Taffy Sinclair 006 - Taffy Sinclair, Baby Ashley, and Me

by Betsy Haynes

  TAFFY SINCLAIR, BABY ASHLEY, AND ME

  Betsy Haynes

  A BANTAM SKYLARK BOOK®

  NEW YORK · TORONTO · LONDON · SYDNEY · AUCKLAND

  RL 5, 009-12

  TAFFY SINCLAIR, BABY ASHLEY, AND ME

  A Bantam Skylark Book / January 1988

  3 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.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1987 by Betsy Haynes.

  Cover art copyright © 1987 by Lino Safftotti.

  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.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  ISBN 0-553-15713-2

  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

  S 11 10 9 8 7 6 5

  For Joan Vincenti Cairatti

  CHAPTER ONE

  "Oh, Jana. How darling. That must be the very latest hairstyle."

  Little explosions started going off in my brain, and I whirled around to face Taffy Sinclair. It was almost time for the first bell, and she was standing beside her locker with an icky sweet smile on her face. Mona Vaughn was with her and so was Alexis Duvall. I thought I'd die.

  "Of course it's the latest style," I snapped. "Haven't you noticed it in all the magazines?"

  I hugged my books to my chest and stomped on past Taffy, trying to tune out the snickers that followed me down the hall. Of course Taffy Sinclair would notice my hair. And of course she would make a big deal out of it in front of everybody. Taffy Sinclair is my enemy. She may be gorgeous with her long blond hair and big blue eyes, but she is also the snottiest and most stuck-up girl in the sixth grade at Mark Twain Elementary. I'm not the only one who thinks so, but I'm the one she hates most. In fact, she hates me so much that once she even blackmailed me when I found our teacher's wallet after someone else had stolen it.

  Anyway, I was so busy getting away from Taffy Sinclair and thinking about what a terrible person she is that I almost had a head-on collision with my best friend, Beth Barry, right in the middle of the hall.

  "Hey, slow down, Morgan," Beth said as we stopped a couple of inches apart. "Are you running from a fire?" She looked at me, got a quizzical expression on her face, then added, "What happened to your hair?"

  "I forgot to spit out my gum when I went to bed last night, okay?" I grumbled.

  "Oh, I get it," Beth said, trying not to laugh. "And it got stuck in your hair right above your left ear, and you had to use scissors to get it out. Right?"

  "So?" I said, giving her a blazing look. "SOME people might be polite enough not to point out to their best friend that she has a gigantic hole in her hair right by her face when she obviously already knows it!"

  I brushed on past Beth and ducked into the girls' bathroom to check my hair one more time before I went to class. Normally my dark brown hair hid both of my ears and fell all the way to my shoulders, but now all that remained on the left side was a row of fringe, and my ear was sticking straight out like a sail for the whole world to see. If only there were some way I could keep Randy Kirwan from noticing it. Randy is the most wonderful boy in the world, not to mention the handsomest, kindest, and most sensitive boy in my class. He is also my boyfriend, and I always try to look my best for him. But what could I do? For the millionth time, I tried pulling an uncut strand forward to cover my ear, but as soon as I let go of the hair, it fell back into its regular place. I sighed and made a face at myself in the mirror. I looked awful. In fact, I wouldn't look any worse if I had used those scissors to cut off my nose.

  I couldn't help feeling miserable. Everything in my life was going wrong. This was the most terrible morning I had ever lived through. First I had dropped my toothbrush into the toilet and had to brush my teeth with my finger. Then I looked into the mirror and saw a big glob of pink bubble gum stuck in my hair. And finally, to top it off, Mom hadn't even noticed my hair. She had been too preoccupied. When I came into the kitchen for breakfast, she had a dreamy look on her face and then made the big announcement that she had finally decided to marry her boyfriend, Pink.

  How could she do that to me? After all the times she had said that she didn't want to rush into marriage again. But I didn't have time to think about that right now. The first bell was ringing and I had to get to class.

