Contents
Cover
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also Available
Copyright
Don’t worry. I didn’t make up that description. I got it from the tag on my bridesmaid’s dress. I thought it sounded funny.
I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Sunny Winslow howled when she read the tag in the store.
“Radiant and Luminous?” she blurted out. “That sounds like Wilbur the pig, from Charlotte’s Web!”
“Huh?” said Maggie Blume.
Jill Henderson tapped her chin. “Radiant. That was one of the words Charlotte made in her web — to describe Wilbur.”
“Huh?” Maggie repeated.
“You didn’t read it?” Sunny asked with a look of utter disbelief.
Maggie shrugged. “I saw the video.”
“Uh, guys?” I interrupted. “What do you think of the dress?”
Rule Number One of Dawn’s Theory of Shopping: Never shop with best friends if you have something truly important to buy.
Rule Number Two: If you have to buy it during the holiday season, multiply Rule Number One by ten.
I discovered this at the Vista Hills mall on that Saturday morning. We arrived at 9:00. Mission: to find me a bridesmaid’s dress.
At 9:02 Sunny decided we needed extra energy for our quest. So we had granola and yogurt at a health-food snack bar called Health’s Angels.
We left at 9:45 and ran into Chip Ransom, this ninth-grader who began flirting with Maggie while the rest of us stood around trying not to look too dorky.
At 9:50 Jill spotted the perfect tie for her father in a men’s store window. Of course, we all went in to consult.
At 10:09, in front of SportsWest, Maggie remembered her uncle Lew’s great love for golfing tees.
You get the picture.
When did we start looking for my dress? Noon. By that time, my friends were loaded down with Hanukkah and Christmas presents. Getting them to move was like pulling elephants across a swamp.
Actually, none of us is very elephantlike. We’re all pretty normal thirteen-year-olds. Well, aside from the fact that each of us is a vegetarian, which some people find strange. (I find it strange to eat slaughtered animals.)
You know what else I find strange? Polluting our planet and destroying natural resources, such as trees. As you can guess, I am super-passionate about environmental issues. Here are some other things you need to know about me: I’m in eighth grade. I have long, light-blonde hair and freckles. And my life has been like a soap opera. “The Days of Dawn,” in six scenes:
1. Early Years. I grow up happily in sunny, laid-back Palo City.
2. The Divorce. Mom decides to move back to her hometown (Stoneybrook) with me and my younger brother, Jeff. We buy an old farmhouse with a secret passageway that was once part of the Underground Railroad. I grow to love Stoneybrook, I meet great friends, and I join the Baby-sitters Club.
3. The Big Split. Jeff hates his new town and sinks into a huge funk. After much suffering, he decides he wants to live in California with Dad. Mom reluctantly agrees. (Two hankies for this part.)
4. The Re-marriage. My friend Mary Anne Spier and I discover that her dad used to date my mom in high school. We play matchmaker. They fall in love and get married — and the Spiers move into our house! (Swelling music here.)
5. Dawn’s Big Move. I find myself missing Jeff and Dad terribly. I convince Mom and Richard (my stepfather) to let me move back to California for awhile. (More hankies.)
6. California Wedding. A work in progress. Sure to be another major tearjerker.
Hmm. Maybe I could get Maggie’s dad interested in this plot. He’s in The Industry. In Southern California talk, that means the movie business. You know what Maggie’s favorite part of a movie is? The credits. She sits at the edge of her seat and reads the names of people she knows. (Me? I’m in the aisle, checking my watch.) Her style is more than cool. Hyper-cool. Robocool. Sometimes Maggie’s outfits look totally bizarre, but then two weeks later, everyone else is wearing the same style. (I don’t know how she does it.) Her hair is blonde, except for a small tail in back that’s always dyed some color not found in nature. And her house — whoa. Bedrooms galore, two kitchens, a gym, a screening room, and a pool with a tropical landscape right out of Gilligan’s Island. Glamorous, huh? But despite that, Maggie is down-to-earth and friendly.
