Baby-Sitters Beware (2 page)

"Kristy, hurry! You're going to miss the best part! The house catches on fire, and then it's buried by an avalanche, with her and the monster inside!" Karen shrieked.

What else could I do? I sat down to watch the movie.

The house on the screen started to burn.

"And I thought I had worries," I said softly to Shannon, patting her puppy head.

Shannon wagged her tail and licked my hand reassuringly.

Chapter 2.

Jessi.

"Do you know what our basement is filled with? Insulation," said Mal bitterly. "Boxes of it! Bales of it! Tons of insulation."

"I can see you're warming up to the subject," said Abby, and slapped her leg in exaggerated glee.

Mal did not smile. She just gave Abby a long-suffering look and said, with icy dignity, "Ha, ha."

It was a Monday afternoon meeting of the BSC. Kristy was sitting in the director's chair, as usual, with her visor on and her attention divided between Claudia's dock and the watch on her own left wrist. Claudia, as usual, was on the prowl for junk food, which she keeps stashed in hiding places around her room. Abby was stretched out full length on Claudia's bed, with her feet dangling over the end and her arms folded, staring up at the ceiling. Stacey was pulling out the BSC treasury envelope, preparing to demand that we hand over our dues, since Monday is dues day for the BSC. I was sitting next to Mal on the floor, leaning against the bed and trying to look sympathetic.

Amazingly enough, it seemed as if Mary Anne was going to be ... Late?

Nope. The door flew open and Mary Anne rushed breathlessly into the room.

The dock rolled over to 5:30.

Kristy announced, "This meeting of the BSC will come to order."

"Tigger," said Mary Anne breathlessly, referring to her tiger-striped gray kitten. "I could hear him mewing but I couldn't find him anywhere! Finally I figured out that he was locked in the hall closet."

"Did you get him out?" asked Claudia.

Mary Anne nodded. "I gave him a treat to show him it had all been an accident in the first place."

"Treats are good," said Claudia, holding up a bag of assorted Halloween candy.

"Dues are even better," said Stacey.

We groaned, but we all paid up. Dues might not be better than treats, but they are important (and they do sometimes pay for treats, such as an occasional pizza party for the dub).

But I guess I should start at the beginning.

You may already know a little about the Baby-sitters Club, but in case you don't, we are seven experienced baby-sitters (plus two associates) whom parents can reach with just one phone call to Claudia's number, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons between 5:30 and 6:00.

A simple idea but a brilliant one, thought of by our president, Kristy. The club started out with four members: Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia, and Stacey. Kristy and Mary Anne lived next door to each other on Bradford Court and Claudia lived across the street. Stacey had just moved to Stoneybrook from New York City.

In no time at all the BSC had more work than it could handle. That’s when Mary Anne asked her new friend (who later became her stepsister) Dawn Schafer to join. Mallory, who was (and is) younger, soon followed as a junior officer, and so did I. I mean, I'm a junior officer too, and Mal's best friend.

Then after much back and forth about whether she would be happier staying in Stoneybrook with her mother and new blended family (which by then included Mary Anne and Mr. Spier), or returning to California to, her father and brother and her father’s new wife, Dawn at last decided to move back to California. Aside from missing Dawn as a friend, we soon discovered we were in the middle of a baby-sitting crunch. That's when Abby Stevenson, who had just moved into Kristy's neighborhood, was invited to join, along with her twin sister Anna. Anna said no, Abby said yes.

We have two associate members. Shannon (Kristy's neighbor) and Logan Bruno, who don't often come to meetings, take sitting jobs when the rest of us can't fit them into our schedules.

Kristy is 1) Very Organized, and 2) Full of Great Ideas. As a result, the BSC is very organized, and has some unique things going for it. We meet regularly, and hand over dues every Monday. The dues are used' for gas money for Kristy's brother Charlie (he drives her and Abby to meetings). Also, as I mentioned, the money's used for BSC pizza parties every now and then. We also spend the dues on our Kid-Kits, another Kristy idea. Kid-Kits are boxes that we've decorated (mine has an office theme) and filled with old puzzles, toys, games, and books, plus new stickers and markers and whatever else we think kids might .like to play with. Even though most of the stuff in the Kid-Kits is secondhand, to the kids at our jobs it’s all brand-new. And have you ever met kids who don't like playing with other kids' toys more than their own?

