The author gratefully acknowledges
Peter Lerangis
for his help in
preparing this manuscript.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Prologue
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
About the Author
Also Available
Copyright
“You’re what?” Maritza Cruz’s voice snapped at me over the telephone.
She was mad. I could tell. I mean, I hadn’t spoken to her in weeks, and suddenly, the day before my flight, I was calling to say I was off to Europe.
Maritza lives in Brooklyn, New York. She and I were in a month-long program for promising dancers in NYC, working with the ballet company Dance New York. We grew so-o-o-o close during that month. Almost like sisters.
Some sister I was. Long-lost.
“I know. I’m sorry,” I replied. “My school offered this trip really late, and you had to sign up, but the spaces were limited, so I wasn’t exactly sure I’d be going. And we had to have all these meetings, and this Canadian school is taking the trip with us, so we had to learn about —”
“Where in Europe?” Maritza interrupted.
“England, France …”
“London?”
“Yeah. And Paris —”
“AAAAAAAAUUUUGGGGHHHHH!”
I had to take the receiver from my ear. “I promise I’ll write —”
“No. That’s not it. Tanisha’s going to be there! The whole Dance New York company is performing there!”
“AAAAAAAAUUUUGGGGHHHHH!” Now it was my turn to shriek. I could not believe it. My dance company — the group I trained with, the group I was invited to join — was going to be with me on my vacation!
Okay, let me explain. First of all, Tanisha is Maritza’s older sister. Tanisha is a member of the “permanent company,” personally selected by the head of Dance NY, David Brailsford. (Yes, the David Brailsford, ballet legend, and yes, he did ask me to join. And I still may someday. I’m only eleven, so I have time.) Anyway, if you’re in the company, Dance NY is your school. You take intensive dance classes in the company’s studios in Manhattan, you study your academic subjects with tutors, and you travel all over the world.
“You have to go see them, Jessi!” Maritza said. “They’re playing at a place called the Barbican. And guess what they’re performing? Gotham Rhythm.”
“Oh.”
Psssshhhh went my excitement. Like air out of a bicycle tire.
I knew Gotham Rhythm. Maritza and I had learned it during our training. We had performed it at a recital.
Which means that if I had joined the permanent company, I would have been going to Europe with them. I would have been performing instead of watching.
I did not want to think about that. I was in too good a mood.
But boy, it was hard to sound cheerful.
I gave Maritza the name of the hotel I’d be staying in. She promised she’d talk to Tanisha.
After I hung up, my brain was going a mile a minute.
You said no for a good reason, Jessi, it told me.
Which is true. I mean, I could have said yes to Mr. Brailsford if I lived in New York City. But Stoneybrook is two hours away, so I’d have had to commute to school. Or move.
I was frustrated at first, but I took it in stride. Frankly, I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving all my Stoneybrook friends anyway.
I mean, I do love Maritza and my other Dance NY friends. But Stoneybrook is my home. I belong here.
I haven’t always felt that way. I hated Stoneybrook when I first moved here. Some of our neighbors were awful to my family. They obviously didn’t want African-Americans in their neighborhood. I was dying to move back to my hometown, Oakley, New Jersey, which was much more racially mixed.
Things are better now. People grow up, I guess. Attitudes change. And I don’t miss Oakley as much anymore.
What really glues me to Stoneybrook is the Baby-sitters Club. My absolute best friends.
Which one is the absolutest? Mallory Pike. We are like sisters. We practically read each other’s minds. Which is pretty funny, considering how different we seem on the surface. For one thing, Mal has pale, freckly skin and reddish-brown hair. She doesn’t dance at all, and she’s obsessed with creative writing and illustrating. Plus she has a huge, unruly family that includes eight kids — and cousins all over the globe. (Well, at least in England. She was planning to visit them during our trip.) The very ruly Ramseys, on the other hand, all live in the States, as far as I know, and our branch has only three kids (me, Becca, and my baby brother, Squirt).
What do Mal and I have in common? Well, each of us is the oldest child in the family. That means our parents expect us to be perfect but treat us like babies. (If you’re an eldest sib, you know what I mean. The younger ones have it so much easier.) But the main thing we share is passion. We do things in a big way. Mal is as dedicated to writing as I am to dancing. Also, we both love horses and horse books, and we have read just about every one ever written.
But most of all, we are passionate about baby-sitting. You have to feel that way to be part of the Baby-sitters Club.
Mal and I are junior officers. We’re the only sixth-graders among thirteen-year-old eighth-graders, so it’s kind of an honor to be included. Not that anyone ever says that. We treat each other as equals. Mal and I do everything the other members do — well, except baby-sit away from home at night. But that’s only because our parents won’t allow us to. (I told you they treat us like babies.)
The basic idea of the BSC?
A. Gather a group of reliable sitters at one phone number.
B. Make yourselves available during convenient hours for booking jobs (in our case, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from five-thirty until six).
C. Let local parents know about the group.
D. Wait for the job offers to pour in.
Simple, huh? Parents have one-stop shopping, sitters have regular work (plus an excuse for best friends to hang out together three times a week), and everybody’s happy.
