Ann Martin - Dawn And The Impossible Three

who owned the house kept selling off land until finally there were just one and a half acres left, with the house, an outhouse, a barn, and an old smokehouse. It sort of got rundown. By the time my mom bought the place, nobody had lived on the property for two years. We got it cheap."

"You have a barn on your property?" Kristy asked with interest.

"Mm-hmm."

"Do you play in it?"

"Well," I said, "we're not supposed to go in it too much, but sometimes my brother and I play there."

"Why aren't you supposed to go in it?"

"Because it's so old. Mom's afraid the roof will come crashing down sometime. She may be right."

"You don't have any animals, do you?" asked Kristy.

"You mean in the barn?" I shook my head. "But the people who lived there before us must have. There are still bales of hay sitting around, and there's tons of hay in the hayloft. Sometimes Jeff — that's my brother — and I go up in the loft. There are great places to hide, and we rigged up a rope so that we can swing down from this beam way high up under the roof, and land in the hay."

"Really?" said Kristy.

"Yup."

She paused. Then she said, "I guess you and Mary Anne play in the barn all the time."

"Mary Anne?" I exclaimed. "Not a chance. She won't jump off the beam into the hayloft. She won't even go inside because of what Mom said about the roof. She may have changed this spring, but not that much."

Kristy looked at me and grinned.

When we got home, the front door was locked, so I let myself in with the key. Back in California, I never needed a key. Mom was always home. Now I'm in danger of becoming a latchkey kid.

I almost said so, but luckily remembered just in time that Kristy has been a latchkey kid for years. Instead I said, "I wonder where my mom went."

We found out as soon as we walked into the kitchen. Stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a pair of lips was a note that said:

Hi, kids! I've gone on two job interviews. Back at five. Love, Mom. P.S. Do not, under any circumstances, touch the tofu-ginger salad in the refrigerator.

Kristy looked at me wide-eyed. "You mean 68

there's a chance someone would?"

I tried to glare at her, but it turned into a smile. "Yes," I replied. "We all happen to love tofu-ginger salad. If s good. . . . Really/' I added, as Kristy made gagging noises.

I looked helplessly around the kitchen. "You're probably hungry, aren't you?"

"Starved," Kristy said, "But-but not so starved I'd eat tofu or sunflower seeds or something. I don't suppose you have any peanut butter."

"Sugar-free and unsalted, made from organically grown peanuts."

"That'll do. Any jam or honey?"

"Raw honey. We've already scooped the comb out."

"Wonder Bread?"

"High-fiber wheat-and-bran."

Kristy made do with the peanut butter, honey, and bread. I ate some yogurt with wheat germ in it.

Jeff came home, ate a banana, and went over to the Pikes' to play with the triplets.

When he was gone, I looked at Kristy. "Well," I said, "what do you want to do? We could watch a movie on the VCR. Or I could show you my room. Or we could search the house for a secret passageway."

"Could we go in the barn?" asked Kristy.

"Sure," I said. "As long as we're careful."

We ran out the back door and across the yard to the barn. We didn't even need our jackets since the hayloft gets pretty warm on a sunny day.

The main entrance to the barn (which, I should say, is not a very big barn) is a pair of sliding doors on one end. We leave one of the doors partway open all the time. We've stored some stuff in one of the horse stalls, but nothing that's worth stealing.

Kristy and I stepped through the opening. "Ooh," said Kristy. "It smells . . . like a barn. I mean, even without the animals."

"I know," I said. "Isn't it great? You could almost imagine you were on a big old farm out in the middle of nowhere."

(I think the barn-smell comes mostly from the hay.)

We walked down the aisle between two rows of stalls. The stalls had long ago been cleaned out, and the harnesses and tools that had once hung on the walls had been removed, but here and there a nameplate remained.

Kristy read a few of them aloud. "Dobbs, Grey Boy, Cornflower."

Aside from the stalls and some old feeding troughs, there wasn't much to see.

"How do you get to the hayloft?" asked Kristy.

"This way/' I said. I led her to the end of the barn. A ladder was leaning against the loft, which was just a couple of feet above my head.

We climbed up and Kristy walked around in the hay. "Mmm," she said. "It's soft — sort of. And it smells good." She looked up. The roof was high above us. The sun shone through the cracks and caught the dust motes in its light.

"Neat," said Kristy. "It's so quiet in here."

"You want to swing from the rope?" I asked.

"Sure. I mean, I think so. How high up is it?"

"I'll show you." A series of wooden blocks were built into the wall above the loft. They went up and up and up. I climbed them until I reached a beam that was twelve feet above the hayloft. (Jeff and I measured once.)

"Swing that rope up to me," I called to Kristy.

Kristy looked doubtfully at the rope, then at me. "All the way up there?" she said.

"Sure, it's easy. Just try it."

Kristy took hold of the end of the rope and swung it over and up.

I missed it by inches.

We tried again and I caught it. "Watch this!" I yelled. Holding onto the knot that Jeff had tied near the bottom of the rope, I pushed

away from the wall and sailed out and down. When I had almost reached the other wall of the barn I let go and landed with a thump in the hay. "Oof. Oh, that was great! Do you want to try?" I stood up, brushing the hay off my jeans.

"I guess so." Kristy began her ascent. She was climbing the wall awfully slowly.

"You don't have to go all the way to the beam, if you don't want," I told her.

"No — I can do it."

Kristy sat shakily on the beam. I tossed the rope to her. The expression on her face as she flew through the air changed from sheer horror ("Let go! Let go!" I screeched as she approached the opposite wall) to amazement to joy (when she landed).

She sat in the hay for a moment, then leaped up and exclaimed, "Oh, wow! That was terrific!"

We each took five more turns, Kristy looking cockier every time. Then we lay on our backs in the loft, gazing at the roof and watching the sunlight grow dimmer.

We began to talk. We talked about divorces. ("They should be against the law," said Kristy. I agreed.) We talked about moving. ("Across town is nothing compared to across country," I pointed out. Kristy agreed.) We talked about

the Baby-sitters Club. ("It's more important to me than school/' I said. Kristy understood.)

Then we talked about Mary Anne. After saying some boring things like how good she looked in her new clothes, Kristy said, "I'm glad she made a new friend."

"Really?" I asked.

"Yes. She needs new friends."

"Well, I'm glad she still has her old friends."

"You know, I've been thinking," said Kristy. "We should have an alternate officer for our club. Somebody who could take over any job if one of us can't be at a meeting. Someone who understands each office. Would you like to be Official Alternate Officer?"

"Definitely!" I replied. And that was how, all in one day, I patched up my problems with Kristy and became Official Alternate Officer of the Baby-sitters Club.

Chapter 8.

The spring was growing warmer and warmer. For several days in a row, the temperature reached eighty degrees. Mary Anne said that this was abnormal, which I took as both good news and bad news.

The good news was that maybe we'd continue to have abnormally warm weather, which would be a kind way to ease me through my first Connecticut springtime. The bad news was that maybe next year we would have an abnormally cool spring (to make up for this year), which would be cruel to my system.