The Baby-Sitters Club Friends Forever #3: Mary Anne’s Big Break-up (9 page)

“Drunk? She’s drunk?” squeaked Jil . “That’s why she was throwing up?

Because she got drunk? And now she’s passed out?” Jil was wringing her

hands.

“You just let them sleep, I guess,” I said.

“No, no. It’s more dangerous than that,” said Maggie.

Maggie and Jill and I stared down at Sunny, who was stil sprawled on the

bed. We had tried calling to her and shaking her, but she wouldn’t move or wake

up. She seemed to be breathing all right, though. We didn’t know what else to do,

so we decided we would just let her sleep until the morning.

“Let’s take some of her clothes off, though,” said Maggie. “We’l never get

her into her nightshirt, but let’s take off her shoes and her jeans. She’ll be more comfortable.”

So that’s what we did. Then we rolled her on her side and put a trash can

by the bed in case of nighttime barfing. And then we had another tiff with Jil , who didn’t want Sunny to sleep on her bed at al . But when we tried to move Sunny,

we found that we couldn’t do it easily (or quietly), so she got to sleep on the bed after all.

Then I lay awake worrying about the police. So, it turns out, did Jill and

Maggie. And then I had finally fal en asleep when I heard a cheerful voice say,

“Time to get up, sleepyheads. I fixed you a big breakfast!”

It was Jill’s sister, Liz.

I looked at my watch. Eight o’clock.

Eight o’clock? On a Sunday morning? On this Sunday morning? When I

had gotten, like, two and a half hours of sleep?

Before I could take this is, Mrs. Henderson bustled cheerfully into the

room and snapped up the window shades.

“Rise and shine, girls!” she said. “Sunny, what are you doing sleeping in

your clothes?” At that moment the tea kettle whistled shrilly from downstairs, and Mrs. Henderson hurried out of the room, leaving a cloud of perfume behind her.

“Oh, oh.” Sunny was moaning loudly on the ed. “Oh, my God. The light!

The noise! That smel . Oh…ew…”

Jil ’s head snapped up. “Sunny, are you going to barf?”

“I don’t know. Someone pull the shades down. Make that smel go away.”

Luckily, the tea kettle had stopped whistling.

Jil eyed her through a curtain of tangled hair. “You’re hungover, aren’t

you.” She said. “Tsk. Disgusting.”

That morning was every bit as awful as I could possibly imagine. Maggie

and Jill and I weren’t hungover, of course, but we were exhausted. And Jil was

still mad at s, and we were still mad at her. Sunny was a different story. Her head was pounding. She said she had the worst headache she’d ever had in her life.

Light bothered her. Noise bothered her. And smells made her sick to her

stomach.

So Liz’ s big breakfast was torture for her. The kitchen was lit by sunshine

and large fluorescent lights. Liz banged pots. The kettle whistled again. Timers

buzzed and rang. And the air smel ed of bacon, frying butter, coffee, and Mrs.

Henderson’s gardenia perfume.

I thought Sunny was going to pass out again right at the table. Somehow

she managed not to, and not to barf. But she couldn’t make it through breakfast.

She had to tell Mrs. Henderson that she couldn’t eat because she just isn’t a

morning person, which certainly looked believable, and then she returned to Jill’s bed.

The morning passed. Sunny seemed to feel better. By eleven o’clock, she

said her headache was going away. Which was good since it was time for Ducky

to pick us up and take us back to the scene of the party.

“I can’t go with you,” said Maggie. “Unfortunately, I have to go to some

charity event with Mom and Dad today. One of those huge parties with tons of

celebrities at which Dad will probably hustle around making deals, and Mom will

be so wrapped up in what everyone’s wearing she’ll forget what the charity event

is for, which always makes me mad.” Maggie sighed. “Oh, well. This party’s

outside. Maybe I’ll find a stray cat or something.”

At that moment, a car honked.

“There’s Ducky,” I said, and Sunny and I hurried outside before Mrs.

Henderson had a chance to see that someone other than Carol was picking us

up. “ ‘Bye!” we called. “Thanks!”

“Hey!” Ducky greeted us as we clambered into his car.