Sunny is my closest friend in California. Her full name is Sunshine Daydream Winslow. (It’s not her fault; her parents were hippies.) We both love surfing and ghost stories. Fortunately we also live in the same neighborhood. Her mom is the sweetest person, and she makes the most awesome pottery.
Jill Henderson lives way on the outskirts of Palo City, with her mom (who’s divorced) and her older sister, Liz. Oh, and also three ugly dogs, named Spike, Smee, and Shakespeare. (Maybe their parents were hippies, too.) Jill’s the quietest of us all. She has deep brown eyes and dark blonde hair.
We four are known throughout the greater Palo City area as the We Kids Club. We’ve actually been in the local paper and on TV. But despite our great fame (ha ha), we are very easygoing. Our meetings are semi-regular, we have no officers, and hardly anyone arrives on time.
“Lazy slobs” is how Kristy Thomas would describe the WKC. Kristy lives in Stoneybrook, and she’s the founder of the Baby-sitters Club. She set it up like a business, with herself as president. She’s a born leader — loud, stubborn, and full of great ideas.
Sigh. I miss the BSC. It’s much more structured than the WKC, but I love it just the same.
The Baby-sitters Club has regular meetings three times a week. Our clients (Stoneybrook parents) call during meeting times when they need baby-sitters. Everyone in the club has to arrive on time (or face the Wrath of Kristy), and everyone has a title. My stepsister, Mary Anne, is the club’s secretary. She keeps the records and sets up all our sitting appointments. She and Kristy are best friends and sort of look-alikes. Both are short and have dark brown hair and eyes. But Mary Anne is quiet and sensitive, and that makes her … well, Kristy’s opposite.
Stacey McGill is the treasurer. She’s also a native New Yorker (and a divorced kid; her dad still lives in NYC). She’s blonde and she has the most sophisticated sense of style. Like me, she eats only healthy food. She has to, because she has diabetes. If she has too much sugar, she could get really sick. (Don’t worry. She’s careful.)
Claudia Kishi’s the vice-president, mainly because BSC meetings are held in her bedroom (she’s the only member with a private phone). Claudia’s a real artist. She can paint, draw, make jewelry, and put together the most creative outfits from odds and ends and old clothes. I love Claud, but I’ll never understand two things about her: (1) She is a serious junk food addict, and (2) despite that, she’s thin and healthy looking. Gorgeous, too, with big almond-shaped eyes and jet-black hair (she’s Japanese-American).
The BSC has t
wo junior officers — Jessica Ramsey and Mallory Pike. They’re in sixth grade (the rest of us are in eighth), and their parents won’t allow them to baby-sit at night yet. Jessi’s African-American, long-legged, elegant-looking, and a talented ballerina. Mallory’s white, short, curly-haired, and determined to become a children’s book writer someday. She’s also the oldest of eight kids.
Until I left for California, I was the BSC’s alternate officer. If someone was absent, I took over her job. What did the club do when I left? No problem. The BSC has two associate members, who aren’t normally required to attend meetings. One of them, Shannon Kilbourne, took over for me. Shannon, who goes to Stoneybrook Day School, has curly blonde hair and a luminous and radiant smile. The other associate member is Mary Anne’s boyfriend, Logan Bruno, who works baby-sitting around all his extracurricular sports activities.
Now you know all about me and my life. Well, the important stuff anyway.
Okay. Back to Saturday. We were in the “Bridal Trail” section of Carswell-Hayes, the anchor store of the mall.
The bridemaid’s dress was a satiny material with shirred, off-shoulder sleeves, a fitted bodice, and a flared mid-calf skirt. The soft fuchsia color was just right for a wedding on the beach. (Yes, the beach. Isn’t that cool?)
I tried it on and emerged from the dressing room to a chorus of oohs and aahs.
“It’s gorgeous,” Sunny said.
“Stunning,” Maggie agreed.
“I was a bridesmaid once,” Jill added, “with my sister. She picked the dress and it was sooo ugly. The worst thing was that she spent all this money on a dress she never wore again.”
