Jessi's Wish: Chapters 1-4
In an appropriately metafictive twist (file this one under “creepy involvement with kids”, folks), I was raised by the BSC. Literally (and I’m Facebook friends with enough teenage girls that I think I have license by proxy to stretch the word “literally”). I didn’t grow up in Stoneybrook, Connecticut, but I was so hooked on these books by age eight or so that my mother could assemble me a stack, run an errand, and come back two hours later to find me on the couch where she’d left me. Like all sitting charges, however, I’ve reached my rebellious phase. The time has come for me to mercilessly plumb my former role models’ flaws.
I’m a longtime lurker here - going on two years now, I think. I’ve been here long enough to have favorites, but I’ve never until now tried my hand at my very own snark. Though I love writing, comedy has never been my forte, but today, after a few glasses of Christmas wine, I’ve decided to hammer out my very own holiday miracle.
(It might just be the wine inflating my assessment of my own humor. Odds are the disparity will look something like this.)
I pared down my BSC collection throughout high school and finally chucked most of the remaining ones when I moved out for college, so Jessi’s Wish was the only one I could find in my childhood bedroom. It’s not the most snarkable (spoiler alert: the titular Wish is for a kid with cancer to Get Well Soon [™ Hallmark]). No one with an ounce of tact should be mocking this, so I'm the perfect person for the job.
Cover! Were Hodges even remotely influenced by actual human aging patterns, the characters on the cover would be Jessi and her mom, not Becca and Jessi. I realize Jessi’s long and lean from her ZOMG!dancing, but goddamn, eleven-year-olds have barely hit puberty. Some of them are still under five feet. Not to mention that Jessi’s outfit, while hardly a string bikini, actually looks decently grown-up. I run a fashion blog in my spare time, and that shirt-earrings combo actually resembles something I’d post.
Chapter 1
“‘Whing, whing. Whing, whing.’”
Here we go again, Leran - wait, the acknowledgement in the front cover is to “the real Danielle”. Ann must’ve done this one herself. I’m now imagining Lerangis as some sort of Svengali, dreaming of the day he wields onomatopoeic control over the entire Scholastic community.
“Both of my parents work. They like their jobs a lot. In fact, Dad likes his so much that when his company told him he was being transferred to the branch office in Stamford, Connecticut, he picked up and moved us Ramseys to Stoneybrook, which is near Stamford.”
Keep telling yourself that, sweetie. I’m sure the reason he’s hiding out in been transferred to a small town has everything to do with how much he likes his job and nothing to do with having pissed off New Jersey’s finest Mafia enclave. (Speaking of which, who else, as a kid, read Jessi’s descriptions of her idyllically integrated Oakley neighborhood and imagined New Jersey as some post-racial paradise? I call a vote make a motion to amend the list of Things Ann Knows Nothing About.)
“Rebecca is eight. Just as I go by the nickname Jessi, she goes by the nickname Becca.”
I’m glad we got an example here, because otherwise I’m sure I would have absolutely no mental context in which to process the idea of a nickname. Also, is it common practice to introduce someone by their legal name and then qualify it with a nickname? Why not just introduce yourself as what you want to be called? You use a nickname because you’d rather not use your legal name, so why mention said legal name at all?
"She has a sense of humor and a neat imagination, although she's shy."
Dafuq is this "although"? I can practically taste Ann's self-loathing. (It tastes a lot like this red wine.)
“There are two other members of our household. One is Misty, our hamster. The other is Aunt Cecelia.”
Clearly you think the world of Aunt Cecelia: she’s worthy of being mentioned in the same chapter - nay, the same paragraph! - as Misty “Best All-Around Pet” Ramsey. I’m sure that’s exactly the kind of veneration she had in mind when she left behind her home and everything she knew to move into a cramped guest room with her overly permissive brother (Island Incident, anyone?) and his Nina-Sayers-in-training daughter.
“Before Aunt Cecelia came, I was always taking care of Becca and Squirt. Now I don’t have the chance very often, which is a shame because I love to baby-sit and (sorry for bragging) I’m really good at it.”
It seems really strange to me that every interaction these girls have with their younger siblings MUST take place within the context of an authoritarian relationship. Is there some unwritten rule (come to think of it, I wouldn’t put it past K. Ron to have actually written it down) that you can’t just play with your little siblings without getting paid for it? How healthy can it be to ALWAYS see your big sister as an authority and never as a friend, a peer, a mentor, etc.? I understand missing that feeling of autonomy and responsibility, but jeez, Aunt Cecelia isn’t forcibly depriving you of time with your siblings. Go out and push Becca on the swings without turning everything into a goddamn “teachable moment”.
“I heard a clank in our garage then and realized that Becca had come home from school. (The clank was the sound of the kickstand on her bicycle hitting the cement floor.)”
Thanks for clarifying, Jessica, otherwise I might’ve assumed Becca had anvils for feet. Also, I’ve changed my mind: I suspect this is a Miles book. Svengalerangis, like any good cult leader, probably has more pressing ghostwriting gigs than Jessi books, even Very Special Episode ones.
“‘[T]he toy drive is going really well. Bellair’s gave us one hundred dollars’ worth of new toys.’ (Bellair’s is Stoneybrook’s department store.)”
Okay, this is definitely a Miles book. Also, one hundred dollars’ worth of new toys is … four Special Edition Barbie dolls. In 1990, the year before this book was written, it’d be about five. It’s pretty low of Bellair’s to offer up a falsely impressive number to kids they know won’t realize how piddling it actually is. Jussayin’.
“‘We might not be able to have the club anymore. We might have to stop it.’
‘How come?’