Who’s the genius behind this idea? Picture a short, athletic-looking Caucasian seventh-grader who can’t sit still. She has brown eyes and shoulder-length brown hair, and she’s dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. Ta-da: Kristy Thomas. Now imagine her living in a little house with three brothers (two older and one younger) and a mom who is single because Kristy’s dad skipped out on the family. Now picture Kristy watching her mom call frantically around town in search of a sitter for Kristy’s youngest brother, David Michael. An idea is forming….
Cut to the present. Kristy now lives in a mansion, because her mom got married again, to a guy named Watson Brewer, who happens to be rich. Home life is just the way Kristy likes it, which is total chaos. At her house live not only her three brothers, but two stepsiblings, an adopted sister, and a live-in grandmother. And Kristy is now the president of a super-successful baby-sitting organization. In addition to seven
regular members, it includes two associates who help out in emergencies, and even one honorary member. (More about them later.)
Zoom in on BSC headquarters, also known as the bedroom of Claudia Kishi. Kristy is bossing everyone around, in her loud voice. Claudia, the club vice-president, is burrowing under her bed, pushing aside piles of old sketches, paintings, and beads.
For Claudia, imagine a trim Japanese-American girl with long hair and beautiful skin, wearing some cool outfit she’s put together from thrift shop and vintage clothing store finds.
Claudia has two main talents: art and junk food. The art is obvious. You can see her paintings on the walls, a new project on her easel, and her homemade jewelry around our wrists and necks.
The junk food is hidden. Her parents don’t mind Creativity, but they frown on Bad Nutrition.
As Claudia emerges with a bag of Kit-Kats, she nearly collides with a blonde girl in a cutting-edge black ensemble. That’s Claudia’s best friend, Stacey McGill. Her fashion sense practically screams “New York City!” She is lucky enough to have been born and raised there, and she still visits regularly, to see her divorced dad. Stacey’s our treasurer and resident math whiz. In this scene she’s collecting dues money from all the members (which, by the way, happens only on Mondays).
You may notice that Stacey is the only one not accepting a Kit-Kat from Claudia’s bag. That’s because she has diabetes, which means her body cannot handle refined sugars. If she eats too much sugar — or too little — she could become very sick. But as long as she has regular meals, stays away from sweets, and gives herself daily injections of insulin, she leads a perfectly normal life. (I know, ew, right? That’s what I used to think, but Stacey insists it’s no big deal.)
Luckily Claudia has chips too, which Stacey can eat. And does.
So now you’re seeing us in our typical state — pigging out — when suddenly the phone rings.
Abby Stevenson snatches up the receiver. (No, she’s not the only member who answers the phone. We all can.) As she holds it to her ear, it disappears under her lion’s-mane of curly hair. She says something like, “Baby-sitters Club, no job too small, no kid too big!” because she’s … well, Abby. Dedicated to the art of saying weird things and making people laugh.
Abby’s our alternate officer. That means she takes over for any absent officer. She’s also our newest member. She moved from Long Island (with her mom and twin sister, Anna) to a house up the street from Kristy not long after our former alternate officer, Dawn Schafer, moved away. Just in time too, because we were swamped with job offers. We asked both sisters to join the BSC, but Anna turned us down. She’s a budding concert violinist, and she practices during prime baby-sitting hours.
Abby is very different from her quiet, thoughtful sister. Abby’s loud and funny. She’s super-athletic. She’s asthmatic too, which means she has to carry around a prescription inhaler. And she has about a million allergies — pollen, strawberries, dogs, kitty litter, dust, you name it.
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine Abby being serious about anything. But she is, deep down. I see her serious side whenever she talks about her dad, who died in a car crash a few years ago. I also saw that side of her in synagogue. Abby and Anna invited all of us BSC members to their Bat Mitzvah, a ceremony that marks the passage into womanhood for Jewish girls. The twins had to recite in Hebrew, and they did it beautifully.
Anyway, back to the scene at Claudia’s. The phone call is a job request from a client. Abby is taking down the info, and she promises to call back. As she hangs up, we all turn to Mary Anne Spier.
Think neat and shy, preppyish clothes, warm brown eyes, short brown hair. That’s Mary Anne. As secretary, she’s in charge of the BSC record book, which contains our job calendar. With one glance, Mary Anne immediately knows who’s available. The calendar dates are neatly marked with all our jobs and our conflicts — medical appointments, after-school activities, family getaways, and so on. (In the back of the book is a client list: addresses, phone numbers, rates charged, and notes about the kids we baby-sit for.)
Shy, modest Mary Anne and loud, opinionated Kristy have been best friends since birth. They used to live across the street from each other. (If you drew a line connecting their old houses and Claudia’s, you’d make a triangle.) But first Kristy moved to another house in Stoneybrook, and then so did Mary Anne, after her dad married Sharon Schafer.
