Baby-Sitters Club 041

by Ann M. Martin

  Claudia Kishi, another BSC member, is the one I spoke to on the phone when I felt as if I was wimping out with Logan. Although Claudia grew up with Kristy and me, she's always been more mature than we have. She wears the trendiest clothes you can imagine, and she is so cool. A typical Claudia outfit might be black leggings, a baggy black-and-white shirtdress, low black shoes, and big wild earrings for her pierced ears. This outfit would be particularly striking on Claud because of her looks. She's as gorgeous as Dawn, but in a different way. Claudia is Japanese-American. She's got silky, jet-black hair; dark, dark, almond-shaped eyes; and this creamy complexion. The fact that her complexion is flawless comes as a great surprise to everyone, since Claud is the biggest junk-food nut we've ever known. If it tastes good and is bad for you, Claud likes it. Of course, her parents don't approve of the habit, so Claudia has to hide her junk food. She's got it stashed all over her bedroom - in drawers, under pillows, behind books on her shelves. It's amazing.

  Poor Claud. She has another habit her parents don't approve of - she reads Nancy Drew books. So she has to hide her books, too. The reason her parents don't approve of Nancy Drew is that they feel Claud should be reading something more challenging. I think she should be allowed to read what she wants to read. If she didn't read her mysteries, she wouldn't read anything at all. Claud is not a great student. She's smart, but she does poorly in school, especially in math, reading, and spelling. Her teachers say she doesn't apply herself, but if I were Claud, I'd be just plain nervous about school. That's because Claud has to follow in the footsteps of her older sister, Janine, who is a true genius. Janine is in high school, but she takes courses at the local community college. Plus, she is always winning awards for her schoolwork. Luckily, Claudia has one true talent. She is an artist. She can do just about anything - paint, sketch, sculpt, even make jewelry. She makes a lot of her own jewelry, and sometimes makes jewelry for other people.

  Claudia's best friend is Stacey McGill. Like Dawn, Stacey is a newcomer to Stoneybrook. She and her parents moved here from New York City just before Stacey was to begin seventh grade. Stacey had grown up in New York (she is so lucky) and she's as sophisticated as Claudia, which may be why they get along so well. Stacey also wears super-trendy clothes - layers on layers, hats, pins, cowboy boots, that sort of thing. Plus she's allowed to have her blonde hair permed and she likes to wear nail polish, usually with sparkles in it.

  Stacey may seem glamorous, but her life has definitely not been that way. Stacey's had a tough time, with both her family and her health. See, Stacey had moved to Stoneybrook because the company her father works for had transferred his job to Stamford, which is a city not far away. The McGills had been here for less than a year when the company transferred Mr. McGill back to New York. We were all sad to see Stacey leave (Claudia was especially sad), but then something traumatic happened. Stacey's parents decided to get a divorce. Even worse, Mr. McGill wanted to stay in New York with his job, while Mrs. McGill wanted to return to Stoneybrook. So Stacey had to decide whether to live in the city in which she'd grown up or to move back to Stoneybrook with her mom. Luckily for Claud and all us BSC members, Stacey chose Connecticut, but she still visits her father pretty frequently. Going back and forth between Connecticut and New York is not always easy, though.

  As for Stacey's health, she has a disease called diabetes, and she has a severe form of it. (She said something recently about being a "brittle" diabetic, but I don't know what that is.) Anyway, when someone has diabetes, it means that a gland in the body, the pancreas, stops making something called insulin. Insulin breaks down sugar in the blood. Without insulin, a person's blood sugar level gets all out of whack and he (or she) could even go into a diabetic coma, which is very dangerous. So poor Stacey has to inject herself with insulin (ew, ew, EW!) every day, and stay on a strict diet. On her diet she can eat practically no sweets, and she has to count calories to make sure she consumes the proper number - without fail. Stacey has been looking thin lately and feeling tired. Sometimes we worry about her.

