Claudia and the Bad Joke

by Ann M. Martin

  Betsy shook her head. “No, it isn’t,” she agreed. “And you know what? To make up for what I did, I’m going to fix us a special dessert.”

  Dawn was about to refuse, since she doesn’t eat junk food, but she knew that now was not the time to turn down Betsy’s offer. Betsy was trying to make up for things. Wasn’t she?

  “Okay,” said Dawn. “What kind of dessert?”

  “Ice-cream sundaes.”

  Dawn sighed. Not only did she really not want any ice cream, but she remembered Mary Anne and Jessi’s experience when the triplets had fixed sundaes. However, that was the Pikes’ house, not the Sobaks’.

  “Great!” said Dawn, hoping she sounded enthusiastic. “I’ll clean up the kitchen table, you make the sundaes.”

  By the time Dawn had put the leftover food away and loaded the dishwasher, Betsy was carrying two dishes to the table. She had made real sundaes — ice cream topped with whipped cream, a cherry, and chopped peanuts. Dawn wished she liked sundaes better.

  Betsy set one dish in front of Dawn and sat down with the other. She took a bite. “Oh, heavenly,” she said. She closed her eyes for a moment.

  Reluctantly, Dawn lifted her spoon. She just knew she was going to regret this. She would probably get pimples and cavities from all the sugar. She was concentrating so hard on how unhealthy the ice cream was that she forgot about who had dished it out — the practical-joke queen. She put the spoon in her mouth. And then she did something she had never done before. Well, at least not since she was a very little kid. She spit her mouthful back out.

  “Oh, disgusting!” she cried. “Betsy, what is this? It tastes like soap.”

  “It’s shaving cream! Gotcha!” Betsy managed to choke out. “I got whipped cream. You got shaving cream!”

  Dawn just shook her head.

  When Mr. and Mrs. Sobak came home, Dawn didn’t say a word about the jokes. She couldn’t. It would seem like tattling. And it sounded so babyish.

  But babyish or not, another battle in the practical-joke war had been fought — and Dawn was pretty sure that this time Betsy Sobak had won.

  I was bored.

  Not just a little bit, rainy-day sort of bored. I was loll-around-the-house, complain-about-everything bored. I was so bored I wanted to go back to school.

  It was hard to believe.

  I don’t know how Mimi put up with me.

  It was a Monday afternoon. I’d been home from the hospital since a week before the previous Thursday (longer than the doctor had first said I would have to stay home). The good news was that I didn’t have to stay in bed so much and I could go back to school on Wednesday. The bad news was that by that time I would have missed three weeks of school. Even though I’d been keeping up with my homework, I was worried about the classwork I’d missed. When you’re me, it’s not a good idea to miss three weeks of school. It’s hard enough keeping up when you’re there every day.

  “Mimi,” I said, as I waited for my friends to arrive for our club meeting, “what if I have to stay back? Do you think I’ll have to repeat eighth grade? It would be horrible! All my friends would go on to the high school and I’d be left behind with a bunch of drippy former seventh-graders who probably wouldn’t even —”

  “Claudia, my Claudia,” Mimi interrupted me.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table, shelling peas for dinner. I was supposedly helping her, but I’d reached that point where I was so bored I didn’t want to do anything.

  That doesn’t make much sense, does it? You’d think if you were bored enough, you’d be happy for little chores. Like, if someone came up to you and said, “Would you please pick the lint balls off my sweater?” you’d say, “Oh, thank you thank you thank you. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I’ve been waiting for something like this.” But that wasn’t the case with me. The boreder I got, the less I wanted to do — except start my regular life again.

  “Claudia, you let imani — ima — you let thoughts run away with you,” said Mimi. “No. I think you do not have to repeat grade. You are worry too much. If you fall very far behind, maybe summer school. But your mother, your father, your sister, and I — we help you.”

  I nodded. “I know you will. I guess I’m just nervous. I’ve never missed three weeks of school before. At first it did seem like a vacation. Now it doesn’t seem like one at all.”

  “You know, my Claudia,” said Mimi gently, and she stopped shelling the peas for a moment, “I have idea about you. I am not … I am not … head doctor, but this is what I think. I think you worry about school because there is something else you not want to worry about. And that is baby-sitting. What about club? Do you make decision yet?”

