Dear Stacey,

Hi! I’am so, so exited! I cannot wait to see you I realy didn’t beleve that the frist time we got to see each other again woud be in new York. Just five more days and we’ll be their. I’am bringing lots of speding money. Can we go to bloom blume that big huge depratment store. And lets go to some art musims or at least one. I can’t wait!

Luv ya!
Claudia

It could only happen in New York. Only in New York could you be sitting in the middle of your absolutely gorgeous blue-and-white bedroom reading a postcard, and see a gigantic roach sneak out from behind the dresser and have the nerve to run right across the rug and disappear under the closet door. In any other place, a roach would have the good sense to stick to yucky places like laundry rooms or greasy kitchens. But in New York, they get all bold and start invading bedrooms.

My first thought, after he disappeared into the closet was, Oh, disgust. Now do I have to go look for him? My second thought was, I sure hope my friends don’t see him (or any of his buddies) when they visit this weekend. My friends live in Connecticut, and the worst insect they’ve ever seen is a bee. A roach would freak them out. (I left the roach alone in the closet. No way was I going after him.)

If I’d known what was going to happen when my friends came, I might have taken the roach as a bad sign, a sign that the weekend was going to be a mistake. (Do you have any idea what I’m talking about? You must be pretty confused by now, so I better give you the background to this story.)

For starters, I am Stacey McGill. I’m thirteen years old and I live in New York City. I’ve lived here all my life, except for last year. Last year, my parents and I moved to Stoneybrook, Connecticut, which was where I met these friends I’ve been talking about. My friends are Claudia Kishi (she’s the one who wrote the postcard), Kristy Thomas, Mary Anne Spier, and Dawn Schafer. The five of us had this neat business called the Baby-sitters Club. But after only a year (well, a year and a couple of months) in Stoneybrook, my mom and dad and I moved back to New York. (These moves have to do with Dad’s job, and the explanations for them aren’t too interesting.)

I have to admit that I wasn’t very upset at the idea of moving back to New York. I’ve always loved the city, and I missed it when we were in Connecticut. Believe me, I really minded the idea of leaving my new friends, but I was thrilled to be getting back to such a bustling, busy place. I love people and stores and shopping and museums and restaurants and theaters. I don’t love roaches, but I’ll take one or two of them any day over the quiet of Stoneybrook. Stoneybrook is a very pretty little place with nice people, but if you want excitement, you have to drive all the way to Washington Mall, outside of Stamford, which just does not live up to Fifth Avenue.

Anyway, I had moved back to New York, and my friends and I hadn’t seen each other in a while. Claudia and I had just been starting to talk about my visiting Stoneybrook for a weekend, when something happened.

The something was Judy.

I don’t know Judy’s last name. She’s the homeless woman who lives on our block. (Some people call her a bag lady.) Now I bet you’re wondering about something. You’ve heard me mention a roach in my bedroom and a bag lady on my block. Just where in New York do I live? you’re probably asking yourself. Well, I live in a very nice neighborhood on the Upper West Side. As I said before, New York roaches live everywhere — and lately, so do homeless people. Homelessness is a serious problem in New York. There are thousands and thousands of people like Judy. Some of them live in shelters or welfare hotels, some live in subway stations or railroad stations, and some actually live on the street. Judy is one of the ones who actually live on the street. She sleeps in doorways or on top of grates where warm air blows up from the subway. She gets her food from garbage cans or begs for handouts.

It is not a nice life.

I see Judy at least twice a day (when I go back and forth between my nice, comfortable, doorman apartment building and my nice, comfortable private school), and I have an idea of what her life is like. Although I’m sure you can’t completely understand homelessness until you’ve experienced it.

What I see when I see Judy is a woman who looks a lot older than she really is. (She looks about a hundred, but Dad says she’s only forty-two. I don’t know how he knows this.) I see a woman who owns so few things that she won’t part with any of them. And I mean, she hangs onto empty tin cans, bottle caps, newspapers, and used plastic cups. She carries her stuff around in old, wrinkled, falling-apart shopping bags. She’s a walking dump — but that stuff we’d call trash is her life. I see a woman who is almost always hungry, who has huge sores on her legs, whose hair is matted, and whose face and hands are permanently red from being exposed to the sun, wind, heat, and cold.

Judy and I couldn’t be more different. Yet we’re friends. Well, sort of. When Judy is in a good mood, we smile and say hello to each other. Judy calls me Missy. When she’s not in a good mood, which is often — watch out! Judy will stand on the sidewalk and just shout stuff for hours. She screams and yells, then finally she quiets down and mumbles crossly. When she’s in those moods, she doesn’t call me Missy. She doesn’t call me anything. I don’t think she even recognizes me.

