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

with sugar, caffeine, and sodium," replied Kristy. "And maybe some artificial coloring, and, oh, some bigludium exforbi-nate."
    I laughed. "We've probably got something like that. I'm going to have iced tea, though."
    "I'll have iced tea, too," said Dawn, who had turned green at the very thought of artificial coloring.
    "I'll go for the glutious exorbitants," said Claudia.
    "Me, too," said Mary Anne.
    Claudia followed me to the kitchen and helped me fill five glasses. I'd noticed lately that when she and I were with the rest of the club, we acted happy or silly, and kidded around. But when we were alone we fell into a sad kind of silence. We weren't angry; we just had all these "last things" to say to each other but didn't know how to say them, which was maybe the saddest thing of all about my moving.
    "You know/' I said, dancing around the edge of the awful subject, "I haven't told Charlotte that I'm moving."
    Claudia, who was standing by the ice-maker in the freezer, glanced over her shoulder at me. "You haven't?" she said in surprise.
    I shook my head. "I guess I've been putting it off."
    "You better tell her soon," said Claud. "I mean, the ads for the yard sale will be a major clue. Don't you think she should find out from you and not from some poem that begins 'Red are the roses, blue are the seas'?"
    I smiled. "I guess so. It's not going to be easy, though."
    "No, I suppose it isn't. If she feels anything like me ..."
    I waited for Claudia to finish her sentence, but she let it hang there.
    "Well," I said, "we better go back upstairs. Kristy's waiting to be bigludium exforbinated."
    Claudia just nodded. I thought she looked a little teary, but by the time we had joined the others, she seemed fine.
    We worked on the ads until we had finished our soda and iced tea. We'd made quite a stack and were pretty proud of them.
    "All right," I said. "Down to the basement.
    Wait'11 you guys see what Mom bought for us this morning."
    "What? What?" cried my friends.
    "You'll see/' was all I'd tell them.
    We reached the top of the steps to the basement and I flicked on the light. The sale items were downstairs in a big jumble on, under, and around the Ping-Pong table we'd bought the winter before and now had to sell.
    "These," I said when the five of us were standing by the sale items, "are what my mom bought us." I held up two small packages from the dime store.
    "What are they?" asked Mary Anne.
    "Price tags. Blank ones." I replied. "Some that we can stick on, and some that we can tie on things we don't want to gum up, like stuffed animals or clothes."
    "Oh, great!" exclaimed Kristy. "This sale is going to look so professional! Let's start the tagging right now."
    "Okay." I took a sweater from off the pile of clothes I'd outgrown. "What do you guys think? Forty dollars?"
    "Forty!" screeched Claudia. "Are you kidding?"
    "Well, Mom must have paid a lot for it, and it's only a year old. Forty dollars is a steal."
    "Not at a yard sale it isn't," said Mary Anne.
    "Are you sure?" asked Dawn.
    "Dawn, have you ever been to a yard sale?" asked Kristy.
    "No. People in California don't have yard sales."
    "Well, trust me; you put a forty-dollar tag on that sweater, and our customers will laugh us right out of the yard."
    After a whole lot of haggling, my friends talked me down to $3.50.1 was stunned. "How are we going to earn any money?" I asked.
    "We will," Kristy insisted. "You'll see."
    Finally, we got the hang of how much we could charge for things, so we divided up the items and set to work separately. The pricing went quickly that way. We'd gone through maybe a third of the stuff when, very slowly, Kristy raised her head and looked around at the rest of us. "Heyyy," she said softly in a way I knew meant she'd just had another one of her brilliant business ideas.
    "What?" we asked.
    "I have an idea."
    (I knew it!)
    "Let's make this sale more than just a regular yard sale. Let's sell lemonade, too."
    "And how about those great brownies I can