Stacey's Ex-Best Friend

  For Gemma and Hallie

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Letter from Ann M. Martin

  About the Author

  Scrapbook

  Also Available

  Copyright

  Snow was falling again.

  For a planet that’s supposed to be feeling the effects of global warming, it certainly was having a cold winter. And a snowy one. That was okay with me. I like snow. It makes me feel cozy. Now that my mom and I live in a real house in the country and have an actual working fireplace, the coziness is even better. Last week when it was snowing (for, like, the seventy-fifth time since the beginning of January), Mom and I made popcorn after supper and ate it in front of the fire. No TV, no radio or music, just Mom and me and the popcorn and the fireplace.

  Does that sound lonely? Well, it wasn’t. It was peaceful and wonderful. But I have to tell you that my family used to be bigger. That was when my parents were living together. But a few months ago they got divorced. Mom and I moved here to Stoneybrook, Connecticut. Oh, all right, we don’t actually live in the country. We live in a small town. But Stoneybrook sure feels like the country compared to New York City, which is where I grew up. And where my father still lives.

  My name is Stacey McGill. I’m thirteen. I’m an only child. And I am now officially a divorced kid. As I said, I grew up in New York, the Big Apple. I was born there, and I love that city. Really. I love everything about it. Well, almost everything. I don’t love rats, of course. Or cockroaches. Or crime or guns or violence. But I do love the museums and the historical landmarks and the stores and theaters and restaurants. And the tall buildings. And the hidden pockets of surprise — tiny parks and old houses and gardens that you find just by turning a corner, and that are not mentioned in any guidebook. (Can you tell I good old NYC?)

  Okay, so I was born in the city, and Mom and Dad and I lived there until the company Dad works for changed his job and we had to relocate to Connecticut. That was at the beginning of seventh grade. I am now an eighth-grader at Stoneybrook Middle School (SMS). But I haven’t lived solely in Connecticut during the past year. No, that would be too simple. Here’s the thing: We’d been living in Stoneybrook for just under a year (long enough for me to adjust to small-town life and to make a group of really good friends, including a new best friend), when Dad’s company transferred him back to New York. So we picked up and moved again. I returned to my old life. A new apartment, but the same private school, the same NYC neighborhood, and my other best friend, my New York best friend, Laine Cummings.

  And then it happened. Something I’d been afraid of for a few years, ever since the parents of several of my friends started getting divorced. My own parents began to fight. And finally they made The Announcement. They were getting divorced. To make things even more complicated, Dad decided to stay in New York (he would move to a small apartment, though), while Mom wanted to return to Stoneybrook. I had to choose where I wanted to live. In other words, I had to choose between my parents. After a lot of thinking (and a lot of crying and apologizing), I decided to go back to Connecticut. But I made my parents promise I could visit Dad in New York a lot. They promised. So here I am in Stoneybrook, in a little house with Mom.

  Why did I decide to live in Connecticut instead of in the Big Apple? Mostly because I have so many friends here. The first time I moved to Stoneybrook I joined the Baby-sitters Club (BSC). (I’ll explain that later.) The club is made up of seven members: me and six other SMS students. Those six students are my good friends. And one of them, Claudia Kishi, is the new best friend I mentioned.

  I do miss Dad and New York and Laine Cummings, but they’re just a train ride away, which isn’t bad.

  * * *

  That snowy afternoon was on a Wednesday. My friends and I were going to hold a BSC meeting, but it wouldn’t start for two hours, so I decided to begin my homework. Often on weekday afternoons I’m busy with a baby-sitting job. But not that day.

  I pulled out my math book. I just adore math. (Honest. I really do.) Before I had even opened the book, though, the phone rang. I dashed into Mom’s room and picked up the upstairs extension.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hey, Anastasia! It’s me!”

  “Laine!” I cried. “Hi … Why are you calling me Anastasia?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’s just more grown-up than Stacey.”

  “I guess,” I replied. I pictured Laine. She was probably curled up in the armchair next to her phone. (Note that I said her phone. She has a private line and everything. Well, so does Claud, my other best friend.)

