Dear Stacey,

I can’t wait! I can’t wait! I can’t wait! New York, here I come! I’ve been reading everything I can find about New York. Please can we eat at Serendipity, or maybe at the Hard Rock Café, if we can get in there? Do you think we’ll see anyone famous? Does anyone famous live in your apartment building? Is your building on the route of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade? Just curious.

See you soon!
Love,
Mary Anne

Obviously, Claudia and I weren’t the only ones excited about my friends’ trip to New York. Mary Anne was nearly frantic. The thing about Mary Anne and New York is that, if this is possible, she has a crush on the city. I’m serious. She’s starstruck. She feels the same way about New York that most kids feel about their favorite movie star or rock group. And coming to New York at thirteen without her dad (she’d been here before, but it’s different when your father’s dragging you around) was for Mary Anne like getting the opportunity to meet her idol.

I thought about that as I put my coat on and left our apartment that Friday morning.

“Bye, Mom!” I called.

“Bye, honey! Say hi to everyone for me.”

And have fun and be careful, I thought.

“And have fun and be careful!” she added.

It never fails. Mom always says that as I leave the apartment. Sometimes I try to escape before the words leave her lips, but so far, I haven’t been able to.

In the hallway, I punched the DOWN button and waited for the elevator to arrive. Then came the stomach-tossing ride to the lobby. Our elevator doesn’t just rise and fall, it zooms.

The doors opened and I crossed the lobby, calling hello to Lloyd and Isaac, who were on duty at the desk, and thanking James, who held the door open for me. Some people think I’m spoiled, living in this doorman building, but I’ll tell you something, I just feel safe. I like doormen for security. (But it is nice to have someone hold the door open for you when your hands are full.)

I left our building and walked up the block to Central Park West, where I hailed a cab. Mom gives me cab fare any time I’m going more than ten feet away from the apartment, unless I’m going to be with a group of people. She doesn’t like me walking around the city alone, or even taking the bus or subway alone. I can’t tell if she’s being overprotective or just sensible. In a big city like New York, you really can’t be too careful.

I closed the door of the cab. “Grand Central Station, please,” I told the driver.

He didn’t say anything. (Cabbies hardly ever do.) He just pulled the taxi into the traffic.

I settled back in the seat and thought about the friends I would see soon. In a way, it’s surprising that the five of us are friends, because we’re so different. Or maybe that’s why we’re friends. Isn’t there some old saying about variety being the spice of life? And opposites attracting? If we were alike, we’d probably be really boring and not at all interested in each other. Well, there isn’t any danger of that. Let me tell you a little about the friends I was going to meet. I’ll start with Kristy Thomas, since she’s the president of the club.

If I thought the last year of my life (moving from New York to Connecticut and back again) had been wild, wait till you hear about Kristy’s. Kristy, Claudia, and Mary Anne used to live in the same neighborhood. Kristy’s house was next door to Mary Anne’s (the two of them are best friends), and across the street from Claudia’s. At the beginning of seventh grade (last year), Kristy had this idea for starting a baby-sitting service in her neighborhood. She saw how long it sometimes took her mother to find a sitter for David Michael, Kristy’s little brother. If Kristy and her big brothers weren’t available, her mom sometimes had to make four or five calls before she found someone who was free. So Kristy teamed up with Claudia, Mary Anne, and me, and we formed the Baby-sitters Club. (Dawn joined us later.) We’d meet three times a week, and parents would call us while we were meeting. The great thing about this arrangement was that parents could reach four sitters with just one call, so they were practically guaranteed a sitter. No more calling everyone in the world.

This was Kristy’s idea, and it was brilliant. That’s one thing Kristy is known for — her brilliant ideas. She has them all the time. The other thing she’s known for is her mouth. She can’t keep it closed and sometimes it gets her in trouble. I really hoped Kristy would behave herself in New York and not do or say anything embarrassing. But I couldn’t count on that. Kristy is a little immature. She even looks immature. She’s sort of small for her age, and she doesn’t pay much attention to her clothes. In fact, she almost always wears the same kind of outfit: jeans, turtleneck, sweater, and running shoes.

What about Kristy’s wild year? Well, ever since she was little, Kristy had lived with her two older brothers, Sam and Charlie, David Michael, who’s seven now, and her mom, who was divorced. But when Mrs. Thomas decided to marry Watson Brewer, this millionaire she’d been dating, Watson moved Mrs. Thomas and her family across town to his mansion. There, Kristy not only lives in the lap of luxury, but she inherited a stepsister and stepbrother whom she adores, and of course, Watson, her stepfather. What a change for her! (I’m making it sound better than it is. Kristy is still getting used to having been uprooted, and to her new home and neighbors and neighborhood.)

