"Okay, Margo. Let's think about your talent again," I said. And suddenly inspiration hit. "Hey, you could recite something!" I suggested. "A nice long poem like The Owl and the p.u.s.s.ycat.'"

"I know The House That Jack Built'!" Margo cried. "This is the house that Jack built. This is the malt, that lay in the house that Jack built. This is the rat, that ate the malt, that lay in the house that Jack built."

Margo wasn't sure of the rest of the poem, but she found her book called The House That Jack Built, and decided she could memorize it.

"Terrific!" I told her.

But Margo was frowning. "It doesn't seem like enough," she said. "It's just talking. It's - Hey, I know! I know something I can do well that I've never seen anyone else do. It's real talent! I'll be right back."

I looked at Claire. "Do you know what she's going to do?" I asked her.

"Probably the banana trick."

The banana trick? My stomach began to feel funny. . . .

Margo returned to the room carrying a banana. "Watch this!" she exclaimed. She sat on the floor, leaned back against her hands, picked up the banana with her feet - and peeled it with her toes.

(And I thought she was uncoordinated!) "This is the house that Jack built," she said, after the banana had been peeled. She took a big bite. "Thish ish the mart, that ray in the housh that Jack bit."

"Shee?" she said a few moments later, as she polished off the last of the banana. "I can peel a banana with my feet. I bet no one else can do that. And I can eat it while I say my poem."

I closed my eyes. I thought I felt a headache coming on. I didn't feel any better when I heard Claire say, "My talent is better than yours, Margo. I'm going to win the pageant."

Of course Margo replied, "No you're not. I am."

What next? I wondered. It hadn't really occurred to me that the Pike girls would be competing against each other. What if one of them did win the pageant? The other would lose not just to strangers or even friends, but to her own sister. How awful!

On the other hand, I was beginning to think that there wasn't much chance that either girl would win - not with banana-peeling and rude Popeye songs.

"You guys," I said, "let's go on to something else. You're probably going to need to know how to curtsy. I bet you'll have to curtsy when you meet the judges. How about practicing that for awhile?"

The girls looked at me blankly. "What's curtsy?" asked Margo.

I explained.

I demonstrated.

The girls tried curtsying.

Margo tipped over sideways. Claire knelt down so low she had trouble getting up.

"Let's work on poise," I suggested. I placed a book on each girl's head. "Now stand up straight and walk gracefully, just as if you were walking by the judges."

Margo did so, batting her eyes and looking coy.

Claire did so, too, but she swayed her hips back and forth and the book slid to the floor.

"Told you," said a voice from the doorway.

It was Mallory. She looked disgusted, but her sisters didn't seem to notice.

"Watch our talents, Mallory-silly-billy-goo-goo!" Claire cried.

Mallory watched. (Margo had to demonstrate without a banana, though. I didn't want her to spoil her appet.i.te for supper.) When Claire and Margo were finished, Mallory glanced at me. It was all we could do to keep from laughing. Nevertheless, as I walked home that evening I began to wonder what I'd gotten myself into.

, The Pike girls were not pageant material at all.

Chapter 7.

When I read Mary Anne's notebook entry I smelled trouble. Big trouble. The pageant business was getting out of hand. Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe I was just disappointed that the Pike girls were going to peel bananas and sing about wor-orms and ger-erms. At any rate, Myriah suddenly seemed like hot compet.i.tion.

The Perkins family lives next door to Mary Anne. They live in the house Kristy lived in before her mother married Watson Brewer and the Thomases moved into his mansion on the other side of town. There are five people in the Perkins family - Mr. and Mrs. Perkins, five-and-a-half-year-old Myriah, two-and-a-half-year-old Gabbie, and Laura, the newest member of the family, who's just an infant.

The afternoon that Mary Anne sat at the Perkins house was a gloomy, rainy one, but Myriah and Gabbie didn't seem to mind. (Mary Anne was sitting just for the two older girls while their mother took Laura to the doctor for a checkup.) They had dressed up in funny clothes and were dancing around their playroom.