“Oh,” I replied. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure I wanted to buy it.
“But this one’s different,” Jill quickly said. “You could wear it a lot.”
Sunny and Maggie nodded in agreement.
A saleswoman walked over to us and asked, “May I help you?”
I fingered the material. I was falling in love.
“I think she’ll take it,” Sunny said to the woman.
I wondered what Mary Anne would think. I spotted the same dress in her size on the rack. I wanted so badly to buy one for her. But would that be right? Shouldn’t my co-bridesmaid be in on the decision? What if she hated it?
She couldn’t.
“It’s on sale, twenty percent off,” the saleswoman said. “And it’s returnable if you’re not satisfied.”
That did it. I took both dresses off the rack.
“I’ll take two,” I said to the woman.
“Yea!” Maggie exclaimed.
“Let’s celebrate,” Jill said.
“Lunch at Tito’s Burritos!” Sunny suggested.
“No, Health’s Angels,” Maggie replied.
I let them fight it out while I paid for the dresses. All I could think about was the look on Mary Anne’s face.
She was going to love it.
“Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way. Time to eat, have a seat, who wants scrambled eh-eggs?”
As I bounded into the kitchen, poor Mom was shuffling toward the coffee pot. She stopped and looked at me as if I’d gone completely crazy.
“Nine o’clock, time to rock, open up the fridge …” I sang.
I am not usually like this. Really. Snow does this to me. Besides, it was a Saturday. I had nothing to do except sit for the Barrett and DeWitt kids. And THE SEASON had begun!
When we first moved to Stoneybrook, I thought the holidays would be bo-ring. No offense, but my old hometown is pretty amazing at this time of year. New York City, that is. The tree at Rockefeller Center, the department store windows, the smell of roasting chestnuts at every corner….
I thought I’d never adjust to the “country.” But you know what? I had a chance to live in New York again. After my family moved to Stoneybrook, we had to move back because of my dad’s job. That’s about when Mom and Dad started heading toward a divorce. Then I was faced with a choice — stay in NYC with Dad or return to Stoneybrook with Mom. And I chose Stoneybrook.
So the holidays aren’t as flashy here. But hey, the snow on the ground stays white much longer. I never get stuck in the subway. Movie theater lines are shorter. And I get to hang out with my best friends in the world.
Plus I love baby-sitting, and as a Baby-sitters Club member, I do a lot of it.
That day, for example, I had been hired to keep the Barrett and DeWitt kids out of their parents’ hair. The two families were going to visit their future house, to watch while the painters and decorators started work.
I was looking forward to it. I feel very close to the Barretts. I had been with them and the DeWitts when they picked out the house to begin with. I also spent two weeks last summer with the Barretts in Sea City, New Jersey (I was hired as mother’s helper), where we all went through a hurricane together.
“Dutchess,” mumbled Mom, with a mouthful of the omelette I’d made.
I assumed she was saying “Delicious,” so I answered, “Thanks.”
I was halfway through my own omelette when I heard a horn honking outside.
Mom scowled. “So early in the morning?” she grunted.
Ding-dong went the front door bell.
“Time to go!” I cleared my plate, grabbed my coat from the outside hallway, and ran to the front door.
“Did you take your medicine, sweetheart?” Mom called out.
“Yes, Mom.”
“Bundle up!”
“Yes, Mom. ’Bye!”
My medicine, by the way, is insulin. It regulates the sugar in my bloodstream. Most people’s bodies make their own insulin, but diabetics have to inject it daily. (Please don’t barf. It’s not as gross as it sounds.)
“Hi!” Buddy Barrett greeted me as I opened the door. “Lindsey was blowing the car horn. She’s in big trouble.”
Buddy is eight. Lindsey DeWitt is eight. Put them together and you get … big trouble. (Did you think I was going to say sixteen? Faked you out.)
Behind Buddy I heard squealing voices:
“I want to sit with Suzi!”
“Close the windows!”
“Ryan’s drooling!”