  I shifted my position uncomfortably. I was sitting on one kitchen chair with my leg propped up on another.

  “No,” I replied. “I haven’t made a decision.”

  “You think about it?” Mimi asked me.

  “Well, not too much. I’ve been trying not to.”

  Mimi nodded. Janine or my parents might have prodded me or scolded me, but Mimi just accepted that I was having some trouble.

  I looked at the kitchen clock. Five-fifteen. My friends would be arriving soon, but not soon enough to save me from this discussion. “You know what the problem is?” I said to Mimi. “I don’t think I want to make a decision. I don’t want to baby-sit because I’m afraid to, and I don’t want to drop out of the club because I like being part of it. So if I don’t make up my mind, I won’t have to do either one.”

  “That is called being in limbo, my Claudia, and you cannot stay there,” Mimi informed me gently. She wasn’t going to come right out and say it, but she meant that I better make a decision.

  “I just can’t decide,” I told her. “I know I should be able to talk to you or Mom or Dad or Janine — or my friends — but I feel like I can’t because there’s nothing to say. I don’t know how to talk about this anymore. It’s not —”

  Ring, ring.

  “I’ll get it,” I said. I had chosen my spot in the kitchen carefully. I was close to both the phone and the refrigerator. I could get to either one without moving much. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Hi!”

  “Hi, Stacey! How come you’re calling on this line?”

  “Because I figured you’d be downstairs …. And I was right!”

  “Oh. Well, great timing! Everyone’s going to be here in a few minutes.”

  “I know. That’s why I called now. I wanted to talk to you, and I figured that by the time we finished, the other girls would have arrived and I could talk to them, too.”

  “Oh, good. But it’d be easier if I talked to you in my room. So if you don’t mind, let me crawl upstairs and I’ll call you from my phone. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Stacey and I hung up. “Mimi?” I said. “I know I have to make a decision. I know I can’t stay in limbo. So I will decide. But it might take awhile.”

  “That is okay, my Claudia. It is okay as long as you are responsible. And making the decision is part of being responsible.”

  I nodded. Then I got my crutches, hobbled to the stairs, and with Mimi watching anxiously from below, backed awkwardly to the second floor on my bottom, dragging my crutches with me. When I reached my room, I settled on my bed and dialed Stacey.

  “Hi,” I said. “Okay, I’m in my room now. How are you doing?”

  “Fine,” Stacey replied. “How are you?”

  “Bored.”

  “I bet. Once I missed a whole month of school. I was so bored my mother said she was going to look for a full-time job. She couldn’t take me anymore. Of course, she was kidding. I think.”

  “Mimi’s being really patient,” I told Stacey.

  “What else would Mimi be?” Stacey replied.

  We laughed.

  “Well?” said Stacey.

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, what are you going to do about the Baby-sitters Club?”

  “Oh, my lord. Is t
hat all anyone can think of?”

  “Excuse me,” said Stacey. “It was only a question.”

  “Sorry. Mimi just asked me about it, too. The answer is, I still don’t know.”

  Stacey and I talked for a few more minutes, and even though that was really great, it made me think how much I miss her. We used to have all the time in the world for talks. Then my friends started to arrive. Dawn and Kristy came first, then Mary Anne, then Mallory, then Jessi. Dawn, Kristy, and Mary Anne each spoke with Stacey.

  “I,” I said to Jessi and Mallory while the others were crowded around the phone, “will be so glad to put on real clothes. You can’t imagine. I haven’t been dressed in days.”

  “Do you know what you’re going to wear to school on Wednesday?” asked Jessi.

  “Not for sure. But it’ll have to be a dress. I’m not going to cut slits up the legs of all my pants and jeans, just so I can get them on over my cast …. Hey, Mary Anne!” I whispered loudly, tapping her arm. “Get off the phone, okay? This call is costing a fortune.”

  When Mary Anne had said good-bye, Kristy called the meeting to order. “Our first piece of business,” she said, “is that we need an answer, Claud.”

  “An answer to what?”

