The All-New Mallory Pike, Chapters 4-6
Mallory and her parents travel to Riverbend, the Pike kids are brats, and we arrive at Riverbend.
Chapter 4
Mallory wakes up and describes her room. So if you ever want to write a Mallory fanfiction, check out the description: yellow curtains, horse posters, big wooden M Mallory and her dad found at a junk shop. Vanessa has an Emily Dickinson poster on her wall. I checked to see if this was a real thing, and it is.
I found one here.
I think it's quite pretty and I would hang it on my wall, except I'm not a poetry person.
Vanessa apparently makes Mal give her a weather report in exchange for a poem every morning. Mallory's getting the shit end of the stick here, because the poem she gets is, "Today's the day!/It's super cool./Mallory's going off to school." On the wall, Emily is making gagging noises.
Breakfast is chaotic and her siblings don't seem to care very much about Mallory leaving. Adam is pissed that Mallory took so long to get downstairs because his parents wouldn't let him start eating without her. Mallory gets dressed in a blue sweater and jeans: dull, but nice. Better than the tracksuit on the cover. Jessi comes to see her off (and then baby-sit) and they cry. :(
Chapter 5
The next chapter is a Mary Anne/Jessi baby-sitting chapter, the notebook entry of which I am sure makes all those cursive-haters out there cry. (My handwriting looks like Mary Anne's, so, get over it and stop telling me you can't read cursive :))
Adam, Byron, and Jordan decide to step into Mal's older sibling role, and they turn into three Kristys. They don't want anyone in charge of them. They have a point: Mal is only a year older than them; they deserve some responsibility. Jessi doesn't have much to stand on here, being eleven to their ten. That was one thing I never understood about the BSC. Thirteen, maybe, but eleven was so close to the clients' ages. And in some cases (Tiffany, Ben Hobart), people went back and forth between being a sitter and being a sittee.
Mallory mentions in her narration that the experiment (Dawn and Too Many Sitters) with letting the triplets be junior baby-sitters hadn't worked out. Perhaps it would have worked out if the Pike parents had bothered to delegate any responsibility to a child other than Mallory. Did you ever see the Pikes do chores?
Nicky, as always, is hiding somewhere creepily. This time, he was in a crawl space under the stairs.
This actually is how I picture Nicky Pike.
Jessi and Mary Anne tell Nicky he has to go pick up his legos. Nicky says Mal wouldn't have made him take apart his castle. I foresee this being used as an excuse for months to come.
Poor Claire is crying because no one bothered to explain to her what "drop off" and "boarding school" mean, and she is upset because she thinks her parents and oldest sister have fucked off to "Chassamoosets" forever, leaving her to be raised by the triplets and a rotating cast of BSC members. They explain it all to her, like the Pike parents should have done weeks ago.
Claire goes to her room, and suddenly, she is annoying to Margo, who points out that Claire can't last five seconds without singing a stupid song. Fair point.
I read Kristy in Charge a couple of days ago (where the whole "Spaz Girl" thing started) and Vanessa is very obnoxious in that book as well, holding the younger Pike kids hostage in her Poetry Jail, I mean School. Like Haley Braddock, Vanessa Pike's character goes from mildly annoying to total asshole at the end of the series.
Right now, though, she is just mourning the loss of Mallory. She is in their room, dressed all in black, with the lights off and the curtains drawn, writing by the light of a single desk lamp.
Mary Anne tells her that Mallory is not dead, and this is where Asshole!Vanessa comes out. Vanessa tells her that Mary Anne has never lost a sister, and Mary Anne begins to remind her that duh, Dawn left them for California, but Vanessa would rather read her some more terrible poetry. Jessi pretends to hear the triplets fighting and they get the fuck out of there.
Unfortunately, what is waiting for them is only incrementally more pleasant than listening to Vanessa's poetry or breaking up a fight between the triplets. Everyone has realized that with Mallory gone, Vanessa has a room all to herself. Perhaps the Pike parents should have thought of that ahead of time. Nobody's going to stand for Vanessa living by herself when all four boys share a room.
