Ann Martin - Baby-Sitters Club 090

It was a hard decision for Dawn. It was hard for Mary Anne and her new blended family to reblend, too.

But lucky for me, because Dawn's departure meant the BSC needed a new member and fast. So when I moved to town, they checked out my sister and me and invited us to join the club.

Anna said no.

That surprised them. I don't think anyone's ever said no to them before. I said yes.

But I think I'm still going to surprise them.

Anyway, Kristy and Mary Anne are organized. Kristy is president of the BSC, captain of a little kids' softball team, Kristy's Krushers (I'm now the assistant coach), and a good student.

Mary Anne is the secretary of the BSC. She keeps track of when we have sitting jobs and where and with whom. She writes everything down in the club record book. She's never, ever made a mistake. Not once. She also has a boyfriend and she makes good grades at school.

Oh, yeah - they are both pretty stubborn, too.

But Kristy and Mary Anne are not exactly alike.

Kristy is the most outspoken person on the planet. Okay, maybe not the planet, but probably in all of Stoneybrook. Shy she is not. She is energetic and quick-tempered and her big mouth gets her in trouble sometimes. But it also gets things done. She's not afraid to try out a new idea.

That's how the BSC came into being. One day Kristy was sitting at home listening to her mother try to find a baby-sitter, one painful phone call at a time. Suddenly she thought, what if my mom could make one phone call and reach a bunch of baby-sitters?

The rest is history. Or herstory.

Mary Anne is shy. Painfully shy, sometimes. Very sensitive. I haven't been around Stoneybrook or the BSC that long, but I figured that out in a flash. She blushes deeply at little things. Tears fill her eyes over sad commercials on television. This would drive me crazy, but I see the up side of it. Mary Anne does not recklessly trample your feelings the way Kristy sometimes does. She's an excellent listener and from what I've seen, a loyal friend. I don't think she'd ever deliberately hurt someone else's feelings. It's too easy for her to put herself in the other person's place and imagine just how bad he or she might feel.

Perhaps these are the qualities that put Mary Anne ahead of the rest of the club, boyfriend-wise. She was the first to turn up with a steady guy. His name's Logan and Mary Anne thinks he looks just like her favorite star, Cam Geary.

Maybe. But he is pretty cute, and unique. He's a jock, like me, totally into sports. But he's also an associate member of the BSC. That means he takes jobs when we can't and that he comes to the meetings sometimes. Interesting, right? And cool.

So there's your first set of best friends.

Set #2: Another study in opposites in, oh, so many ways.

Claudia Kishi and Stacey McGill. Two knockout babes. This is what the guys in my school on Long Island would call them. They would be right. Not only are Claudia and Stacey easy on the eye, but they know what to wear and how to wear it. Fashion sense to the max. But each in her own way.

Claudia is the vice-president of the BSC because she is one of the founding members, with Mary Anne and Kristy, and because she has her own phone line in her room. That means BSC business doesn't tie up a telephone line another family member might want to use. Her room is also BSC headquarters.

Claudia has long black hair, creamy perfect skin, brown eyes, and a passion for art, junk food, and Nancy Drew books. She brings her artistic talents to her style of dress - she even makes a lot of her own jewelry - and looks great in combinations of colors and styles that no one else would be caught dead in.

She loves junk food and at every BSC meeting produces excellent sugary and salty treats from hiding places all around her room, including a hollowed-out book. Today, for example, we were eating Dove chocolates, barbecue potato chips, and pretzels.

Claudia also loves to read Nancy Drew books, which is a mystery to her parents. (That's a joke - see?) Her mother is a librarian and Claudia's older sister is a real, live genius, so I guess her parents think Claudia should read books such as War and Peace for fun. But apart from Nancy Drew, Claudia doesn't like books, or anything to do with school. She has trouble with every subject, basically, except art.

Claudia's an art genius, not an academic one. No doubt her parents will catch on sooner or later.

Now stop me if these two friends don't sound totally different.

Stacey, Claudia's BF (best friend), is the treasurer of the BSC because she is a math whiz (as well as a good student in general.) She's from New York and most of the time looks as if she were a model who stepped off a fashion designer's runway. She has shoulder length blonde hair, blue eyes with dark lashes, pierced ears, and a way about her. She's from New York City originally, and probably the other members of the BSC think she is the most sophisticated of them. True, she is, at least in the way she dresses and views the world. But from what I've scoped out, she makes some pretty unsophisticated choices. For instance, recently she almost quit the BSC altogether, because she was hanging out with a way cool crowd. The kind of crowd that's too cool to be real friends, which of course you only find out when you need a real friend.

Fortunately, Stacey came to her senses and now she's back with the BSC.

Stacey was eating the pretzels. She was the only one eating the pretzels. Because she's a diabetic and her body can't handle sugar, she has to be very, very careful about what she eats and when. She even has to give herself injections of insulin every day. If she doesn't do all that, she could become very, very sick, and even go into a coma.

She doesn't seem to miss junk food. She can watch her best friend consume amazing quantities of it with amazing calm.

Now to the junior officers: Mal and Jessi, who are both in sixth grade at SMS. As junior officers, they can't baby-sit at night, except in their own homes, so they take a lot of afternoon jobs. Shared interests: books, especially mysteries and books about horses; also horses, and, of course, kids. (The #1 requirement for being in the BSC!) Differences: Mal comes from a large family. She has seven siblings, including brothers who are triplets. She has curly red hair and blue eyes, and freckles across her nose. She wears braces and glasses and wants to be a children's book writer and illustrator when she grows up. She's already won a writing contest and she's secretary of her class at SMS.

Jessi has black hair, which she often wears pulled back in a bun. She has dark brown eyes and medium brown skin and she walks with the grace of a ballerina.

In case you haven't figured it out, Jessi is a ballet dancer. She takes special classes two afternoons a week, gets up every morning at 5:29 to practice at the barre in the basement of her family's house, and has had big roles in at least two ballets (The Nutcracker was one).

Jessi's family may be a bit larger than average: She has a younger sister and a baby brother, plus an aunt who lives with them. But it is definitely not as large as Mal's.

Have I left anyone out? Oh. Shannon. Shannon does not fit into the best friend theme. She is an associate member, like Logan, and isn't particularly tight with any one BSC member. Shannon is a neighbor of Kristy's and mine. She attends a private school, Stoney-brook Day School (where they have to wear uniforms). She has thick, curly blonde hair, pale skin, blue eyes, and high cheekbones. She has two younger sisters and a pedigreed Bernese mountain dog, Astrid, who is the mother of Kristy's family's puppy. Shannon and Kristy didn't get along very well when they first met, but they sorted it out. Then Shannon gave Kristy one of Astrid's puppies after Kristy's old collie, Louie, died, and David Michael named it Shannon in honor of Shannon.