know how.”
“Neither do I, but we can try. You have some tools in that drawer in the kitchen, remember? Go in and get a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Okay?”
“Please,” Jamie reminded me.
“Please,” I added, and he ran toward the kitchen. While he was gone, I stuffed the cardboard packaging into the recycling bin and took another look at the instructions. No problem. I hoped.
And it wasn’t. Maybe I should take mechanics or something, because the wheels went on as easy as could be. There was even a little tube of grease for the wheels and the chain.
“All set. Ready to roll, Jamie?”
Jamie was so excited he’d stopped talking. He just nodded vigorously.
“Okay. Up you go.” I gave him a boost and rolled the bicycle across the patch of grass onto the driveway.
But when I looked at Jamie again, he wasn’t smiling. He was just staring down at the ground.
“Jamie? Ready for your first real bike trip?”
Jamie didn’t nod. Instead he shook his head, still looking at the ground.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He looked up then. “I’m going to fall,” he wailed. “I’m going to fall and it’s going to hurt!” He stared back down at the ground.
“Oh, Jamie.” I put an arm behind him. “No you won’t. You have the extra wheels, see? You’re all balanced. You won’t fall. I’ll stay right with you.” Jamie didn’t answer. But I could feel how tense he was. “We could wait. Just a little while, you know. Until you got used to the idea.”
“NO.”
I waited, anyway. This was a new one. I tried to think what to do, tried to remember learning to ride a bike myself. And come to think of it I did remember falling. But that was after the training wheels, wasn’t it?
While we were standing in a frozen tableau in the driveway, Claudia showed up. “Claudia!” Was I ever relieved. Two heads would be better than one for sure.
“Hi, Kristy. Hi, Jamie. Neat bike!”
Jamie smiled and looked up (just for a second). “It’s mine.”
“I know. You look great.” Jamie nodded slightly.
“So, Claudia. Why don’t you get on the other side and we’ll walk alongside Jamie and hold onto him and the bike for his first ride,” I suggested. “Sort of like human training wheels.”
Claud understood right away. “Great.” She put her arm around Jamie and gave him a little squeeze. “Let’s just take a couple of steps, for practice, okay?”
Jamie nodded a little more, so that’s what we did. Two steps, stop, then two more steps, stop, then two more.
“Don’t you have art class today?” I asked Claud.
“Got out early. Mary Anne said you were here today, so I came over.” We reached the end of the driveway and made a big wide half-circle turn and started back. Jamie was frowning with concentration.
“Because,” Claudia went on, “I have some ideas for your campaign.”
“The campaign? Oh — great!” I hadn’t forgotten about it. I mean, who could, when you’d had to register and fill out forms and all that at school. But I’d sort of put it off, because no one could officially start campaigning till the following week.
Which wasn’t that far away now.
“What I thought is, you need a theme. And a striking design. But something simple, too. That’s the key to good design, you know. Simplicity. A shape the eye can instantly recognize as symbolic of what, or who, it represents.” Claudia may not like school, but she knows art.
We reached the top of the driveway and waited while Claudia flipped through her art notebook. “Here,” she said, holding something out to me.
On a piece of paper was the letter “K,” a really standout drawing of it. By the top of it was a + sign. “See,” Claudia explained. “It can mean K+ like a super grade in school. And what we do is we put this everywhere: You could just go around putting the word Okay everywhere, but with your brand-name K+ in it.”
“That’s how you really spell it, isn’t it?” I teased, and Claudia who is a world-class creative speller — which unfortunately means she doesn’t always spell words the way the dictionary does — grinned.
I grinned, too. “It looks great, Claudia.” I was really getting psyched now. “We can make buttons and all kinds of slogans —”
“Like A+ = K+.”
“Or Extra-special K.”
“Or Kristy for K+ President,” said Claudia, writing it out quickly in her notebook.
“It’s definitely time to get organized. Maybe we could get together after the club meets this Friday. I don’t have a sitting job that night, and we can check with Mary Anne and see who does —”
“Even if they do, we could have pizza and just go to our jobs from my house.”
“Good idea. Claudia, you’re a genius.”
Claudia looked pleased.
Jamie, meanwhile, did not. “More,” he said. “I need to practice more.”