We don't take the Kid-Kits to every job. We save them for rainy days, or for kids who are in bed with colds, or for times when we think we might need something extra to help a job

go smoothly. And you know what? They work, almost every time.

Mary Anne maintains the dub record book, where she records each job and keeps a calendar of other things the BSC members do, such as my special ballet lessons in Stamford at Mme. Noelle's, every Tuesday and Friday afternoon after school. The record book also has a list of all our clients, with their addresses and phone numbers, plus any special information we might need.

Kristy runs a tight ship. Someday, I'm sure, she'll be running a bigger ship, such as a major corporation (or maybe Congress) in much the same way.

Of course, our success isn't all due to organization. We can also congratulate ourselves on being very, very good at what we do. (I'm not bragging, just stating a fact. We wouldn't be successful if we weren't good, would we?) I think one of the reasons the BSC is such a solid club is because we are all so different. I know you've heard it before, that opposites attract. But in this case, It’s really true. We all get along, most of the time, even though our group is filled with pairs of opposites.

For example, Kristy and Mary Anne are best friends. It's true that they have a lot in common: They are both short, each lost a parent early on, they are both very organized and responsible, and they both live in blended families now.

But Kristy is outspoken and outgoing and sometimes almost too blunt. She gets her point across, and she won't take "no" for an answer. (Although she certainly doesn't hesitate to use it as an answer herself!) Kristy, who has brown hair and brown eyes, wears a sort of uniform of her own — jeans and sneakers and a sweater or T-shirt. She is also athletic, and coaches a softball team called Kristy's Krushers, made up of little kids whose ages range from two and a half to eight.

Mary Anne is shy and not athletic. (I can't imagine her as a coach, standing on the field blowing her whistle and running a practice!) She is very sensitive and cries easily. Even commercials can make her cry. Unlike Kristy, who has always lived in a larger than average family, Mary Anne was the only child of an only parent for a long time. Her mother died when Mary Anne was just a baby, so Mr. Spier raised Mary Anne alone. He wanted to make sure that he did it right (and he clearly did) so he was very, very strict. It took Mary Anne awhile to make him see that she wouldn't be a little girl who needed little-girl rules forever.

Gradually he loosened up, (especially after Mary Anne showed him how responsible she was already) and now she doesn't have to wear little kid clothes (or braids!) anymore. He's even calm about the fact that Logan (yes, one of the associate members of the BSC) is Mary Anne's steady boyfriend. In fact, her father is pretty all around reasonable these days.

And that’s not just because of Mary Anne. Dawn Schafer had something to do with it, too.

How?

Well, Dawn and Mary Anne became best friends not long after Dawn moved to Stoneybrook, with her mother and brother, from California. Dawn's mother had grown up in Stoneybrook and was returning after she and Dawn's father divorced. Soon Dawn and Mary Anne discovered that Dawn's mom and Mary Anne's dad had been high-school sweethearts. They put their heads together and gave .the old romance a new push, and it worked! Sharon Schafer became Sharon Schafer Spier, and Mary Anne and her father (and her kitten Tigger) moved into the old farmhouse where Dawn and her mom were living. (Dawn's brother Jeff had moved back to California before the wedding.)

Since Dawn and Mary Anne were best friends, they were pleased that they could be sisters, too. Here's another case of very different people getting along. Dawn, who is tall and has long, straight blonde hair and blue eyes, and two holes pierced in each earlobe, is quiet but not at all shy. And she has very strong feelings about things. She's practically a vegetarian. She avoids all sweets (she calls sugar poison!), and is careful about what she eats. She's very environmentally conscious, too.

We miss Dawn, and I know Mary Anne misses her most of all.