  “Are you in the club or not?” Kristy asked bluntly.

  “What is this?” I cried. “Torture Claudia Day? I don’t have an answer.”

  “Claud,” Dawn said gently, “we don’t want you to leave the club. But if you’re going to, we need to know.”

  “Right,” agreed Kristy, a little more sympathetically. “I mean, we couldn’t keep holding meetings in your room if you weren’t a member of the club. So we’d have to find a new meeting place and give our new number to all our clients. We’d have some work to do. That’s why we’d kind of like your answer.”

  I sighed. “I just can’t tell you yet. Because I don’t know the answer myself. I’m really sorry. I know it isn’t convenient.”

  “Oh, Claud,” said Mary Anne, sounding disappointed. “You can’t drop out of the club. We’ve had too much fun. Remember —”

  “This wasn’t fun,” I said, pointing to my leg.

  “No, of course not. But don’t forget about the fun we have had. Remember when Lucy Newton was christened?”

  “And remember our trip to Disney World?” said Dawn.

  “And our trip to New York?” added Kristy.

  I glanced at Mal and Jessi, hoping they didn’t feel too left out. They hadn’t come to New York with us, since they were too young. And they hadn’t been part of the club when we went on the other trip.

  But they didn’t look upset at all, which meant that they probably weren’t even thinking about the trips. They just wanted an answer from me, like everyone else did.

  “Can I give you my answer in a week?” I asked. “That’s all I need. Just one more week.”

  “Okay,” said Kristy. “Sure. Claud, tell us something, though. Do you miss baby-sitting?”

  “I miss everything!”

  “Honestly. Do you miss it?” she asked seriously.

  I paused. “Yes. I do. I’d give anything to see Jamie or Myriah or Gabbie or Karen or one of your sisters or brothers, Mal.”

  “You’re going to stay in the club, I just know you are!” exclaimed Mary Anne.

  “I’m really not sure,” I said.

  We stopped talking then because the phone began ringing. We set up some jobs.

  “How’s Betsy?” I dared to ask, when we hit a lull.

  “The same,” replied Mal, sounding irritated. “Joke, joke, joke. We can’t beat her. She’s unstoppable.”

  “We’re losing the war, aren’t we?” I said.

  Kristy screwed up her face. “I hate to admit it, but yes. We’re losing it.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” I said thoughtfully. “Mimi is right. We can’t control everything in life. And I don’t like that.”

  My friends and I looked at each other. No one said a word. The room was silent.

  “Gosh, I’m bored!” I exclaimed. “Anyone have any lint balls? I’ll be glad to pick them off your clothes for you.”

  We all laughed — but I was feeling worried. Now I had only a week to decide if I really wanted to be in the Baby-sitters Club.

  Saturday

  I did it, I did it, I did it! Just a few days ago we thought we’d lost the war against our great practical joker. Today we won it. Oh, okay. I won’t be modest. I won it. I won the war. I did have a little help, though. You know how we’re always complaining about Sam because sometimes he goof-calls us at our meetings? Well, today my brother and his jokes came through. Leave it to Sam to be able to out-joke Betsy Sobak. You want to know how good he is? This is how good he is. He helped me out-joke her and he hadn’t even been to the film festival. (He has ordered from McBuzz’s a few times, though.) All Sam needed to know was that Betsy and I were going to the movies ….

  Leave it to Sam? No — leave it to Kristy. Kristy and her great ideas. Sam did help her, but Kristy was the one who finally beat Betsy at her own game of jokes. On Saturday, three days after I was allowed to go back to school, Kristy had a special sitting job with Betsy. The movie theater downtown was having a two-week-long run of kids’ movies — Mary Poppins, The Parent Trap, The Red Balloon, The Wizard of Oz, Swiss Family Robinson, all sorts of things. The Saturday afternoon feature was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Mrs. Sobak had asked Kristy to take Betsy while she and Mr. Sobak went to another golf tournament. She said she’d buy the tickets and refreshments, then pay Kristy a small fee. (After all, Kristy was getting a free movie out of the deal.)

