Jessi and the Dance School Phantom, Page 3

  I felt like such a jerk, walking back into the dressing room with my entire class marching behind me. When we got there, we started to tear the place apart. Mme Noelle stood at the door of the room as we searched. She had a funny look on her face, as if she smelled a dead fish or something. Usually, she made a point of staying out of the dressing room — and it was obvious that she wasn’t enjoying this little visit.

  “What is zot?” she asked, pointing at Carrie’s neon green, pink, and yellow jacket, which was tossed over a sink.

  “That’s my jacket,” said Carrie.

  “I see,” sniffed Mme Noelle.

  “I think it’s wicked cool,” said Katie Beth. “I wish I had one.”

  “Perhops if you young ladies were more careful with your sings, zis would not hoppen,” said Mme Noelle, looking at me.

  I felt tears stinging my eyes. It wasn’t fair! True, everybody’s stuff was strewn all over the room. But I’m actually a pretty neat person. My stuff is usually put away in my locker. And I’m always prepared for class. At least I always have been.

  I looked around at my classmates. They’d finished poking through the piles of stuff and were looking back at me. I picked up my dance bag one more time and checked it again. No luck. It was empty, except for my high-tops. Too bad I couldn’t dance in those.

  I looked at Mme Noelle and shrugged my shoulders. “I’m sorry,” I said. “They’re not here.”

  She gave me a glance that said, as clearly as words would have, “Jessica Romsey, I am most disappointed in you.” Then, out loud, she simply said, “Come.”

  We trooped back into the studio and got ready to warm up at the barre. I was just going to have to do the exercises barefoot. Mme Noelle put on some music and led us through a few minutes of pliés (plee-ay — that’s when you sink down, keeping your backside tucked in and only bending at the knee) and relevés (reh-leh-vays — that’s when you go up on your toes).

  I saw her look at me as I relevé’d. Everybody else was en pointe — that is, really up on their toes. I was kind of just pretending. Madame shook her head, her lips in a tight line.

  “Zis will not do,” she said suddenly. “If Mademoiselle Romsey cannot practice en pointe, zere is no reason to rehearse today. After all, she is zee Princess Aurora, and we cannot do very much wizout her.” She turned her back on us and lifted the needle from the record. “Zis rehearsal is concelled.”

  I was shocked. This was worse than I ever could have imagined! Everybody groaned. I knew how they felt. There’s nothing worse than missing a day of dancing — it throws off your whole routine. And we needed every rehearsal that was scheduled. The performance wasn’t all that far off.

  “Isn’t there any way we can still rehearse?” asked Lisa.

  “What if we just look for the shoes one more time?” asked Hilary. “If Jessi says she brought them, they must be in that room somewhere.”

  Mme Noelle didn’t look happy about the idea, but she agreed. “One more time,” she said. “But zen, rehearsal is off.”

  I hated having her mad at me.

  We all paraded back into the dressing room. I brought up the rear — I wasn’t too enthusiastic about another pointless search. Just as I entered the room, I heard Katie Beth squeal.

  “Hey, here they are,” she said, holding up a pair of toe shoes. They were mine. I could tell from across the room. “They were in your bag the whole time, Jessi.”

  I ran over to her and grabbed them without even saying thanks. My shoes! I’d never been so happy to see them. But I knew Katie Beth was wrong. Those shoes had definitely not been in my bag the whole time. I knew it as surely as I knew my own name.

  “Very good, Katie Beth,” said Madame. “Zee mystery is solved. Now let us get on wiz zee rehearsal!”

  She led us back into the studio and the rehearsal began for real. I put on my toe shoes as Madame told us about the first part of the dance we would be practicing.

  “And zen,” she said, “zee Princess Aurora enters wiz a glissade …” She made a movement that suggested what I was supposed to do, “… and zen a relevé en arabesque.” Again, she illustrated what she meant.