  “How’s it going?” asked Laine.

  “Fine. How are you doing?”

  “I’m great! All I can think about is our winter break. It’s coming up, you know. One week surrounded by two weekends. Nine glorious days of freedom, from Saturday, February seventh, through Sunday, February fifteenth. I absolutely cannot wait.”

  I smiled. Vacations have always been important to Laine. And since my parents are good friends of her parents, we’ve taken some vacations together. I mean, our families have.

  “What are you going to do during those nine glorious days?” I asked.

  Laine sighed. “I have so many choices,” she said.

  “Poor baby.”

  Laine laughed. “Let’s see. What I think I’m going to do is just stay here. There’ll be a ton of good parties to go to. And King will be here. We’ll go to the parties together. King is really tight with my friends. The age difference doesn’t seem to matter at all. You know.”

  I didn’t know. Laine and I are close, but it’s not like we talk every day, the way we did when we were going to the same school. “Um … what do you mean? About the age difference?” I asked.

  “Well, King is fifteen. Didn’t I mention that?”

  “No.” The last time we had spoken was on New Year’s Eve. I was sure I would have remembered if Laine had told me about a fifteen-year-old boyfriend named King. You don’t forget a name — or an age — like that. “I don’t think you mentioned King at all,” I told Laine.

  “Oh. Well, he goes to Rudy Matthews School. Across the street.” (Laine meant across the street from her school.) “I met him at this party. His hair is kind of long and he wears it in a ponytail, which I think is awesome. Anyway, we’ve been going out for two weeks now. We can’t wait for vacation. He’ll be on vacation when I am. And a lot of his friends will be throwing parties, so I’ll be hanging around with the high-school crowd, more or less.”

  Gosh. An older boyfriend named King. High-school kids. I was amazed.

  “But,” Laine went on, “I could also go on our school’s ski trip. Or I could fly (by myself, of course) to Florida and stay at Aunt Mona and Uncle Edgar’s condo. It’s right on the beach.”

  Suddenly I had a brilliant thought. It just flashed into my head out of nowhere. “Hey!” I cried. “I’ve got a better idea. You could come here! You could spend your vacation in Stoneybrook. Wouldn’t that be terrific? I wouldn’t be on vacation, but that would be okay. Claud and everyone would be around. And you’ve never been here. You haven’t seen my house or the town or my school. You’d like to see my friends again, wouldn’t you?” (Laine has met the members of the BSC several times.) “May
be you could come to school with us. Oh, and meet the kids we baby-sit for. Laine, this would be so distant!”

  “It would be so what?”

  “So distant. Oh, I forgot. My friends and I made up that word. It means, you know, like really, really cool.”

  “Oh.” Laine paused. Then she said, “Stace, I don’t know.”

  “You have to come, Laine. Please, please, please?” I stopped, realizing I sounded like a little kid. And also realizing I should mention my brilliant idea to Mom before Laine accepted the invitation. “Laine?” I said. “Think about it, okay? I’m going to get permission from Mom. I’ll call you back around five. Before our BSC meeting.”

  Well, I got permission from Mom in a snap. No problem. As I said, she and Laine’s mom are really good friends. Mom has known Laine since the day Laine was born, and she adores her. She thinks she’s wonderful. So the idea of a week-long visit from Laine was just fine with my mother.

  When I called Laine back (on the dot of five o’clock) the first thing I said was, “It’s all set. I got permission. You can come!”

  “Okay …” replied Laine, slowly.

  “Okay, you’ll come?” I exclaimed. “That’s fantastic! How will I ever wait until February seventh? It feels like it’s years away.”

  I chattered on until Laine said, “Don’t you have to go to a BSC meeting or something?”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I better get off the phone. But I’ll call you in a few days so we can make plans. Talk to you then. ’Bye, Laine!”

