Kristy and the Secret of Susan (2 page)

"Casual" is a pretty good way to describe Dawn herself. She's very laid-back. For the most part, she doesn't care what people think of her and just sort of goes her own way. (I'm hoping a little of that will rub off on Mary Anne.) Dawn does have chinks in her armor, though. Every now and then, something will cut deep enough so that Dawn feels hurt or anxious. But not often. She's easygoing, a caring stepsister to Mary Anne, and a good friend to the rest of us.
As I mentioned before, Dawn grew up in California. Moving to the East Coast was hard for her. Not only did she leave her father behind, but she misses the warm weather. Dawn is happiest when July and August come to Stoneybrook. Maybe because of California (or maybe not) Dawn is also a health-food nut. So's the rest of her family. They don't eat meat or junk food, and they love vegetables, fruit, and gross stuff like tofu.
Oops, I've gotten off the subject again. Anyway, Dawn, Jeff, and their mom moved to Stoneybrook - but Jeff, who's nine or ten, was never happy here, so he finally moved back to California to live with his father. I know Dawn was terribly hurt then. Her family was split in half and separated by three thousand miles. But she's happier now that she has another family. At first, everyone had some problems getting adjusted, but Mary Anne's organized, finicky father turned out to be a good husband for Dawn's disorganized, scatterbrained mother. And Dawn loves having a sister. She had always wanted one.
Guess what one of Dawn's favorite activities is - reading ghost stories. And guess where she lives - in a centuries-old farmhouse with an actual secret passage in it. This is the truth, although if s hard to believe. The passage may even be haunted, but we're not sure.
Okay, on to Claudia. Claudia Kishi, the vice-president of the BSC, is as gorgeous as Dawn, even though the two of them don't look a thing alike. Claud is Japanese-American. Both of her parents are Japanese, but Claud was born here in Stoneybrook. She has very long, silky, jet-black hair; dark, almond-shaped eyes; and a creamy complexion. Like Dawn, she's got pierced ears, too, only she has one hole in one ear and two in the other. (By the way, Mary Anne and I do not have pierced ears and intend to keep them like that - intact.) Anyway, aside from being beautiful, Claudia is also an incredibly cool dresser and an incredibly talented artist. You should see her clothes. She's always wearing short flared skirts, or leggings, or ankle socks and flat shoes, whatever is the most cool fashion at the moment. I don't know how she knows what's cool. Maybe she reads magazines or something. Claudia is also especially good at accessorizing. Again, she just knows how to do it. And she spends a lot of her baby-sitting money on the accessories - belts, jewelry, and tons of stuff for her hair - ribbons, bows, funky dips, beads. She wears her hair a million different ways. I've never seen anyone who can come up with so many styles.
Claudia makes some of her own jewelry - ceramic earrings and pins, papier-mâché bracelets, that sort of thing. Claud can draw, paint, sculpt, make pottery, you name it. I'm glad she's good at art because she's terrible in school, although she's smart. For some reason, school is just hard for Claud, and she doesn't like it. She gets only average grades and she's the world's worst speller. Unfortunately, her sister, Janine, is a genius. She's so smart that even though she's a high-school student she gets to take courses at the local community college. For pleasure, Janine reads stuff like Atomic Theory or The History of Law-making in America. Claud reads Nancy Drew books, but her parents don't approve of them, so she has to hide them in her room.
Books aren't the only thing she hides. Claudia is also a junk-food addict, something else her parents disapprove of. So there are bags of chips and candy, and packages of Twinkies and Oreos hidden in her room, too. Opening a drawer in Claud's room, or going after some- thing that's rolled under her bed, can be a surprising experience.
Claudia's best friend is Stacey McGill, and the two of them are alike in a lot of ways. Stacey is also very sophisticated, quite pretty, and extremely cool. She's as funky a dresser as Claud - short, tight pants, push-down socks, the whole bit. Every now and then she gets her hair permed, and, of course, she's got pierced ears.
Claudia and Stacey are boy-crazy.