By the curb in front of our house, kids were running back and forth between the Barrett sedan and the DeWitt station wagon. Mrs. Barrett and Franklin were standing outside, directing them like traffic police.
As Buddy and I walked toward the cars, I heard Suzi Barrett cry out, “Stacey sits with us!”
“Uh-uh! No way!” Taylor DeWitt retorted.
Suzi’s five and Taylor’s six. Usually Suzi is sweet-natured, but Taylor brings out her competitive side.
The other kids are Madeleine DeWitt (four), Marnie Barrett (two), and Ryan DeWitt (two).
From the expressions on the faces of the two grown-ups, I could see it had already been a long day.
“Hi, Stacey,” Mrs. Barrett said with a tired smile. “I hope you have a lot of energy today.”
“Hop in,” Franklin said, holding open the passenger door of the station wagon.
“No fair!” screamed Buddy.
* * *
I have never seen kids so noisy and excited. The new house was only about a half mile away, but I felt as if we were driving to Chicago.
As we pulled up in front of the house, the car doors flew open. Before I could unbuckle my seat belt, Buddy, Lindsey, Taylor, and Madeleine were running across the front lawn.
Next Suzi emerged, dragging a sleeping bag.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“To test the bedrooms,” she replied. “So I know which one’s best.”
As she marched toward the house, I looked at Mrs. Barrett. She shrugged.
“It’s locked!” Buddy shouted.
“Ee! Ee! Ee! Ee!” Marnie was shrieking with excitement in her car seat. I took her out, Franklin unbuckled Ryan, and Mrs. Barrett unlocked the front door.
Clomp-clomp-clomp-clomp! Footsteps echoed against the bare wood floors inside.
The house lo
oked smaller than I’d remembered. It had two stories, a little patio out back, and a tiny front yard.
Marnie and Ryan seemed to find the pebbles on the driveway fascinating. I could hear Buddy making ghost noises in the attic. Lindsey and Taylor were opening and closing all the windows.
“The painters are due in fifteen minutes,” Mr. DeWitt said. “The kids have to be out of their way.”
“Okay,” I replied.
Well, fifteen minutes passed by. Then twenty. Then a half hour.
I ran in and out of the house. I broke up a fight between Buddy and Taylor. I tried to explain to Suzi why she wouldn’t be able to sleep in the kitchen. I supervised the two toddlers when they decided to walk up and down the front steps a million times.
The workers arrived forty minutes late. Mrs. Barrett had this tight little smile on her face. I recognized it. I had seen it in Sea City when she was about to fly into a rage.
I was glad I wasn’t one of those workers.
“Come on, guys!” I called into the house. “Time to go outside.”
Buddy came running up from the basement, just as Suzi was walking through the living room. “I saw a rat downstairs!” Buddy announced.
“A what?” Mrs. Barrett, Mr. DeWitt, one of the workers, and I asked all at once.
Suzi was goggle-eyed. Buddy approached her, holding his fingers to his mouth like fangs. “It had these sharp, sharp teeth, and it said, ‘Where’s Suzi? Where’s Suzi?’”
Suzi burst into tears and ran out of the house. “Mo-o-o-om!”
“Hamilton Barrett, you come over here this instant!” Mrs. Barrett commanded.
The next few hours passed in a blur. The workers marched in and out of the house with paint supplies, wallpaper, and ladders. I set up games of red light-green light, tag, duck-duck-goose, and anything I could think of. We went on a backyard treasure hunt and found a golf ball, an interesting rock, and an empty film cannister.
Franklin nearly exploded when one of the workers accidentally put a hole in the kitchen wall. Mrs. Barrett hated the new living room wallpaper and insisted on switching it. Madeleine managed to sneak inside and came out screaming, with a hand covered in plaster.
Lindsey yelled at Madeleine. Mrs. Barrett yelled at me. Franklin yelled at Mrs. Barrett. The workers yelled at each other. When I tried to take Madeleine into the basement to wash her hands in the industrial sink, she freaked out. “I hate rats!” she screamed. Buddy thought this was hysterical.
Here Come the Bridesmaids! Page 1
