With each name, my heart sank. Not that I hate reading. I like it. But this was serious stuff. How was I going to do all of it and baby-sit?
After class I slumped into the hallway, avoiding eye contact with Cokie. Fortunately, the next period was lunch. Mary Anne, as usual, was waiting for me by her locker.
“Uh-oh,” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
I shrugged. “Nothing a terrible hot lunch can’t cure. I just can’t believe how much work I have to do this year.”
“Me, too,” Mary Anne said as we walked toward the cafeteria. “My science teacher is making us collect specimens and set up a home lab …”
Mary Anne’s sentence trailed off. She was staring at a huge poster on the bulletin board outside the cateteria. In splashy red letters, STONEYBROOK FALL FROLIC was printed over a background of bright, colorful leaves.
“‘A day of autumn crafts and events,’ ” I read aloud. “ ‘Brenner Field. Saturday, October fifth.’ Whaaaat? That was the day for Fall Into Fall! How could they do this to me?”
“Oh, Kristy, don’t be upset,” Mary Anne said. “Maybe it’s just as well. I mean, we’re all kind of tired from the Mexican festival. No one will be disappointed if we don’t do it —”
“Who said anything about not doing it?” I asked. “We’ll postpone it until the twelfth. The trees will be more colorful, anyway.”
“Uh-huh,” Mary Anne said dully.
We stepped onto the lunch line. I grabbed a tray and slapped it onto the metal track. “You make it sound as if no one wants to do Fall Into Fall,” I remarked.
“I didn’t say that. It’s just that everyone is busy, Kristy. You said yourself that school is going to be a lot of work this year.”
As Mary Anne was loading up her tray, I spotted Claudia entering the line. “Hi, Claud!” I called out.
Mary Anne’s face froze. She quickly picked up her tray and scooted toward the tables.
I took a couple of frozen yogurts and followed her.
The usual BSC table was empty. Mary Anne sat at the end of it. I sat to her left.
“Don’t let her near me,” Mary Anne whispered.
“Can’t you guys just kiss and make up?” I asked.
“Ask Claudia. She’s the one who decided not to talk to me.”
“Well, you weren’t exactly Miss Congealiality yourself.”
“Gene. Congeniality.”
“Whatever.”
Claudia sat down across the table from me, two seats to my left. She gave me a tight-lipped smile and said hello.
“Hmm, I have this crick in my neck when I turn your way, Claud. Maybe you can slide over a few seats closer to my friend, Mary Anne.”
I thought a little humor wouldn’t hurt. Boy, was I wrong. Claudia frowned and dug into her sandwich. Mary Anne began twirling her pasta onto a fork.
“Hey, guys, anyone know what’s between the bread today?” Abby’s voice called out.
She and Stacey sat down directly opposite me, creating a kind of buffer zone between the enemy camps.
Abby lifted a slice of bread from her sandwich and examined the brown glop inside. “So that’s what they did with last year’s footballs.”
Stacey nodded. “Recycling.”
Claudia and Mary Anne silently chewed their meals. They looked like the faces on the rocks at Easter Island.
“Did you see that poster?” Abby asked. “Guess we’re off, huh?”
“Nah,” I replied. “We’ll do it the week after.”
Mary Anne shook her head. “We can’t. Mallory and her family are visiting cousins in Pennsylvania.”
“Janine’s getting a certificate from the chamber of commerce that day,” Claudia muttered. “Genius of the decade or something.”
I shrugged. “Okay, then, the week after.”
Abby took a date book from her backpack and leafed through it. “We’re visiting my uncle on Long Island that weekend.”
“The next week,” I pressed on.
“That’s the last weekend in October,” Stacey said. “My dad’s taking me apple picking in the country.”
Abby laughed. “How about a Thanksgiving festival instead?”
“Fall Into Winter,” Stacey suggested.
“We could hang snowballs from the trees,” Claudia said.
Everyone was cracking up now. No one seemed concerned about our crisis.