  I love to watch Mme Noelle move. She doesn’t dress in leotards for class — she just wears a turtleneck and a long black skirt. And when she demonstrates steps, she doesn’t do them full out. But every move she makes is just so — so full of grace is the only way I can describe it. You can see all those years of dance training in the slightest motion of her arm. I don’t think she knows how to move like a regular person anymore. I wonder if I’ll ever have that kind of poise.

  For me, for now, ballet is more like hard work. The stuff I do without having to think about is stuff I’ve been doing nearly every day for seven years. And everything new I learn is based on those foundations. It takes a long, long time to learn to dance.

  I tried to concentrate on learning my steps. I was doing the best I could to forget about the whole miserable scene before rehearsal. But I couldn’t get it out of my head.

  Mme Noelle couldn’t either — that was obvious. She was very impatient with me, and since I was feeling distracted, she kept having to repeat directions. That didn’t help.

  “Long neck, Mademoiselle Romsey!” she said. “You are not doncing zee part of a hunchback. You are a princess — please act like one.”

  I stretched my neck and proceeded to stumble in the middle of my glissade. I heard somebody giggle behind me. Wonderful! I just knew that everybody in the class was now convinced that I was a complete airhead. Once again I tried to concentrate.

  “STEP!” said Mme Noelle suddenly, clapping her hands. I had gotten off the beat. This was just not my day. She went to the record player and started the music from the beginning. “And … again,” she said, nodding at me. “I want nossing but grace from all of you,” she said. “I want absolutely magnificent, glorious grace.”

  Right.

  I worked harder and harder, forgetting the time, forgetting my lost shoes, forgetting everything except the music and how I was moving to it.

  Before I knew it, Mme Noelle was clapping her hands. “Okay, mademoiselles,” she said. “Next time we will do better, am I right?”

  I met her eyes and nodded. She gave me a tight smile — I guess she was going to forgive me.

  I walked to the dressing room, relieved that rehearsal was finally over. I changed back into my school clothes and reached into my dance bag for my high-tops. I was thinking that the next rehearsal would just have to go better than this one — it certainly couldn’t go any worse. Then I pulled my left sneaker out of the bag and saw something stuck between the laces.

  It was a note. And this is what it said: BEWARE. Nothing more, nothing less. Just … BEWARE.

  I couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to mean. Beware of what? Beware of whom? I thought it was pretty strange. But I was too tired from rehearsal to wonder about it for long. I shoved it into my bag and headed out the door.

  I was still feeling a little shaky by the time I got to Claudia’s for that day’s Baby-sitters Club meeting, but I tried not to let it show as I slipped into my regular spot next to Mallory on the floor. As usual, I had arrived about two and a half seconds before Kristy called the meeting to order. (I nearly always get there just under the wire because of dance class, but nobody gives me a hard time about it, which I’m thankful for.)

  I guess I forgot to mention that our club always meets at Claudia’s house, in her room. This is why: Claudia, the vice-president of the club, has her own phone and her own personal phone number. That means that we’re not tying up any adult’s phone while we take calls during meetings.

  Let me go back and explain a little bit about how the club began and how it works. The whole thing was Kristy’s idea originally. Remember how I told you that she’s always having good ideas? Well, this was the ultimate good idea, and here’s how it happened: One afternoon, way back before Kristy’s mom married Watson Brewer, David Michael needed a baby-sitter. U
sually Kristy or her brothers would have watched him, but this time none of them could. Mrs. Thomas made about three zillion phone calls looking for a sitter, but she wasn’t having any luck.

  That’s when Kristy had her brainstorm. What if parents could reach a whole crew of sitters, just by making one phone call? It seemed like a great idea. Kristy talked to her two friends Mary Anne and Claudia (who were interested) and they started a club — The Baby-sitters Club (or the BSC). Three people didn’t seem like enough for a club, though, so Claudia asked Stacey, whom she was becoming friends with, to join. It was just the four of them until Dawn moved to town and became friends with Mary Anne. Dawn had done some baby-sitting out in California, so they asked her to be a member, too.

  Mallory and I joined the BSC during the time that Stacey was back in New York, before her parents got divorced. The rest of the club members were feeling kind of overwhelmed with jobs, and we were available, so it worked out for everyone. Even though (we think) we’re lowly sixth-graders and can only sit during the day (except for our own families), I think we fit in pretty well.