However, Stacey's home life is different from Claud's. And if you think my family, or Mary Anne and Dawn's family, is interesting, you should hear about Stacey's. Stacey, whose full name is Anastasia Elizabeth McGill, was born and raised in New York City. No wonder she's so sophisticated. Then, just before she began seventh grade, the company her father works for transferred him to their office in Stamford, Connecticut, so the McGill's found a house in Stoneybrook and moved here. They'd only been here a year when the company moved Mr. McGill back to New York. None of us could believe it, but the McGills had to go. Then, they'd been in NYC again for less than a year when Stacey's parents got separated and then divorced. Mr. McGill stayed in NYC with his job, but Mrs. McGill wanted to come back to Connecticut. Poor Stacey had to choose where to live. She decided on Stoneybrook and us and the BSC, thank goodness, but she visits her dad in New York a lot.
Another thing about Stacey is that she has diabetes. That's a disease in which her pancreas doesn't make enough of something called insulin, so her blood sugar level gets out of control. Stacey has to give herself injections (ew, ew, ew) of insulin every day, and also stay on a strict no-sugar diet. Otherwise, she could get really sick. She could even go into a coma. It must be hard for her to have to turn down Claud's junk food all the time.
Guess what. When Stacey and her mom moved back to Connecticut, they couldn't move into their old house. That was because Jessi had moved into it! Jessi Ramsey and Mallory Pike are the two younger members of the BSC. They're best friends, eleven years old, and in sixth grade at Stoneybrook Middle School. The rest of us are in eighth grade.
Like Stacey and Claudia, Jessi and Mal are alike in many ways and different in many ways. They're each the oldest kid in their families, and they think their parents treat them like babies. I guess it is hard being eleven. I remember wanting so badly to be more grown-up when I was their age, but Mom didn't start really letting me grow up until I was twelve. Anyway, Jessi and Mal have campaigned hard to be allowed to do more things, and their parents did let them get their ears pierced (just one hole in each ear). However, Mal then had to have braces put on her teeth, and she wears glasses and isn't allowed to get contacts, so she's not feeling particularly pretty these days, even with her pierced ears.
Jessi and Mal both love to read, especially horse stories by Marguerite Henry. Beyond that, they're quite different. Jessi's passion is ballet, and boy, is she good. She takes special classes at a dance school in Stamford, where she had to audition just to get in, and she has danced lead roles in productions before hundreds of people. Mal's passions are writing and drawing, and she thinks she'd like to be an author and illustrator of children's books when she grows up. Jessi comes from an average-sized family - her parents, an eight-year-old sister named Becca, and a baby brother nicknamed Squirt - while Mal comes from a huge family. Her parents have eight children! Mal has four brothers (three of them are identical triplets) and three sisters. An- other difference is that Jessi is black and Mal is white. This doesn't matter to them, or to any of us in the BSC, but Jessi's skin color bothered a lot of people in Stoneybrook, I'm ashamed to say. The Ramseys' neighbors gave them a really hard time at first, although they've calmed down now. They've found that there's not a thing to dislike about the Ramseys.
Oh, I forgot one other similarity between Jessi and Mal. Each of their families has a pet hamster! Okay. So now you know the members of the Baby-sitters Club. A meeting was about to begin. I put on my visor, sat down in Claud's director's chair, stuck a pencil over my ear, and called the meeting to order.
Chapter 3.
As president of the BSC, I feel it is my duty to run our meetings professionally and in a businesslike manner. We have done that since the club first started. How did the BSC begin? Well, it began because of David Michael, really. See, back at the start of seventh grade, when Mom and Watson weren't even talking about getting married, my mother and brothers and I still lived on Bradford Court, next door to Mary Anne and across from Claudia. In those days, Sam and Charlie and I were responsible for taking care of David Michael after school until Mom came home from work. We took turns. But, of course, an evening came when we realized that none of us was free to baby-sit for him the next day, so Mom had to find another sitter on short notice. It wasn't easy. I remember we were eating pizza for dinner that night, and I sat there with my slice, watching Mom make call after call. Nobody was available - and Mom was wasting a lot of time on the phone.
That was when I got my greatest idea ever. Wouldn't it be neat if Mom could make just one call and reach a whole lot of sitters at once? As soon as I could, I told Mary Anne and Claudia that I'd thought of a business we could start. We could form a baby-sitting club and meet several times a week. Then people could call us during those times and reach three responsible, reliable sitters. (We were already baby-sitting a lot in our neighborhood.) With several people at the other end of the phone, the caller was bound to find an available sitter.