Claudia Kishi is the club’s vice president. She’s also my best friend. Well, she’s my Connecticut best friend. I have a New York best friend, too — Laine Cummings. She’ll be at the party tonight, and she and Claudia will meet for the first time. Claudia is the vice president because the girls always hold their meetings in her bedroom. They chose her room because she has a private phone and a private phone number. During meetings, when lots of job calls come in, the girls don’t tie up any line but Claudia’s. This is important.

I know I said that all the girls in the club are different, but there are some similarities between Claudia and me. The two main ones are our taste and the fact that we are (face it) sort of sophisticated. At least, we’re more sophisticated than Kristy, Mary Anne, and Dawn are. We both love clothes and wear trendy outfits like short skirts and baggy sweaters. And we both like to do things with our hair. I used to get mine permed, but I don’t do that anymore. I let it grow out, and now it’s just thick and fluffy and blonde. You should see Claud’s hair, though. She’s Japanese-American and has this long, silky black hair. And boy, does she go out of her way to do special things to it. For instance, she’ll part it down the middle, fix one side in three or four braids, and let the other side fall loosely over her shoulder. Also, she’s always experimenting with barrettes and hair clips and bows and headbands. Jewelry, too. To top things off, Claudia is just plain gorgeous, with these dark, almond-shaped eyes and this creamlike complexion. She has never once had a pimple, and probably never will. Claud’s hobbies are art (she’s really talented), and reading mysteries. Unfortunately, she’s a terrible student, as you could probably tell from her postcard.

The secretary of the Baby-sitters Club is Mary Anne Spier, and she has a big job. She’s the one who has to keep the club record book up to date. Kristy insists that the club members, in order to run the business professionally, write a summary of every job they go on. The summaries are recorded in the club notebook. Mary Anne also has to keep up the record book. The most important pages in the record book make up the appointment calendar. There, Mary Anne schedules the sitting jobs. She is careful and neat and rarely makes a mistake.

Although they’re best friends, Mary Anne and Kristy are very different. They may both be fairly small for their age (and they even look alike with their brown hair and brown eyes), but the similarities end there. Kristy is loud and sort of cynical; Mary Anne is quiet and shy, dreamy and sensitive (she cries easily). She may even be a little romantic. She’s the only one of us to have a steady boyfriend. (His name is Logan Bruno.) And her family is certainly different from Kristy’s. While Kristy’s was big even before Mrs. Thomas married Watson Brewer, Mary Anne has just her dad and her kitten, Tigger. Mrs. Spier died when Mary Anne was really young. Mr. Spier used to be incredibly strict with Mary Anne, but over the past year, he’s loosened up a lot. Now Mary Anne has stopped wearing the jumpers and kilts and loafers her father used to choose for her, and has started wearing more trendy clothes. She’s branched out in terms of friends, too. She and Dawn are very close, and then there’s Logan. Mary Anne would never have had a boyfriend last year….

The other person coming to New York was Dawn Schafer. Dawn is now the treasurer, which used to be my job. Dawn had been a sort of substitute officer (we called her an alternate officer) before I moved, so she easily filled my position. (In case you’re wondering, when I left the club, the girls replaced me with two sixth-graders, junior officers named Mallory Pike and Jessi Ramsey. They weren’t coming to visit because I didn’t know Mal that well and I didn’t know Jessi at all. Plus, their parents wouldn’t have let them come.) The treasurer’s job is to keep track of the money the club members earn, and to collect weekly dues, which are spent on club supplies and stuff.

Dawn was not an original member of the club. She moved to Connecticut from California about four months after Kristy started the club. She moved because her parents got a divorce, so this past year has been a wild one for Dawn, too. Besides having to adjust to life without her father, she had to get used to the East Coast, especially to cold weather. She had to start at a new school in the middle of a year, and make new friends, and her mom had to find a job. Then, not long ago, Dawn’s younger brother decided he just couldn’t handle that new life, and he moved back to California and Mr. Schafer. Dawn misses her brother a lot, but she seems happy enough. She’s very close to her mother. Besides — she’s got the Baby-sitters Club!

Dawn is a real individual. She’s a health-food freak. She does things her own way and doesn’t care what people think of her. I guess that means she has a lot of self-confidence. And she sure stands out in a crowd. Her hair falls all the way to her waist and is so blonde it’s almost white. Her eyes are a dear, pale blue. I remember feeling practically speechless the first time I saw her.

The more I thought about my friends, the more eager I became to see them. But the taxi was just crawling along. We seemed to be approaching a traffic jam at Columbus Circle. There was nothing to do but settle back and wait.

So I did. When we finally reached Grand Central, I paid the cabbie and scrambled out of the taxi.

In a few minutes, the members of the Baby-sitters Club would be reunited!