Everything Changes

by Ann M. Martin

  So … what happened after you caught your dad? I want to know details. I guess I’ll have to hear them when we’re back home. Can you believe our vacations are over? We looked forward to them for so long, and now they’re almost behind us.

  Have a safe trip!

  Lots of love,

  Stacey

  July 29

  Wow. So many mixed feelings.

  Is very late at night, long after lights-out, and for once campers are asleep (at least, think they are). Can’t sleep myself, though, so pulled out flashlight and journal.

  We’re down to final end-of-camp activities. Strange, because isn’t REALLY end of camp, just of our session. By Monday, another session begins. But feels like end of camp. Tonight was special after-dinner activity, which will describe in moment; tomorrow is rehearsal for skits for Parents’ Day; and next day, Sat., is Parents’ Day — which means we go home. (Sad face.)

  Back to this evening. So glad A. and I have made up. Campers thrilled as well. Even Marcia and Harmoni still getting along. H. said didn’t want them to end up like A. and me. Hmphh. Not sure want to be that kind of example. Anyway, for last week, each cabin has been preparing a skit or song or dance routine to put on this evening. Our girls wrote skit entitled “Peace and Harmoni.” (Guess who came up with title.) All about getting along, fights, making up. Was hilarious. Marcia and Harmoni decided to play each other. Had fine time. Marcia lent Harmoni all her makeup, and was very good sport when Harmoni went overboard and wound up looking like someone arrested by Cover Girl Police.

  Will include excerpt from skit here:

  * * *

  Marcia (playing Harmoni): La, la, la, la, la. Oh, I just love camp. Everything here is so wonderful.

  Harmoni (playing Marcia) enters wearing all her hideous makeup.

  Marcia: Except for the Forest Monster.

  Harmoni: Forest Monster? What Forest Monster?

  Marcia: Oh, it’s just you, Marcia. Please forgive me.

  Harmoni: I never forgive anybody for anything.

  Marcia: Let’s not fight. Let’s ask our CITs to help us work out our problems. Kristy, oh, Kristy. Could you come here for a second?

  La Vonne (playing me): Certainly. Let me just finish writing this nasty note about Abby in my private journal. Okay. All done!

  Marcia: Kristy, why would you write something nasty about Abby in your journal?

  LaVonne: Because Abby is a pigheaded —

  Jenna (playing Abby): Excuse me! Excuse me! I heard that. And Kristy, you are —

  Marcia: Well, Marcia, I guess our CITs are not going to be able to help us.

  Harmoni: Maybe we’ll have to help them.

  * * *

  Skit went on from there. Was a little embarrassing but not too bad. Most of audience was laughing. Think A. and I laughed hardest of all. Sat together during evening and thoroughly enjoyed performances. Think is great sign of maturity when can laugh at self.

  Wait. A. is whispering to me from below.

  Okay. Back again. Is now almost an hour later. A. climbed up here for late-night chat. Tried again to explain to me decision to drop out of BSC. Told her she didn’t have to do that. Said felt compelled to. Said is happy we’re not fighting anymore, but would be even happier if I actually understood her decision. And now I think I do.

  A. said she loves baby-sitting and especially loves belonging to BSC. Feels thankful to have moved to new town and found so many great new friends so quickly. Knows she’s lucky, that that doesn’t happen very often. But went on to say she’s beginning to feel overwhelmed. Stretched too thin. There are just not enough hours in day to fit in everything she wants to do, and now the regular meetings and the many jobs MA assigns her feel like pressure. Would be happier if could just baby-sit every now and then, like she did on Long Island. Then could devote more time to school and soccer or have free, unscheduled time.

  Here’s the scary thing.

  I know exactly what she means. Just am not prepared to give up BSC. Was best thing I ever did. Can’t discard it like used Kleenex. Thought of giving it up makes stomach grow cold. Awful.

  * * *

  On to more pleasant thoughts. Will be SO happy to see MA again. And Stacey and Claud and everyone. Just a few more days and we’ll all be together. What a month has been. MA not moving — excellent, excellent news — and Cl. and St. will surely have adventures to relate.

  Back to less pleasant thoughts. How are MA, St., Cl., and I going to run BSC by selves? Will have Shannon to help out every now and then, I know, but seems almost impossible. How can 5 of us do what 9 of us could just barely do?

  Must turn off these horrid thoughts or will never go to sleep, and want to enjoy last days of camp.

