#9 - The Ghost at Dawn's House (Chapters 13-15)
Chapters 1-3
Chapters 4-6
Chapters 7-9
Chapters 10-12
Yes, the ~thrilling~ conclusion to this book! Though I'm sure you've all figured it out by now. It was easier to solve than a Cam Jansen mystery.
Also, poll at the end for what book you want me to snark next! Most of them have been done already (but not for a few months), but that's all I have now that my mom got rid of my BSC books...or, some of them since I kept periodically sneaking more out of the box hehehe.
Onto the snark!
Chapter 13:
Dawn decides to freak herself out again by exploring the passage, after she nearly made Mary Anne wet her pants in fear by bringing her inside. Great Dog Tales, the book that they found last time, is gone (the ghost must have gotten offended by Mary Anne and Dawn WTFing over it), but in its place, is a crust of bread. Forget a spectral Mallory...if the ghost is sneaking food and reading questionable literature, sounds like a spectral Claudia!
Oh, and she finds another key, shoved into a crack at the bottom of the steps. Dawn leaves it be, just in case Jared the ghost gets mad and haunts her with floating images of raw steak. And that rainy night, she hears moaning in the passage, so Little Miss I Love Ghost Stories sleeps downstairs again. Maybe Charlie and Janine have a thing for love in the rain.
Two days later, she gets to test her theory about the ghost (which is even more predictable than the mystery of who was sending threatening letters to Mary Anne) when she goes to babysit the Pikes. Mrs. Pike is taking the girls for haircuts, including Claire - Dawn says her hair hasn't been the same since Vanessa and Margo doused her with that shampoo. I'm imagining it as really really shiny and greasy. Ew. So the stage is set.
Lucky Dawn - Mallory is babysitting with her. Whenever Mallory gets to babysit with one of the other BSC members, she always acts like such a dweeb. Like, I picture her sniffing Dawn's sweatshirt and saying "So this is what being part of the BSC smells like! I want to smell like organic granola too!" Anyway, the triplets let Nicky play basketball with them - with the three of them against him. Why do I get the feeling that this was what Mallory was like 3 years prior? Damn, why am I being so mean to Mallory? Regardless, Nicky doesn't care since he's riding the high of being able to play with his brothers.
For lunch, what do you know...Mrs. Pike didn't get around to feeding the Pike Army. Geez, Mrs. Pike - even the Duggars get tater tot casserole on time, and they have twice as many kids! What's your excuse? So the girls get food court stuff at the mall, the boys are sent out to the backyard to eat bologna from the family trough (thank you to whoever wrote that description on the BSC forum, it cracked me up). Ok, they aren't sent out to the trough, because Mallory gets an Idea (don't tell Kristy, even though Mallory isn't a member yet) and decides to give the boys a smorgasbord for lunch. Dump everything out of the fridge, and let them fend for themselves. And it cleans out the fridge, so Mrs. Pike can forget to refill it before that big-blizzard that's on the way.
And what would a BSC book be without a LOLZ-worthy mispronunciation of something? Nicky calls it a "schmurgerbeard" and promptly gets called stupid by Jordan. I think that's what irritates me the most about the BSC books (especially near the end, where there was a ton of it). Someone mispronouncing a word and someone else responding with "Don't you mean ______, a [definition of word]?" Thank you for the vocabulary lesson, AMM and ghosties.
The boys make a big mess of things, Adam's glopping mayo on bread, Byron is eating peanut butter out of the jar with his hand, EW EW EW, especially on Byron. Geez, my sister eats peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon, and that grosses me out to no end. Byron is a step DOWN from that. And I guess along with the Pikes whole "We don't have rules, we're cool parents!" thing, they also don't have table manners. Jordan runs to the stove and says he wants fried bologna. In addition to the 10-year-old reincarnation of Elvis here, Adam wants a fried egg and Byron wants fried peanut butter and jelly. That last one sounds good; I read a restaurant review for a sandwich place here in Boston that does fried peanut butter and jelly, and the review said it tastes like candy.
Nicky says he wants fried barf. Cue crickets chirping. Much like Dwight Schrute, Nicky sure knows how to ruin a funny moment.
