"Martin, Ann M - Baby-sitters Club Mystery 011 - Claudia and the Mystery at the Museum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin Ann M)
But Kristy's family has changed Ч and grown Ч a lot in the last year or so. It all started when Kristy's mom fell in love with a man named Watson Brewer, who happens to be mega-rich. When they got married, Kristy and her brothers moved across town to live in Watson's mansion. (They used to live across the street from me.) Watson has two children from his first marriage, Karen and Andrew, who live with him part-time. And soon after their marriage, Watson and Kristy's mom decided to adopt a baby, so Emily Michelle came to live with them, too. She's an incredibly cute two-and-a-half-year-old Vietnamese girl. Soon after she arrived, Kristy's grandmother (everybody calls her Nannie) moved in to help out with everything. Full house, right? And thatТs
not even counting the pets Ч Shannon, Boo-Boo the cat, and the goldfish.
I don't have any pets, but when the game got around to me, I decided I'd be a wildly colored jungle parrot. I envision plumes of red, gold, green, and blue. Purple tail feathers. A bright yellow beak. The flashiest, coolest bird in the jungle, that's me.
I'm vice-president of the club. I don't have many official duties, although I do make sure to have plenty of snacks on hand for meetings. The reason I'm vice-president is that I am the only one in the club with my own phone and a private line, so we don't tie up anyone else's phone with all the calls we get. That's important. We meet in my room three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from five-thirty to six. That's a lot of phone time.
Our club treasurer is Stacey McGill, my best friend. The animal she picked was a big jungle cat, like a lion or a panther. I think that's perfect. Stacey has blonde hair, and huge eyes with dark, dark lashes, so she looks like one of those big, tawny cats. Plus, she has a certain elegance, as if she knows she's queen of the jungle.
Like me, Stacey likes clothes and fashion and experimenting with hairstyles and makeup. But while I'm a wild dresser, Stacey is
more trendy and sophisticated. I think that's because she grew up in New York City. And she still visits there a lot, because her father lives there. Stacey's parents got divorced not that long ago, and Stacey (luckily for me!) decided to live in Stoneybrook with her mom.
Stacey may look like a queen, but she has down-to-earth problems, just like anybody else. The divorce was hard on her, for one thing. Also, she has diabetes, which is a disease that keeps your body from handling sugar the way it should. (No doubt Janine could give you the full scientific explanation, but I sure can't.) What that means for Stacey is that she has to keep track of every single thing she eats, and she has to be really careful about avoiding sweets. She can't eat Ring-Dings or candy bars, no matter how hungry she is. Also, she has to check her blood sugar all the time and give herself shots of this stuff called insulin, every day. It sounds gruesome, but Stacey makes it seem like no big deal. We all admire her for that.
As treasurer, Stacey keeps track of how much money we each earn. ThatТs easy for her, since she's great at math. She also collects the club dues every Monday. We hate to pay up, but she makes us cough up the money. We use some of the treasury funds to pay
Kristy's brother to drive her to meetings. Some of the money goes for materials for our Kid-Kits, which are boxes full of games and books (mostly used) and stickers and crayons (those are new) that we sometimes bring with us on jobs. (Kid-Kits are another of Kristy's great ideas, by the way.) And once in a while we break into the treasury to splurge on a pizza party.
The club secretary is Mary Anne Spier. I'll tell you what she's like, and you can try to guess what animal she said she'd be. She's small, like Kristy (who happens to be her best friend)/ and she has brown hair and brown eyes. She recently got a great new haircut, and she looks terrific. She used to dress very conservatively, but that was only because her father insisted on it. He brought her up, since her mother died long ago, and he thought he had to be strict to be a good parent. He's finally loosened up a little, though, and now Mary Anne has some pretty cool clothes.
Mary Anne is very shy, but also very caring and sensitive. She has a romantic nature, which is probably why she's the only one of us who has a steady boyfriend. His name is Logan Bruno, and we all like him.
So, have you guessed? Mary Anne would like to be a koala. She said she would spend
most of her time hiding in the trees, but she would also let herself be hugged by children, if they needed her.