  The last two members of the BSC are younger than Dawn, Kristy, Stacey, Claudia, and I. Their names are Mallory Pike and Jessi Ramsey, and they're both eleven and in sixth grade. They are also best friends, and like most best friends they have some things in common, yet are very different in many ways. Here are the ways in which they're different: Mallory comes from a huge family. She has seven brothers and sisters! And three of them are identical triplets (boys). Jessi comes from a more regular-sized family. She has a younger sister and a baby brother. (Mal and Jessi each live with both of their parents, plus Jessi's Aunt Cecelia lives at the Ramseys' house.) Jessi is thinking of becoming a professional ballet dancer one day, while Mal is pretty sure she's going to write and illustrate children's books after she goes to college. Boy, you should see Jessi dance. She is really talented. She dances en pointe (that means on toe), she takes lessons at a special ballet school in Stamford, and she has danced lead parts in lots of productions before big audiences. Mallory is talented, too, but she's more private about her stories and drawings. We don't get to see many of them, but when we do, we're impressed.

  One last difference between Jessi and Mal - Jessi is black (with long, long dancer's legs, and beautiful eyes), and Mal is white (and not feeling too pretty these days. She wears glasses and braces, and has unruly red hair).

  Here are the ways in which Mal and Jessi are similar.

  They both like to read, especially horse stories by Marguerite Henry. And they're each the oldest kid in their family but feel that their parents treat them like babies. For instance, the Pikes absolutely will not allow Mallory to wear contacts instead of glasses. However, in a recent parent-daughter breakthrough, Mal and Jessi convinced their parents to allow them to have their ears pierced. So that was something. Maybe contacts for Mallory will come next.

  I feel awfully grateful to have so many good friends. If there were such a thing, I think the BSC members would be the Seven Musketeers. Oh, sure, we've had our arguments and fights, but we're usually there for each other, through thick and thin. And we're pretty understanding of each other.

  Chapter 3.

  "What is that?" I asked, looking horrified.

  Claudia looked pretty horrified herself.

  The two of us were in her room, along with Dawn and Mallory, waiting for a meeting of the BSC to begin, and I had just pointed to something. It was a large, sticky-looking brown stain on Claudia's bedspread, and it was only partially covered by the quilt folded at the end of the bed.

  "Oh, lord," said Claudia, examining it. Then she leaned over and smelled it.

  "Gross!" exclaimed Mal. "How can you do that?" But Claudia looked relieved. "It's only chocolate," she said. "I hid a candy bar under the quilt. I guess it got a little warm in there." "What are your parents going to say when they see it?" asked Dawn.

  Claudia shrugged. She pulled the quilt over the stain to hide it. "I'll worry about that some other time." Claudia flopped onto her bed and leaned against the wall. She was looking especially acute that day. (Acute means cool. My friends and I make up words all the time, and only we know what they mean. Distant and dibble also mean cool.) Claud was wearing an oversized raspberry-colored shirt, a short black skirt, and black leggings (the layered look)." On her feet were black cowboy boots, and dangling from an earcuff was a huge collection of beads and stones. (Claud does have pierced ears, but the holes were empty.) I settled myself in my usual spot on Claud's bed (beside Claud), but only after she had covered up the chocolate stain. Compared to Claudia, I looked like a complete nerd, even though I was wearing one of my better outfits: blue print pants that were wide on top but narrowed to cuffs at the ankles, and a short-cropped T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and this acute picture of a cactus wearing a cowboy boot.

  Kristy came thundering up the stairs and into Claud's room then. (There's no mistaking when Kristy is on her way to club headquarters.) "Where is everybody?" she asked immediately. "It's already five twenty-f
ive." "They'll get here," replied Claud calmly.

  And Claud was right. By 5:29, we were all in our places. Dawn and Claudia and I were sitting in a row on Claud's bed; Jessi and Mal were cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the bed; Stacey was straddling Claud's desk chair backward; and Kristy - our president - was sitting in a director's chair, wearing a visor, a pencil stuck over one ear.

  She looked almost regal, even though she was just wearing blue jeans, a turtleneck shirt, and her running shoes.

