Ann Martin - Baby-Sitters Club 033

Okay. On to Jessi and Mal. The first thing to know about them is that they're the younger members of the BSC. While Kristy, Stacey, Mary Anne, Dawn, and I are in eighth grade, they're in sixth. They're also best friends with a lot of similarities and a lot of differences. For instance, each of them is the oldest kid in her family, and they both feel that their parents treat them like babies. Eleven is a hard age, I guess. I wouldn't want to be eleven again. I remember that my mother expected me to be mature then, but also wouldn't give me many privileges. However, Jessi's and Mal's parents did let them get their ears pierced recently. (Kristy and Mary Anne are the only club members who don't have pierced ears.) But now Mal's got braces on her teeth, and she wears glasses and isn't allowed to get contacts yet, plus neither Mal nor Jessi is allowed to babysit at night, so they still have a long way to go. Both Jessi and Mallory have younger brothers and sisters, but Jessi has just two - her eight-year-old sister, Becca, and her baby brother, who's nicknamed Squirt - while Mal has seven. And three of her brothers are identical triplets! Also, both girls like to read, especially horse stories, but Jessi's other interest is ballet, while Mal likes writing and drawing. Jessi is a really talented ballerina. You should see her dance. She takes special classes at a ballet school in Stamford, and she has performed leading roles onstage before lots of people. Mallory is talented, too. She keeps a journal, and is always writing stories and illustrating them. She says she wants to be an author and illustrator of children's books someday.

One last difference between the girls. Mal is white and Jessi is black. I don't see what the big deal is, but when the Ramseys first moved to Stoneybrook (and by the way, they bought Stacey's house when the McGills went back to New York!), people here gave Jessi's family a really hard time. Some people wouldn't let their kids play with Becca, other people avoided the Ramseys. I guess this is because there aren't many black families in Stoneybrook (Jessi is the only black student in the whole sixth grade), but sheesh. What's wrong with people? At least things have quieted down. Becca and Jessi have friends now, and most of the Ramseys' neighbors have accepted them, thank goodness.

So those are my friends, the ones I'd see in just a few hours when our first BSC meeting of the week got underway.

Chapter 3.

I felt as if I'd been watching clocks all day. First I'd watched the one in science class. Now I was in my room watching my own clock as the digital numbers flipped toward five-thirty. I was waiting for our BSC meeting to begin. The meetings are always held in my room, the official club headquarters.

While I waited for my friends to arrive, I started thinking about the BSC, so I'll tell you about our club, how it got started, and how it works. As I said earlier, Kristy is the president and founder of the club. It was one of her big ideas. She got the idea way back at the beginning of seventh grade. In those days, she (and Mary Anne) still lived across the street from me, and Watson Brewer had not yet proposed to Kristy's mother. Mrs. Thomas was working full-time, and David Michael was just six then, so it was up to Kristy, Sam, and Charlie to take turns watching him in the afternoons. This arrangement was fine until the day came when nobody - not Kristy, not one of her brothers - was free to sit for David Michael. So Mrs. Thomas started calling babysitters. Since it was a last-minute situation, she had to make call after call, trying to find someone who wasn't already busy. Kristy watched her mother doing this and thought, Wouldn't it be great if a parent could make one call and reach a whole group of baby-sitters at once, instead of having to make so many individual calls? And that was how her great idea was born. She discussed it with Mary Anne and me, since all three of us did some baby-sitting, and then she asked us to form a baby-sitting club with her. Of course, we agreed right away, but we decided three people weren't enough. I suggested that we invite Stacey McGill to join the club, too. She had just moved here, but she and I were already getting to be friends. Stacey was glad to join the club. She had baby-sat in New York, and she wanted to meet people in Stoneybrook.

So that was the beginning of the club. We decided to hold our meetings three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons from five-thirty until six. Parents could call us at those times and they would reach four experienced sitters at once. They were bound to get a sitter with just one phone call.

How did people know about our club and when to call us? We advertised. We sent out dozens of fliers in our neighborhoods, and we even placed an ad in the Stoneybrook News. Sure enough, we got job calls at our first meeting, and business has gotten better and better since then. By the middle of seventh grade, we even needed a new member to help us out, so we asked Dawn (who had just moved here) to join the club. Then when (gulp) Stacey moved away, we replaced her with both Jessi and Mal, but naturally we let Stacey back in the club when she returned to Stoneybrook. Now we have seven members and two associate members, and Kristy says the BSC is big enough.

We run our club very officially and professionally, thanks mostly to Kristy. Kristy makes us keep a notebook in which we write up every job we take. Then we're responsible for reading the book once a week. None of us really likes to do this, but we have to admit that knowing what's going on with the families we sit for and seeing how our friends solve sitting problems is pretty helpful.

Also, each of us holds a certain position in the club. Kristy is the president, since she started the club, and since she has such great ideas for it. One of her great ideas was Kid-Kits. A Kid-Kit is a decorated box or carton (we each have one) filled with our old toys, books, and games, plus new items such as coloring books and art supplies, that we sometimes take with us on baby-sitting jobs. Kids love them - which makes us popular sitters and really helps our business! I'm the vice-president. This is mostly because I have a phone in my room and my own private phone number. We can take calls here without tying up someone else's line or getting a lot of calls that aren't for us. That's why my room is club headquarters.

Our secretary is Mary Anne. She probably has the biggest job of any of us. It's up to her to keep the club book in order. The record book (which is entirely different from the notebook) is where we keep track of all important club information: the names and addresses of our clients, the money we earn and how our club dues are spent (that's really Stacey's job - she's the treasurer), and our schedules and appointments for baby-sitting jobs. Scheduling is the biggest of Mary Anne's duties and she sure is good at it. This is lucky, since originally we just wanted Mary Anne to be the secretary because she had the nicest handwriting of any of us. We had no idea what her job would turn into. Mary Anne has to keep track of my art classes, Jessi's ballet lessons, Mal's orthodontist appointments, etc., in addition to scheduling every job that's called in. Mary Anne is terrific at this. As far as we know, she has not made one mistake. We're grateful to her for that.

As I mentioned before, Stacey is the club treasurer. It's her job to record the money we earn. This is just for our own interest. Each member gets to keep all the money she earns on a job. We don't try to divide the money up or anything. Stacey is also in charge of collecting our weekly dues each Monday. She just loves this part of her job. Stacey likes having money (even when it's club money, not her own), and hates parting with it. But she does have to part with it. The dues money goes into the club treasury (a manila envelope) and is spent on various things: paying Charlie to drive Kristy back and forth to BSC meetings now that she lives so far from my neighborhood, paying part of my monthly phone bill, buying items - such as art supplies, soap bubbles, or activity books - for the Kid-Kits, and . . . fun stuff! We like to have a club sleepover or pizza party every now and then. Since Stacey is so great at math, she makes a very good treasurer.