"But I don't want to move!"

"Kristy, I said 'might.' "

"Okay."

"Time to get ready for bed now. Good-night, sweetheart."

" 'Night, Mom."

On Monday at our next meeting of the Babysitters Club, everyone seemed to be back to normal. And most of us had news.

"Guess what!" Mary Anne said, in between phone calls.

"What?" Claudia and Stacey and I said.

"Dad and I hardly talked to each other all day Sat.u.r.day, but on Sunday, I decided to go ahead and try reasoning with him about the money I earn, since I figured I didn't have anything to lose. I told him I'd be earning a lot of money through the Baby-sitters Club, and I asked him if I could spend half of it any way I wanted - if I promised to put the other half in the bank. And he said yes! So if we have the party, I can go!"

"Great!" I cried. "Hey, that's wonderful! You really stood up to your dad."

"Yeah. . . ." Mary Anne looked embarra.s.sed, but I knew she was pleased with herself.

"I have some good news, too," Claudia said. "I caught up on almost all of my homework, and I got a B-minus on those ten math problems. And last night I had a talk with my parents. I told them I wasn't Janine and they said they knew that. Then they said I had to start setting aside time for my homework every day. At first I thought Dad was going to say no more baby-sitting, but instead he said an hour or so after dinner would be all right, and he and Mom and Janine and Mimi would help me. That cuts into my TV time, but I'd rather give up TV than art or baby-sitting and the club." Claudia reached under her mattress and pulled out some licorice sticks, which of course she pa.s.sed around and of course Stacey refused.

"Well, that's good," said Mary Anne. "I'm proud of us, aren't you, Claudia?"

"Yeah," said Claudia.

I wanted to tell my good news about sitting for Watson's kids, but I was more curious about Stacey and why she had done what she did.

"So, Stace," I said brightly. "How was your weekend? How was New York?"

"Oh, it was fine. I went shopping at Bloom-ingdale's and bought this." She indicated the plaid wool pants she was wearing, which were held up with bright red suspenders. "I got a matching hat, too."

"Nice," I said. "How were your friends?"

"Fine." Stacey was picking at a piece of fuzz on her pants, carefully not looking at the rest of us.

"It must have been fun to spend so much time with them."

"Yeah."

"You know, the strangest thing happened on Sat.u.r.day morning," I said. As usual, I couldn't help it. I was dying to say what I knew. There would be no stopping me, despite the fact that Claudia was sending me an urgent telegram with her eyes. Shut up, they were saying. Don't do this. But it was too late, even though I knew it was going to cause problems. Even though I knew that Claudia still considered Mary Anne and me babies, and Stacey sophisticated, and therefore was going to protect Stacey and whatever she was up to.

"Mary Anne saw you come home with your parents on Sat.u.r.day," I said. "How come you made your mom say you stayed in New York?"

Stacey's head jerked up, her eyes flashing. She looked like she wanted to kill Mary Anne or me or possibly both of us. "Are you accusing my mom of lying?" she cried.

I thought for a moment. "I guess so."

Stacey stood up, hands on her hips. "Kristy, you - you - "

See, the thing is, right then, if Stacey wanted an "out," she had one. She could have blamed the whole thing on her mother by saying her mother was punishing her that weekend or something, and boy, weren't parents awful. But she didn't do that. She just blew up. And she didn't give any reason for why she and her mom were lying, which, Mary Anne said later to me in private, only proved that Stacey (and her mother) were covering something up.

Anyway, Stacey stood in Claudia's room, glowering at me. "I can't believe you just said that, Kristy. You're such a baby."

"You don't have any tact at all," added Claudia, immediately jumping to Stacey's defense, as I had known she would.

Mary Anne remained silent. She hates arguments.

"Well, how do you think I feel, being lied to?" I shouted. "Talk about tact. It made me feel like a little kid."

"You are a little kid," said Claudia. "Look at how you're dressed."

I looked. "What's wrong with the way I'm dressed?"

"Really, Kristy, a sweater with snowflakes and snowmen on it? You look like a four-year-old."

"Well, you've got sheep barrettes in your hair," I yelled. "You think they're adult?"

"Sheep," Claudia informed me witheringly, "are in."

"Who cares? Everything's in sometime. First it was frogs, then pigs, now it's sheep. Maybe next week it'll be snowmen. And how do you expect me to keep up with that stuff, anyway? I don't have time for it."

"That's because you and Mary Anne are too busy playing dolls."

"Dolls!" I yelled. (Mary Anne looked as if she'd been slapped in the face. I knew she was going to start crying soon, and it only made me angrier.) "We do not play with dolls!" The thing is, though, that we just gave them up over the summer.

At that moment, surprisingly, Mary Anne spoke up. "Claudia, Kristy didn't mean to upset Stacey." Mary Anne's chin was trembling. Her eyes were about to overflow.

"Didn't mean to upset her! She accused her mother of lying."

Mary Anne's eyes spilled over.

"Oh, what a crybaby," Claudia said, but I could see she felt bad.

Suddenly a knock came on the door.

"What!" yelled Claudia.

The door opened a crack. I was terrified that Janine was going to be on the other side of it with some stupid comment like there's no such word as crybaby.

