Claudia and the Bad Joke (7 page)

     
“Thanks,” I replied.

     
Then I got to say hi to every single kid in the class, individually. 1 didn’t talk to most of them very long, but when Kristy got on, we had a discussion about my homework.

     
“I’ll collect it for you, if you want,” she said, “and give it to you at our meetings. On Tuesday and Thursday, I’ll send it home with Mary Anne.”

     
“Hey, how did Mary Anne know about this phone call?” I asked.

     
“Oh, we’ve had it planned forever. We were hoping you’d come home on a weekday. We were dying to do this.”

     
“I’m glad you did,” I said. “It’s too bad Mary Anne isn’t in our homeroom.”

     
“Oh, I gotta go, Claud,” said Kristy suddenly. “‘Bye!”

     
Someone else picked up the phone. “Claudia?” said my teacher again. “The bell is about

to ring, so we’ll have to hang up.”

     
“Thank you for calling,” I told the class. “I really appreciated it.”

     
“Good-bye!” shouted the kids.

     
I could hear the bell ring then, so I got off the phone. Just as I was hanging up, Mimi came into the den, carrying a tray.

     
“Oh, goody. Breakfast,” I said.

     
“Who was on phone?” Mimi asked.

     
I told her about the call as she handed me the tray. “Oh, Mimi. This looks super!” I exclaimed.

     
On the tray were waffles and bacon, orange juice and tea. Strong tea. Mimi had even put a flower in a bud vase.

     
Mimi sat at the end of the couch and watched me eat.

     
“You know what?” I said to her, my mouth full of bacon.

     
“What, my Claudia?”

     
“The doctor says I’ll have to have physical therapy after he takes the cast off. Exercises and stuff.”

     
“I am sure you do them fine,” Mimi said. “Practice, practice.”

     
“It’ll probably hurt.”

     
“A little. Will hurt a little, yes. But you will do it.”

     
“Mimi? Were you ever scared after you had your stroke?”

     
“Oh, plenty. Very scared.”

     
“You know what I’m scared of?” I said. “I’m scared to baby-sit again.”

     
Mimi looked thoughtful. “What is really scary,” she told me, “is to think we do not have control. Cannot keep accident from happening. Or stroke from happening.”

     
“Well, I know one way to have a little control. I won’t baby-sit. Then I won’t be exposed to kids and their toys and tricks.”

     
“Is that what really want?” asked Mimi.

     
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

     
“You must think over,” said Mimi solemnly. “Very important. You have any ideas, you need any help, you come to me, my Claudia.”

     
“I know. I know I can do that. Thanks.”

     
When I had cleaned my plate, Mimi took the tray away. She returned a little later with a cup of tea for herself.

     
Mimi looked at her watch. “Oh! Claudia! I put on TV. Time for Wheel of Fortune!”

     
I’d forgotten about Mimi and Wheel of Fortune. She’d started watching the daytime reruns of the show last summer when she was recovering from her stroke. I’d thought they might be helpful. (The word games improved her read-

ing and vocabulary.) Mimi had gotten hooked. She switched on the TV and we settled into

the show.

     
“Spin wheel! Spin wheel!” Mimi wouldcry. “No, don’t guess now!”

     
Mimi and I played along. If we had been contestants, we would have won a lot of prizes. Well, a few anyway. Oh, all right, Mimi would have won prizes. Then we watched Gilligan’s Island and I Love Lucy. I read my Nancy Drew for awhile. After lunch, Mimi and I watched soap operas.

     
If I could just forget about the baby-sitting problem, I thought, having a broken leg wouldn’t be bad at all.

Chapter 10.

My cast was a work of art. No kidding. Now that I was out of traction and could reach it, I couldn’t keep my hands (or my Magic Markers) off of it. It was just too tempting a drawing surface. I know you’re supposed to let your friends sign your cast — and I was going to do that — but those big white spaces seemed to me to be jumping up and down, screaming, “Color me! Color me!” Huge areas of my cast were solidly covered with designs and sketches.

