Claudia and the Bad Joke (9 page)

     
“That’s nice, Betsy,” said Dawn. “That’s very nice. Thank you so much. I want you to know that I really appreciate your ruining my Kid-Kit.”

     
“Oh, it’s not ruined,” Betsy assured her. “The slime is just one big glob. I can get it all out of the box at once. I’ll show you.”

     
Betsy reached her hand in the box and withdrew the slime. Sure enough, it was in one big glob. Dawn checked the Kid-Kit anyway, though.

     
The slime was gone.

     
“Where do you keep it?” asked Dawn. “The slime?” said Betsy. “In this can.” Betsy pulled a can out from under a chair, where she’d apparently been hiding it. She dropped the slime back in. Slurp.

     
“What a disgusting noise,” said Dawn, trying to look ill. “That slime is . . Oh . . . Oh, my. . .“ Dawn raised her hand to her forehead.

     
“What’s wrong?” asked Betsy, looking alarmed. She put the lid on the can and set the slime on the table.

     
“I — I feel a little . . a little . . . faint,” Dawn replied weakly. And with that, she flopped over onto the rug.

     
“Dawn!” Betsy exclaimed. “Dawn, wake up!”

     
Dawn waited until she was pretty sure Betsy was leaning over her. Then she opened her eyes and shouted, “BOO!”

     
“Eeee!” cried Betsy, leaping back.

     
Dawn began to laugh.

     
After a moment, so did Betsy.

     
Dawn shrugged her shoulders. There seemed to be no beating the practical-joke queen.

     
“Come sit on the couch,” Betsy said to Dawn. “I’m sorry about the slime.” Betsy stood up, sat on the couch, and patted the seat next to her.

     
An apology. That was a good sign. Maybe Betsy would want to read for awhile. Dawn got Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and joined Betsy.

FW000000!

     
Suddenly Betsy was hysterical again. “Gotcha with the pooh-pooh cushion!” she exclaimed.

     
That did it. Dawn lost no time in pretending she’d seen a mouse. She screamed, “A MOUSE!” and jumped up on a chair. Before she could even think, Betsy did the same thing.

     
“Got you!” cried Dawn. “There is no mouse!”

     
Once again, Betsy laughed.

     
Another joke battle was on. Betsy startled Dawn with a fountain pen that squirted water at her. Dawn pulled out the rubber spider. Betsy pulled out a fat rubber toad. That was unfortunate, because by then, Dawn had run out of tricks.

     
She decided to try reasoning with Betsy. “Why do you play jokes all the time?” she asked her.

     
“Because 1 like to,” Betsy replied. How could Dawn argue with that? The kid just liked jokes. And she was quick to point out that her baby-sitters played them, too.

     
“Well, do you think you could stop for awhile?” asked Dawn. “It would be a refreshing change.”

     
So Betsy stopped. She and Dawn played

with some of the stuff in the slime-free KidKit. They actually had a good time. They even

got so involved in a game of Monopoly that Dawn forgot about lunch until she heard Betsy’s stomach growl. She looked at her watch.

     
“Quarter of one!” she cried. “Betsy, we’ve got to eat lunch.”

     
“Aw, but —“ Betsy started to protest. “It’s okay,” Dawn told her. “We’ll leave the game right here. We’ll come back to it after lunch.”

     
“Okay,” said Betsy.

     
Dawn fixed soup and sandwiches. After she and Betsy had eaten, Betsy sat back in her chair and looked at Dawn thoughtfully. “I’m

really sorry,” she said quietly. “You know, about the jokes. All of them.” This time Betsy sounded as if she meant it.

     
“You are?” Dawn replied. “Well, I’m glad to hear you say that. It isn’t easy to apologize.”

     
Betsy shook her head. “No, it isn’t,” she agreed. “And you know what? To make up for what I did, I’m going to fix us a special dessert.”

     
Dawn was about to refuse, since she doesn’t eat junk food, but she knew that now was not the time to turn down Betsy’s offer. Betsy was trying to make up for things. Wasn’t she?