  (But am very, very worried.)

  Friday

  Dear Claud,

  I’m on the train again. I’ll be mailing this card to your house from the Stoneybrook train station. Dad, Samantha, and Ethan all came to Grand Central to see me off. I cried when I had to say good-bye. As an amusing little joke, Dad said, “Well, Samantha and I have reached a decision.” (My heart jumped to my throat.) “Our decision is to wait another month before we discuss the topic again. We’re going to take things very slowly.”

  Ha-ha. Give me a heart attack.

  See you soon!

  Love,

  Stacey

  Friday

  Dear Stacey,

  We’re are on are way home. This morning I said goodbye lobsters and lobstar traps, goodbye cliffs and seales, goodbye fog and mist and ocean smells, good-bye ferrys, goodbye library and lighthouse. I said my hardest good-bye yesterday. I said goodbye to Rachael. We both cried a little.

  This morning I said goodbye island.

  Then I said I will be back again next summer, and next summer, and the summer after that and after that.

  Love,

  Claudia

  Friday, July 30th

  Dear diary,

  Hi. Me again. It’s funny. Now that my life has calmed down I don’t feel so frantic about writing in you anymore. I still turn to you each and every night, but only because I want to, not because I feel I HAVE to, not because I feel that if I don’t write about what happened during the day I’ll explode.

  So. I’m on my way back to Bradford Court. Who would have guessed? I have so many memories from that street, a lifetime of memories. When our house burned down, I lost lots of memories. Now I’m regaining some others. Maybe, in life, things do sort of even out in the end.

  Of course, things won’t be the same as they were when Dad and I lived in our old house. Kristy won’t be next door; the Hobarts are there instead. And we won’t even be next door to the Hobarts but across the street in the Goldmans’ house. When I was little, I used to be able to look out my bedroom window and into Kristy’s. We would signal to each other with flashlights. I wonder if Claud and I will do that. Or are we just too grown-up?

  Still, I’ll be back on my old street. I’ll be able to step out of the Goldmans’ front door and think, There’s where Kristy and I hid from Claudia the time we played that mean trick on her in second grade. There’s my front stoop where I used to sit and wait for Dad to come home from work. There’s the tree I was so afraid to climb. There’s the little patch of daffodils that Mimi helped me plant.

  I’ll be in heaven.

  That is, if I can ever decide what to do about Logan.

  August 1

  It’s the end of a very long day.

  I came upstairs to my room after dinner, planning to relax by rereading this journal from the beginning, which I have just finished doing. Now it all seems so frivolous, as if I weren’t taking it seriously. It was fun to read, but … I don’t know. I think maybe I’ll write this last entry here and then start a new journal tomorrow, even though this notebook is half blank. I think I have come to a good stopping place in my life, a place at which I’ll end one thing and begin another.

  I haven’t written anything since Friday, so must back up in order
to relate all that has happened.

  Well … July is over. Claudia and Stacey and I are back in Stoneybrook. Stacey came home on Friday, and Claud and I got back yesterday. The very first thing I did when I ran through our front door (after I yelled to Watson that no, I was not going to just leave my trunk sitting in the hall) was dash to the phone and call Mary Anne.

  “Hey! You’re back!” she cried. “How was Parents’ Day?”

  “Great! Have you found a house yet?”

  “Oh, I guess you didn’t get my last letter. You won’t believe this! We’re going to rent the Goldmans’ house — NEXT DOOR TO CLAUDIA! And we’re going to renovate our barn!”

  Then Mary Anne dropped a bombshell. She has decided she must seriously consider breaking up with Logan. For good. Not like in that wimpy way she broke up with him the last time, the time that didn’t take. The only thing is that she and Logan haven’t spoken since their disastrous dinner. How do you break up with someone you never see?

  When Mary Anne and I got off the phone I called Claudia, then Stacey. Everyone had so much to say, and we all missed each other so much that the four of us decided to get together today.

  So this afternoon we sat in my room with the air conditioner blasting. We ate chips and drank sodas and iced tea.

  “Hey, you guys,” said Claud at one point. She was sitting on the edge of my bed, braiding Stacey’s hair, while Stacey sat on the floor at her feet. Mary Anne was lying on the bed, leaning against my reading pillow, flipping through a copy of People. I was sitting at my desk, tipping so far backward in my chair that Mary Anne was just inches away from telling me I was going to fall.

  “Yeah?” said Stace.

