Good-bye Stacey, Good-bye by Ann M. Martin Read Free Book Online

long last, Nicky climbed out of the tree with the tape recorder.
    "Let's go inside and find out what they said," he suggested.
    "Don't you know?" asked Mallory.
    "Nope. I fell asleep."
    The Pikes were tired of spying so they followed Nicky into the house. The first part of the tape was nothing but birds chirping and leaves rustling. Once, Nicky yawned. At long last, though, a voice was heard. Only one sentence was spoken and then a door slammed.
    The voice said, "Ve vill have courgettes for deener." Then, slam!
    "That just sounds like a regular old French accent," I said, but nobody heard me. The kids were in a panic.
    "Courgettes? What are courgettes?" shrieked the Pikes.
    "Children?" suggested Nicky, with terror in his eyes.
    There was confusion until Mallory thought to look up the word in a cookbook. "Courgettes," she informed everyone, "is the French word for zucchini. You know, squash?"
    Claudia grinned. Mallory had saved the day. She had prevented hysteria. Thank goodness she was so practical.
    Claudia told me later that as she walked home that evening, she thought about my moving. She thought about the hole I'd leave in the club. Could Mallory fill the hole? she wondered. No, she decided immediately. Mallory was good with kids, but she was two years younger than the rest of us sitters. How would she fit into the club? And she didn't have nearly as much experience as I did.
    As Kristy had said, I was going to be hard to replace.
    Chapter 8.
    "What do you think?" asked Claudia, holding up some sample ads for our yard sale.
    "Well," I said, trying to be tactful, "the art is wonderful, Claud. I love your snail with his antennae, and the house on his back instead of a shell. . . ."
    "But?" Claudia prompted me.
    I glanced at our other friends.
    "But the poetry stinks," spoke up Kristy. ''Hasty and Stacey don't rhyme, and we don't have any snails for sale."
    "Well, thanks a lot," said Claudia huffily.
    The members of the Baby-sitters Club were gathered, for the third afternoon in a row, at my house to get ready for the yard sale. Mom was right. A sale was a lot of work, but we'd been having fun. At least, we had been up until now.
    "Hey, everybody," I said, "I don't want to be a slave driver or anything, but we don't really have time for arguments."
    "But, Stacey, Kristy is so rude," Claudia complained, looking wounded.
    "I'm sorry," Kristy said contritely. "Really I am. Look, why don't we divide up the work on the ads and each do what we're best at? Dawn and I will write the poems, Mary Anne and Stacey, you do the lettering, and Claudia,
    you illustrate the ads. . . . Nobody can draw as well as you," she added.
    Claudia looked mollified. "All right/' she agreed.
    "And after we've made a few more good ads to put up," I said, "we better start tagging all that junk in the basement."
    We bent over our papers and worked busily.
    "Now this is an advertisement," Kristy announced a few minutes later. "Listen."
    Here's what she read:
    " 'We're moving back to New York City, We know it's going to be hard. But things will be just a little bit better, If you'll come to the sale in our yard.' "
    "Not bad," I agreed. "I like that. Mary Anne, let's each letter one of those poems."
    "Okay," she said and set to work on a piece of bright yellow construction paper.
    "All right, how's this?" said Dawn after a few more minutes. She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. Then, as if she were about to recite a composition in English class, she stood up, put her hands behind her back and said gravely, "Red are the roses, blue are the seas. . . . Come buy our junk. Please, please, please, please!"
    For a moment, no one could tell whether
    Dawn was joking or serious, but when we realized she was practically turning blue from trying not to laugh, we all began snickering and giggling. Dawn laughed the hardest of all.
    "Very funny," I said, when we'd recovered. "Does anyone want something to drink?"
    "Only if you've got some soda that's just brimming