In the light, his car looked different. Worse, actually. It was the oldest car

I’d ever seen that wasn’t an antique. Not that you’d mistake it for one of those

nice antique cars. What it looked like was a junk pile.

“so how’d you guys make out last night?” Ducky asked us. He was

wearing clean blue jeans and a T-shirt with a picture of Elvis on the front.

“Oh…okay,” said Sunny.

“Hungover?” Ducky asked her.

“Yeah. But now I’m better.”

“I try never to get drunk,” said Ducky as he left Jil ’s street and turned onto

a main road. “In fact, I don’t drink at all. Or smoke. My body is a temple. I put only the purest of things in it. Like Mountain Dew and Pez.”

I smiled. “Thanks again for driving us home last night. Did you have any

trouble when you got home?”

“Nope. Like I said, my brother was out. He never knew. Besides, he trusts

me. So do my parents. Even long distance.”

Ducky drove along, concentrating on the road, and I took a good look at

him now that it was daylight. He was so earnest. And very clean-cut. He looked

like someone you could really talk to. I thought of all the girls I’d seen sitting with Ducky in study hall. Did Ducky want to be our friend now? I hoped so. I felt very

special. Chosen by him.

“Okay,” said Ducky a few minutes later. “Here we are.”

He had pul ed into the driveway of a large house. If the lawn of the house

hadn’t been littered with cups and papers and things, and if the pool hadn’t been

full of ruined lawn furniture, I would never have guessed that this was where the

party had been held. It seemed so different in the daytime. And in the quiet, with no party guests.

Ducky said that no one was at home, and it certainly looked that way – a

sleepy house, the windows closed, the garage door pulled down. Not a sign of

life.

“Okay,” said Sunny. “I might as well start looking by those bushes.”

She pointed to the scene of her barf fest.

Ducky and I spread out in other directions. But I hadn’t gone far when I

thought I heard a door open. I whirled around – just in time to see a woman say

to Sunny, “Is this what you’re looking for?”

Sure enough, the woman had come through the front door of the house,

the house that looked unoccupied. I froze, twisted around with one arm in front of me and the other at my side.

The woman was holding an object out toward Sunny. Even at a distance I

recognized it as Sunny’s wallet. Her wallet is neon pink plastic, hard not to see.

Which was probably why the woman had already found it.

“Um, yes,” said Sunny in a smal voice, reaching for the wallet.

“Okay. Come here, then. All three of you.”

I glanced at Ducky, who was crawling out from under a bush.

Ducky and I approached the woman. I thought she looked familiar.

I thought she was a teacher at Vista.

She was. “Hi, Ms. Krueger,” said Ducky sheepishly.

“Hello, Christopher.”

“Ms. Krueger, honestly we did not know this was your house,” said Ducky.

“Not before the party, and not now. I mean, I guess you know that some of the

other kids knew – “

My mouth dropped open. “What?”

“-but I didn’t. And Dawn and Sunny certainly didn’t.

“Who thought up this prank?” Ms. Krueger asked Ducky.

“I’m not sure. All I knew was that the party was going to be held at a house

where no one was home this weekend.”

“As if that weren’t bad enough,” said Ms. Krueger.

Sunny and I were looking from Ducky to Ms. Krueger like we were at a

tennis match. I had no idea what they were talking about.

“What are you talking about?” Sunny blurted out.

“I’ll explain in the car,” Ducky replied. He paused. Then he shrugged.

“Well, we got what we came for. Come on, you guys.”

“Not so fast,” said Ms. Krueger. “All right. Christopher McCrae and Sunny

Winslow, I know you two were here last night.” (Ms. Krueger must have looked in

Sunny’s wallet.) She turned to me. “And your name would be?”

I considered giving her a fake name, but I couldn’t do that to Sunny and

Ducky. If they were going to get into trouble, then I would get into trouble with

them.

I sighed. “Dawn Schafer,” I told her.

“Dawn Schafer,” she repeated. She looked at each of us in turn. “Do your

parents know where you were last night?” I decided she had sort of a nice face,

especial y for someone who was probably in the process of ruining my life. It was

narrow, lightly freckled, with gentle brown eyes. Everything about her seemed

soft, even when she was asking hard questions.

“Not technically,” I replied.