“Don’t you guys want to do this?” I asked.
No one answered right away. They were all looking at each other. Trying not to smile.
I could take the hint.
“Great, guys,” I said. “Just great. I go through all the trouble to think up the most fantastic event in BSC history, and no one wants to do it. Forget it, then. It won’t work if I’m the only one interested.”
I shoved a hunk of hamburger in my mouth.
“It’s not that, Kristy,” Mary Anne said.
“Oh, yes, it is,” Abby piped up.
I glared at her. “What’s with you guys? Don’t you want to get the year off to a good start?”
“Sure,” Abby said. “But Kristy, you have to face facts. If we can’t do it, we can’t do it. As my dad used to say, ‘You have to meet your overhead and move on.’”
“What’s overhead?” Claudia asked.
Abby looked up. “A roof.”
“Oh!” Claudia blurted out. “Mary Anne, I forgot to tell you. I have a dentist appointment on Wednesday afternoon. Dr. Rice could only make an appointment during meeting time.”
“I have a problem, too,” Stacey said. “With Monday. My doctor wants me to come in for a checkup.”
Mary Anne scribbled notes on the back of a napkin.
Abby cleared her throat. “While we’re on the subject, what if marching band practice goes past five-thirty? Can I, like, have a lateness clause?”
“Marching band?” I asked. “Is this some kind of joke?”
Abby shrugged. “I’m thinking of it. Anna says I should start on an instrument.”
What was going on here? Had the Baby-sitters Club suddenly dropped to bottom priority? I wanted to jump up and scream at them.
I counted to twenty in my head, then said, “I knew when we changed our schedule, something like this would happen.”
Stacey rolled her eyes. “Kristy, one thing has nothing to do with the other.”
“Remember when Monday, Wednesday, and Friday used to be untouchable?” I asked. “We set up our appointments and stuff around meeting times. Gladly. Because we knew we had to. That was why I didn’t want to change Fridays. Once you do something like that, you’re saying the club isn’t that important. Now look what’s happening — a chain reaction.”
“Uh, I think you may be taking this a little too seriously,” Claudia said.
“Our clients depend on us,” I shot back. “That’s why they keeping calling back. Our motto was, ‘One call, seven sitters’ — remember? Not, ‘One call, four or five sitters who bothered to show up and a couple of others out shopping.’ ”
“Kristy, our clients don’t care who’s actually at the meeting,” Stacey said. “They can’t see us.”
“I never understood why we have to be so strict about attendance,” Abby added. “Mary Anne can book an absent member for a job.”
“When you think about it, we could have the club with no members present at all,” Claudia remarked. “Just let the answering machine pick up. I mean, we always take their information and call back anyway.”
“Oh, great, Claudia,” I said. “So why bother having meetings at all?”
“Hey, relax, I wasn’t serious,” Claudia replied. “I just meant that we can be flexible. We’re busy people, Kristy. We have to bend a little.”
I pushed my chair back and stood up. “Look. I invented the Baby-sitters Club. The whole idea was to work together. Human-to-human contact, over the phone and in meetings. If you don’t have that, you don’t have a club. Period.”
“Kristy —” Mary Anne pleaded.
B
ut I’d heard enough. I picked up my tray and walked away.
I had completely lost my appetite.
“Kristy, look!” called Jackie Rodowsky.
My back was to him. I was busy gassing up Archie Rodowsky’s toy car with a garden hose (shut off, of course).
“Vroom! Vroom! High octame, please!” ordered Archie.
Jackie is seven and Archie’s four. I was sitting for them Tuesday afternoon because their parents and their nine-year-old brother, Shea, were at a teacher conference.
Actually, Shannon was supposed to have taken the job, but she had to cancel. She’d called during our meeting to tell me that she now had astronomy club on Tuesdays.
Surprised we’d had a meeting the afternoon of our cafeteria fight? I was.