  Even though I made it to the classroom before the second bell, I was the last person in the room. My four best friends were already in their seats, and so was Taffy Sinclair. Wiggins was writing the math assignment on the board with her back to the class. I had to go by Taffy's desk to get to mine, and I stuck my nose in the air, raised my left hand to cover my ear, and started to march right past. I wasn't going to give her the chance to make fun of my hair again. Just then I stumbled, tripping over something in the aisle. My books went flying as I caught myself.

  "Taffy Sinclair!" I shrieked. "You tripped me! Miss Wiggins, Taffy Sinclair stuck her foot out when I went by and tripped me."

  Taffy came up out of her seat like an erupting volcano. "Liar!" she screamed. "I didn't trip you. You're probably so clumsy that you fell over your own feet."

  "I did not! You tripped me!"

  "YOUNG LADIES!" Wiggins turned around so abruptly that her red curls were bouncing, and she had on her I've-had-it frown. "Will you please get control of yourselves?" She paused and the room went deadly silent. "Now, what seems to be the problem? Jana, you may begin."

  "She tripped me, Miss Wiggins. Honest, she did. I was just walking to my seat minding my own business."

  "I did not," Taffy blurted. I could see that she was trying to squeeze fake tears out of her eyes. "She tripped herself, and now she's trying to get ME into trouble."

  Wiggins didn't say anything for a minute, and I could practically hear the computer in her brain clicking away, comparing our arguments. I held my breath. She would probably believe Taffy Sinclair instead of me. Prissy, icky sweet Taffy, who always buttered up the teachers. Besides, why should Wiggins care if I was having a horrible day, and my toothbrush fell into the toilet, and I had to cut a huge glob of bubble gum out of my hair, and my mother was going to marry Wallace Pinkerton, and Taffy Sinclair had stuck out her foot and tripped me? Why should she care about any of it? It wasn't her problem.

  Wiggins cleared her throat. "Jana and Taffy," she began, frowning at us over the top of her wire-frame glasses. "I think that what we need here is a cooling-off period before we discuss this situation any further. I will give each of you a hall pass, and I want you to take your math books and this morning's assignment and spend the rest of the period in the detention room in the principal's office. Perhaps the two of you will be ready for civilized discussion after that."

  My heart sank. I had never been sent to the detention room in my life. Mostly only rowdy kids like Clarence Marshall got sent there.

  "This is all your fault, Taffy," I snarled as we headed down the hall toward the principal's office a few minutes la
ter. "If you hadn't tripped me, this would never have happened."

  Taffy stopped and glared at me. "I did not trip you, Jana Morgan. Don't blame me if you're so graceful that you fell over your own feet."

  I hated Taffy Sinclair more than I had ever hated her before. I wanted to punch her out, but I knew I would only get into more trouble than I was already in, so I shot her a poison-dart look and stormed on down the hall as fast as I could with her charging along right behind me. She probably didn't want me to get there first and tell my side of the story to Mrs. Winchell, the principal.

  Just as we started to go past the glass double front doors, I stopped. I thought I had heard a sound. Taffy stopped, too, and looked at me.

  "What's the matter?" she demanded.

  "I heard a noise," I snapped. "A kitten or something."

  "What? A kitten in the school?"

  "Shhh! Listen!"

  The sound came again, and this time Taffy heard it, too. "It does sound like a kitten. I wonder how it got into the building."

  We both looked up and down the silent hallway. I couldn't see the kitten or anything else that looked as if it could be making that sound.

  "Maybe it got trapped in one of the lockers," I suggested.

  Taffy nodded, and we each took one side of the hall and walked along next to the lockers, listening carefully. When we reached the end of them, we turned around and came back again, still listening. Nothing. Then I scanned the tops of the lockers in case it had climbed up there and couldn't get down. Nope. There was no kitten stranded up there, either.