     
“Okay,” said Dawn. “What kind of dessert?”

     
“Ice-cream sundaes.”

     
Dawn sighed. Not only did she really not want any ice cream, but she remembered Mary Anne and Jessi’s experience when the triplets had fixed sundaes. However, that was the Pikes’ house, not the Sobaks’.

     
“Great!” said Dawn, hoping she sounded enthusiastic. “I’ll clean up the kitchen table, you make the sundaes.”

     
By the time Dawn had put the leftover food away and loaded the dishwasher, Betsy was carrying two dishes to the table. She had made real sundaes — ice cream topped with whipped cream, a cherry, and chopped peanuts. Dawn wished she liked sundaes better.

     
Betsy set one dish in front of Dawn and sat down with the other. She took a bite. “Oh, heavenly,” she said. She closed her eyes for a

moment.

     
Reluctantly, Dawn lifted her spoon. She just knew she was going to regret this. She would probably get pimples and cavities from all the sugar. She was concentrating so hard on how unhealthy the ice-cream was that she forgot about who had dished it out — the practicaljoke queen. She put the spoon in her mouth. And then she did something she had never done before. Well, at least not since she was

a very little kid. She spit her mouthful back

out.

     
“Oh, disgusting!” she cried. “Betsy, what is this? It tastes like soap.”

     
“It’s shaving cream! Gotcha!” Betsy managed to choke out. “I got whipped cream. You got shaving cream!”

     
Dawn just shook her head.

     
When Mr. and Mrs. Sobak came home, Dawn didn’t say a word about the jokes. She couldn’t. It would seem like tattling. And it sounded so babyish.

     
But babyish or not, another battle in the practical-joke war had been fought — and Dawn was pretty sure that this time Betsy Sobak had won.

I was bored.

     
Not just a little bit, rainy-day sort of bored. I was loll-around-the-house, complain-abouteverything bored. I was so bored I wanted to go back to school.

     
It was hard to believe.

     
I don’t know how Mimi put up with me.

     
It was a Monday afternoon. I’d been home from the hospital since a week before the previous Thursday (longer than the doctor had first said I would have to stay home). The good news was that I didn’t have to stay in bed so much and I could go back to school on Wednesday. The bad news was that by that time I would have missed three weeks of school. Even though I’d been keeping up with my homework, I was worried about the classwork I’d missed. When you’re me, it’s not ~ good idea to miss three weeks of school. It’s hard

enough keeping up when you’re there every dày.

     
“Mimi,” I said, as I waited for my friends to arrive for our club meeting, “what if I have to stay back? Do you think I’ll have to repeat eighth grade? It would be honible! All my friends would go on to the high school and I’d be left behind with a bunch of drippy former seventh-graders who probably wouldn’t even —“

     
“Claudia, my Claudia,” Mimi interrupted me.

     
She was sitting at the kitchen table, shelling peas for dinner. I was supposedly helping her, but I’d reached that point where I was so bored I didn’t want to do anything.

     
That doesn’t make much sense, does it? You’d think if you were bored enough, you’d be happy for little chores. Like, if someone came up to you and said, “Would you please pick the lint balls off my sweater?” you’d say, “Oh, thank you thank you thank you. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I’ve been waiting for something like this.” But that wasn’t the case with me. The boreder I got, the less I wanted to do except start my regular life again.

     
“Claudia, you let imani — ima — you let

thoughts run away with you,” said Mimi. “No. I think you do not have to repeat grade. You are worry too much. If you fall very far behind, maybe summer school. But your mother, your father, your sister, and I we help you.”

     
I nodded. “I know you will. I guess I’m just nervous. I’ve never missed three weeks of school before. At first it did seem like a vacation. Now it doesn’t seem like one at all.”

     
“You know, my Claudia,” said Mimi gently, and she stopped shelling the peas for a moment, “I have idea about you. I am not. . . I am not . . . head doctor, but this is what I think. I think you worry about school because there is something else you not want to worry about. And that is baby-sitting. What about club? Do you make decision yet?”

     
I shifted my position uncomfortably. I was sitting on one kitchen chair with my leg propped up on another.