  I hung up the phone. But since I didn’t have to leave immediately for our club meeting, I began making a list of things Laine would enjoy doing in Stoneybrook. She could spend a day at school. She could come on a baby-sitting job with me. Maybe she would meet Charlotte Johanssen, who’s my favorite kid to sit for. We could go shopping. We could go to a movie. It was too bad there aren’t a lot of good restaurants here. Laine likes to eat. In New York she can choose from thousands of restaurants. But not here.

  Where I’m concerned, maybe that’s lucky. See, I have to be careful about what I eat. I stick to a pretty strict diet. This is because I have diabetes. I’m what’s called a brittle diabetic, which means I have a severe form of the disease. A diabetic can’t process sugar the way most people can. So I have to stay away from desserts and sweets (I can eat fruit, though) and also give myself injections of something called insulin. And I have to test the level of sugar in my blood every day. Too high or too low and I could get really sick. Needless to say, eating isn’t exactly my hobby.

  It’s funny about insulin and food and Laine. Laine and I had our most memorable fight several years ago when I first got sick. Laine did not understand about diabetes at all. She just thought my sickness was gross, if not contagious. (Which it isn’t.) Oh, well. Eventually we made up. And we’ve made up after our other fights, too. That’s how some friendships work. You fight, you make up, you fight, you make up.

  I bounced out of my room. Time for the meeting of the Baby-sitters Club. And time to see my other best friend.

  I knew Claudia would be happy to hear about Laine’s trip to Stoneybrook. As I mentioned, Laine has met my friends in the Baby-sitters Club several times. That’s because most of the BSC members have been to New York several times. And that’s because my friends and I do a lot of things together. I mean, aside from attending club meetings.

  One of the many things I like about the BSC is that we’re a great group of friends. Sometimes I think that’s even more important than the fact that we’re a successful baby-sitting business. Although that’s certainly important, too. The BSC was the idea of Kristy Thomas. She’s the club president now. It was Kristy who thought of turning baby-sitting into a business. This was her simple but brilliant reasoning: When a parent needs a sitter, he or she could save time finding one by placing a single phone call and reaching a whole group of sitters at once. One club member would surely be free, so the parent could line up a sitter without having to make any more calls.

  The BSC started out with just four members: Kristy, Claudia Kishi, Mary Anne Spier, and me. Soon we needed another member, so Dawn Schafer joined the club. Finally Jessi Ramsey and Mallory Pike (eleven-year-old sixth-graders) also joined. Now the seven of us meet three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons from five-thirty until six. Parents know they can call us during those times and reach seven capable sitters. How do they know when to call us? Because we advertise. We’ve handed out fliers and even placed an ad in the local paper. Business is booming!

  The club is successful for a number of reasons. I think the main one is that Kristy runs it in such a businesslike, professional manner. Every member of the club has a title, and most of us have specific responsibilities, too. Claud is the vice-president, Mary Anne is the secretary, I’m the treasurer, and Dawn is what we call the alternate officer. Jessi and Mal are junior officers. Before you see the club members in action, let me tell you a little about each of them, their lives and the roles they play in the club.

  As president, Kristy does more than run the club. She also keeps coming up with her great ideas. She’s famous for them. One was the BSC notebook. Long ago (okay, last year, when most of us were twelve and in seventh grade) Kristy thought that keeping a sort of diary of our baby-sitting jobs would be helpful. So now after any of us goes on a job, that sitter is responsible for writing it up in the notebook. Then once a week we’re supposed to read the notebook to find out what happened when our friends were sitting, how they solved baby-sitting problems, and what’s going on in the lives of kids we might sit for soon ourselves.

  Another of Kristy’s ideas was the BSC record book. We find that keeping records is important to the business. In the record book are listed our clients — their addresses and phone numbers, the rates they pay, and the ages of their children. Also in the record book are the scheduling pages where we keep track of the jobs we’ve signed up for.

  Then there are Kid-Kits. As far as children are concerned, Kid-Kits were Kristy’s all-time greatest idea. Each of us sitters has a Kid-Kit, which is simply a cardboard box decorated with paint and glitter and filled with child-appealing stuff — our old toys, games, and books, plus art supplies, activity books, and so forth. We sometimes bring the kits with us when we baby-sit, and our charges adore them. Which is great. Happy kids mean happy parents who will want to call the BSC with future sitting jobs! What on earth would the club do without Kristy?

