Ann Martin - Kristy And The Snobs

"You knew Astrid was a girl, too?" was all I could exclaim. "You knew about the puppies?"

Of course, Mom had no idea why I said that, and she was in a rush to get back to work, so we ended the conversation. Boy, I thought when I'd hung up the phone, I must really be out of it. I decided this was my punishment for thinking that all my neighbors were snobs, and not bothering to get to know them.

"Mom said yes!" I announced to Shannon.

"Great," she replied. "Now call your brother."

I did, but I didn't tell him why I was calling. I just asked him to come over to the Delaneys'.

While we waited for David Michael, Amanda and Max played with the puppy. "You know,"

I said to Shannon as we watched the kids, "I'm really sorry about taking your baby-sitting jobs away from you. I baby-sat so much in my old neighborhood that it didn't occur to me not to sit when I moved here. It's just part of my life. I didn't think about the people here who might already be sitters."

"Oh, that's okay," replied Shannon. "There are more than enough jobs to go around. Tiffany and I are the only ones of our friends who really like to baby-sit, and we can't possibly do it all ourselves. I don't think I was mad at you as much as I was ..." (Shannon blushed) ". . . jealous."

"Jealous of me?"

"Yeah. Because your club is such a good idea."

"But you and Tiffany kind of implied that our club is babyish."

"Yeah, we did. But we didn't mean it."

The doorbell rang then and I let David Michael in. When he saw the puppy on the kitchen floor a whole range of expressions crossed his face. First he looked surprised, then pleased, then sad (thinking of Louie, I guess), and then wary.

"Whose is that?" he asked. He looked from Shannon to the Snobs.

"Actually, she's ours," I answered. "If you

want her." I told him about the Kilbournes' offer.

"I don't want her," David Michael said rudely, and I felt like shaking him. "She isn't Louie." But before I could do anything, David Michael knelt down on the floor, in spite of himself.

The puppy pranced over to him and stood with her front feet on my brother's knees. David Michael smiled.

Shannon and I looked at each other and smiled, too.

The puppy stretched up, David Michael leaned over, and they touched noses.

"Ooh," said David Michael, "she has a soft nozzle."

"Muzzle," I corrected him.

"If we keep her," said my brother, "she won't be Louie. Louie was special."

"No," I agreed. "Louie was one-of-a-kind. This puppy is a girl, and she'll look different and act different. She's not a new Louie."

"Good," said David Michael.

"So do you want her?" asked Shannon.

"Yes," replied my brother.

"And what do you say?" I prompted him.

"I say, 'Let's name her Shannon.' "

So we did.

Chapter 15.

"Help! Kristy! Save me! The ghost of Ben Brewer is after me!"

Karen ran shrieking through the second-floor hallway and burst into my room in a panic. "Kristy! Kristy!"

"Ahem, Karen," I replied.

Karen was only fooling around. She knew as well as I did that there probably wasn't any ghost in our attic. And if there was (because we just weren't sure) he certainly wasn't going to chase little girls around in broad daylight.

It was a Saturday afternoon, two weeks to the day since Louie's funeral. Karen and Andrew were spending another weekend with us, and Shannon the puppy was almost ours. The members of the Baby-sitters Club were gathered in my room. We'd just had a meeting the day before, of course, but every now and then we like to get together and not conduct

business. Besides, my friends enjoy visiting the mansion.

Karen plopped down on the floor between Mary Anne and Dawn. "You know who old Ben Brewer is, don't you?" she asked them.

"Your great-grandfather?" Mary Anne ventured. (Ghost stories make her nervous.)

"Right. Before he became a ghost, anyway. He was a - what's the word, Kristy?"

"Herpitologist?" I suggested.

"No!" cried Karen, laughing. "The word that means he stayed in the house all alone for years. He never went out and no one ever went in."

"He was a recluse," I said, "according to Brewer family history."

"And he ate fried dandelions," Karen added.

Stacey snorted.

"Well, he did," Karen insisted, turning to Stacey indignantly. "Anyway, he's a ghost now and he haunts our attic."

"Only the attic?" asked Claudia.

"Yes, thank goodness," I replied.

"But every now and then he leaves it," said Karen. "Just for a few minutes. He likes to chase me through the halls. He says otherwise he never gets any exercise."

"You mean any e-x-o-r-c-i-s-e?" spelled Mary Anne, but Karen wasn't old enough to get the

joke. The rest of us laughed, though.

"You do know that's not true, don't you, Karen?" I asked.

"Yes," she admitted. "But it's fun to pretend. Sometimes I'm sure he's behind me." (I shivered.) "But it's not pretend about the attic. He really haunts it."

"We have an honest-to-goodness secret passage in our house," spoke up Dawn.

"You do?" Karen's eyes widened.

"I've been in it," I announced.

"You have?" Karen's eyes became the size of soup tureens.

Crash, bang, THUMP.

"What was that?" exclaimed Stacey.

"My brothers," I replied. "I think."

"Yup, that's right," said Karen. "They're playing football."

"In the house?" I asked.

"Yes. Andrew is the football."

I rolled my eyes. Mom and Watson were out for the afternoon. I wasn't baby-sitting, since Sam and Charlie were home, but I felt I should be on top of things. There were ten kids in the house, plus Boo-Boo.

"This house," I informed my friends, "is actually a madhouse. Can you imagine what it'll be like when Shannon arrives?"

At that moment, Charlie charged into my

room with Andrew in his arms and threw him on the bed. "Touchdown!" he shouted.

Andrew squealed and giggled. He sounded a little too wild, which was unlike him. "Do a cannonball!" he shrieked. He tucked himself into a ball and Charlie picked him up again and ran him down the hall chanting, "Ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom." We heard a soft thud as my brother tossed him onto another bed.

"Hey, you guys! Perk up!" I shouted to them.

My friends laughed.

Karen ran after Charlie shouting, "My turn! My turn!"

"When do you get Shannon?" Mary Anne wanted to know.

"In two or three days," I replied.

"You know, Kristy," Claudia began, "I hate to say this, but - "

"Then don't," I interrupted.

"Don't what?"

"Say it."

Claudia made a face at me. "But," she continued, "you complained an awful lot about Shannon Kilbourne and the other snobby girls around here, and now Shannon's giving you a puppy. That's a pretty nice thing to do."

"I know," I said in a small voice as I traced the pattern of the bedspread with my finger:

"She's not as bad as I thought she was. In fact, she's sort of all right."

"Well, what happened?" asked Dawn.

I shook my head. "I'm not sure. But we did have a talk the day Shannon brought Shannon to meet me."

"What kind of talk?" asked Claudia. She was lying on her back on the floor and began blowing a gigantic pink bubble with a wad of Bazooka.

"You know, if that pops, it's going to cover your face and goo up your hair," Stacey pointed out after a few seconds.

Claudia ignored her and kept on blowing.

"We had a very pleasant talk," I replied. "We talked about baby-sitting. I said I hadn't realized that I might be stepping on someone else's territory when I started sitting around here. It was just natural for me to sit."

"What did Shannon say?" asked Mary Anne. "Did she understand?"

"Oh, yes. Believe it or not, she said she was jealous."

"You're kidding," said Dawn and Stacey at the same time.