Dawn cooks fried bologna for Adam and Jordan (while dry-heaving, I'm assuming) and fried peanut butter and jelly for Byron. All throughout lunch, the triplets harass Nicky, including telling him to point to his head and say Mark Twain's initials. Ok, I admit, this book made me do that to my sister. My parents didn't think it was funny. Dawn, being a member of the BSC which means they shall never discipline children, gives them a weak "Ok stop." If I were her, I'd say "Stop picking on your brother, or else I'm throwing away your fried shit and I'm telling your mom when she comes home." Well, maybe I wouldn't waste food.
Ok, I underestimated Dawn. Adam pulls Nicky's chair out from under him and the triplets crack up. Nicky, clearly upset, runs off (I wonder where...). And Dawn gets off her ass and does some babysitting. Since this is Dawn and she's never angry (probably from that contact high she gets from being around Sharon), they shut up right away. Dawn says she's telling Mrs. Pike how asshole-ish they were to Nicky, despite them whining for her not to tell. What a bunch of little shits. This must have been before the BSC Brainwashing took effect.
Dawn runs off to find Nicky, leaving Mallory in charge, and orders the boys to clean the kitchen. Please. When an older sibling is in charge, that means shit (I'm the oldest in my family, I know). Dawn's going to come back and find the kitchen an even bigger mess and Mallory spinning in the dryer with her training bra tied to her head. Dawn also says she feels bad about yelling at the triplets. Uh, they were treating their younger brother like garbage, and you feel bad for yelling at them? You know, being in charge of kids means BEING ASSERTIVE! Sure enough, Dawn runs right to her house and into the barn. Hey, look! The bale of hay is moved aside, and the trap door's open! Our fearless babysitter grabs a flashlight from the kitchen and jumps down the ladder into the Secret Passage.
First thing she hears is heavy breathing. I KNEW it! Charlie and Janine ARE in there! Dawn, however, has other thoughts: She thinks Jared's in there with her and, among other people, considers calling Mary Anne. Ok, if there's a ghost in there, what good is calling Mary Anne? Mention that to her, and she'd turn into a ghost herself. Or cry. Or both. She also considers calling the cops, but just like a good BSC member, stops herself because she has to solve this mystery, dammit!
Weighing over her clues, and concluding that someone must have been using the passage since the floor is hard-packed (and ghosts are weightless...geez, Claudia could have come up with that conclusion), Dawn starts calling out for Nicky again when she hears footsteps.
Chapter 14:
The footsteps get faster! Someone's running away! Like a non-brainwashed charge being told by Kristy "Are you ready for a BSC-run taffy pull?" Dawn catches up and, what do you know, it's Nicky. Who didn't see that coming. This was the secret place he was going whenever he was being teased by the triplets, but he adds that he never went up the stairs because that would be trespassing. Well, you entered the barn to get down here, and that's on Dawn's property. Doesn't that make what you're already doing trespassing?
Dawn shows him where the passage ends up (he thought it was a dead end) and he's fascinated. Anyway, he says one time after Adam was setting him up for years of therapy, he ran off with his book (Great Dog Tales, so that weird line about having a dog as a best friend makes sense now) to the barn, which is exactly two blocks from the Pikes. He snuck in and found the trap door, so that became his secret place (insert joke here). And, of course, all the stuff Dawn found was Nicky's. Like the nickel was from his coin collection - he brought his coin collection to look at while he was pissed at the triplets? Like was he imagining dropping his coins off the side of the building so they'd land on the triplets? The Pikes are WEIRD.
And the ice cream cone was his - bought one for a WHOLE DOLLAR from an old-fashioned ice cream truck. I wish ice cream from the ice cream truck still cost a dollar :( and LOL at Dawn and Jeff thinking that cone was from the 1900s. The keys weren't his though...so the only reasonable explanation is they belong to Jared. Thank you Dawn.
Dawn apologizes for discovering his secret place, and says she's upset that he scared her. Yeah, forget that he was trespassing your property, he scared you, that's all that matters! Nicky apologizes for scaring her, and they head back to the Pikes. Oh, and he never hid there at night, so Dawn gets nervous about what was making all that noise in there at night. My Charlie/Janine theory still holds true.
And Dawn says it's ok if Nicky wants to go there and hideout. Subplot solved. He says she's his favorite babysitter. Don't tell Kristy, she'll freak if a charge has a favorite sitter, because then they'll ask for her specifically!
