Needless to say, I was a nervous wreck by the time I got home. All sorts of horrible thoughts ran through my mind as I dashed from Bradford Court, where Claudia and Mary Anne live, to my own street. Maybe my grandfather was sick … or worse. Maybe my dad had been in an accident driving home from his job in Stamford. Maybe, maybe …
But when I burst through the front door of my house, I found both Mom and Dad in the kitchen, putting supper on the table. Whatever it was couldn’t be too bad, or they wouldn’t be folding napkins and filling glasses with milk.
“Here I am!” I exclaimed. “Mom, what’s the matter? I thought someone had died or something!”
“Oh, Stace, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.” My mother kissed my cheek. “We have something important to tell you, that’s all. Now sit down. Supper’s almost ready.”
“You’re not making me go to another doctor, are you?” I asked warily as I slid into my seat.
When I’d first gotten diabetes, Mom and Dad had been scared to death. They’d dragged me from one strange doctor to another, trying to find a “cure,” even though there is no cure for diabetes — just ways to control it. They’d nearly driven me bananas. As it was, all my friends thought I was either crazy or contagious. Things got so bad for us that when Dad’s boss offered him a job heading up a new branch of his company in Stamford, Connecticut, he took it, and we moved out of New York and up here to Stoneybrook. My parents finally calmed down about my disease, and I made friends with Claudia and the other members of the Baby-sitters Club. After a while, I even made up with Laine, my New York best friend. (She was mad at me for keeping secrets from her, and we’d had a fight.) So I hoped Mom and Dad weren’t going to ruin things by getting weird about my diabetes again.
“Another doctor?” my mother repeated. “Oh, no. Nothing like that.” She set out a bowl of broccoli, a fresh green salad, and a plate of baked chicken legs, all foods I can eat. When we were done serving ourselves, I looked expectantly from my mother to my father. One of them had better start talking soon, I thought. Before they did, something exciting occurred to me.
“Hey, Mom, are you pregnant? You are, aren’t you?” I exclaimed. My parents always wanted to have another kid after they had me, but they hadn’t been able to. Maybe I was finally going to be a big sister.
Dad smiled ruefully. “I wish that were the truth,” he said, “but it isn’t. I think I better tell you what’s really going on before you imagine us colonizing Mars or something.”
I giggled.
“All right,” he went on. “This is the truth. Do you remember when my company opened the branch in Stamford?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Right before we moved here.”
Dad nodded. “Well, the new branch isn’t doing well at all. The company has decided to get rid of it —”
“Oh, no! You lost your job!” I cried. Frantically, I began to calculate how much money I had saved from baby-sitting jobs, and how far it could be stretched.
“Not quite,” said Dad. “They’re combining the Stamford branch with the Boston branch. And I’m being transferred back to New York.”
After I dropped my knife onto my plate, a silence fell over the room. The room, in fact, became so silent that I could hear the Marshalls’ dog barking two houses away.
“Stacey?” said my mom gently. “We know this is a surprise, but think how much you’ve missed New York.”
“I know, I know. I am thinking about that.” I really had missed New York, even though my last few months there had been pretty unhappy, what with doctor visits, and friends who’d become former friends, and even a couple of stays in the hospital. On the other hand, I liked Stoneybrook a lot. I didn’t have any former friends here, only true, good friends — except for Howie and Dori, the Jerk Twins. And I had the Baby-sitters Club and Charlotte Johanssen and a school I liked and a whole big house, instead of a not-so-big, tenth-floor apartment.
“Think of all the wonderful things we’ll have when we move back to the city,” said my father. “Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
“Central Park and the Donnell Library,” added my mother.
“Bloomingdale’s, Saks, Tiffany’s, Benetton, Laura Ashley, Ann Taylor, Bonwit Teller, Bergdorf Goodman, and B. Altman’s,” I added, wondering if my parents would decide I was old enough to get some charge cards.
Mom and Dad laughed.
“That’s the spirit,” said my mother. “Eat your salad.” (She watches me like a hawk, to make sure I stick exactly to my special diet.)
I ate a mouthful of salad, and, for good measure, one of chicken. “When are we moving? I hope it’s at the end of the school year. I’m really looking forward to graduating with Claudia.”
My parents glanced at each other.
“I’m afraid we can’t possibly wait that long,” my father told me. “The end of the school year isn’t for months. We’ll be back in New York four or five weeks from now.”
“Four or five weeks?!” For the second time that night, I dropped my knife onto my plate.
“The company wants me back as soon as possible,” said Dad, “and I plan to do what they ask. I feel lucky that we don’t have to pick up and move to Boston.”
“We put the house on the market today,” Mom informed me, “and we’ve got real estate agents looking for an apartment in New York. We’re going to try to move back to the neighborhood we were in before. That way you’ll be near Laine again. Oh, and I talked to Miss Chardon at Parker Academy. You’ll be able to rejoin your class there.”
I couldn’t believe it. My head was spinning. Should I jump for joy and call Laine with the great news, or burst into tears and call Claudia with the rotten news?
Mom and Dad took my silence for shock and rushed ahead with more promises.
“We’re going to try to find a bigger apartment,” said my mother.
“We’ll buy tickets to a show once a month,” said my father.
“Claudia can visit you anytime.”
“You can visit her anytime.”
My excitement was growing. It was taking over any other feelings. I remember how I liked to walk down New York streets, and I could almost feel the city pulsing around me. It was noisy and busy and fast. There was something going on in New York at all hours of the day and night. In our old apartment, when I looked out of my bedroom window at night, I could see the city spread out before me, a maze of lighted windows. When I look out my window here at night, I see, well, darkness. Plus, there’s not a thing to do in Stoneybrook after 10 P.M.
“Mom? Dad? This is great!” I cried. “Can I call Laine?”
My parents grinned.
“You can call her when you’ve finished your dinner,” said Mom.
I never ate a meal so fast in my life. In a flash I was upstairs in my bedroom. I have a phone in my room, just like Claudia does, but I don’t have a private number. I dialed Laine.
“Hi!” I said. “It’s Stacey. You will never in a million years guess what I have to tell you.”
“What?” screeched Laine.
I gave her the news.
She screeched some more. Then we began to talk and make plans about my return to New York. “I’ll even be back in our class at Parker,” I told her.
Laine paused. “You will?”
“Yeah…. Why?”
“Well, I don’t know. I was just thinking about when you left. I mean, Allison Ritz and Val Schirmer and all those girls who, um —”
“Who hated me,” I finished for her. I began to feel slightly numb. Who was I kidding? I’d been dying to get away from New York and all those former friends by the time we moved to Stoneybrook. How could I have forgotten about that? Here in Connecticut I had Claudia and Mary Anne and Dawn and Kristy, real friends who liked me and didn’t care that I had diabetes.
“Laine,” I said, “I better go. I’ll call you again soon, okay? … Thanks…. Bye.” I depressed the button on the phone and then dialed Claudia’s number. “Hi, Claud,” I said when she’d answered, and immediately I began to cry.
“What is it? What’s wrong, Stace?” she kept asking.
When I finally managed to give her the news, Claudia began to cry, too.
“I have to see you,” I told her. “I have to talk to you right now. Do you think I could come over even though it’s a school night?”
“I’ll check with my parents,” Claudia said, “And you check with yours.”
Ten minutes later, I was on my way back to the Kishis’.