Contents
Title Page
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
Letter from Ann M. Martin
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Scrapbook
Also Available
Copyright
“Everybody, listen!” Mom shouted to my family in the living room. “I’ve got great news!”
Nobody heard her. They were all too busy talking at once. You see, it was Saturday, October thirtieth, the day before Halloween. Seven kids were swarming around one big trunk filled with costumes in the center of the room and let me tell you, it was a real zoo.
I’m Mallory Pike and I’m eleven, the oldest of all of those kids. Life at my house is usually pretty crazy but today things were totally bonkers. I don’t know if it was all the excitement of preparing for Halloween or the cold that I had, but I was feeling pretty tired. I lay on the couch and watched as Margo, my seven-year-old sister, got into a tug-of-war with Claire, who’s five and the baby of our family.
“I want to be the ballerina!” Margo cried.
“You’ve already been a ballerina,” Claire said, wrenching the tutu from Margo’s hands.
Vanessa, who is nine, stepped between them. “Claire’s right. It’s her turn to wear the costume.”
“Why don’t you be a dog?” eight-year-old Nicky suggested. He was wearing a pirate’s eye patch over his glasses.
“I don’t want to be a dog,” Margo said, pouting. “They’re ugly.”
“Dogs are cool,” Adam shot back. Adam is one of the triplets, who are a year younger than me and identical. He gestured to Byron and Jordan, who were posed with black masks covering their eyes. “But if you don’t want to be a dog, why not be a Ninja warrior with us?”
“Or a gypsy fortune teller like me?” Vanessa suggested. “I’m going to wear lots of makeup and Mom’s bracelets and jewelry.”
Margo liked that idea and for a moment the shouting died down. That gave Mom, who was still standing in the doorway, just enough time to make her announcement.
“Will the Pike family please try to keep it to a dull roar while I tell you my news?”
We turned to look at Mom, who smiled and said, “That’s better. I just got a call from my cousins in New York.”
“The Strausses?” Dad asked as he took a seat next to me on the couch.
Mom nodded. “Marie and Phil were both on the line. They want us to meet them in New York for Thanksgiving. We’ll watch the Macy’s parade, then go out for dinner.”
“The Macy’s parade?” Jordan asked, wide-eyed.
“Yes.” Mom grinned. “The official parade. Phil was given bleacher seat tickets right in front of Macy’s!”
“Wow! We’ll get to see the groups do their dance numbers and sing their songs!” I cried.
Dad smiled. “After watching it on TV all these years, it would be fun to actually see it in person.”
“A parade!” Margo picked up her toy baton and put a glitter-covered New Year’s hat on her head. “That’s what I’ll be. A majorette. Follow me, everybody!”
Nicky and Claire fell in behind Margo and marched around the living room, singing, “We’re going to the city, the city, the city, we’re going to the city and we’ll be on TV.”
My family calls New York “the city” because it’s not far from where we live in Stoneybrook, Connecticut. We only have to hop on the train and we’re there in an hour or so. Of course, a family as big as mine doesn’t hop on a train that often. That’s why I was so excited about the idea of spending Thanksgiving in New York. I imagined us all in red-and-white-striped stocking caps and mufflers, sitting on the special bleachers oohing and ahing over the parade. I could just see Nicky making faces at the TV cameras and the triplets trying to get autographs from all of the famous people.
“Will we stay at the Strausses’ apartment?” Vanessa asked, as she marched around the living room for the fourth time.
“Good heavens, no,” Mom replied. “Where would they put all ten of us? No, we’ll have to stay at a hotel.”
“Hmmmm.” Dad scratched his chin. “Things get pretty booked up around Thanksgiving. It might be tough to get reservations.”
“I know.” Mom pursed her lips. “And finding room for us at a restaurant could be tough, too.”
I could tell by their tone of voice that they were starting to have second thoughts. Which meant that any minute they would change their minds and say we should stay home for Thanksgiving. I decided I’d better speak up.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I’m sure some hotels are booked up by now, but New York has thousands of hotels. They can’t all be full. And the same goes with restaurants.”
