by Betsy Haynes
THE AGAINST TAFFY SINCLAIR CLUB
Betsy Haynes
BANTAM BOOKS
NEW YORK · TORONTO · LONDON · SYDNEY · AUCKLAND
This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.
RL 4, IL age 9 and up
THE AGAINST TAFFY SINCLAIR CLUB
A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with Thomas Nelson Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Thomas Nelson edition published November 1976
Bantam Skylark edition / February 1981
8 printings through September 1988
Skylark Books is a registered trademark of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and elsewhere.
No character in this book is intended to represent any actual person; all incidents of the story are entirely fictional in nature.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1978 by Betsy Haynes.
Cover art copyright © 1981 by Bantam Books.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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ISBN 0-553-15712-4
Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CW 16 15 14 13 12 11
For my daughter Stephanie with love
CHAPTER ONE
Friday is Wretched-Mess Day. That's the day I clean my room. Mom picked Friday because she said that my room ought to look nice for the weekend just in case we have any company, which we sometimes do. Mostly I keep my door closed so I can have some privacy, but I have to admit that when it's open my entire wretched mess is visible from the living-room sofa, and that is where company usually sits.
This particular Wretched-Mess Day Mom went into a fit. I guess what set her off was a call she got about a bill being overdue, added to the fact that my father had missed another support payment. Anyway, before she left our apartment for work she tore around like Roadrunner screaming that I had to clean out all the garbage under my bed. You'd have thought the health department was on its way out to quarantine the apartment from the way she carried on. And I really resented her calling my things garbage. It's all good stuff. I just don't have any other place to put it.
At first I was glad that I had cleaned out under my bed. I found some things that I'd been looking for for a while. There was an overdue book under there that I had forgotten to return to the school library before summer vacation started, and the sombrero my friend Melanie Edwards brought me from Tijuana, and the blue ribbon I won last spring for being the best speller in the fourth grade, not to mention one red sneaker, one green knee sock, my Girl Scout canteen, and my brown-and-gold-plaid skirt.
There was also my notebook from the Against Taffy Sinclair Club, of which I am the president. Taffy Sinclair and I hate each other just about as much as any two people can, which is why I have this club. My four best friends belong. We don't really do much in our club except talk about Taffy and how she carries on in front of the boys, batting her eyelashes and dropping things all the time so that she can bend over and show her underpants. Just before school was out for the summer we started collecting five cents dues every week so we could send her cards like the one that said, "You must have been a beautiful baby, but Baby, look at you now!" and which had a picture of King Kong on the inside. Once we ordered a free sample of a new kind of sanitary napkin sent to her, but we don't know if she ever got it.
Taffy doesn't have a club. She doesn't even have very many friends, because she's stuck up and snotty and thinks she's the most gorgeous creature in the world. Hardly anyone wants to have anything to do with her, except maybe Mona Vaughn. Mona has a huge nose and buck teeth and is just about as ugly as Taffy Sinclair is pretty. She has some friends of her own, but every so often she follows Taffy around for a few days as if she thought some of Taffy's looks would rub off on her. It never lasts long, though, because Taffy is just as snotty to Mona as she is to everyone else.
You can tell that Taffy's a really horrible person by the things she does. Take, for instance, what she did on the last day of school. I nearly died. I walked into the fourth-grade room and someone had written on the blackboard, "Jana Morgan has B.O." I knew who had done it. It had to be Taffy Sinclair.
As I said before, I was pretty glad to find all of those things under my bed. It was what I pulled out last that made that Wretched-Mess Day extra wretched. To the casual observer, it was just an ordinary shoe box. Well, it wasn't really a shoe box. It was a boot box. I picked it because it was bigger than any of my shoe boxes. In it I keep all the letters I've ever gotten from my father since he and my mother were divorced when I was three. There are only four, which isn't very many for practically my whole lifetime. Of course it isn't all his fault that he doesn't write more often. He changes jobs and moves around a lot, and that can really keep a person busy.
Mom doesn't know that I've saved the letters. I don't suppose she'd mind. After all, she's always telling me what a great person my father is and how on the night they met he asked her to dance and they kept on dancing until after midnight, and things like that. I haven't told her about my boot box because it's just something I sort of want to keep private.
Letters aren't the only things I keep in that box. I guess you'd call the other things souvenirs. I don't have very many, at least not very many different kinds of things. I have a whole bunch of envelopes that my support-payment checks came in. I dug them out of the trash, so a couple of them are messed up with coffee grounds and stuff. They're all alike, though, so I stopped collecting them.
Another thing I keep there is a picture. It was taken last Christmas and shows me in front of a tree with all my presents. I'm holding a doll that my father sent me. He doesn't usually send me regular presents. Mostly he just adds a little extra to that month's check. Mom made some remark about me taking the doll with me on my next date and then packed it away for me to give to my little girl someday. I thought that was a funny thing to say since I was only ten then and I didn't go on dates, but I didn't play with dolls anymore either.