Vanessa basically goes, "FUCK YOU" to all her siblings, and claims she's been waiting her whole life for a room of her own.
The Pike Room Wars are on.
Chapter 6
Mallory and her parents arrive in Easton, Massachusetts, home of Riverbend Hall. Unfortunately for the Scholastic editors, Easton is a real place, considered part of the Providence metropolitan area, and not in the Berkshires like this book's Easton. Easton is described as being "20 miles from Stockbridge, one of the bigger cities in this part of Massachusetts," and there is a Stockbridge, MA in the Berkshires, but its population is 1,947. It sounds fairly well-known for such a small town, since it has a Norman Rockwell museum, so perhaps they should have researched it a bit better.
Riverbend is described as being made up of small white buildings with green shutters that look like houses.
This is a building at Smith College. Since it's Ann, let's just assume Riverbend is supposed to look like this.
There is also a meetinghouse made of brick for dining and school-wide meetings, a red barn that is now used for art classes, and a library. It all sounds very nice and there is a stream.
Notice there is no gym. Mallory's Fantasy School does not include a gym.
All of the buildings at Riverbend are named after famous women (I guess Riverbend is too new to have rich alumni who donate money to the school and insist on having the building named after them). Mallory lives in Earhart.
Now, here, for me, is where things kind of take a turn for the unreal. Mallory is greeted at Earhart by Pam, a student. She is a senior, but lives in the sixth-grade dorm as a kind of "housemother." Now, usually students who take a leadership role in residence life at a boarding school are called "prefects," but I'm not going to quibble with that because boarding schools are like cults in that they develop their own weird languages over time.
I'm not going to give you an example because then if someone who went to my school read this, they would automatically know that I went there. But I can say things that sound as meaningless as the stuff that ol' Tom Cruise is saying up there, and it would make total sense to anyone who went to my school in the past seventy or so years. If I have a family dinner or something and I need to know the level of formality, I'll still discuss it with my brother using our dress code's terms for various levels of dress.
But anyway, a boarding school would NOT leave a senior in high school in charge of an entire dorm of sixth-grade girls. There is never any mention in the book of a teacher living in the dorm as well. Even as seniors, we had several teachers living in our dorm in apartments. At night, there was a teacher in our hallway. In boarding school, there are teachers EVERYWHERE. Finding places where they can't find you so you can have sex or do drugs or smoke or drink is basically a varsity sport.
Pam shows Mallory and the Pikes Mallory's room. Pam hesitates a little when she says that she is sure that Alexis is looking forward to meeting Mal, so you know that it's not true.
Alexis has also taken over almost the entire room, which consists of two beds, a desk at the foot of each bed, and a long, low dresser in between, two windows, plus a closet. Alexis's stuff covers the entire top of the dresser, and almost all of the closet. There is no room on the walls for Mallory's BSC collage. Alexis has put up pictures of "slightly scary-looking rockstars" instead. Mallory naively figures that Alexis has forgotten that she was getting a roommate this semester.
Mallory tells her parents to leave, since she wants to face her new life alone. She smells her pillow, which smells comfortingly of home. She heads to new student orientation, where the dean, Jane Maxwell, has the new students introduce themselves. There is only one other new sixth grader, Smita Narula, who is from NYC via New Delhi (even more sophisticated than Stacey!) and already has friends at Riverbend.
Riverbend is described as an "alternative school with progressive ideas about education. The focus is on drama, writing, dance, visual arts, and music. Even the other courses such as math and gym are given a creative twist." I'm not sure how you can give math a creative twist and still learn algebra, but whatever.
Teachers are called by their first name and students are given rotating jobs to keep the school running. One of the jobs is working in the faculty daycare, which, as you can imagine, excites Mal. She is probably composing a letter to Kristy in her head about how she is going to keep her baby-sitting chops sharp while she is away. Oh, and Jane mentions how each dorm has a "prefect," but my previous statement about how having a dorm with JUST a prefect would never, ever happen still stands.
Smita and Mallory and Pam all hang out in the living room. Riverbend seems awesome so far, but you know that Mallory can't have nice things and soon the shit will hit the fan.