Chapter 15:
BSC SLEEPOVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Surprisingly, the movie choices du jour are mostly "current" stuff (Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Sixteen Candles), and outweighs the two typical BSC movie choices - Mary Poppins and The Parent Trap (the original, I'm guessing it isn't the Lindsay Lohan one). So yeah, guess who suggested each one. They can't choose which two to watch, and voting doesn't work. So Kristy picks two out of a hat, since she's the Club President and their Supreme Lord and Master. Hail K. Ron! Ghostbusters and Sixteen Candles it is.
They did makeovers too, compliments of Stacey and Claudia. Number one, Kristy let them do makeup on her without her fake-puking like Dawn in a Burger King? Number two, I pity whoever was on the receiving end of a Claudia makeover. "Claudia, you had that makeup gun set on WHORE!" And Mary Anne's squeeing over Cam Geary again. O HAI FORESHADOWING!
While watching the giant marshmallow guy asplode in Ghostbusters, Kristy gets a hankering for s'mores (as you are wont to do). Dawn laughs; she doesn't have sugary crap in her house! Claudia and Kristy, of course, came prepared with an artillery of junk food - chocolate, marshmallows, M&M's, chips...oh, and some crackers for the boring health food people. Damn you and your diabetes, Stacey! You ruin sleepovers!
The candy freaks run off to make their s'mores, and Stacey and Dawn roll their eyes at them. While they're gone, Stacey teaches Dawn how to french-kiss and they practice on each other Dawn decides to get some revenge. And what better way than to scare the shit out of them with the Secret Passage? Hey, Dawn must like it because she uses it on Mary Anne later on in the series. Dawn explains about her Secret Passage, and Stacey responds, "Hey, I know plenty about secret passages." No, she agrees to take part in Dawn's vendetta against people who bring sugar into her house.
The s'mores eaters come back (dammit, now I want s'mores!) and they all finish the movie. When it's done, Dawn brings them upstairs under the guise of putting MORE makeup on Mary Anne to make her look like Cam Geary's girlfriend Corrie Lalique. Give it another book, and she'll have a Cam Geary of her own! Well when they all go upstairs, Dawn says she and Stacey are going to get some sodas. We get this wonderful exchange between Claudia and Dawn:
"You have soda?" asked Claudia skeptically. "Or do you mean Perrier or sparkling, saltless mineral water from an artesian well or something?"
I tried not to sound sarcastic. "Yes, we have soda. Real soda. Mom bought it for the party. One hundred percent sugar."
"Good," said Claudia, not cracking a smile.
First of all, how the fuck does Claudia know the word "artesian?" She probably spells it "arteezhun." Second of all, shut the hell up Claudia. Dawn was nice enough to accommodate you, and you act all ungrateful? What a bitch. And Perrier's good. Holy crap, did I just stick up for Dawn?
Stacey and Dawn sneak into the passage, rap on the walls and the pipes, and freak the shit out of everyone inside. Mary Anne goes nuts and screams that it's the ghost and Kristy is all confused. As long as she doesn't tell Karen that there's more ghosts in Stoneybrook. Well Dawn and Stacey come out of the passage and everyone laughs over it. Dawn tells them all about it, and Claudia immediately wants to go in. But wait! They hear noise coming from the passage. And since it's 1am, it isn't Nicky (or could it be? Maybe the triplets stuck his hand in a glass of water and he ran out of the house to blow off some steam). Or, well, you guys know what the alternative is. So it's a good thing Claudia isn't going inside.
The girls go downstairs to sleep and the next morning discuss what they should do in the last days before they start 8th grade for the 1st of 193 times. And we've seen food in mouth dialogue, and allergy dialogue, and butchered accents, and here we have probably the only case of face-in-pillow dialogue. Mary Anne says "Having a cookout," but instead it sounds like "Havee a fuh-fow." *headdesk*
I wonder what would happen if we got the entire BSC to go into the Secret Passage. I'm guessing they'd find a videotape and we'd find out about it in #203: Claudia and her Sister's Dirty Little Secret.
Ok, now that that's all over with....vote for which book you want me to snark next!