Recognize the name? Sharon is Dawn Schafer’s mom. Richard and Sharon were once high school sweethearts, until fate separated them. Off they went to separate colleges, and eventually marriages and their own families. But Richard didn’t have it easy. Mrs. Spier died shortly after Mary Anne was born. While he recovered from the grief, he let his parents-in-law raise Mary Anne. But when he tried to retrieve her, they refused. They thought he couldn’t handle single parenthood. Well, he did finally get Mary Anne back, but he went overboard to prove himself. He raised Mary Anne super-strictly — rules, rules, rules. (She had to wear pigtails and little-girl outfits right up to seventh grade!) When he finally started easing up on her, fate stepped in again: In California, Sharon had divorced her husband. She moved back to her hometown, Stoneybrook (with Dawn and Dawn’s brother, Jeff). And the rest is legend: (1) The Joining: Dawn is accepted into the BSC, (2) The Discovery: Dawn and Mary Anne find out about the long-lost love, (3) The Matchmaking: They bring together the lovebirds, and (4) A New Family: After a big wedding, Mary Anne and Dawn become stepsisters!
Now, that’s a happy ending.
Well, sort of. Jeff moved back to California. After awhile, so did Dawn, which devastated Mary Anne.
But they talk on the phone all the time. And Dawn does visit a lot. (She’s the honorary member I mentioned.)
This summer, for example, Dawn was in Stoneybrook. She, Claudia, Mary Anne, and Logan Bruno (Mary Anne’s boyfriend) had been selected to be counselors at the Playground Camp run by Stoneybrook Elementary School.
By the way, Dawn is in our BSC scene too. She has blue eyes and light blonde (almost white) hair that hangs down to her waist. She’s wearing bell-bottoms and a loose-fitting top. And she’s probably munching on some disgusting health food snack, like turnip chips.
Logan is not in the scene (which is just as well, because he would tease Dawn about her cuisine). Neither is Shannon Kilbourne, an eighth-grader who goes to a private school called Stoneybrook Day School. They are our associate members, and they’re not required to attend meetings or pay dues.
Now you have a picture of all my best friends.
Add thirty minutes of phone calls, laughter, and eating, and you have a good idea of why I didn’t want to move to New York City.
My fame and fortune can wait. Traveling to Europe with my best friends is something I’d never want to miss.
I opened my dresser drawer, pulled out a leotard and some ballet slippers, and tucked them into my suitcase.
If I was going to meet the Dance NY kids and see Mr. Brailsford, I’d better stay in shape.
A few hours of practice in hotel rooms wouldn’t hurt.
“Elvis? Abby, please.” Kristy Thomas rolled her eyes at me, then turned toward the buffet table.
“He must have performed in Europe,” I said, munching on some carrot sticks. “He was an international star. Like the Queen. I’ll bet she met him.”
The BSC going-away party was in full swing. We were all crowded around the grub table. Watson and Kristy’s mom had made a lot of the food themselves.
The music? Well, it was Watson-esque — old-fashioned big-band vinyl records. We tolerated it because the food was good.
I was dying to sneak around in his record library and find some vintage Elvis recordings.
I LUV Elvis (surprised, huh?). I don’t know why I do. I just always have. I’ve been to his house, Graceland, with some other BSC members. It was definitely one of the cooler experiences of my life.
“First of all, your list makes no sense,” Kristy said. “I mean, who says we’re going to meet th
e Queen?”
“Just in case,” I replied. “We are visiting Victoria’s castle, right? Maybe the Queen’ll drop by to borrow some sugar.”
“Yuck,” exclaimed Dawn Schafer, Duchess of Health, as she loaded sprouts onto her plate.
“Actually, I don’t think Victoria really lives in a castle,” said Mary Anne. “She does like to exaggerate.”
Claudia nodded, her mouth full. “Ishpobbia-pashashuan.”
“Swallow, please,” Stacey said.
“It’s probably just a palace or something,” Claudia repeated.
“Anyway, Elvis was in the army,” I said, “so he might have entertained the overseas troops during the war. But where?”
Claudia spun around from the table, her plate stacked high with tortilla chips and pretzels. “Elvis was in a war? Which one?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Civil?”
Kristy nearly spat out her Triscuits. “That was in the eighteen hundreds. Didn’t they teach you that on Long Island?”
I shrugged. “I must have been absent that day.”
“Maybe he sang at the Barbican,” Jessi suggested. “That’s where I’m seeing Dance New York.”
“Cool,” Stacey remarked. “Can you get us tickets?”
“Not me,” Kristy said. “I’ll be busy visiting all the cricket stadiums.”
“Are those like flea markets?” I asked.
Kristy threw a dinner roll at me.
“You’re all crazy,” Claudia grumbled. “I’m glad I decided to stay.”
She put her arm around Mary Anne. But Mary Anne didn’t look too happy.
In fact, she was on the verge of tears.
Jessi smiled at her sympathetically. “We’re going to miss you too, Mary Anne.”
Fwoosh. Up went the floodgates.
Logan Bruno was the first to hug Mary Anne. Then Kristy. Then the rest of us.
A big old BSC group hug.
A weepy one.
“Who died?” asked Sam Thomas, Kristy’s fifteen-year-old brother.
“Can’t you let us have a Moment?” I asked.
Mary Anne was wiping away sniffles. “I’m really glad I signed up for Playground Camp. But I don’t know…. I guess it’s hard seeing you so excited. And knowing I’ll be here …”