     
On the day of the first club meeting after I came back from the hospital, I lounged on my bed, waiting for my friends and illustrating my cast. A few minutes before, Mimi had watched me climb the stairs to my room. She wouldn’t let me do it with the crutches unless someone else came with me (she thought it was dangerous), so I had figured out a way to back up

the stairs on my bottom. It looked really stupid, but it was safe.

     
Downstairs, I heard the front door open and a squeal as someone (probably Mary Anne) greeted Mimi. Then I heard footsteps on the stairs and finally Mary Anne appeared.

     
“Hi!” I greeted her. “I thought it was you.”

     
“Hi! . . . Can I sign your cast?”

     
“Sure.”

     
“Oh, goody. I’ve got a really cute autograph.”

     
Mary Anne took one of my pens and carefully wrote:

     
While she was working on that, the rest of the club members arrived. Jessi was the last one, as usual. She has a busy schedule in the afternoons, and she dashed in just as Mary Anne capped her pen, and Kristy said, “This meeting will now come to order. I move that we all sign Claudia’s cast and welcome her back.”

     
Everyone dove for my Magic Markers (except Mary Anne).

     
“Mary Anne,” I said, “I think we could use some refreshments. Look under my bed and see what you can find.”

     
Mary Anne disappeared, then returned triumphantly with one large bag of pretzels and two small bags of M&Ms.

     
“Kristy, that’s mean!” Dawn suddenly exclaimed, leaning over to read what Kristy had written on my cast “Listen, you guys. It says, ‘God made the rivers, God made the lakes, God made Claudia . . . well, we all make mistakes.’

     
Jessi and Mal started to giggle. “That’s not mean!” said Jessi. “It’s funny.”

     
“No, it’s mean,” cried Dawn, but she was laughing, too.

     
So were Kristy and a dust-covered Mary Anne.

     
“Autographs are dumb,” Mal announced.

     
Everyone was talking and laughing and arguing. How could I decide not to be part of such a great group of people? 1 must be crazy. But I was pretty sure I was going to have to leave the club. I would tell my friends whenever the time seemed right.

     
“Order, order!” cried Kristy. “This is a meeting, everybody, not a party. Come on. We have business to take care of.”

     
We settled down. I was stretched out on my bed. Dawn was at my feet, still doodling on my cast. Mary Anne, who usually sits with us on the bed, sat with Mal and Jessi on the floor, since I was taking up so much space. And Kristy, of course, sat in the director’s chair, her visor in place. “Okay, Dawn,” she said, waving her pen around as she spoke, “how’s the treasury? Are we in good shape?”

     
“We’re fine . . . but Claudia owes dues from when she was in the hospital.”

     
I blushed. The thing was, I didn’t want to pay dues if I was going to drop out of the club.

     
“Are you broke?” Dawn asked. “If you are, don’t worry about it. You can make up for it next week.”

     
“No, it’s not that,” I said uncomfortably. “It’s, um, it’s . . .“ I was hoping the phone would ring then and let me off the hook (get it?), but no such luck. “See, I did a lot of thinking in the hospital,” I began. “And, well, you know how important my art is to me. I really want to be an artist when I grow up. Or maybe a clothes designer. So I thought, what if I had broken my arm or smashed my hands when I fell? What if I had hurt myself so badly that I couldn’t draw or paint anymore?”

     
“But you didn’t,” Mallory pointed out sensibly.

     
“But I could have,” I said.

     
“What are you getting at?” asked Kristy, with narrowed eyes.

     
“I’m getting at
  
I-want-to-drop-out-

of-the-club,” I said in a rush. “Baby-sitting is too dangerous.”

     
“Claudia!” everyone cried. “You can’t do that!”

     
The phone did ring then, but we didn’t all dive for it, like we usually do. Kristy picked it up after glaring at me for a moment and arranged for Dawn to sit for the Perkins girls. Then she turned to me. She looked as if she was about to let her mouth go on a rampage, but Mary Anne jumped in ahead of her.

     
“Claud,” she said, “we understand that you must be scared. Your accident was awful. But it wasn’t caused by baby-sitting.”