But it was Mimi who poked her head in. "Excuse me, girls," said Claudia's grandmother in her gentle, slightly accented voice, "but what is going on in here? Downstairs I can hear you. You are yelling. What is wrong, and may I help you in some way?"

We all grew quiet. I felt slightly ashamed. "I'm sorry, Mimi," said Claudia. We'd all been standing up about ready to kill each other, and now we found places to sit down again.

"Are you girls all right? May I help?" Mimi asked again.

"No, thank you," said Claudia, sounding subdued. "We didn't mean to be so loud."

"All right. If you need me, I will be in the kitchen. Claudia, your friends must leave in fifteen minutes."

"Okay."

Mimi tiptoed out and closed the door softly behind her. I looked at the four of us and saw that we were sitting as if we were at war: Mary Anne next to me on the floor, Claudia and Stacey together on the bed. We were facing off.

The phone rang.

"I'll get it," we all said, and leaped for the phone, each of us determined to answer it. Stacey and I got to it first and both grabbed it off the hook. We had a real tug-of-war, yanking it back and forth, before I jerked it out of Stacey's grip.

"Baby-sitters Club," I said gruffly. "Yes? . . . Yes?" It was a new client. He needed a sitter for Thursday after school for his seven-year-old daughter. I took down all the information, and said that I'd get back to him in five minutes.

"Well?" said Claudia after I'd hung up the phone.

Stacey was so mad she had turned red. No kidding. She couldn't even speak.

"Who's free Thursday afternoon?" I asked. "It's a seven-year-old kid, Charlotte Johanssen, on Kimball Street."

"I'm free," said Claudia.

"So'm I," Stacey managed to say through clenched teeth.

"Me, too," said Mary Anne timidly.

"Me, too," I added.

We glared at one another.

"Well, now what?" said Stacey.

"Yeah." Claudia narrowed her eyes. "Whose dumb idea was this club, anyway? Four people all wanting the same job. That's stupid."

"Since the club was my dumb idea," I snapped, "I'll take the stupid job." And I did. After I'd hung up the phone for the second time I said to Mary Anne, "Come on, let's go. I can see we're not wanted here."

Claudia looked a bit sheepish. "Kristy . . ." she said hesitantly.

"Save it. I'm not speaking to you at the moment."

Mary Anne and I left the house without bothering to say good-bye to Mimi. Mary Anne was crying again. I almost said something nasty to her, but realized that if I did, the four of us might become three against one, which was definitely worse than two against two.

"Don't cry," I said at last.

"I'm sorry. I just hate fighting, that's all."

"Me, too. But we'll all be friends again soon."

"I guess so."

"I know so. We've got the club to hold us together, right?"

"Right," agreed Mary Anne.

But she didn't sound very sure, and I didn't feel very sure.

So even though I was worried about the fight and sorry we'd had it, I believed that it would all blow over soon enough. And by later that evening, I heard such astonishing news that I forgot all about the fight anyway.

Mom and Watson had gone out to dinner, and my brothers and I had finished our homework and were sitting around the kitchen table playing Monopoly. Well, Charlie and Sam and I were playing Monopoly. David Michael, who had fully recovered from his virus, was busy making G.I. Joe attack a ferocious enemy Kleenex box. Sam had just bought all four railroads and was cleaning Charlie and me out, when the back door opened and in walked Mom and Watson. We hadn't expected them home so early.

"Surprise!" cried Mom, coming into the kitchen. Watson threw a handful of confetti on her.

My brothers and I smiled. "What's going on?" asked Charlie.

Mom and Watson looked at each other, eyes sparkling.

I got a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach.

"You tell them," said Watson.

Mom turned to us. She looked radiant. "I agreed to become engaged," she said.

Already?

Mom held up her left hand. There was a ring on her fourth finger with a diamond on it about the size of a boulder.

"Wow," I couldn't help saying.

We all crowded around to look at the ring. "It's pretty," said David Michael.

"It means Watson is going to be your step-daddy," Mom told him.

"Really-really-really?" David Michael jumped up and down. Sam hugged Mom, and Charlie shook Watson's hand. But I just stood there. I wasn't upset, but I wasn't happy either. I could only think of questions. Finally, I asked just one. "When will the wedding be?"

"Oh, not for months," replied Mom.

I let out a sigh. That was definitely a relief.

On Tuesday, Mary Anne and I avoided Claudia and Stacey in school until the very end of the day. Then I screwed up the nerve to ask Claudia if she wanted to hold a Babysitters Club meeting the next day as usual. She said it was all right with her.

That night, for a change, Mom and my brothers and I went over to Watson's for dinner. Andrew and Karen were there. Watson was taking care of them more often than usual since their mother had broken her ankle.

Karen was in rare form. She loved having company and spent a long time trying to straighten out all the relationships. "If my daddy and your mommy get married - " she started to say to me, hopping from one foot to the other while Watson pa.s.sed a plate of potato chips and onion dip around the living room.

"When we get married/' Watson interrupted her.

"Okay, when you get married, Kristy, you'll be my stepsister, and Charlie, you'll be my biggest stepbrother. . . . How old are you, anyway?"

"Guess," said Charlie.

"Thirty-five?"