I, Nerves-of-Steel Thomas, had a lump in my throat when I went to Claudia’s house. I half expected to find a Keep Out sign on her door and a voodoo ritual with a Kristy doll going on inside.
It wasn’t that bad.
Everyone apologized to me, and I forgave them. We paid dues, took a few calls, and went home. A nice, normal meeting.
Sort of.
Claudia and Mary Anne still weren’t speaking to each other. Every time I looked at Abby, I could feel something clench up in my stomach. Stacey spent most of her time huddled over a math book with Claudia, giving homework advice. Jessi did a ballet warmup that took up half the room and lasted the whole meeting. Mallory had her nose in a book.
I wouldn’t put it on my list of best meetings, but at least we weren’t screaming at each other. I was kind of relieved.
“Kristyyyyyy!” Jackie shouted again.
“Just a minute!” I withdrew the garden hose from the gas tank of Archie’s plastic car. “All full, sir. That’ll be ten dollars!”
“No, ten cents!” Archie said, and he drove away without paying. (Sometimes the young ones are the toughest customers.)
I turned to see Jackie sitting in the fork of the Rodowskys’ old oak tree, about four feet off the ground. His gap-toothed grin made him look like a jack-o’-lantern. “I climbed up here all by myself!”
“Great, Jackie,” I said. “Just don’t go up any higher.”
“I’m going to hang a googolplex apples!”
“Uh, Jackie, I hate to tell you this, but the festival is off.”
The jack-o’-lantern disappeared. “Why?”
“There’s going to be another fair the same day, at Brenner Field,” I explained.
“Then I’ll hang apples there!”
“Jackie, I don’t want you climbing any higher. It’s too dangerous.”
“But I want to!”
“Get down!”
“No!”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Archie vrooming along the driveway, around the corner of the house. I thought fast. “Jackie, is it that you don’t know how to climb down? I could help you …”
That did it. Down he came.
I should explain something. Jackie Rodowsky’s private BSC nickname is the Walking Disaster. Abby says he has the Sadim touch. Sadim is Midas backward. Everything he touches turns into an accident.
He has had a raisin stuck up his nose. He’s poked himself in the eye with a drinking straw. He’s had his arm stuck in his pants drawer. I can’t count how many times he’s been in a cast.
Seeing him in a tree hadn’t done much for my nerves of steel. Now that he was climbing down, I raced away. “Archie, where are you going?” I yelled out.
He was rolling down the driveway, toward the street. “Shopping,” he announced.
“Oh. Well, the store’s that way,” I said, pointing toward the backyard.
Archie stopped. Sighing heavily, he said, “Not that store. The supermarker.”
“Oh, of course.” I called into the backyard: “Jackie, are you on solid ground yet?”
“Ye-es!” sang Jackie.
“Park right here, sir,” I said to Archie. “Step in for our specials on chicken and marshmallows.”
Archie solemnly climbed out of his car and strode up the front lawn with me. “Do you sell trucks?”
“Uh, why, sure we do. Right back here near the dairy products.”
Archie took an imaginary shopping cart and started loading it up. As I waited by the imaginary checkout counter, I heard Jackie’s voice above me: “Hey, Kristy! I’m climbing on the roof!”
My heart nearly jumped into the cash register. I looked up, shielding my eyes from the sun. “Jackie, don’t you dare —”
Jackie grinned at me from behind the screen of a second-story window. “Fooled you!”
“Not funny,” I said.
Archie jumped up and down, clapping his hands. “Do it!”
“You stay out of this,” I said. “You’re shopping.”
Archie sighed. “Do I have enough to buy a tree?” he asked, holding out imaginary money.
“Sure.”
As Archie and I bagged his purchases, I kept glancing up at the bedroom window.
While we were loading the car, I heard the whack of the back door slamming. Good, I thought. Jackie was back on solid ground.
I trotted alongside Archie as he rode up the driveway and into the backyard.
Jackie wasn’t anywhere to be seen. My eyes darted toward the toolshed, but the door was bolted shut.