Our koala makes a great secretary. Mary Anne is in charge of the club's record book, which includes information about our clients as well as the schedules of each sitter. At a glance, Mary Anne can tell you which of us is available for a job.
The dub record book was Kristy's idea, of course, and so was the dub notebook. The dub notebook is where we write up jobs that we've been on, so that the other members can read our notes and keep up-to-date on whatТs happening with our clients Ч who's suddenly afraid of the dark, who's on a broccoli strike, and so on. All that writing and reading is a real pain sometimes, especially for a terrible speller like me, but I guess it pays off. Parents appreciate sitters who are well informed about their charges.
One member of the BSC wasn't in my room that afternoon, but I want to tell you about her anyway since she's still very much a part of the dub. Her name is Dawn Schafer, and she's Mary Anne's other best friend Ч and her stepsister. Remember I mentioned that Mary Anne's father had loosened up a little? Well, we think it may have had something to do
with the fact that he fell in love again with an old high school girlfriend, and then married her. That girlfriend was Dawn's mom, Sharon. She grew up in Stoneybrook, but after high school she moved to California. She got married there, and that's where Dawn and her younger brother Jeff were born. After the Schafers divorced, when Dawn was twelve, Sharon brought Dawn and Jeff back to Connecticut. Dawn adjusted to the move pretty easily, with the help of the BSC. But Jeff never got used to Connecticut, and he ended up moving back to California to live with his dad. Dawn missed him like crazy from the moment he left, so she finally decided to spend a few months with him and her dad, in California. She has promised to come back to Stoneybrook, though, and we all hope she makes it sooner rather than later. We miss her.
When Dawn had to choose an animal, she didn't hesitate. "A dolphin," she said. "I'd be perfectly happy skimming through the water and playing in the waves." I can see Dawn as a dolphin. She's certainly at home in the ocean, since she practically grew up on the beach.
Dawn was our alternate officer, which meant that she could take over for any other officer who had to miss a meeting. So far we haven't
filled her job, and so far that's been okay. We've been attending meetings pretty regularly.
Now, so far all the members I've told you about are thirteen and in the eighth grade, like me. But two members of the BSC are younger. They are Jessi Ramsey and Mallory Pike. They're best friends, and they're eleven and in the sixth grade. They are junior officers, which means that they take mostly afternoon jobs, since they aren't allowed to sit at night except for their own families.
We didn't have to ask them which animal they'd choose. We knew they would both want to be horses. Jessi, who studies ballet seriously (and is very talented) said she'd be a Lipizzaner, which is a kind of stallion that is trained to dance in a special way. And Mallory, who loves to read and write (and wants to be an author someday), said she'd be a horse "just like Black Beauty in the book."
Jessi is African-American, with coal-dark eyes and long dancer's legs. She has a little sister named Becca and a baby brother named John Philip (everybody calls him Squirt). Her Aunt Cecelia lives with the family, too.
brothers and sisters! She's the oldest, and then there're Adam, Byron, and Jordan (they're triplets), Vanessa, Nicky, Margo, and Claire. What a handful! I think they have been wearing Mal out lately. She's been feeling tired and run-down all the time.
Last but not least, the BSC has two associate members who don't always attend meetings. They help out when we're overbooked and need extra sitters. One of them is Logan Bruno, Mary Anne's boyfriend. He wasn't at our sleepover, of course, but Mary Anne told him about the game, and he said he'd be a hawk, so he could fly. The other is Shannon Kilbourne, who lives in Kristy's neighborhood. Lately Shannon's been coming to meetings more often so we're getting to know her better. She's really nice. I liked her animal choice. She said she would be a cat, so she could lie in front of a roaring fire all day.
So thatТs the zoo we call the BSC! Imagine if we'd actually turned into the animals we'd chosen. My room would have sounded like a jungle. But in reality the noises were pretty normal Ч girls talking and laughing, the phone ringing, and lots of crunching sounds as we passed around the popcorn I'd made for the meeting.