- #6-Kristy's Big Day
- Super Special #7-Snowbound
- #68-Jessi and the Bad Babysitter
Chapters 4-6
Chapters 7-9
Chapters 10-12
Yes, the ~thrilling~ conclusion to this book! Though I'm sure you've all figured it out by now. It was easier to solve than a Cam Jansen mystery.
Also, poll at the end for what book you want me to snark next! Most of them have been done already (but not for a few months), but that's all I have now that my mom got rid of my BSC books...or, some of them since I kept periodically sneaking more out of the box hehehe.
Onto the snark!
Chapter 13:
Dawn decides to freak herself out again by exploring the passage, after she nearly made Mary Anne wet her pants in fear by bringing her inside. Great Dog Tales, the book that they found last time, is gone (the ghost must have gotten offended by Mary Anne and Dawn WTFing over it), but in its place, is a crust of bread. Forget a spectral Mallory...if the ghost is sneaking food and reading questionable literature, sounds like a spectral Claudia!
Oh, and she finds another key, shoved into a crack at the bottom of the steps. Dawn leaves it be, just in case Jared the ghost gets mad and haunts her with floating images of raw steak. And that rainy night, she hears moaning in the passage, so Little Miss I Love Ghost Stories sleeps downstairs again. Maybe Charlie and Janine have a thing for love in the rain.
Two days later, she gets to test her theory about the ghost (which is even more predictable than the mystery of who was sending threatening letters to Mary Anne) when she goes to babysit the Pikes. Mrs. Pike is taking the girls for haircuts, including Claire - Dawn says her hair hasn't been the same since Vanessa and Margo doused her with that shampoo. I'm imagining it as really really shiny and greasy. Ew. So the stage is set.
Lucky Dawn - Mallory is babysitting with her. Whenever Mallory gets to babysit with one of the other BSC members, she always acts like such a dweeb. Like, I picture her sniffing Dawn's sweatshirt and saying "So this is what being part of the BSC smells like! I want to smell like organic granola too!" Anyway, the triplets let Nicky play basketball with them - with the three of them against him. Why do I get the feeling that this was what Mallory was like 3 years prior? Damn, why am I being so mean to Mallory? Regardless, Nicky doesn't care since he's riding the high of being able to play with his brothers.
For lunch, what do you know...Mrs. Pike didn't get around to feeding the Pike Army. Geez, Mrs. Pike - even the Duggars get tater tot casserole on time, and they have twice as many kids! What's your excuse? So the girls get food court stuff at the mall, the boys are sent out to the backyard to eat bologna from the family trough (thank you to whoever wrote that description on the BSC forum, it cracked me up). Ok, they aren't sent out to the trough, because Mallory gets an Idea (don't tell Kristy, even though Mallory isn't a member yet) and decides to give the boys a smorgasbord for lunch. Dump everything out of the fridge, and let them fend for themselves. And it cleans out the fridge, so Mrs. Pike can forget to refill it before that big-blizzard that's on the way.
And what would a BSC book be without a LOLZ-worthy mispronunciation of something? Nicky calls it a "schmurgerbeard" and promptly gets called stupid by Jordan. I think that's what irritates me the most about the BSC books (especially near the end, where there was a ton of it). Someone mispronouncing a word and someone else responding with "Don't you mean ______, a [definition of word]?" Thank you for the vocabulary lesson, AMM and ghosties.
The boys make a big mess of things, Adam's glopping mayo on bread, Byron is eating peanut butter out of the jar with his hand, EW EW EW, especially on Byron. Geez, my sister eats peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon, and that grosses me out to no end. Byron is a step DOWN from that. And I guess along with the Pikes whole "We don't have rules, we're cool parents!" thing, they also don't have table manners. Jordan runs to the stove and says he wants fried bologna. In addition to the 10-year-old reincarnation of Elvis here, Adam wants a fried egg and Byron wants fried peanut butter and jelly. That last one sounds good; I read a restaurant review for a sandwich place here in Boston that does fried peanut butter and jelly, and the review said it tastes like candy.
Nicky says he wants fried barf. Cue crickets chirping. Much like Dwight Schrute, Nicky sure knows how to ruin a funny moment.