  The movie date was Kristy’s first job with Betsy. Kristy saw it as a giant challenge. She wasn’t sure she could actually beat Betsy, but she was determined not to lose another battle. As soon as she found out what kind of afternoon had been planned for her and Betsy, she went to her brother Sam. She explained the problem we were having and — bang — just like that, Sam had tons of advice (well, jokes) for Kristy. And they were jokes that would work especially nicely in a movie theater.

  At twelve o’clock on Saturday afternoon, a car horn honked in front of the Brewer mansion. Kristy ran outside. The Sobaks were waiting in the driveway. She slid into the backseat next to Betsy. Mr. and Mrs. Sobak were in the front.

  “Now,” said Mrs. Sobak as she drove through Stoneybrook, “the movie starts at twelve-thirty and it’s long — almost two and a half hours — so it’ll let out just before three. Mr. Sobak and I will be home around five. You two can walk to our house after the movie — it isn’t far — and then, Kristy, we’ll drive you home later. Is that okay?”

  “That’s fine,” replied Kristy as Betsy sneakily squirted her with her trick fountain pen. Kristy ignored Betsy. She didn’t even wipe the water off her face.

  The Sobaks let Betsy and Kristy off in front of the movie theater. Mrs. Sobak handed Kristy some money, and then she pulled the car into the stream of traffic on Stoneybrook’s main street. “Ta-ta!” she called.

  “Okay, Bets,” said Kristy. “Get ready for a great movie. And,” she went on, “I have something important to tell you. I’d like you to listen carefully.”

  “Okay,” said Betsy curiously as Kristy pulled her away from the crowd of kids in front of the theater.

  “What I want to tell you is … no more practical jokes. I won’t put up with them,” said Kristy firmly. “I don’t like them, even if you do. So no practical jokes. Got it? Not one more.” Kristy had told herself that she would not put her plan into action unless it was really called for. If Betsy was good, then Kristy would not continue the practical-joke war.

  “Okay,” said Betsy a bit uncertainly.

  “I’m not kidding,” Kristy told her. “So promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  “What do you promise?”

  “I promise not to play any more practical jokes,” said Betsy obediently.

  “All right,” Kristy replied.

  Betsy flash
ed Kristy a big smile. “Please can I give the lady the money for our tickets?” Betsy begged. “I just love doing that. I’ll say, ‘One adult and one child, please.’”

  “Sure,” said Kristy. “Here you go.” She held out some of the money Mrs. Sobak had just given her. Betsy reached for it, and — BZZZZZZ!

  “Gotcha!” hooted Betsy. “I gotcha with my joy buzzer! Hee-hee-hee!”

  I don’t believe it! thought Kristy. The kid played another joke. Right after flat-out promising not to. Well, that does it. The plan goes into effect now.

  Kristy just smiled. Soon she would be the one saying, “Gotcha!”

  Betsy and Kristy joined the line of kids waiting to buy tickets. An awful lot of people were standing outside the theater. Kristy looked around, hoping to see someone she knew. But she didn’t recognize any faces.

  Betsy did, though. “Hey! There are Hilary and Cici!” she whispered to Kristy. “Oh, and Justin and Joey.”

  “Go say hi,” Kristy suggested.

  Betsy looked uncomfortable. “Uh, no. That’s okay.”

  “No, really. Go on. I’ll save our places in line.”

  Betsy shook her head. “I don’t think they like me.”

  “Any particular reason?” asked Kristy.

  “Maybe because I tied their shoes together during assembly last week. When they stood up, they fell down.”

  “Well, that’d do it,” said Kristy drily.

  “And also because I fixed the door to the girls’ room so that a baggie full of water fell on Cici when she went inside …. Oh, and I put fake ants in Justin’s sandwich, and a fake fly in Joey’s pudding, and fake barf in Hilary’s lunch.”

  “You put fake barf in someone’s lunch?” exclaimed Kristy. “That’s disgusting!”

  “I know,” said Betsy, who looked both guilty and proud of herself.

  “So now those kids don’t like you?” asked Kristy.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Hmm. Kristy decided to keep her eye on Hilary and Cici and Justin and Joey.

  The line was moving fast. Soon Kristy and Betsy and Betsy’s classmates had bought their tickets and were entering the theater.