  As soon as the numbers on Claud's digital alarm clock changed from 5:29 to 5:30, Kristy said loudly, "Okay. Come to order!" Kristy, being the president, gets to lead the meetings. Anyway, the original idea for the Baby-sitters Club was hers. See, a year or so ago, when Kristy still lived across the street from Claud, and before Mrs. Thomas had married Watson Brewer, Kristy and her older brothers took turns baby-sitting for David Michael after school. They didn't mind that arrangement, but of course a day came when all three of them knew they were going to be busy after school, so they wouldn't be able to take care of their little brother. That night, Kristy sat around eating pizza for dinner and watching as her mother made call after call, trying to find someone who could take care of David Michael the next afternoon. And that was how Kristy got her big idea to form a baby-sitting club. If a parent could make one call and reach several sitters at once, it would save time for the parent and also pretty much guarantee him or her a sitter. Someone was bound to be free.

  Kristy told her idea to Claudia and me, and we thought it was great. We also thought a fourth member might be a good idea. Three people didn't seem like quite enough. So Claud mentioned that she was getting to be friends with Stacey McGill, a new girl at school. When we found out that Stacey had done a lot of baby-sitting in New York, we invited her to join the club.

  Now we had a sitting business - but no one knew about it. We decided to advertise. We told everyone we could think of about the club. We passed out fliers. We even put an ad in the paper. Our ad and the fliers told parents that they could reach us Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons from five-thirty until six at Claudia's house.

  Well, at our first meeting, everything went well. We got job calls right away. And the business just kept growing. By the middle of seventh grade we had too much business and realized we needed a fifth member. Dawn had just moved here from California then, and she and I were already friends. So Dawn joined the club. Then Stacey had to leave, so we replaced her with both Jessi and Mal. And then Stacey returned. Of course, we let her back in the club. Now the club has seven main members (there are two other members who don't come to meetings, but I'll tell you about them later), and we think seven is plenty. Claudia's room is getting crowded! Everyone in the BSC has a title. For instance, as I mentioned before, Kristy is the president. This is not only because she thought up the business in the first place, but because she gets good ideas and really knows how to run a club (even if she does get bossy sometimes). Kristy makes us keep a club notebook. In the notebook, each of us writes up every single job she goes on. Then, once a week, we're responsible for reading the notebook to see what happened while our friends were sitting. None of us really likes writing up jobs (except maybe Mallory), but we have to admit that finding out how the other sitters solved problems, and what's going on with the kids we sit for, is pretty helpful.

  Kristy also decided that we should have a record book in which we keep lists of our clients, their names, addresses, phone numbers, the rates they pay, etc. Plus, we record any money we earn, and on the appointment pages we keep track of when our sitting jobs are.

  Another one of Kristy's great ideas was for each of us to make a Kid-Kit. A Kid-Kit is an ordinary cardboard carton that you decorate to look cheerful and pretty and fill with things kids will like, such as our old games, toys, and books, as well as new things that have to be replaced from time to time, like art materials, coloring books, and sticker books. Then we can bring the Kid-Kits on sitting jobs if we want to. (They're especially handy on rainy days.) Kids love them, so their parents are happy, which means our clients will call the BSC again, which means more sitting jobs for us! The vice-president of the club is Claudia. Since she has her own phone and personal phone number, we use Claudia's bedroom for our headquarters. And since we therefore descend on her three times a week, tie up her phone, and eat her junk food, we felt it was only fair that Claud be our vice-president.

  I am the club secretary, and I'm responsible for keeping the record book up-to-date and in order. I'm also responsible for scheduling every single sitting job. There are a lot of details involved here, but I'm good at details. Besides, Kristy thinks I have the neatest handwriting of any of us.

  Our treasurer is Stacey. She's a real math brain. Her job is to collect our weekly dues, put the money in the treasury (a manila envelope), and hand out money when it's needed - for instance, to buy refills for the Kid-Kits, to help pay Claud's phone bills, and to pay Charlie for driving Kristy to and from meetings now that she lives across town. Stacey also records the money we earn. (This is just for our interest. We don't pool our earnings and then divide it up. The money each of us makes is ours to keep.) Dawn is the alternate officer of the BSC. That means that she can take over the job of anyone who misses a meeting. She knows the responsibilities of everyone in the club. That way we'll never have to go without a secretary, a treasurer, or etc. Dawn is like an understudy in a play, or a substitute teacher.

  Mal and Jessi are our junior officers. This simply means that they're younger than the rest of us, and aren't allowed to sit at night unless they're watching their own brothers and sisters. They can baby-sit after school or on weekend days, though, which is good because it frees us older club members for evening jobs.