Dawn cooks fried bologna for Adam and Jordan (while dry-heaving, I'm assuming) and fried peanut butter and jelly for Byron. All throughout lunch, the triplets harass Nicky, including telling him to point to his head and say Mark Twain's initials. Ok, I admit, this book made me do that to my sister. My parents didn't think it was funny. Dawn, being a member of the BSC which means they shall never discipline children, gives them a weak "Ok stop." If I were her, I'd say "Stop picking on your brother, or else I'm throwing away your fried shit and I'm telling your mom when she comes home." Well, maybe I wouldn't waste food.
Ok, I underestimated Dawn. Adam pulls Nicky's chair out from under him and the triplets crack up. Nicky, clearly upset, runs off (I wonder where...). And Dawn gets off her ass and does some babysitting. Since this is Dawn and she's never angry (probably from that contact high she gets from being around Sharon), they shut up right away. Dawn says she's telling Mrs. Pike how asshole-ish they were to Nicky, despite them whining for her not to tell. What a bunch of little shits. This must have been before the BSC Brainwashing took effect.
Dawn runs off to find Nicky, leaving Mallory in charge, and orders the boys to clean the kitchen. Please. When an older sibling is in charge, that means shit (I'm the oldest in my family, I know). Dawn's going to come back and find the kitchen an even bigger mess and Mallory spinning in the dryer with her training bra tied to her head. Dawn also says she feels bad about yelling at the triplets. Uh, they were treating their younger brother like garbage, and you feel bad for yelling at them? You know, being in charge of kids means BEING ASSERTIVE! Sure enough, Dawn runs right to her house and into the barn. Hey, look! The bale of hay is moved aside, and the trap door's open! Our fearless babysitter grabs a flashlight from the kitchen and jumps down the ladder into the Secret Passage.
First thing she hears is heavy breathing. I KNEW it! Charlie and Janine ARE in there! Dawn, however, has other thoughts: She thinks Jared's in there with her and, among other people, considers calling Mary Anne. Ok, if there's a ghost in there, what good is calling Mary Anne? Mention that to her, and she'd turn into a ghost herself. Or cry. Or both. She also considers calling the cops, but just like a good BSC member, stops herself because she has to solve this mystery, dammit!
Weighing over her clues, and concluding that someone must have been using the passage since the floor is hard-packed (and ghosts are weightless...geez, Claudia could have come up with that conclusion), Dawn starts calling out for Nicky again when she hears footsteps.
Chapter 14:
The footsteps get faster! Someone's running away! Like a non-brainwashed charge being told by Kristy "Are you ready for a BSC-run taffy pull?" Dawn catches up and, what do you know, it's Nicky. Who didn't see that coming. This was the secret place he was going whenever he was being teased by the triplets, but he adds that he never went up the stairs because that would be trespassing. Well, you entered the barn to get down here, and that's on Dawn's property. Doesn't that make what you're already doing trespassing?
Dawn shows him where the passage ends up (he thought it was a dead end) and he's fascinated. Anyway, he says one time after Adam was setting him up for years of therapy, he ran off with his book (Great Dog Tales, so that weird line about having a dog as a best friend makes sense now) to the barn, which is exactly two blocks from the Pikes. He snuck in and found the trap door, so that became his secret place (insert joke here). And, of course, all the stuff Dawn found was Nicky's. Like the nickel was from his coin collection - he brought his coin collection to look at while he was pissed at the triplets? Like was he imagining dropping his coins off the side of the building so they'd land on the triplets? The Pikes are WEIRD.
And the ice cream cone was his - bought one for a WHOLE DOLLAR from an old-fashioned ice cream truck. I wish ice cream from the ice cream truck still cost a dollar :( and LOL at Dawn and Jeff thinking that cone was from the 1900s. The keys weren't his though...so the only reasonable explanation is they belong to Jared. Thank you Dawn.
Dawn apologizes for discovering his secret place, and says she's upset that he scared her. Yeah, forget that he was trespassing your property, he scared you, that's all that matters! Nicky apologizes for scaring her, and they head back to the Pikes. Oh, and he never hid there at night, so Dawn gets nervous about what was making all that noise in there at night. My Charlie/Janine theory still holds true.
And Dawn says it's ok if Nicky wants to go there and hideout. Subplot solved. He says she's his favorite babysitter. Don't tell Kristy, she'll freak if a charge has a favorite sitter, because then they'll ask for her specifically!