Next time, we will meet Alexis DeCamp.
Chapter 4
Mallory wakes up and describes her room. So if you ever want to write a Mallory fanfiction, check out the description: yellow curtains, horse posters, big wooden M Mallory and her dad found at a junk shop. Vanessa has an Emily Dickinson poster on her wall. I checked to see if this was a real thing, and it is.
I found one here.
I think it's quite pretty and I would hang it on my wall, except I'm not a poetry person.
Vanessa apparently makes Mal give her a weather report in exchange for a poem every morning. Mallory's getting the shit end of the stick here, because the poem she gets is, "Today's the day!/It's super cool./Mallory's going off to school." On the wall, Emily is making gagging noises.
Breakfast is chaotic and her siblings don't seem to care very much about Mallory leaving. Adam is pissed that Mallory took so long to get downstairs because his parents wouldn't let him start eating without her. Mallory gets dressed in a blue sweater and jeans: dull, but nice. Better than the tracksuit on the cover. Jessi comes to see her off (and then baby-sit) and they cry. :(
Chapter 5
The next chapter is a Mary Anne/Jessi baby-sitting chapter, the notebook entry of which I am sure makes all those cursive-haters out there cry. (My handwriting looks like Mary Anne's, so, get over it and stop telling me you can't read cursive :))
Adam, Byron, and Jordan decide to step into Mal's older sibling role, and they turn into three Kristys. They don't want anyone in charge of them. They have a point: Mal is only a year older than them; they deserve some responsibility. Jessi doesn't have much to stand on here, being eleven to their ten. That was one thing I never understood about the BSC. Thirteen, maybe, but eleven was so close to the clients' ages. And in some cases (Tiffany, Ben Hobart), people went back and forth between being a sitter and being a sittee.
Mallory mentions in her narration that the experiment (Dawn and Too Many Sitters) with letting the triplets be junior baby-sitters hadn't worked out. Perhaps it would have worked out if the Pike parents had bothered to delegate any responsibility to a child other than Mallory. Did you ever see the Pikes do chores?
Nicky, as always, is hiding somewhere creepily. This time, he was in a crawl space under the stairs.
This actually is how I picture Nicky Pike.
Jessi and Mary Anne tell Nicky he has to go pick up his legos. Nicky says Mal wouldn't have made him take apart his castle. I foresee this being used as an excuse for months to come.
Poor Claire is crying because no one bothered to explain to her what "drop off" and "boarding school" mean, and she is upset because she thinks her parents and oldest sister have fucked off to "Chassamoosets" forever, leaving her to be raised by the triplets and a rotating cast of BSC members. They explain it all to her, like the Pike parents should have done weeks ago.
Claire goes to her room, and suddenly, she is annoying to Margo, who points out that Claire can't last five seconds without singing a stupid song. Fair point.
I read Kristy in Charge a couple of days ago (where the whole "Spaz Girl" thing started) and Vanessa is very obnoxious in that book as well, holding the younger Pike kids hostage in her Poetry Jail, I mean School. Like Haley Braddock, Vanessa Pike's character goes from mildly annoying to total asshole at the end of the series.
Right now, though, she is just mourning the loss of Mallory. She is in their room, dressed all in black, with the lights off and the curtains drawn, writing by the light of a single desk lamp.
Mary Anne tells her that Mallory is not dead, and this is where Asshole!Vanessa comes out. Vanessa tells her that Mary Anne has never lost a sister, and Mary Anne begins to remind her that duh, Dawn left them for California, but Vanessa would rather read her some more terrible poetry. Jessi pretends to hear the triplets fighting and they get the fuck out of there.
Unfortunately, what is waiting for them is only incrementally more pleasant than listening to Vanessa's poetry or breaking up a fight between the triplets. Everyone has realized that with Mallory gone, Vanessa has a room all to herself. Perhaps the Pike parents should have thought of that ahead of time. Nobody's going to stand for Vanessa living by herself when all four boys share a room.
Vanessa basically goes, "FUCK YOU" to all her siblings, and claims she's been waiting her whole life for a room of her own.