  So, all together there are seven of us now, and it seems like the club is just the right size. In fact, I don’t think Claudia’s room could hold too many more people without bursting at the seams.

  The way the club works is pretty simple. We meet on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 5:30 to 6:00. Parents can call during those times to arrange for a sitter. (Most of the parents have been using us forever; new clients find out about us through the fliers we distribute from time to time, or by word of mouth.)

  Kristy is the club president, and she takes her job pretty seriously: She’s all business at meetings. She always sits in Claudia’s director’s chair, with a visor on her head and a pencil over her ear. She calls each meeting to order just as the digital clock flips to 5:30. Sometimes she asks us if we’ve read the club notebook. (We always say yes, because we always have.)

  The club notebook, in case you’re wondering, is the place where we record every job we go on. We write down what happened, who it happened to, why it happened, and anything else we can think of. Seriously, it’s a good thing that we have it. Reading it keeps us up to date on our clients and what’s going on with them. The only thing is, it’s kind of time consuming to write all that stuff down — and then to read what everybody else wrote. But it’s worth it. By the way, the notebook was Kristy’s idea (of course).

  Anyway, let’s get back to answering the phone. When a call comes in, someone takes it (we all dive for it) and finds out when and where the job will be. Then we tell the parent that we’ll call right back. Next, Mary Anne, the club secretary, checks the record book. (It’s different from the notebook.)

  The record book is kind of an amazing thing. In it, Mary Anne keeps track of all our schedules: Claudia’s art classes, my dance classes and rehearsals, Mal’s orthodontist appointments … you get the idea. Then, when a call comes in, she only needs to take a quick peek to see which of us is free. In the record book is a lot of other stuff besides our schedules. It has records about all our clients: names, addresses, phone numbers — and also stuff about the kids we sit for, like who’s allergic to what.

  Anyway, once Mary Anne finds out who’s free, it’s usually a simple matter to decide which of those sitters gets the job. We rarely squabble over jobs, since there’s always enough work to go around. Then we call back the parent and confirm the job. And that’s it!

  Well, not quite. I forgot to tell you about the treasury. Stacey, the math genius, is in charge of that. As treasurer, she can tell you in about three seconds exactly how much money we have available.

  Where does the money come from? Well, it’s like this. We keep all the money we earn on jobs — that’s ours. But every Monday, we pay club dues. (Not without a lot of complaining, I might add — we hate to part with our hard-earned money.) The dues are used for club stuff, like paying Kristy’s brother Charlie to drive her back and forth to meetings since she lives too far away to walk now.

  We also use the money for the occasional pizza bash or for sleepover munchies. (We’re not all business, all the time!) And we use some of it for supplies for our Kid-Kits. Kid-Kits are yet another of Kristy’s great ideas. They’re really just cardboard boxes, but we’ve each decorated our own with all kinds of stickers and sequins and stuff. The boxes are stocked with things that kids love — crayons and books and puzzles and paper dolls … stuff like that. We bring them on any job where they might come in handy.

  Okay, so Kristy is the president, Claudia is vice-president, Mary Anne is secretary, and Stacey is treasurer. You might be wondering where that leaves Dawn, Mallory, and me. Well, Dawn is what we call an alternate officer. That means that any time one of the others can’t make it to the meeting, Dawn fills in for them. She has to know how to do everyone else’s job.

  Mallory and I are junior officers, which really doesn’t mean much at all, except that we’re younger and that we can only sit during the afternoons. This is fine with me — I don’t know if I’m really ready to sit in some strange house alone at night! (I do sit for my own brother and sister at night, and Mal sits at her house — but that’s different.)

  There are also two other members whom I haven’t told you about. They’re associate members, and they don’t come to meetings. But they do take jobs, when the rest of us are all booked up — and that’s been a big help more than once. Logan Bruno, Mary Anne’s ex-boyfriend, is one of the associate members. (He’s really nice — and you should hear his neat Southern accent. He moved to Stoneybrook from Louisville, Kentucky, and he sounds like someone out of Gone With the Wind. He and Mary Anne are still good friends, by the way.) The other associate member is Shannon Kilbourne, this girl who lives in Kristy’s new neighborhood. I don’t know her too well, but she seems nice.