Mom looked at Dad. “Mallory’s got a point.”
“It might take a few more calls,” I said. “But I bet we could get reservations. Do you want me to help call?”
Mom sat on the couch next to me and felt my forehead. “No, I think you should rest. You look a little tired.”
I hated to admit it but I didn’t feel just a little tired, I felt a lot tired. It must have been this virus I caught after Dawn (one of our BSC members) moved back to California. What’s the BSC? It stands for the Baby-sitters Club, which is just about the most important thing in my life. But I’ll tell you about our club later.
Anyway, I’d been feeling really rundown lately. I know I must sound like one of those Geritol commercials for old people but I’m serious. Sometimes I could barely keep my eyes open in class. When I came home from school, I was too tired to do my homework or even watch TV or eat dinner. And if anyone in my family gets the teeniest, tiniest little cold, I catch it. I just wished I would get over this.
I spent the rest of Saturday night on the couch watching the Halloween modeling show. First Margo was a majorette, then a cowgirl, then a mermaid, and finally a princess. I think I fell asleep while she was looking for construction paper to make her crown.
Dad must have carried me to my room because I woke up the next morning in my bed.
“Happy Halloween!” Nicky shouted through a paper towel holder he had aimed at my ear.
I fumbled to find my glasses. (Yes, I’m four-eyed. I want to get contacts but my parents won’t let me.) Then I looked at the clock. It was nearly eleven. I’d missed breakfast and my morning chores!
“Where is everybody?” I mumbled to Nicky as I shuffled to my closet for my robe.
“Dad and the triplets are in the garage making wooden swords. They decided to be pirates.”
“I thought you were going to be a pirate,” I muttered.
“That was yesterday.” Nicky leaped in front of me at the top of the stairs and struck a pose with his arms folded across his chest. “Now I’m Aladdin.”
We passed my parents’ room where Vanessa was sitting on Mom’s dresser in front of the mirror, waving. But she wasn’t waving to us. She was waving at the mirror.
“Vanessa, who are you waving at?” I asked.
My voice startled her so much that she nearly fell off the dresser. When she saw me, her cheeks turned a bright pink and she murmured, “The cameras.”
“What cameras?” I asked.
“The ones at the parade on Thanksgiving,” she said, hopping off the dresser. “I called my friend Liza last night and told her we were going to be at the parade and she sa
id to start practicing my wave.”
“Why do you need to practice?” I asked. “A wave’s a wave.”
“No, Liza said there are three types of waves,” Vanessa explained. “The windshield wiper, screwing in the light bulb, and the flap.” Vanessa demonstrated them as she spoke. The windshield wiper looked like its name, and so did the flap, which consisted of her flapping her hand up and down. But the light bulb seemed a bit more complicated.
“The Queen of England uses the light bulb one,” Vanessa said, eyeing her reflection once more. “It’s the hardest to do because you have to hold your hand in a wave position as you turn your wrist back and forth, like you were screwing in a light bulb.”
Nicky and I joined Vanessa at the mirror, practicing our waves, until Mom came in and found us. When we explained that we were practicing our waves for the cameras, Mom clasped her hands in front of her and put on her really serious look, the one she wears when she delivers bad news.
“What makes you so sure we’re going to the parade?” Mom asked.
“Oh, no,” Vanessa gasped. “We have to go. I’ve told all of my friends. It’d be too embarrassing if we stayed home.”
A smile crept around the corners of Mom’s mouth. “We’ve found a hotel that can take us. We’re just waiting to hear from a restaurant your father called. If they can fit us in then we’ll go.”
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” I said.
The rest of the day was spent getting ready for Halloween. Claire had slept in her pink tutu the night before and skipped around the house all afternoon, chanting, “Trick or treat, trick or treat, give us something good to eat!”