  Can you believe it? Even with seven members of the BSC, people sometimes call and offer us a job that none of us can take. That's because we're so busy. Aside from baby-sitting and homework, most of us have other activities or responsibilities. Jessi takes ballet lessons, Claud goes to art classes, Mallory has appointments with the orthodontist. . . . When we realized that there were going to be occasional times when we'd have to disappoint a client and tell him or her that nobody in the BSC was free to sit, we signed on two associate members. The associate members don't come to meetings, but they are good backups (also good baby-sitters). They're people we can call on in a pinch. One is Shannon Kilbourne, a friend of Kristy's (she lives in Kristy's neighborhood) and the other is ... Logan Bruno! Our club is very efficient (thanks mostly to Kristy), and it's businesslike and professional, which is why it's successful.

  I am proud to be a member of the BSC.

  When Kristy said, "Come to order!" the rest of us sat up a bit straighter. We paid attention to our president.

  "Okay," Kristy went on. "It's Monday, dues day. Fork over." Most of us groaned as we reached into our pockets for money. Stacey, however, passed around the treasury with a gleam in her eye. She loves collecting money. (But she hates parting with it. She makes a big production out of withdrawing funds from the treasury each time any of us needs to replace an item in the Kid-Kit or something.) When the dues had been collected, Kristy said, "Any club business?" We shook our heads. Things were running smoothly.

  "How's Mrs. Prezzioso?" Kristy wanted to know.

  "She's fine," I replied. "She's going to have - " "Don't tell us what the baby's going to be!" shrieked Jessi.

  "I wasn't going to. I was just going to say that she's going to have the baby soon. In a few weeks, I think. But she's the same old Mrs. P." The phone rang then, and Dawn answered it. "Hello, Baby-sitters Club. . . . Oh, hi, Mr. Ohdner. . . . Friday night? . . . Okay. I'll check and call you right back." Dawn hung up the phone and turned to me. "Mr. Ohdner needs a sitter next Friday night from seven until about ten-thirty. Who's free?" I checked the appointment pages in the record book. "Let's see. You're free, Kristy, and so are you, Stace," I said.

  "You take the job," Kristy said to Stacey. "You live much nearer to the Ohdne
rs than I do. Besides, Andrew and Karen will be with us that night. I want to spend some time with them." That's how we usually handle job calls - no squabbling over who gets one if several of us are free. We know there will be other jobs.

  Dawn called Mr. Ohdner back to tell him that Stacey would be sitting on Friday.

  As soon as she hung up the phone, it rang again. Then two more times. The meeting was pretty busy. One of the last calls to come in was from Mr. Prezzioso, Jenny's father. He hardly ever calls, so Jessi was surprised when she picked up the phone. "It's Mister Prezzioso," she mouthed to the rest of us. Then she went back to the phone call. She was saying, "Three of us? . . . Well, we don't usually take on jobs like that, but this sounds fun. Let me check with the others and call you right back. . . . You're at work? Oh, that makes sense." Jessi jotted down a phone number, said good-bye to Mr. P., and hung up.

  "What was that all about?" asked Kristy.

  "Mr. Prezzioso," Jessi said, "is planning a surprise baby shower for Mrs. P. He wants three of us to give him a hand that day - one to watch Jenny, and two to decorate the house while Mrs. P. is being taken out to lunch or something, and to serve food, clean up, and stuff like that." "Well, I think we should take the job," said Kristy. "The Prezziosos are good clients, and besides, there is some baby-sitting involved." She turned to me. "Are three of us free that day?" Jessi gave me the date and time of the shower. I checked the appointment pages. Claudia, Stacey, and I were free, so we took the job.

  When the meeting was over, Kristy announced, "Good one, you guys!" and sent us all home.

  Chapter 4.

  Ahhh.

  I had been looking forward to this for a long time. It was a snowy Saturday afternoon, and I had already finished my weekend homework. I didn't have a baby-sitting job or anything to do. I mean, anything I had to do. In other words, I was free, free, free. And with the snow falling outside, I felt that this was the perfect afternoon to do cozy indoor things. Let's see. I could work on the sweater I was knitting. Or I could start a present for the Prezzioso baby - maybe a knitted blanket, or a hat and booties.