  “Did you ever think I’d want to move to an island?”

  “You really want to move to Monhegan?” asked Mary Anne.

  “One day. Definitely.”

  I looked around at my friends. “Hey, do you realize we are the original members of the Baby-sitters Club?” I said. “We are the ones who started it all.”

  “Think of everything that’s happened since then,” said Stacey.

  “I have been. It’s practically all I thought about while I was at camp.”

  “Really?” asked Mary Anne.

  “Well, no. But I thought about it a lot.”

  From her spot on the bed Claud began to look uncomfortable.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  She cleared her throat and stopped braiding Stacey’s hair. “Well, it’s just that I had such a great time taking Rachael’s class on Monhegan. And having so much time for nothing but drawing and painting. Well … I began to think that I’d really like to have that luxury more often.”

  “Can’t you?” I asked.

  “Not really. Not with homework and baby-sitting and club meetings.”

  “You sound like Abby,” I said. Then Stacey began to look uncomfortable. “What,” I said crabbily.

  “I was kind of thinking that I might like to have more time to go into the city. I don’t know what’s going to happen with Dad and Samantha, but I want to be able to watch the show. Also, the math club is going to expand next year. More meetings. More competitions.”

  I sighed. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I don’t really know how I can do all those things and continue to baby-sit as much as usual. Plus, sometimes it’s hard to get to BSC meetings after math club meetings.”

  I glanced at Mary Anne, who had put down her magazine and was now staring at the rest of us, looking troubled. I waited for her to say how upset she was by all this, that there had been too many changes in her life recently. Instead, she said, “You know, renovating the barn is going to be an enormous job. I’m probably going to have to help Dad and Sharon quite a bit this year. I wasn’t sure how to cram that in with sitting and homework and everything.”

  By now, Claud, Stacey, and Mary Anne were all looking at me nervously. I knew they expected me to explode. In fact, I expected me to explode. Instead, I heard myself saying, “Well, I guess I can understand. Lately I’ve been feeling just way too busy. I have homework and softball and Kristy’s Krushers. Sometimes all I want is a little free time.”

  “I wonder how Shannon is feeling about the Baby-sitters Club these days,” said Stacey.

  We decided to call her. I can’t say I was surprised to hear Shannon say pretty much the same things we’d just been saying. “In fact,” she went on, “I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you that I don’t even think I’ll have time to be an associate member of the BSC once school starts.”

  A few minutes later I hung up the phone. I looked at my friends. “It’s just the four of us now,” I said to them. “The original four.” I could feel tears spring to my eyes.

  “You know we won’t be able to run the club the way it’s been running,” said Mary Anne gently. “There’s just no way. We can’t handle all the jobs. We could barely do it after Mallory left.”

  “I know.”

  “And the truth is,” added Claudia, “we don’t want to be as busy as we were last year.”

  “I know,” I said again. And one of the tears escaped from my eye and ran down my cheek.

  Stacey knelt beside me and wiped the tear away. “Kristy?”

  “I’m okay. I know it’s time to change the club. It’s the right thing for all of us. Even for me. It’s just … sad. It was a really, really good thing, and I hate to see it end.”

  “It’s not going to end,” said Stacey. “I think we should just cut back. We won’t look for new clients. And we’ll take fewer sitting jobs but not stop sitting altogether.”

  “Maybe we could meet just once or twice a week,” I added.

  “Perfect,” said Claud.

  “Really?” I asked. “Does this feel right to you guys?”

  “Does it feel right to you?” asked Mary Anne.

  I nodded.

  “Then I think it’s the right thing to do.”

  “Me too,” said Claudia and Stacey at the same time.

  * * *

  And so this whole big huge chapter of my life is drawing to a close. I wonder what I’ll be when I’m no longer the president of the Baby-sitters Club, when I’m just a regular kid who baby-sits. Will I still be me, Kristy Thomas?

  I don’t know, but I’ll find out. And I’ll record it all in my next journal as I begin my new life.

  About the Author

  ANN M. MARTIN is the acclaimed and bestselling author of a number of novels and series, including Belle Teal, A Corner of the Universe (a Newbery Honor book), A Dog’s Life, Here Today, P.S. Longer Letter Later (written with Paula Danziger), the Family Tree series, the Doll People series (written with Laura Godwin), the Main Street series, and the generation-defining series The Baby-sitters Club. She lives in New York.

  Copyright © 1999 by Ann M. Martin

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First edition, 1999

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