At four o’clock, the triplets appeared at the top of the stairs in full pirate dress. Each wore a bandanna on his head and a black patch over one eye. Jordan had even found an old fake parrot in a trunk in our attic and pinned it to his shoulder.
“Arrrgh!” they all shouted at once.
Nicky was right behind them. He wore a towel turban that kept slipping down over one eye and had slipped Mom’s copper bracelet on his left arm. Claire’s tutu was wrinkled but she didn’t care. Margo’s paper princess crown looked wonderful (even though it did shower glitter every time she moved), and Vanessa’s gypsy outfit was her best ever. Big gold clip-on earrings dangled from her ears and she’d teased her hair so it stuck out at the sides.
“You kids look great,” Dad said as he arranged them on the stairs for a group photograph. “After this shot I’ll tell you my good news.”
Dad didn’t get a chance to announce it because Nicky yelled it first. “We’re going to New York for Thanksgiving!”
“That’s right, and we’ll be staying at the —”
The cheering drowned out the rest of his sentence. Margo and Nicky hugged each other. The triplets gave everyone high and low fives. Vanessa hugged me, then made a beeline for the phone. She had to call her friend Liza and gloat.
The kids chattered nonstop about the New York trip as Dad and I got them ready to leave the house. My best friend, Jessica Ramsey, and I had planned to take her little brother and sister out, but by the time I’d passed around bags and talked Claire into wearing a coat over her tutu, I was too exhausted to walk anywhere. So I gave Jessi a call.
“I think I’m going to stay home tonight. I’m really tired,” I said.
“What’d you do?” she asked. “Stay up late last night?”
“No, I fell asleep after dinner and didn’t wake up till eleven this morning.”
“That’s strange,” Jessi said. “Are you sick?”
I felt my forehead. It didn’t feel unusually warm. “I don’t have a fever, or anything like that,” I explained. “I just feel worn out.”
“Well, you better not come with us, then. Squirt and Becca are so excited, they’ll probably run the entire night.”
(Squirt is the nickname for Jessi’s baby brother, who’s only about a year and a half. Becca’s her eight-and-a-half-year-old sister who looks like a younger version of Jessi.)
“Sorry to back out on you,” I mumbled.
“That’s okay,” Jessi replied. “I understand.”
“Oh, guess what. One more thing,” I said before we hung up. “My family’s going to New York for Thanksgiving and we get to watch the parade from special bleacher seats right in front of Macy’s. We might be on TV.”
“Mal, that’s fantastic!” Jessi squealed.
I wished I was as enthusiastic about it as Jessi sounded, but I just didn’t feel it. I had a really uneasy feeling inside. Something awful had just occurred to me. What if I was still sick in three weeks? I couldn’t travel all that way and feel this lousy. I’d ruin the whole vacation.
Jessi and I said good-bye and I sat at my desk, trying to catch up on my work. I’d missed a lot of school as I caught cold after cold and the homework had really started to pile up. The more I stared at my math, the more blurry-eyed I felt. Finally I shut my math book and lay my head on top of the desk. I decided to take a little nap before the trick-or-treaters started ringing our bell.
I slept through Halloween! Can you believe it? The members of the Baby-sitters Club couldn’t, when I told them at Claudia Kishi’s house on Monday afternoon.
“How could that happen?” Stacey McGill asked. “Your doorbell must have been ringing nonstop for hours. Ours sure was.”
All I could do was shrug. “I guess I was pretty tired.”
“Tired!” Claudia repeated. “You must have been catatonic!”
Before anybody could make another remark, the digital clock on Claudia’s dresser turned from 5:29 to 5:30 and Kristy Thomas, who was wearing her visor and sitting in the director’s chair, announced, “All right, everybody. This meeting of the BSC has officially started.”