Ms. Krueger looked like she was about to say something else, but before

she could, Sunny cried, “Are you going to press charges?”

“Press…charges?” Ms. Krueger swallowed back a smile. “It doesn’t quite

work like that. I’m not sure what I’m going to do. In the meantime, please keep

this in mind: My husband and I were away for the weekend on a much-deserved

and long-awaited minivacation. We were phoned in the middle of the night by the

police saying that our yard had been trashed and we might want to return right

away, which we did. Now we get to spend the remainder of our vacation cleaning

up this.” She waved her arms around, indicating the sea of mud, litter, and

broken furniture.

“Ms. Krueger, we didn’t know. We really didn’t!” I cried. “We got these

invitations and we thought the party was going to be at the house belonging to

whoever sent the invitations. We didn’t know no one would be there – or that it

was your house.”

“I know you didn’t. It wasn’t your fault…YouI’m not so sure about,” she

said to Ducky.

A few minutes later, Ms. Kruger let us go. “But this isn’t over yet,” she

cal ed after us.

“I didn’t think so,” muttered Sunny.

Tuesday afternoon 10/7

Having survived today (miraculously, it seems), I can finish writing about

the weekend more calmly. And so the story continues…

The second Sunny and I were settled into Ducky’s car, Suny looked in her

wallet, which wasn;t missing a thing. Then we bombarded Ducky with questions.

“You knew the party was going to be held at an empty house?” I asked

him.

“It was a prank?” said Sunny.

“Are you sure you didn’t know this was Ms. Krueger’s house?” I said.

Ducky answered that last question first. “No. I honestly didn’t know this

was Ms. Krueger’s house. I wouldn’t have come over here if I’d known.” When

Sunny and I didn’t say anything, Ducky added even more seriously, “The party

was a prank thought up by the upperclassmen. It was their way of hazing the

eighth-graders. They planned this mysterious party and they decided to hold it at

Ms. Krueger’s house because they knew she wouldn’t be home this weekend.

They served liquor at the party, and they waited until things got just out of control, and then they called the cops. I’m not sure who made the call, but the plan was

for the caller to say he was a neighbor and complain about the noise or

something. Then all the upperclassmen left. The only kids who got caught were a

bunch of eighth-graders. But I didn’t know half of this until I got to the party.”

Sunny slumped in her seat. “Oh, man.”

“We got tricked,” I added glumly.

“Our parents are going to know what we did last night,” said Sunny. “That’s

al my mom needs right now.”

Ducky glanced at Sunny in the rearview mirror, but al he said was, “I don’t

know. Ms. Krueger’s okay. Let’s just wait and see what happens.”

“Easy for you to say. If you get in trouble, your parents won’t hear about it

for months. And what are they going to do from Ghana, anyway?” muttered

Sunny.

The rest of the ride was pretty quiet. At last Ducky pulled up in front of my

house, and Sunny and I climbed out. “See you tomorrow!” called Ducky.

“Everything’s going to be okay. Really.”

“ ‘Bye!” I called back.

Sunny was halfway across the lawn on her way to her house when

suddenly I remembered something. “Hey, Sunny!” I yelled. “Yesterday I promised

Jil I’d go back to the mal with her. I better keep the promise. You don’t want to come with us, do you?”

Suny shook her head. “Nah. Jill’s kinds of driving me crazy right now.

Besides, I should go visit my mom.”

“Okay. See you later.”

Well, there’s nothing like a bad secret to cause a little resentment. The

moment I walked through the front door and saw carol, I thought about the baby

and all the questions I wasn’t allowed to ask anyone. Carol was dressed in tennis

whites and eating an ice cream cone. Not exactly the picture of a pregnant

woman.

I answered Carol’s questions about the sleepover with “yeah” and “Uh-

huh” and “Nope” and other things grown-ups hate. Then I called Jill and arranged

to meet her at The Bear Necessities in half an hour. And then I mademy great

escape. I told Carol I’d be back in time for dinner.

At the mall, Jill moped around The Bear Necessities, poking at stickers,

glancing at pencils and erasers and teddy bears and ponies. Finally I said to her,

“Come on. Let’s go to Starburst’s. Let’s get a soda or an iced tea or something.