Chapter 15:
BSC SLEEPOVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Surprisingly, the movie choices du jour are mostly "current" stuff (Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Sixteen Candles), and outweighs the two typical BSC movie choices - Mary Poppins and The Parent Trap (the original, I'm guessing it isn't the Lindsay Lohan one). So yeah, guess who suggested each one. They can't choose which two to watch, and voting doesn't work. So Kristy picks two out of a hat, since she's the Club President and their Supreme Lord and Master. Hail K. Ron! Ghostbusters and Sixteen Candles it is.
They did makeovers too, compliments of Stacey and Claudia. Number one, Kristy let them do makeup on her without her fake-puking like Dawn in a Burger King? Number two, I pity whoever was on the receiving end of a Claudia makeover. "Claudia, you had that makeup gun set on WHORE!" And Mary Anne's squeeing over Cam Geary again. O HAI FORESHADOWING!
While watching the giant marshmallow guy asplode in Ghostbusters, Kristy gets a hankering for s'mores (as you are wont to do). Dawn laughs; she doesn't have sugary crap in her house! Claudia and Kristy, of course, came prepared with an artillery of junk food - chocolate, marshmallows, M&M's, chips...oh, and some crackers for the boring health food people. Damn you and your diabetes, Stacey! You ruin sleepovers!
The candy freaks run off to make their s'mores, and Stacey and Dawn roll their eyes at them. While they're gone, Stacey teaches Dawn how to french-kiss and they practice on each other Dawn decides to get some revenge. And what better way than to scare the shit out of them with the Secret Passage? Hey, Dawn must like it because she uses it on Mary Anne later on in the series. Dawn explains about her Secret Passage, and Stacey responds, "Hey, I know plenty about secret passages." No, she agrees to take part in Dawn's vendetta against people who bring sugar into her house.
The s'mores eaters come back (dammit, now I want s'mores!) and they all finish the movie. When it's done, Dawn brings them upstairs under the guise of putting MORE makeup on Mary Anne to make her look like Cam Geary's girlfriend Corrie Lalique. Give it another book, and she'll have a Cam Geary of her own! Well when they all go upstairs, Dawn says she and Stacey are going to get some sodas. We get this wonderful exchange between Claudia and Dawn:
"You have soda?" asked Claudia skeptically. "Or do you mean Perrier or sparkling, saltless mineral water from an artesian well or something?"
I tried not to sound sarcastic. "Yes, we have soda. Real soda. Mom bought it for the party. One hundred percent sugar."
"Good," said Claudia, not cracking a smile.
First of all, how the fuck does Claudia know the word "artesian?" She probably spells it "arteezhun." Second of all, shut the hell up Claudia. Dawn was nice enough to accommodate you, and you act all ungrateful? What a bitch. And Perrier's good. Holy crap, did I just stick up for Dawn?
Stacey and Dawn sneak into the passage, rap on the walls and the pipes, and freak the shit out of everyone inside. Mary Anne goes nuts and screams that it's the ghost and Kristy is all confused. As long as she doesn't tell Karen that there's more ghosts in Stoneybrook. Well Dawn and Stacey come out of the passage and everyone laughs over it. Dawn tells them all about it, and Claudia immediately wants to go in. But wait! They hear noise coming from the passage. And since it's 1am, it isn't Nicky (or could it be? Maybe the triplets stuck his hand in a glass of water and he ran out of the house to blow off some steam). Or, well, you guys know what the alternative is. So it's a good thing Claudia isn't going inside.
The girls go downstairs to sleep and the next morning discuss what they should do in the last days before they start 8th grade for the 1st of 193 times. And we've seen food in mouth dialogue, and allergy dialogue, and butchered accents, and here we have probably the only case of face-in-pillow dialogue. Mary Anne says "Having a cookout," but instead it sounds like "Havee a fuh-fow." *headdesk*
I wonder what would happen if we got the entire BSC to go into the Secret Passage. I'm guessing they'd find a videotape and we'd find out about it in #203: Claudia and her Sister's Dirty Little Secret.
Ok, now that that's all over with....vote for which book you want me to snark next!
- #6-Kristy's Big Day
- Super Special #7-Snowbound
- #68-Jessi and the Bad Babysitter