The Pike Room Wars are on.
Chapter 6
Mallory and her parents arrive in Easton, Massachusetts, home of Riverbend Hall. Unfortunately for the Scholastic editors, Easton is a real place, considered part of the Providence metropolitan area, and not in the Berkshires like this book's Easton. Easton is described as being "20 miles from Stockbridge, one of the bigger cities in this part of Massachusetts," and there is a Stockbridge, MA in the Berkshires, but its population is 1,947. It sounds fairly well-known for such a small town, since it has a Norman Rockwell museum, so perhaps they should have researched it a bit better.
Riverbend is described as being made up of small white buildings with green shutters that look like houses.
This is a building at Smith College. Since it's Ann, let's just assume Riverbend is supposed to look like this.
There is also a meetinghouse made of brick for dining and school-wide meetings, a red barn that is now used for art classes, and a library. It all sounds very nice and there is a stream.
Notice there is no gym. Mallory's Fantasy School does not include a gym.
All of the buildings at Riverbend are named after famous women (I guess Riverbend is too new to have rich alumni who donate money to the school and insist on having the building named after them). Mallory lives in Earhart.
Now, here, for me, is where things kind of take a turn for the unreal. Mallory is greeted at Earhart by Pam, a student. She is a senior, but lives in the sixth-grade dorm as a kind of "housemother." Now, usually students who take a leadership role in residence life at a boarding school are called "prefects," but I'm not going to quibble with that because boarding schools are like cults in that they develop their own weird languages over time.
Click to viewI'm not going to give you an example because then if someone who went to my school read this, they would automatically know that I went there. But I can say things that sound as meaningless as the stuff that ol' Tom Cruise is saying up there, and it would make total sense to anyone who went to my school in the past seventy or so years. If I have a family dinner or something and I need to know the level of formality, I'll still discuss it with my brother using our dress code's terms for various levels of dress.
But anyway, a boarding school would NOT leave a senior in high school in charge of an entire dorm of sixth-grade girls. There is never any mention in the book of a teacher living in the dorm as well. Even as seniors, we had several teachers living in our dorm in apartments. At night, there was a teacher in our hallway. In boarding school, there are teachers EVERYWHERE. Finding places where they can't find you so you can have sex or do drugs or smoke or drink is basically a varsity sport.
Pam shows Mallory and the Pikes Mallory's room. Pam hesitates a little when she says that she is sure that Alexis is looking forward to meeting Mal, so you know that it's not true.
Alexis has also taken over almost the entire room, which consists of two beds, a desk at the foot of each bed, and a long, low dresser in between, two windows, plus a closet. Alexis's stuff covers the entire top of the dresser, and almost all of the closet. There is no room on the walls for Mallory's BSC collage. Alexis has put up pictures of "slightly scary-looking rockstars" instead. Mallory naively figures that Alexis has forgotten that she was getting a roommate this semester.
Mallory tells her parents to leave, since she wants to face her new life alone. She smells her pillow, which smells comfortingly of home. She heads to new student orientation, where the dean, Jane Maxwell, has the new students introduce themselves. There is only one other new sixth grader, Smita Narula, who is from NYC via New Delhi (even more sophisticated than Stacey!) and already has friends at Riverbend.
Riverbend is described as an "alternative school with progressive ideas about education. The focus is on drama, writing, dance, visual arts, and music. Even the other courses such as math and gym are given a creative twist." I'm not sure how you can give math a creative twist and still learn algebra, but whatever.
Teachers are called by their first name and students are given rotating jobs to keep the school running. One of the jobs is working in the faculty daycare, which, as you can imagine, excites Mal. She is probably composing a letter to Kristy in her head about how she is going to keep her baby-sitting chops sharp while she is away. Oh, and Jane mentions how each dorm has a "prefect," but my previous statement about how having a dorm with JUST a prefect would never, ever happen still stands.
Smita and Mallory and Pam all hang out in the living room. Riverbend seems awesome so far, but you know that Mallory can't have nice things and soon the shit will hit the fan.
Next time, we will meet Alexis DeCamp.