Anyway, I sat there staring at that box for a long time, knowing that I shouldn't open it. It's funny how sometimes the more you know you shouldn't do something the more you have to do it. It's sort of like . . . well, you can't help yourself. My hands were shaking so hard that I almost couldn't get the lid off. But I did, and there on top was That Letter—That Letter that had ruined my entire summer.
I picked it up and opened the envelope just as if I didn't know what was in it. There it was, the Easter card with the dumb pink duck on the front, that dumb pink duck with the stupid grin on its face carrying a basket of weird-looking eggs. I never saw such a dumb pink duck. Inside the card was a piece of paper, which I let fall into my lap. It was such a tiny piece of paper that it's really a compliment to call it a letter.
I didn't look at it. I didn't have to. I knew all the words by heart. All it said was, "Dear Jana, Sometime this summer I am going west for a two-wee
k vacation. Would you like to come with me? I would like that very much. Love, Your Father."
Thank goodness the phone rang just as I was about to cry, which would have been a silly thing to do. I dropped that dumb pink duck right on his nose and ran into the living room to answer the phone.
It was Beth Barry, my best friend. "Jana!" she shouted, nearly knocking out my ear. "She's back!"
"Who's back?"
"Taffy Sinclair, who else?"
"What's so unreal about that? School starts next week," I said. Beth gets kind of carried away sometimes. Taffy had been gone all summer, but there was nothing strange about her coming back in time for school.
"Wait until you see her. You won't believe it. I think we'd better call the club into emergency session."
"Did she suddenly get a case of the uglies?" I asked hopefully. "Did all her beautiful blond hair fall out? Did those great big basset-hound eyes swell shut? Did . . ."
"Shut up, you idiot. I hate to tell you, but it's nothing like that. In fact, it's sort of the reverse." Neither one of us said anything for a minute. I couldn't imagine Taffy Sinclair getting any prettier, but I had to know.
"Well?" I said.
"Sit down," said Beth.
I did.
"Well?" I said again.
"Okay, here goes. Taffy Sinclair has you-know-whats!"
"Oh, no," I groaned. It was almost too much to stand. What more could one girl have? I must have groaned for a full five minutes before I pulled myself together. "What good would an emergency session of the club do?"
"I have a plan."
"What kind of plan?"
"I can't tell you over the phone," Beth whispered dramatically. "But it just may be the greatest plan you ever heard."
"I doubt that," I snickered. "But anything is worth a try. Call everyone and tell them to be over here in forty-five minutes."
After I hung up I hurried back into my room to finish cleaning up my wretched mess before my friends came over. There was my boot box right where I had left it. I picked up the letter off the floor and tossed it back into the box. Then I slammed on the lid and shoved it under the bed again. This wasn't the time to worry about the letter.
I went to the dressing-table mirror and looked at my front. I turned sideways very slowly and stared as hard as I could, but there wasn't the slightest sign of any you-know-whats. Our teacher was always raving about good posture, so I stood up extra straight, but that didn't do any good either.
I couldn't help but wonder what it was like to have you-know-whats. Could you see your shoes when you were standing up? I looked down. Boy, could I see mine! How could you sleep on your stomach? I always sleep on my stomach. I wouldn't want to give that up. I wondered if Taffy Sinclair was still sleeping on her stomach. It would sure serve her right if she wasn't.
CHAPTER TWO
Beth was there in half an hour. I hadn't even finished cleaning up my wretched mess. She was carrying her Against Taffy Sinclair Club notebook as if it were a time bomb. Then I noticed a magazine stuck in it and tried to see what it was, but she jerked the notebook away and sat on it so that I couldn't see it. You'd have thought she was a spy or something.
Melanie Edwards got there next. As usual, she brought a sack of brownies. I think her mother must make brownies twenty-four hours a day. I think Melanie must eat them just about that often, too. Mom says she'll probably lose some of her weight when she gets to be a teenager. I hope so because right now the boys don't talk to her very much.
Christie Winchell came in a couple of minutes later. Christie is a mathematical genius, and I've always wondered if it has anything to do with the fact that her mother is principal of our school. Everyone was there except Katie Shannon, who had to stay home and help get things ready for her mother's encounter-group meeting. Katie is the radical feminist of our group. Don't get me wrong. We're all into the women's movement, but Katie is in really deep.
There is just one chair in my room, the one at my desk, so everybody plopped down on the floor. I tried to look at each girl's front when she came in. I tried to be casual so that no one would know what I was looking at, but that was very hard to do. Then I made a mistake and looked at Beth's front. She was looking at mine. We caught each other at exactly the same moment, and I could feel my ears getting red. I folded my arms across my front, and Beth did, too, but not before I could see that she didn't have any you-know-whats either.
I decided to start the meeting before I got any more depressed, and I pounded Mom's hammer on the radiator a couple of times for attention since we didn't have a real gavel.