I think now would be a perfect time to tell you about our club. It was Kristy’s great idea (she has a zillion of them). The club began after Kristy heard her mom making phone call after phone call to find a sitter for her younger brother, David Michael. Kristy thought, why not form a club so that a client could make one call and reach several sitters? She told her idea to her best friend, Mary Anne Spier, and also to Claudia, who told Stacey McGill, and — ta, da! — the Baby-sitters Club was born.
Kristy was elected president, partly because the club was her idea but also because she’s a born leader. She’s loaded with energy and she has a big mouth. (I’m not being mean. She’d be the first to admit it.) Kristy has brown hair, brown eyes, and is very short. I think she’s the shortest girl in the eighth grade. She’s a real tomboy and generally dresses in her standard uniform of jeans, turtleneck, pullover sweater, and sneakers. Kristy loves sports. In fact, she coaches a softball team called Kristy’s Krushers. The Krushers play the Bashers quite a bit, which brings me to Bart Taylor. The Bashers are his team. He’s Kristy’s sort-of boyfriend. (I say sort-of because she would never call him her boyfriend. But they do go to dances and stuff together.)
Kristy has almost as many people in her family as I do in mine. But it wasn’t always that way. First there was just her mom and her three brothers: Charlie (sixteen), Sam (fourteen), and seven-year-old David Michael. Kristy’s father walked out on their family right after David Michael was born and she never hears from him. It was kind of a struggle for Kristy’s mom to support four kids but a year or so ago she met Watson Brewer. Are you ready for this? He’s a real millionaire. Mrs. Thomas fell in love with Watson, who already had two kids of his own — Andrew and Karen — and they got married. Then they adopted Emily Michelle, a two-year-old Vietnamese girl, which is why Kristy’s grandmother Nannie came to live with them. So on some weekends, when Andrew and Karen are visiting, ten people are at Kristy’s house. They’re lucky they live in a mansion!
You know the saying, opposites attract? Well, it must be true because Kristy’s best friend is Mary Anne Spier (our club secretary), who is one of the shyest people on the planet. Mary Anne is also very emotional. She’ll cry at anything — a sad movie, or a picture of cute kitten
s. Mary Anne likes all animals but has a soft spot for cats, particularly her gray-striped kitten named Tigger.
Mary Anne’s mom died when she was little so she was raised by her dad, who used to be really strict. He wouldn’t let her talk on the phone or stay out late and for awhile her clothes were really babyish. But that’s all changed. He married his high school sweetheart, who just happens to be the divorced mother of Mary Anne’s other best friend, Dawn Schafer. (Dawn was the BSC’s alternate officer — she filled in for anyone who had to miss a meeting — until she left but I’ll tell you about that in a minute.) Let’s see, after the wedding, Mary Anne (who had become Dawn’s stepsister) and Mr. Spier moved in with Dawn and her mom, who lived in this old farmhouse that has a real secret passage. (It might even be haunted.)
They were all pretty happy until a short while ago when Dawn really started missing her dad and her brother Jeff, who live in California. Dawn asked her mom if she could stay with them for several months. It was a tough decision for everyone involved, but finally it was agreed that she could go. Even though Dawn had been happy here, she’d always been a California girl at heart. We all miss her a lot but I’m sure Mary Anne misses her the most.
When Dawn left for California our club went through a rough time trying to figure out how to replace her. Shannon Kilbourne was an associate member, which meant that she just took sitting jobs when the regular club members were extra busy or if we suddenly got a lot of job calls. Shannon is really interesting looking. She has curly blonde hair, blue eyes (that look startling because she wears black mascara), a ski jump nose and super high cheekbones. She lives near Kristy and goes to Stoneybrook Day School, a private school across town. (The rest of us go to Stoneybrook Middle School.) When Kristy first moved to Watson’s mansion she thought Shannon and the other girls in the neighborhood were real snobs but it turned out to be just a big misunderstanding. Now Shannon and Kristy are friends and the best news is that Shannon is able to come to meetings and fill in for Dawn while she’s in California. And we still have one associate member left. His name is Logan Bruno, and guess what. He’s Mary Anne’s boyfriend.