Ann Martin: Baby-Sitters Club 030

BSC030 - Mary Anne and the Great Romance - Martin, Ann M.

Chapter 1.

"Honestly, sometimes living with my mother is like living with a very tall child," said Dawn, and I giggled.

Dawn Schafer is one of my two best friends, and we were spending the evening together because our parents had gone out. What Dawn meant about her mother was that Mrs. Schafer is absentminded and scatterbrained. It's okay for me to say that because Dawn says it all the time.

She said it again now. "Mom is so scatterbrained!" (Dawn had just found a high heel in the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator.) She removed it, set it gently on the floor, and said to the shoe, "I hope you thaw out okay." Then she turned to me. "Well? What do you want for dinner? I mean, besides shoes. Mom left a tofu casserole in the fridge - I'm surprised she didn't leave it in her closet - but I have a feeling you won't want that." "Do you have any peanut butter?" I asked hopefully.

"Yes, but it's all natural, with no sugar or salt." "I'll take it." That was better than tofu.

I made myself a peanut butter-and-honey sandwich while Dawn made herself a salad.

We were getting used to these evenings. Our parents weren't just out. They were out together, on a date. That had been happening more and more lately.

I guess I should stop and explain who Dawn and I are before I tell you any more about our evening. Okay. Besides being best friends, we live in Stoneybrook, Connecticut, and we're both thirteen years old and in eighth grade. My name is Mary Anne Spier. I've lived in Stoneybrook all my life, in the same house, but Dawn moved here in the middle of seventh grade. She moved because her parents got divorced - and she moved all the way from California! She came with her mom and her younger brother, Jeff. The reason they chose to live in Stoneybrook was that Mrs. Schafer grew up here.

One really sad thing (I mean, apart from the divorce and the move), was that Jeff was never happy here. He couldn't adjust to Connecticut, and he missed California and his dad too much. So after awhile, he moved back there to live with Mr. Schafer. Dawn misses the California half of her family a lot, but she talks to them on the phone pretty often and seems happy in Connecticut now.

Anyway, so Dawn was living here with her mom and no dad, and I'd been living here with my dad and no mom (my mother died when I was really little), and one day the most amazing thing happened. When Dawn was unpacking the stuff her family had moved to Connecticut (and, as you can imagine, this took forever, since Mrs. Schafer wasn't much help), she came across her mother's high school yearbook. It was from her senior year, so of course she looked up her mom's picture. Then she looked up my dad's picture, since we knew they'd gone to school together. And guess what we found out. Our parents had been in love years and years ago! But their parents - well, Dawn's grandparents - didn't approve of the relationship. See, the Porters (Dawn's mom's name used to be Sharon Porter) were quite wealthy. And the Spiers were not, although - fake out - Dad put himself through law school and became pretty successful.

Anyway, the Porters encouraged Dawn's mother to go to college in California (as far away as she could get from Dad), and my father and Dawn's mom finally went their separate ways. They each got married, and I think they even forgot about each other - sort of.

Then Dawn and I reintroduced them and they began seeing each other again. At first they took things really slowly. Dad is this reserved, somewhat shy man who hadn't dated in years (not since he and my mother had dated), and he didn't want to rush into anything. Dawn's mom didn't want to rush into anything, either. But she loved dating again. She's very outgoing. For the longest time she went out with this awful, preppy guy whose nickname was Trip, and whom Dawn and Jeff hated and called the Trip-Man. She went out with some other men, too. (That was because after she got a job, people at work kept fixing her up with their single friends.) All along, though, she and Dad would see each other from time to time, but now they're the only people they date. And they go out a lot. That's why Dawn and I were so used to these evenings together. In fact, we weren't just used to them, we liked them! "Let's eat on trays in front of the TV," suggested Dawn. "You know what's on cable tonight?" "What?" I asked. I had no idea. We don't get cable.

"A Hayley Mills festival." Dawn just loves this kid who was an actress back in the sixties. Actually, I kind of like her, too. My favorite Hayley Mills movie is Pollyanna. Dawn's is The Parent Trap.

"A Hayley Mills festival?" I repeated.

"Yup," said Dawn jubilantly. "They're going to show Pollyanna, That Darn Cat, The Parent Trap, and The Moon-Spinners." "That'll take hours!" I cried.

"I know," replied Dawn. "I figure a good ten, if you count commercials and cable-TV ads." "When does the festival start?" I asked.

"Right now! So let's get our trays." This is one thing I love about Dawn's house. You can eat in places other than the kitchen and the dining room. At my house there are a lot of rules. Dad used to have even more. He used to be really strict, but as I've grown up, he's loosened up. However, I would never be allowed to eat dinner on a tray in front of the TV.

So I carried my sandwich and a banana into the den, and Dawn carried this bean sprout-and-chickpea salad into the den, and we sat down to eat and to get our fill of Hayley Mills. After about an hour, though, we'd had our fill. The first movie shown was Pollyanna, and although we both like it, we'd seen it recently.

"I guess there really is something to that saying about too much of a good thing," said Dawn.

I nodded. "Yeah. Let's do something else." First we cleaned up our mess from dinner. (We didn't really need to, since Mrs. Schafer never notices messes, but we always feel we ought to.) Then we went upstairs to Dawn's room.

Here's an interesting thing about her room. In one wall is the entrance to a secret passage.

You want to know the truth? That secret passage scares me to death.

You push this place on the molding that decorates the wall, and a panel swings open. If you walk through, you find yourself in a dark, dank passage that leads down a flight of stairs, goes underground below the Schafers' backyard, and eventually comes up through a trapdoor in the floor of their barn.

I guess I should explain here that Dawn's house is really old. It's a farmhouse, and it was built in 1795. A lot of people have lived in her house over the years (and maybe died there), and there's this one particular person, Jared Mullray, whose voice was last heard coming from the secret passage - but who was never seen again. That was years and years ago, and Dawn and I have good reason to believe that Jared's ghost haunts the passage. So naturally the passage terrifies me. That's just the kind of wimpy person I can be.

Dawn loves the passage. (She considers it hers, since one end of it is in her room.) She loves it partly because it was once a stop on the Underground Railroad, which helped slaves from the South escape to freedom in the North. She also loves it because she just plain loves mysteries, especially ghost stories, and it looks like she's got an honest-to-goodness ghost story at her very own house.

Anyway, to get back to that evening in her bedroom, I sat as far from the passage as possible - on the floor near the doorway to her room, so I could make a fast escape in case I heard moaning or something coming from the passage.

Dawn tried to entertain me by telling me about the time in California when she was baby-sitting for a little boy who believed that pets could understand him the way humans could. He would always say things to the dog like, "Here, Buster, have another cookie. They're good for your teeth. They'll keep the tartar away and then you won't get gingivitis. Visits to the vet are quite important, too, you know. And by the way, you better exercise. You don't want to get overweight. Here, try some push-ups." I was only half listening to Dawn. I kept thinking about my own house and my own room. Since I've lived my entire life in that house, I always feel safe there . . . and safer in my room . . . and safest of all in my bed.