Archie parked his car near the garden hose and climbed out. An acorn bounced off the roof of his car.
“Hey!” He looked around, startled.
“Just a squirrel,” I reassured him.
And then another acorn bopped me on the head.
I heard giggling overhead. I looked up.
Through the leafy branches of the maple tree, I could see Jackie. He was hanging onto a branch at least the height of a basketball rim.
“Jackie, what are you doing up there?” I yelled.
“Look!” he cried out, waving his arms crazily. “I can hang on with just my legs!”
His right arm clipped a small overhead branch. His body lurched off balance. His smile vanished.
“Jackie, noooo!”
He fell forward, lunging with his arms. His palms slapped against the branch next to him.
For a moment he balanced himself, stretched between the two branches. His face was frozen with fright. Then his fingers began to slip. I ran toward him, arms outstretched.
But I was too late. With a high-pitched scream, Jackie tumbled out of the tree.
He hit the ground with a thud.
I dropped onto my knees by Jackie’s side. “Are you all right?”
All I could hear was Archie, wailing at the top of his lungs.
Jackie was silent. His eyes were open, but he didn’t seem to notice me. I leaned over him. “Jackie?”
He sat up suddenly, looking disoriented. Then his face crumpled and he burst into hysterical tears.
Relief washed over me. Jackie was conscious. He was able to move. His back seemed okay.
I wrapped him in a big hug. Over my shoulder, poor Archie was shrieking as if his brother had died. “He’s okay,” I said, signaling him over.
Archie threw his arms around Jackie from behind.
“Can you bend your arms and legs?” I asked.
Jackie wiggled his arms. They seemed fine. But when he raised his left leg, he grimaced. “OW! My ankle!”
“Put your left arm around my shoulder,” I said.
I carefully helped him up. “Ow ow ow ow!” he screamed.
Leaning on me, Jackie was able to hop to a picnic bench.
Half of me wanted to throttle him. The other half wanted to scream at myself.
I was Jackie’s sitter. I was responsible for him. Sure I warned him. Sure he was being obnoxious. But the bottom line was, he was injured. And I was not supposed to let that happen.
“Is his leg breaked?” Archie asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “Jackie, try to point your toes and then pull your foot back.”
His face was twisted with pain, but he was able to
do it. “Do I have to go to the doctor?” he whimpered.
“Probably.” I checked my watch. “But we can wait until your mom and dad come home. Meanwhile let’s put some ice on it.”
I helped him inside and laid him down on the family room sofa. Then I found a blue-liquid cold pack in the Rodowskys’ freezer and wrapped it around his ankle with a dish towel.
I let Jackie and Archie watch a video while I monitored the ankle. It swelled a bit, but it didn’t look too horrible.
When I heard the Rodowskys’ car pull into the driveway, my stomach jumped.
In third grade, I beat up a boy who was teasing me in the school playground. I actually gave him a black eye. That evening his parents brought him to my house, just to yell at me. I will never forget the sinking feeling I had when I saw them walking up the front path.
That was exactly how I was feeling when the Rodowskys came into the family room.
As I explained everything, Mr. Rodowsky listened stonily. Shea had that There goes Jackie again look. Mrs. Rodowsky knelt down and felt Jackie’s forehead (why do parents always do that?).
“That ankle will have to be looked at,” Mr. Rodowsky said.
Jackie started to cry.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Rodowsky,” I said. “It’s my fault. I should have kept Jackie and Archie together, so I could see them both. I never should have let Jackie out of my sight.”
Mrs. Rodowsky gave me a tight smile. “It’s not your fault, Kristy. Kids will be kids.”
I knew she meant Jackie will be Jackie. I knew she understood Jackie’s accident-prone personality. But he was her son. And I was the baby-sitter.
All this BSC pressure was getting to me. I was forgetting how to be a good sitter.
Or maybe I had never been one to begin with. Maybe that’s why the club was falling apart.
Maybe I needed to back off baby-sitting for a while.