Ann Martin - Hello, Mallory

The meeting started off on the wrong foot because Kristy and Dawn were in bad moods and Claudia couldn't find this package of Ring-Dings she'd hidden in her room.

"Did one of you guys take it?" asked Claudia accusingly.

"Are you kidding? That trash?" replied Dawn. "I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. You know, you're going to rot your teeth, Claudia. Your face is going to break out and people will call you — "

"They will call me happy," Claudia interrupted her, "because that's what I am when I eat Ring-Dings. So you can just stop lecturing me about food. If I ate health food, I'd probably turn into a rabbit like you. A skinny, pale rabbit. I'd — "

"Shut up," said Kristy. "You two are wasting our time. This meeting started five minutes ago and all we've done is crab at each other and go on a Ring-Ding hunt. But believe me, we've got a problem. Mary Anne, open up our notebook."

"Yes, sir," said Mary Anne sarcastically. She'd come to the meeting in a good mood, but by now even she was feeling cross.

Kristy held up the club's appointment book, which was opened to the calendar pages. "See this?" she barked.

"Yeah," said Dawn, who was not happy about having been called a skinny, pale rabbit. "So?"

"It is all full," said Kristy flatly. "For two weeks."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that was the point of this club," said Claudia. "To sign up jobs. And when we do that, we fill up the calendar."

"Save the sarcasm," Kristy told her. "Of course that was the point. But what happens if someone calls needing a sitter during the next two weeks?"

"We ask Logan or Shannon to take the job," said Mary Anne. "That's what they're there for. They're our back-ups." (Logan Bruno and Shannon Kilbourne are two associate club

members, which means that they don't come to meetings, but they're called on to take jobs no one else can take.)

"I guess so," said Kristy. "I mean, I know so. It just seems to me that they shouldn't be quite this necessary to us. ... Boy, do we need Stacey back."

"Yeah . . ." the others said and fell silent. They all missed Stacey, especially Claudia, who had been her best friend.

The phone rang then. Kristy, perched in the director's chair, adjusted her visor and reached for the receiver. "Keep your fingers crossed that this is a call for at least a year from now."

That brought a smile to Claudia's face, anyway. The girls listened to Kristy's end of the conversation. "Hi, Mrs. Prezzioso. . . . Oh, fine, thanks. How's Jenny? . . . Good. . . . Thursday afternoon? I'll get back to you right away. . . . Okay. . . . Sure. Good-bye."

Kristy hung up the phone. "Somebody around here wasn't crossing her fingers," she said. "Mrs. Prezzioso needs someone for this Thursday afternoon."

Mary Anne closed the notebook she'd been writing in and took the record book from Kristy. "Let me handle this," she said. "It's my job." She looked at the appointment calendar. "What's

the big deal, Kristy? You and Claudia are both free that afternoon."

"Claudia and I are both sitting that evening. You know our parents won't let us take two jobs on the same day, at least not during the week. We'd never get our homework done."

"Well, I'll call Logan," said Mary Anne happily. She didn't look the least bit upset. That was because Logan Bruno is Mary Anne's boyfriend, and she loves any chance to call him.

Mary Anne knew Logan's number by heart. She dialed it, then pulled the phone into a corner and turned her back on the other club members. "Hello, Logan?" they could hear her say. "It's me. Yeah.... Mmphh, mmblmmbl." She dropped her voice so low that even though Kristy, Dawn, and Claudia leaned over as far as they dared, they couldn't hear what she was saying. And she didn't raise it again until the only thing left to say was, "Good-bye."

"Well?" asked Kristy.

"He's free," Mary Anne replied. "You can call Mrs. Prezzioso now."

As soon as Kristy had done so, another call came in for Thursday.

"Shannon Kilbourne is our only hope," said Kristy, who called her immediately. Luckily, Shannon was free, too.

"That was close," commented Claudia.

"I'll say," agreed Kristy. "Too close. We've got to do something. At this point, even a sitter who was only available in the afternoons would help us."

"We have to find another club member," said Dawn, "and that's that."

"You know," said Mary Anne, "when Stacey and I went to Sea City with the Pikes, Mallory was awfully helpful. She wasn't even supposed to be a baby-sitter, but she automatically watched her brothers and sisters all the time, especially in the water. She remembered to see that they were wearing sunblock, and we knew that if we had to split up into groups, like when we were playing miniature golf, we could put her in charge of one of the groups and not have a thing to worry about."

"You know when we held the playgroup last summer?" began Kristy.

"Yeah?" said Claudia.

"Well, Mallory did more than just help out. When she walked the kids from her neighborhood over to Stacey's house, she taught them about crossing the street. She didn't have to do that, she just did it."

"And," began Claudia, "when she and I baby-sat at the Perkinses' she didn't do anything really wrong. She was mostly clumsy,

like when she spilled the milk and broke the glass. She did make a mistake with the snack and with Chewy, but that wasn't so bad. . . ."

"I just remembered something," spoke up Dawn. "Mrs. Pike called my mom last night to tell her about some PTA thing, and they started talking about Nicky's hand. It turns out that it was a total accident. It happened so fast that no one could have prevented it." Dawn explained what had happened. "So it wasn't Mallory's fault at all — and we blamed her for it," she finished up.

"Oops," said Kristy.

Claudia cleared her throat nervously. "Um," she said, "I didn't want to admit this before, but I didn't know anything about the divestive system before we made up that test."

"It's di-ges-tive," Dawn told her, "and neither did I."

"Me neither," added Mary Anne. She and Dawn and Claudia looked at Kristy.

"Oh, all right, neither did I," said Kristy. "Well, not much."

"Did you know about tourniquets?" Claudia asked her.

"Only that you have to let a doctor remove them."

"You know, it took us hours to make up that test," said Mary Anne slowly, "and not

because we had so many questions to choose from. It was because we had to look everything up."

Kristy hung her head. "I guess we were pretty unfair to Mallory."

"Yeah," agreed the others.

"But we do have to be careful," Kristy went on. "Little kids are important. I mean, everyone is important, but we have a responsibility to the kids we take care of, and to their parents. We can't sign up sitters who are going to let accidents happen or who wouldn't know what to do if a kid got sick."

"That's true," said Dawn, "but I don't think we should expect more from anyone else than we do from ourselves. And I think Mallory knows just as much about children as we do."

"You're right," said Kristy. She paused. Then she added, "Well, shall I call Mallory and ask her back?"

"Yes!" cried Claudia, Dawn, and Mary Anne.

When the phone rang in the hall outside my bedroom, Jessi and I hoped desperately that it was a job call. We hadn't had a single sitting job since that Wednesday afternoon at the Ramseys'. Needless to say, I was pretty disappointed to hear Kristy Thomas's voice on the other end of the line — that is, until I listened to what she had to say.

"Mallory, we were unfair," she began. "The test was unfair. We see that now. So the reason I'm calling is to find out if you want to try joining the club again as a junior sitter. You know, afternoons only. All you'll have to do is go on one baby-sitting job with another club member. I promise she won't make you nervous."