So what does Judy have to do with my friends’ visit to New York? Well, it’s like this: The people on our block who see and hear Judy everyday began to get worried about her. They decided that it was time for them, plain old ordinary citizens, to see what they could do to help Judy and other homeless people in the neighborhood. So they organized a big meeting that was to be held for an entire Saturday afternoon. Most of the adults in my building (including Mom and Dad) were eager to go. Which meant that a lot of kids were going to need baby-sitters. Remember the Baby-sitters Club I belonged to in Stoneybrook? Well, I sort of carried the club back to New York with me, except that I’m the only member of the city branch. For some reason, most of my friends here don’t seem interested in sitting. On the one hand, this is nice, because there are plenty of little kids in my building, so I get lots of jobs. On the other hand, I have to turn down lots of jobs, too, and I always· feel bad about that. Besides, I miss the meetings our club used to hold.

Well, anyway, a total of five parents called up a whole month in advance to ask me to baby-sit on the afternoon of the big meeting. I felt bad about turning four of the families down, especially when the parents were all going to be at the same place for the same time. If only —

And that was when I got my brilliant idea.

“Mom! Mom!” I called.

I ran into our kitchen. As New York apartments go, ours is fairly large. The due that you have a large apartment is if you can actually eat in your kitchen. If you’ve got room for a table and chairs in there, it’s a big apartment. And our kitchen had room for a table and chairs.

That was where I found my mom — seated at the table. She was paying bills. I wasn’t sure if bill-paying time was the right moment to approach her with my idea, but I decided to risk it.

“What is it, honey?” Mom replied.

I sat down across from her. I explained the baby-sitting situation. Then I said carefully, “Um, remember when Kristy’s mother got remarried?”

“Yes?” Mom looked a little confused.

“Remember how the Baby-sitters Club took care of those fourteen children all week before the wedding?”

“Yes?”

“Well, I was thinking. All in all, there are ten kids in the five families that asked me to sit. If my friends were here, we could easily take care of the kids for just one afternoon. And I’m dying to have Claudia and everyone come visit. They could stay for the weekend. What do you think?”

“Four guests?” said Mom thoughtfully. “That seems like a lot of people. It would be fine if it were just Claudia, but —”

“Please? In a way it will help Judy.”

“Do you think you’re up to it?” asked Mom.

“Of course! I haven’t been sick in ages.” (I have diabetes, and Mom and Dad worry about me a lot, but lately, as long as I stick to my diet and give myself the insulin injections, I’ve been just fine.)

“Well,” said Mom, “it’s okay with me, but you’ll need your father’s permission, too.”

“Thanks, Mom!” I cried. I gave her a kiss. Then I waited for Dad to come home from work. I pounced on him the second he stepped through the door.

“Please, please, please?” I said after I’d explained everything.

Dad adjusted his glasses. At long last he said, “All right.”

My parents didn’t seem too excited then, but you should have seen them a few days later. They told me I could take Friday off from school that weekend. This was because it turned out that my friends had that Friday off since there was a teachers’ convention in Connecticut, so they had a three-day weekend. Mom and Dad said that as long as they were coming into the city — their first trip to New York without their parents along (and Dawn’s first trip ever) — they might as well get the most out of it.

Then my parents even suggested that I give a party on Friday night so that my Connecticut friends could meet my New York friends. I couldn’t believe my good luck. What a weekend the five of us would have — three days in the city, a party, and a baby-sitting adventure.

Claudia and I called and wrote constantly as the weekend approached.

“What should I wear in New York?” Claud asked once.

“What you wear in Connecticut,” I told her.

“Exactly?”

“Believe me, you see everything in the city. Once I saw someone dressed as Batman.”

“Maybe it was Batman,” said Claudia, giggling. “But really. What will your friends wear to the party?”

We weren’t getting anywhere. “Wear your black outfit. That really cool one,” I told her. Claudia has incredible clothes. And I wanted her to wear this outfit that was sleek and black and covered with silver stars and sparkles.

“Oh, okay,” said Claud. “Boy, I am so excited! I don’t think I can wait two more weeks. How can I wait two weeks?”

I didn’t know. I was dying of excitement myself.

But the two weeks passed — somehow — and finally it was Friday morning, and time for me to get in a cab and meet my friends at Grand Central Station.