Claudia and Stacey are best friends, too. They are both a little more fashion conscious than the rest of us. Stacey's sense of style has a New York spin to it, while Claudia's is more artistic. For example, for this early December meeting when most of us were in jeans and sweaters, Stacey (who is tall and on the thin side, with blonde hair and pale blue eyes) wore black leggings with cowboy boots, an oversized turtleneck sweater, and this cool black suede vest with pearl buttons. Claudia (who is Japanese-American with creamy, perfect skin, brown eyes, and long, straight black hair) was wearing leggings, too — purple ones — with black Doc Martens, red slouch socks,

black bicycle shorts over the leggings, a big T-shirt with the words "This Might Be Art" scrawled on it in purple (I knew she'd made it herself), and an old black suit jacket of her father's, with the sleeves rolled up. Stacey had gone for your basic gold earrings. Claudia's earrings were purple feathers (she made those herself, too).

They both looked fantastic. I think they would have drawn admiring looks from people even on a crowded street in New York.

But even though they are best friends, like Mary Anne and Kristy, and Mary Anne and Dawn, Claudia and Stacey are very, very different.

For example, when it comes to school, Claudia would rather be anywhere else — maybe even the dentist's. She is not a good student, and she is what you might call a creative speller. Although she's an extremely talented artist, maybe even a genius, her teachers and her parents still insist, to her complete puzzlement, that other school stuff is important, too.

Claudia tries, but she often needs help. And her parents still go over her homework with her every night.

To make it tougher, Claudia's sister Janine is a real, live, academic-type genius. Even

though she's only in high school, she's already taking courses at the local college.

But Claudia manages not to let it bother her, most of the time. She goes on seeing the world her way, making art, and appreciating junk food and Nancy Drew mysteries (two more things about their younger daughter that mystify Claud's parents). She's even managed to combine her love of junk food with her art, by organizing an art show based on junk food. Claudia is the vice-president of the BSC, mostly because she's the only one of us who has her own phone line in her room. That lets us receive calls from clients and call them back without tying up anybody's family telephone line. Claudia doesn't have any official duties, but she makes it her unofficial duty to see that we are well supplied with junk food, plus a little healthy food on the side, for every meeting, something we all appreciate.

The health food is mostly for Stacey. It used to be for Dawn, too, and of course we all can eat it. But unlike the rest of us, Stacey can't eat junk, not the sugary kind, anyway. And she has to watch what she eats very, very carefully.

That's because Stacey has diabetes, which means her body can't regulate the sugar in her blood. She could get very, very sick if she isn't

careful — even go into a coma. It also means that she has to give herself insulin injections every single day.

For a long time, Stacey's parents were just as overprotective of Stacey in their way as Mary Anne's father was of her. But Stacey finally managed to convince them that she could be trusted to take care of herself. And she does.

As BSC treasurer, she also takes care of our dues. Stacey is a math whiz, and good at other subjects in school, too. She's a little more sophisticated than the rest of us, most of the time. In fact, right now she's dating a guy named Robert who hangs out with a crowd at SMS that thinks they are too cool to talk to mere mortals. Robert's not like that, but Stacey was drawn into that crowd for a while, which caused some trouble in the BSC. Boy, am I glad that is all over!

Anyway, Stacey's an only child, like Mary Anne, but unlike Mary Anne or Kristy or Dawn, she's not part of a blended family. Her mother and father got divorced not too long ago. Now her father lives in New York City, while Stacey lives here in Stoneybrook with her mom. Stacey visits her father in New York often, so she maintains her New York cool. But then, it's hard to shake Stacey up. She's

one of the calmest, most level-headed people I know.

Mal and I are the third set of best friends in the BSC. We are both in sixth grade and we both love horses and horse stories, especially the ones by Marguerite Henry. We also like mysteries, and we are the oldest kids in our families, which is a big help for a baby-sitter, experience-wise. But while Mal is the oldest of eight kids (including a set of triplets) I have just one younger sister, Becca, who is eight, and one younger brother, John Philip, also known as Squirt (he's a toddler). My aunt Cecelia lives with us, to help keep an eye on us since my mom went back to her old job.