  So there I was, sitting by Mallory on the floor of Claudia’s room, ready for the meeting to start. Claudia, Mary Anne, and Dawn were all sitting cross-legged on the bed. Kristy was in the director’s chair, and Stacey was sitting in Claudia’s desk chair, leaning way back in it. She looked like she was about to topple over any minute.

  “Did you see that outfit Jennifer Cooke had on today? I mean, she looked like a cross between Princess Di and Minnie Mouse!” said Claud all of a sudden.

  That was all it took to make Stacey — and the chair — fall over. Stacey was fine. She just lay there on the floor, laughing until she was almost crying. “Who does she think she is, anyway — just because she’s won some beauty pageants. All that makeup — it’s too much!”

  I was giggling, trying to imagine the outfit Claudia had described, when Kristy spoke up. “Order!” she said. It was 5:30. And our meetings always start on time.

  Stacey got up from the floor and brushed off her jeans. She was wiping the tears from her eyes and trying to stifle her laughter. Kristy gave her a Look, which meant straighten up, but Stacey was too far gone. You know how it is when you’re not supposed to be laughing — like in the library, or during science class — but you can’t stop? That’s how Stacey was.

  She just kept shaking her head and saying “Minnie Mouse” and then breaking into giggles all over again. Kristy looked a little annoyed.

  Luckily for Stacey, the phone rang then. Kristy dove for it. “Baby-sitters Club,” she said, answering it. Then, “Sure, Mrs. Perkins. No problem. I’ll call you right back.” Kristy hung up and looked around the room. The phone call had given Stacey the chance to get serious. “Mrs. Perkins needs a sitter for Laura,” said Kristy.

  Laura is a baby. We usually sit for her and her two big sisters. “What about Myriah and Gabbie?” asked Mallory.

  “The Perkinses are taking them to that big show in Stamford,” said Kristy. “You know,” she continued, “the one with Minnie Mouse on ice skates.”

  That did it. We all cracked up, including Kristy, and laughed until we were rolling on the floor. We didn’t stop until the phone rang again.

  We were busy handling calls an
d setting up jobs for awhile, so I had to wait for a chance to tell everybody about the disastrous rehearsal I’d had that afternoon. But finally there was a lull in the action, and I told the awful tale.

  “Oh, Jessi!” said Mallory. “Did you just die of embarrassment when you had to come out barefoot? I would have.”

  I admitted that it had been pretty bad. “But the worst thing was that Madame Noelle was mad at me,” I said.

  Mary Anne smiled sympathetically. “You really care a lot about what she thinks of you, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I know how that is,” said Claudia. “It’s like if I don’t finish a project in time for art class. I hate it when I let my teacher down.”

  “But it all worked out okay, right?” asked Dawn. “I mean, you found your toe shoes and everything. But I wonder about that note.”

  I nodded even though the note didn’t have me all that worried. “It’s just that I hate starting out a new production with a rehearsal like that,” I said. Everybody was being so nice. There’s nothing like supportive friends when you’re feeling like a total loser. I noticed, though, that Kristy hadn’t said anything. Maybe she just wasn’t that interested in my ballet stories.

  “Well, it’s all over now,” I said, getting ready to change the subject. I didn’t want to make Kristy mad at me for taking up so much meeting time.

  “Right, Jessi. Next time will be better,” said Kristy quickly. “Now listen, you guys. I’ve got a great idea.”

  Everybody groaned, just to tease Kristy. How can anyone get so many great ideas all the time? No wonder she wasn’t interested in my story — she’d been waiting impatiently the whole time, dying to tell us about her latest brainstorm.

  “It seems to me that we haven’t done anything really special with the kids we sit for lately,” said Kristy. “You know, there hasn’t been a big party, or a carnival, or anything — not for a long time.”