"On the goo-oo-ood ship Lollipop," Myriah sang, "it's a something, something, something to the candy shop, where bonbons play, something, something on Peppermint Bay. . . . Stop, Gabble. Wait," Myriah said. "Where . . . hmm . . . And if you eat too much - ooh, ooh - you'll awake with a tummy ache. . . . Gabbers, hold on. Let me finish."

Myriah was trying to remember the words to a song she had learned the year before. She wanted to perform all by herself, but Gabbie kept pulling at her arm. "Let's sing 'Silent Night/ " she cried.

"No, Gabbers. It's not Christmas. And I'm trying to remember this song."

"Si-ilent night," Gabbie sang anyway. She strutted across the floor in an old pair of clumpy high-heeled shoes.

"You know," Myriah told Mary Anne, "if I could just remember the words to this song, I could sing it and tap dance to it. I took lessons last year. I wonder if my tap shoes still fit."

Myriah dashed out of the playroom.

Gabbie followed her. "I'm coming, too. I'll look for my baldet shoes. I can be a baldet dancer!" she called over her shoulder to Mary Anne.

In a few minutes, the girls returned. Gabbie returned, quietly in a pair of pink ballet slippers that had once belonged to Myriah. Myriah returned noisily. "They fit!" she exclaimed.

"My tap shoes still fit! Now watch, Mary Anne. Okay?"

"Okay," replied Mary Anne. I bet the wheels were turning even then. I bet Mary Anne was mentally auditioning Myriah for the pageant.

Myriah rolled back a throw rug and stood on the wooden floor. She held her arms to one side, smiled, and began stepping across the room. In time to the tapping of her shoes, she sang, "On the goo-oo-ood ship Lollipop, it's a something, something, something to the candy shop, where bonbons play -" She paused. "I don't think that's right, Mary Anne. Not just the something-something part, but even the bonbons part. Oh, well."

"Well, I'm sure we could find the words printed somewhere. But can you sing any other songs?" asked Mary Anne, knowing full well that she could. Both Gabbie and Myriah are famous in the neighborhood for all the long songs they know.

"I know 'Tomorrow,' "replied Myriah. "You know, from Annie? But I can't tap dance to it."

"Let me hear it anyway," said Mary Anne.

(Gabbie was dancing a slow, graceful ballet in a corner of the room, lost in her own world.) "Okay, here goes." Myriah gathered herself together. Then she belted out, "The sun'll come out tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun. ..."

She sang the entire song. She knew every word, was right on pitch, got the timing right, and even added a few hand gestures.

Myriah had an amazing voice.

Mary Anne was impressed. She was so impressed that she told Myriah about the Little Miss Stoneybrook pageant.

"And you think I could be in it?" Myriah asked, awed.

"Sure," replied Mary Anne. "Why not?"

"I don't know," Myriah said slowly.

"Have you ever seen a pageant before?" Mary Anne asked her. "On TV or something? Like Miss America or Miss Universe?"

"Yes," replied Myriah.

"Well, wouldn't you like to be in one for girls? You'd get to dress up and sing or dance. And if you won, you'd wear a crown."

Myriah wasn't saying anything, but her eyes were growing rounder by the second.

"Could I be in it, too, Mary Anne Spier?" asked Gabbie. (She calls everyone by their full names.) Gabbie had stopped dancing. She came over to the couch, where Mary Anne was sitting, and climbed into her lap.

"Oh, Gabbie, I'm afraid not," Mary Anne told her. "You have to be five years old to be in the pageant. You have to be five or six or seven or eight. And you're two."

"I'm almost three," Gabbie said hopefully.

"I know, but you need to be five."

"Yuck, yuck, yuck," Gabbie replied, sliding out of Mary Anne's lap. But she didn't seem too upset.

"You know," said Myriah excitedly, "there are lots of things I could do in the pageant. I know ballet for real. I mean, I've taken lessons. Gabbie just plays in my old shoes. She won't take lessons until she's three. But I know all the positions and I can dance to 'Waltz of the Flowers.' I know gymnastics, too. And I can act! I took creative theater. I was the baby bear in Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I had to say, 'Who ate my porridge?' and 'Look who's sleeping in my bed!' and some other stuff."