"This emergency meeting of the Against Taffy Sinclair Club will come to order."
Everyone stopped talking and sat still except for Melanie, who was crawling around the room passing out her brownies.
"Taffy Sinclair is back in town from her summer vacation. Beth saw her and told me that we have a new crisis."
"What kind of crisis?" Melanie asked.
"Taffy Sinclair has you-know-whats!"
I might as well have announced that Mark Twain Elementary was being turned into an all-girls school. There was a horrified look on every face, but no one said a word. Instead, they all slouched forward at the same time, letting their blouses hang loose so they would hide their chests. The Radio City Music Hall Rockettes couldn't have done it with more precision timing.
"I'll bet the boys will really like her now," said Christie.
Everybody giggled. It sort of broke the tension, and we all started squirming around, secretly trying to look at each other's fronts out of the corners of our eyes.
I banged the hammer on the radiator again.
"Beth has a plan," I shouted. That brought everybody to attention.
Beth cleared her throat and then stood up, which really wasn't necessary since there were only four of us in the room and we could all see her just fine.
"Everybody raise your right hand and solemnly swear that no one outside this room will ever know what we're going to do," she whispered hoarsely.
I looked at Christie and shrugged, and she shrugged back. Then we two slowly raised our right hands. So did Melanie.
"We are going to form a secret order, sort of an auxiliary to the Against Taffy Sinclair Club."
"What for?" I asked. I couldn't see what forming a secret club had to do with Taffy Sinclair and her you-know-whats.
"The purpose of the secret order," Beth went on, giving me a frown that had to mean "Shut up," "is to increase our bustlines faster than Taffy."
"How can we do that?" asked Christie. "Are you some kind of magician? Besides, Taffy already has a head start."
"I'm no magician," said Beth. "But Milo Venus is!"
"Who's Milo Venus?" I asked.
Beth whipped the magazine out of her Against Taffy Sinclair Club notebook. It was an issue of Redbook, which my mother also gets. I usually look through it, and I didn't remember seeing anything about any magician who could do a thing like that.
"Right here on page two hundred and three," Beth said. She pointed triumphantly at a full-page advertisement with a big picture of a very shapely blonde in it, plus a bunch of before and after pictures. "It says, 'Milo Venus is the world's foremost bustline developer.'"
"Wow! Look at her," said Melanie. "'I increased my bustline from thirty-six to a full forty inches in just five weeks with the fantastic Milo Venus Developer,'" she read.
"How does it work?" asked Christie.
"I'm not sure," Beth said. "All it says here is, 'It employs special techniques safely and effectively' and so on and so on. But it does have a money-back guarantee if you don't get results in two weeks."
"Money," I said. "We don't have any money. How much does it cost, anyway?"
"Nineteen ninety-five," Beth said sort of sheepishly.
"Nineteen dollars, and ninety-five cents!" Melanie shrieked.
"That's not so much," said Beth. "We can have weekly dues."
"We already pay five cents to the Against Taf
fy Sinclair Club," I said.
"Well, if we each added another five cents to that and put it all in the secret-order treasury, we would have a total of fifty cents a week," said Beth.
Christie began scribbling in her notebook.
"At that rate it would take . . . um . . . forty weeks to raise the money," she said. "We can't wait that long."
"We can walk dogs or wash cars or something," said Beth. "Everybody think hard between now and next Friday. We'll have another meeting then."
"Okay, but what are we going to call our secret order?" I asked.
"I've already thought of that," said Beth. "I think we should have sort of a code name. Then we can talk about it and it will drive Taffy wild trying to figure out what it means."
"Great," I said. "But what kind of code name can we use?"
"Lambda Rho," Beth said.
"Lamb the what?" said Christie, screwing up her face.
"Lambda Rho," Beth repeated. "Those are the Greek letters for l and r. My sister is in a sorority at college and they call practically everything by Greek letters. It's the weirdest thing you ever heard."
"Hey, that's neat," said Melanie. "But what do the l and r stand for?"
Beth swallowed and looked embarrassed. "Little raisins," she said softly.
There was a lot more giggling and squirming, but everybody finally agreed that Lambda Rho was a great name and that it would drive Taffy up a tree trying to figure it out.
After everybody left, the phone rang. It was Katie.
"Sorry I couldn't make the meeting. Beth said it was really important. Some kind of crisis."
"Taffy Sinclair's back in town, and she's got you-know-whats."
"Huh?"
"I said, Taffy Sinclair's back, and she's got you-know-whats."
"Do you mean breasts?" Katie asked, sounding really disgusted.
"Yeah," I answered awkwardly.
"Then say breasts!" she shrieked. "That's what's the matter with women today. They can't face reality. They're not 'you-know-whats.' They're breasts."
"Okay. Okay. Taffy Sinclair has . . . breasts. Are you satisfied?"