I checked on Lucy, who was still being the perfect baby, crawling contentedly around the playpen. “Hi, Lucy,” I said. She sat up and waved her hands around, making a sound that could have meant “Hi, Kristy.”
“Kristy!”
“Coming, Jamie!” I patted Lucy gently, then went back and took up my position by the bike.
As we turned and headed down the driveway again, Claudia said, “Oh, I almost forgot. Mal’s decided to go ahead and run for secretary of the sixth grade. Jessi’s going to manage her campaign.”
“She’ll do a great job,” I said. “Will you be my campaign manager?”
“We-e-ell,” said Claudia, pretending to think. “Since I am an artistic genius, I suppose I can.”
“Super. Super-plus,” I said.
“Kristy for president.” Claudia flung up her free hand and pretended she was waving to a crowd.
“Baby-sitters rule,” I answered, laughing.
We pushed Jamie up and down the drive way about a hundred more times until his mother came home. I thought he was getting better, but I couldn’t be sure. At least we weren’t stopping every two steps. I was glad I hadn’t told him that learning to ride a bike was easy. Right now it looked like Jamie was going to have to work pretty hard at it, even with training wheels.
But I knew he would, too. That’s one of the things I like about Jamie, that we all like. He’s definitely not a quitter.
At the end of our meeting on Friday, as Mal and Jessi were heading down the stairs to go sit for Mal’s brothers and sisters, I got out of the director’s chair and indicated that Claud should sit in it.
“You’re the campaign manager,” I said.
“Speech, speech,” teased Stacey.
Claudia held up the bag of taco chips she’d been devouring and said, “I hereby declare as my first official act as Kristy’s campaign manager that we order pizza.”
“We do have to keep up our strength,” Dawn put in. “Good nutrition is a key ingredient to a successful campaign … I vote for ’shrooms.”
“Onions,” said Stacey.
“Double cheese,” Mary Anne said.
“Pepperoni?” I asked. “On half,” I added as Dawn wrinkled her nose.
Claudia pulled the phone toward her and placed the order, while Mary Anne turned to me. “Do you want me to collect money from everyone, or …”
Like a good baby-sitter — and a good candidate for class president — I was prepared. “We can’t use the BSC money, of course. So this is on me. Think of it as campaign expenses.”
“I can see you know how to campaign,” said Dawn solemnly.
“I also know how to shake hands, and I’m very good at kissing babies.”
Stacey said, “You’ve got to win, Kristy. Look at the other candidates. Alan Gray …”
“Yeah, but he nominated himself,” said Dawn reasonably. “He’s probably not going to get
all that many votes.”
“Besides, Alan Gray would probably shake babies and kiss hands,” I said, choking. The thought of Alan Gray kissing anybody made me shudder.
“And then Grace,” said Dawn. “She definitely got nominated.”
Grace Blume wasn’t a much better candidate in my opinion. After all, she, like Cokie, has pulled some nasty tricks on me and the others in the BSC. Still, she’s popular, which is probably why she’s running. For Grace, being elected to class president means winning a popularity contest, and that’s about it. She’d probably just rest on her laurels — after she’d gotten a rule passed against members of the Baby-sitters Club attending Stoneybrook Middle School!
“Pete Black got nominated, too. He’s not so bad,” Mary Anne said.
I wrinkled my nose. I didn’t want to contradict Mary Anne, but I think Pete can be really immature.
Mary Anne saw me and smiled. “But you’re definitely the best, Kristy.”
“Right on,” said Dawn.
“Right on?” asked Stacey.
“I think it’s an old hippie expression.”
“Oh. Like far out.”
“Like right.” Dawn shook back her blonde hair, which she had fixed in little braids around her face.
“Like the pizza won’t be here for at least twenty minutes, so let’s get started,” said Claudia, hanging up the phone. She flipped open her art notebook. She’s done a new, more detailed drawing of some of the K + designs. They really stood out.
“I thought we’d use this design for our handouts, and we can try other designs for the posters. Mary Anne, did you bring poster paper?”
“Didn’t you see me bring it in?” Mary Anne motioned to where a huge bag of poster paper was propped against the foot of the bed.
“Right,” said Claudia, very officially. “Now, we can also make buttons, like this …” She flashed another design “… or this.”
Mary Anne reached out for the designs and studied them thoughtfully. “I like them both.”