Mary Anne was as excited as Myriah by then. "We'll have to ask your mom about the pageant, though," she reminded her. "You'll have to work in order to get ready for it. And you might need some new clothes."

Both Mary Anne and Myriah were on pins and needles waiting for Mrs. Perkins and the baby to come home. As soon as they did, Mary Anne, Myriah, and Gabbie all rushed to them.

"What a welcoming committee," said Mrs. Perkins with a smile.

"I missed Laura Loo, Mommy," Gabble said.

"And Mary Anne wants to ask you something," Myriah spoke up.

"Yes?" said Mrs. Perkins as she unzipped Laura's little jacket. She placed the baby in an infant seat.

Mary Anne nervously explained about the pageant and said she'd help Myriah get ready for it. She wondered if maybe she should have mentioned it to Mrs. Perkins before she got Myriah all excited. What if Mrs. Perkins said no?

As it was, she didn't say yes right away.

Mary Anne and Myriah glanced at each other.

"Please can I be in it?" Myriah asked. "Mary Anne will help me."

Mrs. Perkins frowned. "Yes, you can be in it, honey - " she began.

"Hurray!" shouted Myriah.

"- and I'll be happy for Mary Anne to work with you. But I want you to remember something. I want you to think about this."

"Okay."

"You, too, Mary Anne," said Mrs. Perkins.

Mary Anne nodded.

"In any pageant,, or in any game or contest, there are winners and there are losers. You might be a winner, Myriah, and that would be wonderful. Daddy and Gabble and I and even Laura would be very proud of you. But you might be a loser, too. There are going to be lots more losers than winners. And I want you to know that we'll be proud of you if you lose. We'll be proud of you for having the courage to be in the pageant, and for the work and rehearsing you'll do."

"I know," said Myriah, giving her mother a hug. "Thank you."

"One more thing," said her mother. "I think you should know that for some girls, this pageant won't be just fun and games. I hope it'll be fun for you, but for others it will be work. They'll take it very seriously. You might be competing against girls who have been winners in other pageants, or who have won beauty contests or talent contests. They'll know how pageants work. And they might - just might - not be very friendly. I want you to understand what you're getting into, that's all. Okay?"

"Okay," said Myriah. She smiled happily. (She was missing four teeth.) Myriah really had listened and paid attention to what her mother said. But Mary Anne hadn't. Not much anyway.

As it turned out later, she should have. So should all of us baby-sitters. We kept talking about how winning wasn't important - and not one of us really believed it. The fact is, Mary Anne knew - she could feel it - that she was going to be the one to sponsor the winner of the Little Miss Stoneybrook crown. She would prove that she was the best babysitter of all.

Chapter 8.

Claudia had been sitting for Charlotte quite a bit. Not as often as Stacey had sat for her, but a lot. On Friday afternoon, she showed up right after school. Charlotte greeted her at the door with, "Did you bring the Kid-Kit? Did you bring the Kid-Kit?"

Claudia hadn't. She felt terrible. She was sure Stacey would have brought the Kid-Kit.

"I'm really sorry, Char," she said. "I was - "

"And we were right in the middle of Mr. Popper's Penguins, too."

Actually, that may have been one reason (a subconscious reason, if you know what I mean) that Claudia hadn't brought the Kid-Kit. She may have forgotten it on purpose. Claudia is not a great reader. Her favorite books are Nancy Drew mysteries. But Charlotte is this smart, smart little kid who has skipped a grade and may actually be a better reader than Claudia. Even so, she loves to be read to. Imagine Claudia having to spend a lot of time reading out loud. Oh, well.

The point was, Claudia didn't have the Kid-Kit with her, and she felt bad and so did Charlotte. Charlotte is an only child who's a little shy and doesn't see her parents that much. They love Charlotte to bits, but her mother is a doctor and her father has some other important job so they're both just very busy.

Claudia tried to take the sting out of forgetting the Kid-Kit. "Are you playing with Becca a lot these days?" she asked. (Becca is Becca Ramsey, Jessi's little sister. The Ramseys moved into Stacey McGill's house, which is close to Charlotte's.) "Yes," said Charlotte, and she lowered her eyes.

"But?" Claudia prompted her.