  Kristy has a very interesting family. She lives with her mom; her stepfather; her three brothers (Sam and Charlie, who are in high school, and David Michael, who’s just seven); her grandmother; her adopted sister, Emily Michelle, who’s two and a half; and (part-time) her stepsister and stepbrother, Karen and Andrew, who are seven and four. Before Kristy’s mom met Watson (Kristy’s stepfather), the Thomases lived in a modest house across the street from Claud. Then Watson came into their lives and whisked them into his mansion on the other side of town. (Watson is a millionaire.)

  Kristy’s life changed completely, but I think she’s adjusted to everything, including Watson. Kristy is a very strong person. (Actually, she can be maddeningly stubborn.) She’s outgoing, she likes to talk, and she’s always coming up with great ideas. Kristy is also sort of a tomboy. She loves sports, and we rarely see her dressed in anything but jeans, a turtleneck shirt, running shoes, and maybe a sweater and her baseball cap. Just for the fun of it, she coaches a softball team for little kids in Stoneybrook. Her team is called Kristy’s Krushers. An opposing team is Bart’s Bashers, and guess what. Kristy and Bart Taylor have started going to dances and stuff. I guess you could call them girlfriend and boyfriend. (But don’t let Kristy hear you!) Kristy is short, the shortest in our class, and she has shoulder-length brown hair and deep brown eyes.

  Kristy’s best friend is Mary Anne Spier, the secretary of the BSC. Mary Anne has quite a job! She’s the one who has to keep the BSC record book in order, which means she’s in charge of scheduling all jobs. And that me
ans she has to be familiar with a lot of complicated lives. She has to know when Kristy is holding Krushers practices, when Claudia is going to art lessons, or Jessi is taking ballet classes, or when Mallory has to go to the orthodontist. Mary Anne is neat and precise and accurate, so she’s perfect for the job.

  What sort of personality would you expect from the best friend of Kristy Thomas? One as outgoing and as free-spirited as Kristy’s? Well, that’s not Mary Anne. She and Kristy may be close, but Mary Anne is shy, quiet, unsure of herself, and a big romantic. Also, she cries really easily. Just mention Gone With the Wind or Love Story, and Mary Anne’s eyes turn into leaky faucets. Maybe it’s fitting that Mary Anne was the first of us BSC members to have a steady boyfriend.

  Considering how different Mary Anne and Kristy are, it’s interesting that they actually look sort of alike. Mary Anne is also short (not quite as short as Kristy, though), and has brown hair and brown eyes. However, she wears glasses for reading. And she cares about clothes. Her strictish father won’t let her wear anything too trendy, but at least Mary Anne can get away with bright colors, baggy tops, and a fair amount of jewelry.

  Mary Anne lives with her dad, her stepmother, and her stepsister. (Her mom died a long time ago.) Believe it or not, her stepsister is … Dawn Schafer, who happens to be Mary Anne’s other best friend. (Mary Anne’s like me; she has two best friends.) Can you imagine being best friends and then winding up as stepsisters? I can’t. Although, I guess I might have a stepsister of my own one day. Who knows what would happen if Mom or Dad got married again? Anyway, Mary Anne, her dad, and her kitten, Tigger, moved into Dawn’s colonial farmhouse not long ago, and Mary Anne likes being part of a bigger family for the first time in her life.

  Okay. You’ve met several pairs of best friends. Now it’s time for you to meet my Stoneybrook best friend, Claudia Kishi. Claud is the BSC vice-president mainly because we hold our meetings in her room. This means invading her room three times a week, eating her junk food, and tying up her phone. Like Laine, Claud has her own phone and her own phone number. This is primarily why we chose her room as the BSC headquarters. We can use her phone during meetings and not have to worry that someone else is waiting (impatiently) to talk on it.