Dot sometimes forgot just how vast Bree’s house was. It was one of the newer homes in the neighborhood, which went up after builders bulldozed a small beach cottage and crammed a giant monstrosity onto a not-so-huge lot. It had a fountain in the front yard and swirly trees cut like corkscrews lining the driveway. Every floor of the big white house was adorned with columns and balconies and terraces. It looked like a cross between a house and a wedding cake. Whenever they drove past, Dot’s mom wrinkled her nose and said the tone of the neighborhood had really changed.
Bree and her four siblings each had their own room, and there were many more rooms beyond that—including a gym, a screening room, even a small bowling alley in the basement. No matter how many times Bree invited Dot and Malia over, Dot sometimes still got lost.
Bree’s bedroom, nestled onto the third and highest floor, was nearly the same size as Dot’s entire bungalow. It had a walk-in closet, a canopy bed, a pink velvet couch, a cozy purple chair, a giant desk, a mirrored vanity for makeup and hair products, and a bunch of silver leather poufs scattered around for lounging. The center of the room was anchored with a giant, fluffy white area rug, where Dot, Malia, and Bree were sprawled, surrounded by bowls of candy. New money and white sugar—Dot’s mom would have had a conniption.
Immediately following the disaster outside the Larsson house, Dot insisted they huddle for a very necessary crisis management meeting. As the head of marketing, it seemed like the right thing to do. It had only been twenty minutes since the whole debacle, but Dot had already stress-eaten approximately forty-five M&M’s. Meanwhile, Bree was holding her cat like a rag doll and anxiously petting its fur. The cat looked perturbed, to say the least.
“Oh my god!” Malia exclaimed, scrolling around on her phone. “Chelsea added a link to her Instagram profile. For something called Seaside Sitters.”
She clicked on the link and a beautiful website loaded onto the screen. With gorgeous professional photos, perfectly formatted text, and complementary shades of beachy blues, it was, quite possibly, the most well-designed site Dot had ever seen.
“When did they have the time to put this together?” Dot asked.
Somehow, Chelsea, Camilla, and their equally awful friend Sidney had managed to form something called the Seaside Sitters, a highly professional-seeming babysitters organization. At the top of the site, a group photo showed the three of them posing in front of a house with an actual white picket fence, looking clean-cut and beaming. Beneath it, a series of glamorous shots featured each babysitter laughing and frolicking with small children. They looked like stills from The Sound of Music but with jeans instead of lederhosen and beaches instead of Alps. The photos looked glossy and professional, like the entire operation. Dot wanted to throw up and die.
“They accept PayPal and Venmo?” Dot read. “And they offer services in five languages?” She scrolled further down the screen. “Oh my god, they even have an app so you can schedule your appointments right on your phone.”
The more they scrolled, the worse it got.
“They undercut us! They’re accepting lower rates! No wonder they’re stealing our business.”
“Dude, look at these testimonials!” said Malia.
“How can they have satisfied clients when they’ve been in business for two days?” asked Bree.
“These charming, talented, and responsible ladies go above and beyond! My house looked cleaner when I returned than when I left. They even organized the garage, just for fun!”
—Laura Glass
“Every time we hire Seaside Sitters, I am forced to ask myself: are they babysitters, or wizards? Worth every affordable penny!”
—Henry McCormick
“Not only did the Seaside Sitters help our son Thor play Beethoven, they’re teaching all our boys to speak Dutch! Highly recommended! Or, as my kids would say, sterk aanbevolen!”
—Erika Larsson
“Dude, what the—?” said Malia. “I am, like, totally flabbergasted.”
“I know,” Dot said. “Dutch is so not marketable.”
“Um, the Dutch is what you’re choosing to focus on here?” Malia snapped, turning on Dot like a rabid squirrel. “We don’t even have a website! YOU were supposed to make one, ‘Director of Marketing’!” She made air quotes with her fingers.
“Oh, please. Like our biggest issue here is our lack of a website. You’re the one whose sister is actually the devil.”
“The site might be just one of, like, seventy problems we have right now, but it’s still your fault!”
Malia pointed her finger at Dot, who resisted the urge to bite it.
“You guys! Why are you freaking out?” said Bree, with an impossible amount of glee.
“Gee, I don’t know, Bree. Why do you think we’re freaking out?” Malia said, rolling her eyes. “We just lost what was only our second job, an evil organization is looking to take us down, we’re still completely broke”—she turned to Dot before adding—“and we completely lack marketing materials.”
“But I already made a website!” Bree said. Her tone was how Dot imagined a friendly dolphin might sound, if a friendly dolphin could talk.
“Wait, you know how to code?” Dot asked.
“I mean, I looked some stuff up on the interwebs,” she said. “Because I wanted to make us a landing page.”
Dot had to admit, she was seriously impressed.
Bree pulled out her laptop, which was covered in glittery kitten stickers, and started typing away. A few seconds later, she turned the screen so it faced Dot and Malia.
“Ta-da!”
“Oh” was all Dot could manage to say.
Unbeknownst to them, Bree had gone and constructed the jankiest website in the history of the Internet. Whatever they were looking at appeared to have been created in Microsoft Paint. By a sloth. With a jumbo pack of markers and a head full of crazy dreams.
Photos of their three faces were awkwardly cut out and pasted onto stick bodies. Above their heads, a haphazard rainbow arched from one corner of the screen to the other. As if that wasn’t weird enough, an image of Taylor Swift popped out from behind the rainbow, like a demented leprechaun overlord.
Just when Dot thought it couldn’t get any worse, Bree scrolled down to show them the text portion of the site.
It didn’t provide a phone number, email address, or any information that could possibly be useful to anyone. But it did end with a GIF of Taylor Swift, dressed in a skimpy leather outfit, winking and holding a phone.
Malia stared at it with her mouth hanging open.
“Um, as the director of marketing, you really should have run that by me,” Dot said before taking deep, throaty breaths like Darth Vader. Without realizing it, Dot had started using the Ujjayi yoga breathing technique her mom had taught her to combat stress.
“Bree Alia Dot Babysitters,” read Malia. “Is that, like, the best name we can come up with?”
“Whatever. Names don’t have to make sense. Like, this computer is called an Apple. But it’s not a fruit, it’s a computer,” said Bree.
Dot blinked three times. “Yeah, but this may be the worst acronym ever.”
“What do acrobats have to do with anything?” asked Bree.
“Not acro-bats. An acro-nym. When the first letter of each word spells out another name. Like FOMO.”
Bree glanced back and forth between Malia and Dot, searching for some additional guidance. She twirled her hair around her finger, her sparkly nail polish glinting in the light.
“Bree!” Dot was exasperated at this point. “Look. At. The. Screen. Look at how the first letters of each of our names are enormous. Do you see what they spell?”
“B-A-D,” spelled Bree.
Her eyes grew wide. Her mouth formed a perfect circle. She looked back and forth between Malia and Dot, as if one of them could possibly refute what her own hands had created.
Dot buried her head in her hands. “This literally says BAD. BAD Babysitters.”
“But thanks for calling me Alia!” said Malia.
At least someone was happy.