Ann Martin - Good Bye Stacey, Good Bye

From somewhere nearby, Jordan shushed her.

Claire lowered her voice to a whisper. "I sneaked all the way around to their front door. Then I rang the bell and hid. Jordan says I get my white badge for that."

"Okay," said Claudia.

Mallory put a check next to the word White on Claire's page. "What happened when the people answered their bell?" she asked.

"Only the lady came to the door," Claire told her. "She has long, long dark hair. It's even longer than Dawn Schafer's. And she looked around and around and said, " 'elloo? 'elloo? 'oo eez 'ere?' Then she went back inside."

Claudia and Mallory glanced at each other and shrugged.

The spying continued all afternoon. Margo rang the bell and hid, too, but Claudia had to tell the SA's to quit doing that. Vanessa spotted an open basement window and lay on the ground at the edge of the Pikes' yard looking in with a pair of binoculars. She didn't see anything but darkness, but she earned a yellow badge for her quick thinking. At long last, Nicky climbed out of the tree with the tape recorder.

"Let's go inside and find out what they said," he suggested.

"Don't you know?" asked Mallory.

"Nope. I fell asleep."

The Pikes were tired of spying so they followed Nicky into the house. The first part of the tape was nothing but birds chirping and leaves rustling. Once, Nicky yawned. At long last, though, a voice was heard. Only one sentence was spoken and then a door slammed.

The voice said, "Ve vill have courgettes for deener." Then, slam!

"That just sounds like a regular old French accent," I said, but nobody heard me. The kids were in a panic.

"Courgettes? What are courgettes?" shrieked the Pikes.

"Children?" suggested Nicky, with terror in his eyes.

There was confusion until Mallory thought to look up the word in a cookbook. "Courgettes," she informed everyone, "is the French word for zucchini. You know, squash?"

Claudia grinned. Mallory had saved the day. She had prevented hysteria. Thank goodness she was so practical.

Claudia told me later that as she walked home that evening, she thought about my moving. She thought about the hole I'd leave in the club. Could Mallory fill the hole? she wondered. No, she decided immediately. Mallory was good with kids, but she was two years younger than the rest of us sitters. How would she fit into the club? And she didn't have nearly as much experience as I did.

As Kristy had said, I was going to be hard to replace.

Chapter 8.

"What do you think?" asked Claudia, holding up some sample ads for our yard sale.

"Well," I said, trying to be tactful, "the art is wonderful, Claud. I love your snail with his antennae, and the house on his back instead of a shell. . . ."

"But?" Claudia prompted me.

I glanced at our other friends.

"But the poetry stinks," spoke up Kristy. ''Hasty and Stacey don't rhyme, and we don't have any snails for sale."

"Well, thanks a lot," said Claudia huffily.

The members of the Baby-sitters Club were gathered, for the third afternoon in a row, at my house to get ready for the yard sale. Mom was right. A sale was a lot of work, but we'd been having fun. At least, we had been up until now.

"Hey, everybody," I said, "I don't want to be a slave driver or anything, but we don't really have time for arguments."

"But, Stacey, Kristy is so rude," Claudia complained, looking wounded.

"I'm sorry," Kristy said contritely. "Really I am. Look, why don't we divide up the work on the ads and each do what we're best at? Dawn and I will write the poems, Mary Anne and Stacey, you do the lettering, and Claudia,

you illustrate the ads. . . . Nobody can draw as well as you," she added.

Claudia looked mollified. "All right/' she agreed.

"And after we've made a few more good ads to put up," I said, "we better start tagging all that junk in the basement."

We bent over our papers and worked busily.

"Now this is an advertisement," Kristy announced a few minutes later. "Listen."

Here's what she read:

" 'We're moving back to New York City, We know it's going to be hard. But things will be just a little bit better, If you'll come to the sale in our yard.' "

"Not bad," I agreed. "I like that. Mary Anne, let's each letter one of those poems."

"Okay," she said and set to work on a piece of bright yellow construction paper.

"All right, how's this?" said Dawn after a few more minutes. She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. Then, as if she were about to recite a composition in English class, she stood up, put her hands behind her back and said gravely, "Red are the roses, blue are the seas. . . . Come buy our junk. Please, please, please, please!"

For a moment, no one could tell whether

Dawn was joking or serious, but when we realized she was practically turning blue from trying not to laugh, we all began snickering and giggling. Dawn laughed the hardest of all.

"Very funny," I said, when we'd recovered. "Does anyone want something to drink?"

"Only if you've got some soda that's just brimming with sugar, caffeine, and sodium," replied Kristy. "And maybe some artificial coloring, and, oh, some bigludium exforbi-nate."

I laughed. "We've probably got something like that. I'm going to have iced tea, though."

"I'll have iced tea, too," said Dawn, who had turned green at the very thought of artificial coloring.

"I'll go for the glutious exorbitants," said Claudia.

"Me, too," said Mary Anne.

Claudia followed me to the kitchen and helped me fill five glasses. I'd noticed lately that when she and I were with the rest of the club, we acted happy or silly, and kidded around. But when we were alone we fell into a sad kind of silence. We weren't angry; we just had all these "last things" to say to each other but didn't know how to say them, which was maybe the saddest thing of all about my moving.

"You know/' I said, dancing around the edge of the awful subject, "I haven't told Charlotte that I'm moving."

Claudia, who was standing by the ice-maker in the freezer, glanced over her shoulder at me. "You haven't?" she said in surprise.

I shook my head. "I guess I've been putting it off."

"You better tell her soon," said Claud. "I mean, the ads for the yard sale will be a major clue. Don't you think she should find out from you and not from some poem that begins 'Red are the roses, blue are the seas'?"

I smiled. "I guess so. It's not going to be easy, though."

"No, I suppose it isn't. If she feels anything like me ..."

I waited for Claudia to finish her sentence, but she let it hang there.

"Well," I said, "we better go back upstairs. Kristy's waiting to be bigludium exforbinated."

Claudia just nodded. I thought she looked a little teary, but by the time we had joined the others, she seemed fine.

We worked on the ads until we had finished our soda and iced tea. We'd made quite a stack and were pretty proud of them.

"All right," I said. "Down to the basement.

Wait'11 you guys see what Mom bought for us this morning."

"What? What?" cried my friends.

"You'll see/' was all I'd tell them.

We reached the top of the steps to the basement and I flicked on the light. The sale items were downstairs in a big jumble on, under, and around the Ping-Pong table we'd bought the winter before and now had to sell.

"These," I said when the five of us were standing by the sale items, "are what my mom bought us." I held up two small packages from the dime store.

"What are they?" asked Mary Anne.

"Price tags. Blank ones." I replied. "Some that we can stick on, and some that we can tie on things we don't want to gum up, like stuffed animals or clothes."

"Oh, great!" exclaimed Kristy. "This sale is going to look so professional! Let's start the tagging right now."