Ann Martin - Mallory And The Mystery Diary

So I was pleased to enter headquarters at 5:25 that day. When I did, I found Claudia, Kristy, and Mary Anne already there. Claud was fishing around on the shelf of her closet, probably looking for junk food. Mary Anne was seated on Claudia's bed, reading the club notebook (I'll explain about that in a minute), and Kristy was in her official presidential position — sitting in Claud's director's chair, wearing a visor, a pencil stuck over one ear. She insists that our meetings — that the club itself — be run in as businesslike a way as possible.

This must be a good tactic, since the club is so successful. Let me tell you how it began, and how we run it.

As I said before, the club was Kristy's idea. It came to her one day when her mom needed a sitter for David Michael, and neither Kristy nor one of her big brothers was available. So Mrs. Thomas started making phone calls. She made call after call, and while she did so, Kristy was thinking, Wouldn't it save time if her mother could make one call and reach a

lot of baby-sitters at once, instead of calling one person after another?

So she got together with Mary Anne and Claudia, who were her neighbors then (they'd grown up together), and the three of them decided to start a club to baby-sit in their neighborhood. They also decided that they needed a fourth member, so they asked Stacey to join. Stacey had just moved to Stoneybrook (for the first time) and was a new friend of Claud's.

The club was a huge success. Soon they needed a fifth member and invited Dawn, who was getting to be friends with Mary Anne, to join. Then when Stacey had to go back to New York, the other girls asked Jessi and me to take her place.

How does the club run? Well, thanks to advertising (a little ad in the Stoneybrook newspaper and a lot of fliers in mailboxes), people around here know when we meet and call us during those times to line up sitters. When one of us answers Claud's phone, that person takes down all the information about the job. Then Mary Anne checks our schedule to see who's free, and we call the client back to tell her (or him) who the sitter will be.

Each of us has a special job to do in order

to keep the club operating smoothly.

Kristy's job as president is to come up with new ideas for the club, to run the meetings, and to solve problems.

Claudia, our vice-president, doesn't actually have a job, but because she's the only one of us with her own phone and private phone number, we meet in her room so that we don't have to tie up our parents' lines. Since we invade her room three times a week, we think it's only fair that she be the VP.

Mary Anne is the secretary and has the biggest, most complicated job of all of us. She is in charge of the club record book (not to be confused with the club notebook). The record book is where all important club information is written down — our clients' names, addresses, and phone numbers; special information about the kids we sit for; and most important of all, our schedules. Mary Anne has to keep track of Jessi's ballet classes, Clau-dia's art lessons, my orthodontist appointments (did I mention my disgusting braces?), and other things like that, in order to know who's free when, so she can safely schedule sitting jobs for us. She has never once made a mistake.

Stacey is the treasurer, in charge of collect-

ing our weekly dues every Monday and keeping an eye on the money in our treasury. We use that money for several things. One is for fun club stuff. Since we work so hard we like to treat ourselves to sleepovers or pizza parties every now and then. Another is to pay Kristy's older brother Charlie to drive her to and from meetings since she lives so far away now. The third is to buy new items for our Kid-Kits. Kid-Kits were one of Kristy's big ideas. We've each got a cardboard box that is decorated with fabric and paint and stuff, and filled with our old toys, books, and games. We take our Kid-Kits along sometimes when we baby-sit, and the children love them! But things get used up, and every now and then we have to buy new crayons or a coloring book or slicker book.

Dawn is our alternate officer, meaning that she can take over the job of any officer who might be absent from a meeting. She's kind of like a substitute teacher. It's a hard job because she has to know what everyone does. (When Stacey was back in New York, Dawn became the treasurer, but now that Stacey has returned, Dawn gladly took over her old job. She isn't wild about math, and Stacey is.)

Jessi and I are junior officers. To be honest, we don't have jobs. "Junior officer" simply

means that since we're eleven we're only allowed to sit during the daytime — not at night unless we're sitting for our own brothers and sisters. But we don't mind. We get plenty of after-school and weekend jobs.

Two more things about the club, just to show you how officially Kristy runs it. One, she makes us keep a club notebook. In the notebook, each of us is responsible for writing up every single job we go on. Then we're supposed to read the book once a week to see what's happened while our friends were sitting. We learn how they handled problems with kids and things like that. I think everyone but Kristy and me hates writing in the notebook. I like it just because I enjoy writing, and Kristy has to like it, since the notebook was her idea. Two, our club has a couple of associate members. They don't come to meetings, but they're good sitters whom we can call on if a job is offered to the club that no one else can take. One of our associates is a friend of Kristy's named Shannon Kilbourne. The other is none other than . . . Logan Bruno, Mary Anne's boyfriend!

Well, I think that's everything you need to know about the running of the club.

By five-thirty, the seven of us had gathered in Claud's room and were eating pretzels. (Pretzels are one snack food that Stacey can eat and Dawn doesn't consider too junky.) Kristy had opened the meeting and we were waiting for the phone to ring.

"Did you get the trunk unlocked?" Stacey asked me while we waited.

"No, darn it," I replied, and then she and Claud and I had to explain about the trunk.

"We can't find a key, and bobby pins don't work," I added.

"Did you try dynamite?" asked Kristy.

We laughed.

We were still laughing when the first job call came in. For a few moments, no one could calm down. At last Stacey composed herself, picked up the phone, turned toward the wall so she wouldn't have to look at us, and spoke to Mrs. Barrett, who has three little kids. The Barretts live near Dawn and me.

Mary Anne checked the schedule and the job was given to Dawn.

Then Kristy said, "Okay, we have to settle down. We have to be businesslike."

So we did settle down. But every time I thought about blasting the trunk open with dynamite, I wanted to start giggling again.

Chapter 4.

Wow. Dawn used to have disastrous days with the Barrett kids. She called them the Impossible Three. The Impossible Three are Buddy, who is eight and in third grade, Suzi, who is five and in kindergarten, and Marnie, who's just two. Only they're not so impossible anymore.

The reason they used to be impossible was that Mr. and Mrs. Barrett has just gotten a divorce and Mrs. Barrett was not used to coping with three little kids by herself, running a household, and looking for a job. But now she's found a part-time job — a good one — and is much more organized. So things have been going better for the Barretts. I was hoping that Buddy's reading problem was just a small setback.

Anyway, Dawn rang the Barretts' bell five minutes before Mrs. Barrett had asked her to arrive. Us baby-sitters have found that getting to a job a little early is a good idea. (Of course, if you can't get there early, definitely be right on time.) But arriving early gives the parent, or parents, a few extra moments for explanations or to say a special good-bye to the kids. The sitting job starts off in a more relaxed way.