  I shrugged and continued on toward the principal's office when suddenly Taffy gasped and raced to the glass front doors, pushing them open and slipping outside. I turned to look at her and saw her shivering in the cold autumn wind and bending over a basket on the front steps of the school. It was a small basket, filled with what looked like an old, faded blanket.

  In an instant Taffy scooped up the basket and scrambled back inside. "It's a . . . a baby!" she sputtered.

  It was a baby wrapped up in blankets and lying in the basket. Its eyes were closed and its face was screwed into a pitiful expression as it made the high-pitched little cries that I had mistaken for the sound of a kitten.

  "Oh, my gosh." I tiptoed closer and stared at the bundle in Taffy's arms. My heart was hammering away. I couldn't believe it. We had found a real live baby! It was like something in a dream!

  Just then I noticed that there was a wrinkled scrap of paper pinned to the blanket with words written on it in pencil. "It's a note!" I cried, and reached out to smooth the paper so that we both could read it.

  MY NAME IS ASHLEY. PLEASE TAKE GOOD CARE OF ME.

  "Ashley," I whispered.

  At the sound of her name, Ashley opened her eyes. Then she stopped crying and started to smile. I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around the basket, too. Taffy and I just stood there in the silent hallway, holding the baby between us and staring down at her beautiful face. Then we slowly raised our eyes until we were looking at each other. Neither of us could say a word.

  CHAPTER TWO

  "Let's put the basket down and look at her to make sure she's okay." Taffy's eyes were bright with excitement.

  I nodded, still unable to speak around the lump in my throat. Ashley was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. She had reddish-gold hair that curled into soft ringlets around her face and eyes as blue as the sky.

  I could hear the muffled voice of a teacher coming from a classroom somewhere down the long hallway and the clackety-clack of a typewriter in the office, but they seemed a million miles away as we carefully placed the basket on the floor between us and knelt beside it in the empty hallway.

  Ashley was still smiling, and now she was waving a tiny fist in the air as if she wanted to hold hands. I giggled and offered her my finger, which she grabbed and held onto with surprising strength.

  Very gently Taffy pulled the blanket away. The baby was wearing a pink terry cloth sleeper with a bunny on the front. It was clean but faded, and one of Ashley's tiny toes poked out through a hole in the foot.

  "She looks okay." I slowly exhaled a deep breath that I didn't realize I had been holding.

  "Yeah." Taffy grinned broadly. "She looks super."

  I bent forward and sniffed a couple of times. "She smells okay, too."

  We both giggled at that, then Taffy said, "She really likes us. Look at her grin."

  Taffy was right. Ashley hadn't cried once since she saw us, and now she was gurgling happily and drooling bubbles as she concentrated on drawing my finger toward her mouth.

  "Look at her pull on your finger," said Taffy. "Do you think she's hungry?"

  "Gosh. I don't know." With my free hand I dug around in the basket until my fingers touched something hard and round. It was a bottle, and when I pulled it out of the basket, I could see that it was full of milk. I pulled the cover off the nipple and held the bottle near her mouth. "Here, little Ashley," I cooed. "Do you want your bottle?"

  She let go of my finger at once and began eagerly sucking on the nipple. "Look, Taffy," I said in amazement. "Isn't she wonderful?"

  Taffy reached out and stroked her forehead, smiling down at her. "Oh, yes," she said in a breathless whisper.

  When Ashley had finished all that she wanted of her bottle, I gently lifted her onto my shoulder and patted her on the back until she got a bubble up. Then I put her back into the basket. She was content now, and she made sweet little cooing sounds and smiled at us.

  She was so small and precious, like a real live doll. I wanted to sit there beside her forever, to hold her and play with her, but a warning bell was going off in my brain. We weren't her mothers. We were just a couple of sixth-graders who had found her on the doorstep of the school.

  Taffy must have been reading my mind. "What are we going to do now?" she asked softly.