Just before the meeting broke up, Mal said she had some news. She told us that her mom
was going to be very busy for awhile, putting in a lot of overtime with the temporary help agency she works for. She was going to be calling the BSC for plenty of sitters in the next few weeks. "Personally, I think she just wants to escape from the house," she said, laughing. "Claire is driving us all nuts. She saw Annie on TV last week, and now she's decided she wants to be a star. She's been bugging my parents to let her take tap or ballet or theater classes. And she walks around in sunglasses all the time and practices signing her autograph."
We all cracked up, picturing five-year-old Claire as a budding starlet. Then, as the meeting was ending, I brought up Don Newman again, my favorite local celebrity, but before long I noticed everybody seemed to be in a hurry to leave. I guess they just don't appreciate art the way I do.
Chapter 3.
"Wow! Look at that!" Carolyn pulled on my left hand, guiding me toward a sign for an exhibit about the human body.
"No! Over here!" said Marilyn, pulling on my right hand. She was looking at an African mask that hung near a display of drums.
Corrie stood silently in the center of the main hall, gazing up at the large directory that told about the displays. Her eyes were sparkling as she read about the Discovery Room and the Science Room. "Can we see everything?" she asked, looking up at me.
"That's what we're here for," I answered. It was Thursday, and I had brought the three girls to the Stoneybrook Museum. I was as excited as they were, and not just because of the Don Newman exhibit. It turned out that the museum was a perfect place to bring kids. "Hold on," I said to the twins, who were still trying to pull me in opposite directions. "Let's
take our time and look at everything."
The museum wasn't huge, or fancy, but the people who had built it had certainly packed a lot into it. hi fact, I wasn't even sure we could see everything, not in one day. I knew I'd be coming back often, though. This museum was a special place.
It didn't look like your average museum. The floors were wood, instead of marble. There was no big echo-y hall, and there were no fancy paintings in gold frames. It was just a comfortable big building with white walls and lots of windows.
Corrie tugged on my sleeve. (I had dressed up a little, in pink lace leggings and a long black sweater. My hair was tied back with a pink ribbon, and I was wearing pink ballet-type flats.) "Can we go to the Discovery Room?" she asked. Corrie is a pretty, timid girl, with a serious face. She has brownish-blonde hair that's cut straight across her forehead in bangs, and long, dark eyelashes. She's small for her age, and something about her just makes me want to hug her.
"No!" cried Carolyn. "The Science Room! I want to shake hands with a skeleton." Carolyn loves science.
"I want to see the Music Center," said Marilyn. She plays the piano, and she's pretty good.
The twins look almost exactly alike. Marilyn has a tiny mole under her right eye, and Carolyn has one under her left eye. That's how I used to have to tell them apart. That was back when their mother used to dress them identically and treat them almost as one person. As they grew older, they became pretty tired of that, though, and now it's easy to tell them apart. Marilyn wears her brown hair long, and Carolyn wears hers short. Marilyn dresses simply, but Carolyn likes trendy clothes. And, as you might have noticed, they have very different interests.
I picked up a brochure with a museum map on it. "Let's start with the Discovery Room," I said. "If s upstairs. After that, we can check out the Science Room and the Music Center. Then we'll come back downstairs and see the sculptures. How does that sound?"
The girls nodded eagerly. The fact was that everything in the museum sounded interesting and fun, and we knew it didn't really matter what order we saw the exhibits in.
The Discovery Room was pretty cool. The first thing we saw when we walked in was a display on recycling, which included a giant robot the kids could hand soda cans to. There was a large supply of empty soda cans nearby. The robot would take the can and dump it into a box for recycling, and the kids were fascinated by watching the way it worked. I think they liked all the blinking lights on the robot.
The Discovery Room included an area devoted to teaching kids what it feels like to live with different disabilities. They could ride in wheelchairs, and try out crutches. A display showed how Braille works, with sample labels that the kids could "read" with their fingers. Also, there were mystery boxes. Kids had to try to guess their contents using only touch. Corrie loved that activity. "I think if s a bag of marbles," she said, grinning at me as she felt around in one of the boxes.
Carolyn and Marilyn were testing themselves at an electronic quiz board, which had buzzers that sounded and lights that lit up when they pushed a button for the right answer. "I'm a Whiz Kid," said Marilyn, pointing to the screen that showed her rating.
"And I'm a Junior Einstein," said Carolyn, proudly.
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