     
“Of course it was,” I told her.

     
“No. It was caused by Betsy Sobak. And not even on purpose. You know she didn’t mean for that to happen.”

     
“It did happen, though.”

     
“Claudia, we don’t want to lose you,” said Dawn. “Are you absolutely sure you want to drop out of the club?”

     
“No,” I told her. “But I’m pretty sure.”

     
“Look,” said Kristy, “you can’t baby-sit for awhile anyway, can you?”

     
“Not unless I get a walking cast,” I said, “which might happen. But I don’t think I’d be much good on crutches.”

     
“All right, then. Instead of dropping out of the club, why don’t you see how it feels not to sit for awhile? Maybe you’ll miss it a lot.”

     
I thought about that as a few more job calls came in. I passed around the pretzels and M&Ms. I chewed and thought some more.

     
“Okay,” I told the club members at last, “I won’t decide right away. But I want you to know that I’m thinking about it.”

     
“That’s fair,” said Kristy.

     
“Darn old Betsy Sobak,” muttered Dawn. “Look what she’s caused.”

     
“You know, I thought I was prepared for anything,” I said. “Before the swing broke that afternoon, Betsy had already gotten me with a dribble glass, a fake ice cube with a fly in it, and pepper gum.”

     
“Oh, you were lucky then,” said Mallory. “After you guys went to the hospital, I got to see Betsy’s room. It’s, like, a joke warehouse in there. She’s got a rubber chicken, glow-inthe-dark lizards, a giant cockroach, plastic ants, a squirting hair ribbon, an exploding cigar, and a fake bloody tooth.”

     
“I suppose we have McBuzz to thank for all of that, whoever McBuzz is,” I said.

     
Mallory nodded.

     
The phone rang again and Mary Anne picked it up. As she spoke, she kept raising her eyebrows and making faces at us. At last she said to the caller, “I’ll get right back to you.” She hung up. “That,” she told us, “was Mrs. Sobak. She needs another sitter.”

     
“Boy!” I exclaimed. “If I were Mrs. Sobak, I wouldn’t have the nerve to call us again. Her daughter nearly killed me.”

     
Dawn rolled her eyes. “She didn’t nearly kill you.”

     
“Besides,” added Mallory, “when I met Mrs. Sobak, I sort of got the impression that she doesn’t think Betsy misbehaves. She just thinks she’s kind of . . . well, she called her highspirited. And I — Oh! Oh, my gosh! Have I ever got an idea!” Mallory suddenly cried. “Kristy, if I’m free, please can I take the job with Betsy? See, there’s been a lot of practical joking going on in my house —“

     
“Tell me about it,” said Jessi.

     
“So I know a lot of tricks now myself,” Mallory finished up. “And I could borrow some stuff from the triplets.”

     
“You mean, you’d play jokes on Betsy?” exclaimed Kristy.

     
Mallory nodded. “Bad idea?”

     
Kristy frowned. “I don’t know about that, Mal. Playing tricks on a little kid. . . . I just don’t know. It seems sort of mean. On the other hand . . .“ Kristy’s voice trailed off and I could tell she was thinking — hard. “You were certainly patient with Betsy, Claud,” she said at last.

     
“Yeah, and look what she did to her,” Mallory chimed in.

     
“I know, I know,” said Kristy, and her eyes were beginning to gleam. “Well, maybe that would work. Obviously, we have a problem and we have to do something about it. I suppose we could declare a practical-joke war on Betsy Sobak. An unofficial one, of course. I mean, we can’t tell her about it. But maybe it would teach her something. Mary Anne, is Mallory free to take the job?”

     
Mary Anne checked the appointment calendar in the record book. “Yup,” she replied. “I’ll call Mrs. Sobak.”

     
Kristy looked at me. “The war is on,” she said with a grin.

     
I felt a lot better.

     
But after dinner that night, Ashley called, and I made a mistake. I told Ashley I might drop out of the club.

     
“Good for you!” Ashley declared. “I’m really glad to hear that.”

     
“You are?” I replied.