     
“No,” I replied. “I haven’t made a decision.”

     
“You think about it?” Mimi asked me.

     
“Well, not too much. I’ve been trying not to.”

     
Mimi nodded. Janine or my parents might have prodded me or scolded me, but Mimi just accepted that I was having some trouble.

     
I looked at the kitchen clock. Five-fifteen. My friends would be arriving soon, but not

soon enough to save me from this discussion. “You know what the problem is?” I said to Mimi. ~I don’t think I want to make a decision. I don’t want to baby-sit because I’m afraid to, and I don’t want to drop out of the club because I like being part of it. So if I don’t make up my mind, I won’t have to do either one.”

     
“That is called being in limbo, my Claudia, and you cannot stay there,” Mimi informed me gently. She wasn’t going to come right out and say it, but she meant that I better make a decision.

“I just can’t decide,” I told her. “I know I should be able to talk to you or Mom or Dad or Janine — or my friends — but I feel like I can’t because there’s nothing to say. I don’t know how to talk about this anymore. It’s not — Ring, ring.

     
“I’ll get it,” I said. I had chosen my spot in the kitchen carefully. I was close to both the phone and the refrigerator. I could get to either one without moving much. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

     
“Hi!”

     
“Hi, Stacey! How come you’re calling on this line?”

     
“Because I figured you’d be downstairs. . . And I was right!”

     
“Oh. Well, great timing! Everyone’s going to be here in a few minutes.”

     
“I know. That’s why I called now. I wanted to talk to you, and I figured that by the time we finished, the other girls would have arrived and I could talk to them, too.”

     
“Oh, good. But it’d be easier if I talked to you in my room. So if you don’t mind, let me crawl upstairs and I’ll call you from my phone. Okay?”

     
“Okay.”

     
Stacey and I hung up. “Mimi?” I said. “I know I have to make a decision. I know I can’t stay in limbo. So I will decide. But it might take awhile.”

     
“That is okay, my Claudia. It is okay as long as you are responsible. And making the decision is part of being responsible.”

     
I nodded. Then I got my crutches, hobbled to the stairs, and with Mimi watching anxiously from below, backed awkwardly to the second floor on my bottom, dragging my crutches with me. When I reached my room, I settled on my bed and dialed Stacey.

     
“Hi,” I said. “Okay, I’m in my room now. How are you doing?”

     
“Fine,” Stacey replied. “How are you?”

     
“Bored.”

     
“I bet. Once I missed a whole month of

school. I was so bored my mother said she was going to look for a full-time job. She couldn’t take me anymore. Of course, she was kidding. I think.”

“Mimi’s being really patient,” I told Stacey. “What else would Mimi be?” Stacey replied. We laughed.

     
“Well?” said Stacey.

     
“Well, what?”

     
“Well, what are you going to do about the Baby-sitters Club?”

     
"Oh, my lord. Is that all anyone can think of?”

     
“Excuse me,” said Stacey. “It was only a question.”

     
“Sorry. Mimi just asked me about it, too. The answer is, I still don’t know.”

     
Stacey and I talked for a few more minutes, and even though that was really great, it made me think how much I miss her. We used to have all the time in the world for talks. Then my friends started to arrive. Dawn and Kristy came first, then Mary Anne, then Mallory, then Jessi. Dawn, Kristy, and Mary Anne each spoke with Stacey.

     
“I,” I said to Jessi and Mallory while the others were crowded around the phone, “will be so glad to put on real clothes. You can’t imagine. I haven’t been dressed in days.”

     
“Do you know what you’re going to wear to school on Wednesday?” asked Jessi.

     
“Not for sure. But it’ll have to be a dress. I’m not going to cut slits up the legs of all my pants and jeans, just so I can get them on over my cast. . . . Hey, Mary Anne!” I whispered loudly, tapping her arm. “Get off the phone, okay? This call is costing a fortune.”

     
When Mary Anne had said good-bye, Kristy called the meeting to order. “Our first piece of business,” she said, “is that we need an answer, Claud.”