  I looked around helplessly until I spotted the sign beside the front door: All Visitors Must Register in the Office.

  "We'd better take Ashley into the office and show her to Mrs. Winchell," I said. "She'll know what to do."

  "You're right." Taffy jumped to her feet. "I'll put our books in my locker for now."

  I felt better. I liked Mrs. Winchell. Besides being the school principal, she is the mother of one of my best friends, Christie. I knew that she was someone we could trust to help us take care of Ashley.

  I pulled the blanket up and tucked it in around Ashley while Taffy ran to her locker. When she came back, we lifted the basket so that we could carry it between us and headed for the office. Our footsteps echoed in the empty hall. It seemed like hours ago that we had been going to that very place, and we had been fighting like crazy. I looked out of the corner of my eye at Taffy. She must have been thinking about the very same thing because she was looking at me, too.

  With the basket between us we had to turn sideways to get through the office door. We walked up to the counter and waited for someone to notice us. My heart was starting to hammer again. I could hardly wait to tell our story to Mrs. Winchell and see her face when she heard how we had thought at first that the cries were being made by a kitten.

  No one noticed us. Mrs. Lockwood, the school secretary, was sitting at her desk behind the counter, totaling lunch money. Mrs. Gray, who teaches afternoon kindergarten, was checking her box in the teachers' mailbox, and Mr. Rollins, the science teacher, was running off study sheets on the copy machine. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and thought about clearing my throat to get someone's attention. I didn't have to. Ashley picked that instant to start crying again, and she let out such a squall that I almost dropped my side of the basket.

  "What was that?" cried Mrs. Lockwood, shooting straight up out of her chair. Then she spotted Taffy and me. "Girls! What's in the basket?" Suddenly her eyes opened wide, registering surprise. "Oh, my word. It's a baby!"

  "I found her on the front steps of the school," Taffy began excitedly.

  "But it was after I heard
her crying," I corrected. "She would never have seen the basket if I hadn't heard the baby crying first."

  Taffy shot me a poison-dart look. "Only Jana thought it was a kitten. I was the one who noticed the basket through the glass doors and carried her inside."

  "Girls. Girls. This is no time to argue. Put the basket up on the counter before you drop it," Mrs. Lockwood ordered. "Mrs. Winchell!" she called over her shoulder. "Somebody get Mrs. Winchell. I think she's on the phone."

  Before Taffy and I could even start to lift the basket up onto the counter ourselves, Mr. Rollins reached across and took it out of our arms.

  "Poor little thing," he said as he set Ashley on the desk on the other side of the counter where Taffy and I couldn't even see her anymore. "Did somebody leave you on our front doorstep?"

  By this time Mrs. Gray had rushed up and was peering into the basket at the crying baby. too. "Hush, hush, little baby," she cooed. Then she bent closer. "Look. There's a note pinned to the blanket."

  "It SAYS that her name is ASHLEY," I shouted over the commotion. I was starting to get mad. They had taken our baby away from us, and now they were acting as if we weren't even there. "It says, 'Please take good care of me,'" I said even more loudly. "And that's exactly what Taffy Sinclair and I were doing. Ashley wasn't even crying for us."

  "That's right!" Taffy said defiantly. "WE were taking VERY good care of her."

  "I'm sure you were, dears," said Mrs. Lockwood. "And thank you for bringing her into the office. But this is a matter for grown-ups to handle now. Go sit down in those chairs against the wall for the time being. Someone will talk to you in a little bit."

  I clenched my fists and stomped over to the chairs, sitting down in one of them as hard as I could. Taffy followed me. I could see angry tears welling up in her eyes, and I knew that this time they weren't fake tears.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Just then Mrs. Winchell stepped out of her private office. "Did someone call me? What's going on out here?" At the same instant she spotted Ashley in her basket and rushed forward just as Mrs. Lockwood and the two teachers all started talking at once.