My friends thought this was a great idea, too, but they also thought three people weren't enough. So we asked Stacey, who was just getting to know Claudia then, if she wanted to join, and she said yes! A few months later, when Dawn moved to Stoneybrook, our club was doing so much business that we asked her to join, too. Then when Stacey had to move back to New York, we couldn't do without her, so both Jessi and Mal joined the club. And then Stacey returned to Stoneybrook. We welcomed her back into the club, of course. As an original member and a good friend, we'd never have turned her away. Plus, we needed her. I think, though, that with seven members plus our two associate members, Logan and Shannon, the BSC is finally big enough.
Here's how our club operates. The seven members meet three afternoons a week - Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from five-thirty until six. Our clients call us at those times to line up baby-sitters. They know they'll get one. Ifs unlikely that every single one of us plus Logan and Shannon would be busy.
How do clients hear about our club and know when and how to reach us? Because we advertise. Before we even started the club, we distributed dozens of fliers in our neighborhood, and we even placed an ad in the Stoneybrook newspaper. Now we send out fliers occasionally, but we don't really need to. News of our club spreads by word of mouth, plus we have as much business as we can handle.
Every member of the club (except for Logan and Shannon) is an officer.
I am the president. This is mostly because I thought up the club in the first place, and also because I'm good at solving problems, running the club, and thinking up new ideas.
For instance, I decided that we should keep a dub notebook. It's sort of like a diary. In it, my friends and I write up every single job we go on. Then, once a week, we read the recent diary entries to see what went on when our friends were baby-sitting. Nobody (except Mallory) really likes to write in the diary, but we all agree that reading it is helpful. We find out what's going on with the kids we take care of, and how our friends solve sitting problems.
Another of my ideas was that we should each make a Kid-Kit. Kid-Kits are boxes that we decorated with paint and felt and sequins and things, and filled with our old games, books, and toys, plus some new items such as sticker books, crayons, and drawing paper. Children just love playing with the stuff in the Kid-Kits. For some reason, other people's toys are always more interesting than theirs. And happy baby-sitting charges mean happy parents who are apt to call the BSC again with more jobs! Claudia is the vice-president of the club. She's the only one of us with a phone in her room and her own phone number. This is an ideal situation. If we had to use some adult's phone, we'd feel that we were tying it up. Plus, nonbaby-sitting calls would come in and interrupt our meetings. We think if s only fair that Claud be the VP, since we invade her room three times a week, use her phone, and eat her junk food.
Mary Anne is the club secretary. She has the biggest, most complicated job of any of us. As secretary, if s up to Mary Anne to keep our club record book (don't confuse that with the notebook) up to date. In the record book is all the important club information - names and addresses of our clients, the money we earn (recording that is really Stacey's job), and most important of all, the appointment pages. On those pages, Mary Anne schedules every single sitting job we go on. In order to do that, she has to know all of our schedules - when Mal has orthodontist appointments or I've got a Krushers game or Jessi has ballet classes. So far, Mary Anne hasn't made a single mistake. She's amazing.
Stacey is our treasurer. Since she loves money and is a math whiz, this is the perfect job for her. Every Monday, Stacey collects our club dues and adds it to the treasury (which is a manila envelope). Then she doles out money whenever it's needed, usually for four things - new items for the Kid-Kits, to help pay for Claud's phone bill, to pay Charlie to drive me to and from meetings, since I live so far from BSC headquarters now, and to buy supplies for occasional club treats such as pizza parties or sleepovers. Stacey loves collecting the money and hates parting with it.
Dawn is our alternate officer. This means that if any club member has to miss a meeting, Dawn can take over her job for her. She's like a substitute teacher: she has to know what everyone does. When Stacey moved back to New York for that short time, Dawn became the treasurer. But she gladly gave up the job when Stacey returned. She's not nearly as good at math as Stacey is.
Jessi and Mal are junior officers. They don't actually have jobs. "Junior officer" means that they're only allowed to baby-sit after school or on weekends. They can't sit at night unless they're sitting for their own families. They are a huge help to us older members, though. Since they take on after-school jobs, they free the rest of us up for evening jobs.