‘Because Ms. Simon’s husband is going on a really long trip, and she decided to go with him. So she has to leave school for awhile. She can’t find anyone who’ll take her place at the club, and Mr. Katz doesn’t think he can run the club by himself.”
“A really long trip.” Strike two of “keep telling yourself that, sweetie”. Next time you’re in the Cambodian wilds, do me a favor and see if you can get the Jewish guy with the Stoneybrook accent to tell you exactly what the mob did to him. It would be great for my first book.
Also, it doesn’t exactly bode well for a philanthropy club if not one teacher is willing to donate a couple afternoons a week to keep it running. JUSSAYIN’.
Becca then Very Special Episodes for a while about her former classmate Danielle Roberts, now in the hospital for leukemia and one of the beneficiaries of the toy drive. Jessi, of course, has nothing but reassurance to offer. Has Ellen Miles ever met an eleven-year-old in her life? Jessi provides a textbook definition of leukemia, something I wouldn’t trust some of my college classmates to do. (In my comparative religion seminar last semester, I had to explain on the first day to a sleepy-eyed freshman that Wicca is not a myth. And no, we don’t actually ride on broomsticks, except those of us who are into BDSM. Source: I’M GODDAMN WICCAN. /rage)
Also, what eleven-year-old has such a palliative bedside manner? I’m pretty sure that at eleven I would’ve gone ZOMG!cancer and joined my sister in her spaz attack until one of our parents could calm us both down. I’m pretty sure I’d still do that.
Anywho, Jessi calms down her sister and sends her off to play with Squirt. She watches them and ruminates about ways she could help out Becca’s club. Again, is this standard eleven-year-old behavior? I can imagine wanting to aid my [hypothetical - I’m an only child] sister, especially if we were close, but I don’t think I’d lose too much sleep over the plight of other neighborhood children, which is exactly what Jessi does: “The club is important to an awful lot of people". Also, it takes her a full page and a half to come up not even with a solution but with the Great Idea ™ to … call Mallory for advice. If that takes you a full page and a half - best friendship, you’re doing it so, so wrong.
Chapter 3
We pick up exactly where Chapter 1 left off, because Miles wasn’t even trying with this one: not only does she shoehorn in the standard Chapter 2 exposition right in the middle of a goddamn scene, she doesn’t even have the decency to make it a club-meeting scene. Jessi’s about to call Mallory when “I realized I’d been staring at the kitchen phone for about five minutes, while my mind wandered”. Because sometimes I’m just so eager to talk to my best friend that I spend five minutes reviewing our entire friendship and how it fits into the network of our baby-sitting cult, instead of, you know, actually calling her.
“I didn’t reach Mal until that evening. But I was glad I finally did. Mal is so practical. She said, ‘Why don’t you talk about the Kids Club at the next BSC meeting?’ What a simple, wonderful suggestion.”
I see the word “wonderful” is getting the “sophisticated” treatment.
You know, I once wrote a poem about how much I hate the watering down of words like “gorgeous” and “amazing” to describe things like ice-cream flavors or sales on fucking pantyhose. Does it actually amaze you? Does it inspire awe? No? THEN DON’T BLOODY CALL IT “AMAZING” OR “AWESOME”. Like most poems with an angsty note, it wasn’t that good, but I’m citing it to make clear just how a big a pet peeve this is.
That said, I should be more sensitive. I know Mallory doesn’t have a lot going for her, and if Jessi wants to make her believe that her suggestion of talking about childcare-related issues at a baby-sitting club is “wonderful”, I think we can all agree to pat Mal on the head and look the other way for a while.
“The club began awhile ago - before Dawn and I even lived in Stoneybrook. And when Mal was young enough so she was still a baby-sittee, not yet a baby-sitter.”
Grammatical atrocities aside (seriously, Miles, there’s not much of this wine left and it’s my dad’s super-expensive red holiday variety, so I hope you appreciate what you’re doing to me), color me unimpressed that a club has managed to exist for … a year? Eighteen months? Don’t you take that “reminiscing about the good ol’ days” tone with me, Miss “I’m Too Young to Have My Goddamn Ears Pierced”.
“Here is Kristy at her brilliant best! … [Kid Kits] are great for rainy days, for entertaining new sitting charges, and sometimes for absolutely no special reason! … Whew! Sometimes Kristy’s brain is hard to keep up with.”
You know, Jessica, after your toes go to shit and some pretty young thing from San Francisco inspires your inevitable Nina Sayers breakdown, consider a career in infomercials when you get out of rehab. You’ve got a real deftness with exclamation points.
I’ll also never understand the idea that books and games are only for rainy days. How much can you really do on half an acre of suburban Connecticut lawn? Hell, I grew up on ten acres in rural New England, with a forest full of cool stuff like remains of old homesteads and a stream you could follow from my backyard several miles to a huge swimming hole, and I still managed to get bored every other day.
I’m choosing not to say much of the fact that Jessi thinks a box of old toys is “Kristy at her brilliant best”, partially because that joke pretty much writes itself and partially as a moment of silence for Jessi’s small, small life. I knew she and Mallory had something in common.
“I know that makes us sound busy, and we are. Busy, I mean.”
Now I’m out of wine, Miss “Doesn’t Understand How Antecedents Work”. You’re certainly racking up a lot of nicknames today.
“‘I can’t believe no one will volunteer to take Ms. Simon’s place,’ said Dawn.
‘Me neither….But I have this idea.’
‘What?’ asked Mary Anne.’
‘I could take Ms. Simon’s place.’
Silence.
‘I want to help out,’ I began.
‘Jessi, what aren’t you telling us?’ said Kristy.”
It takes a special kind of paranoid to immediately assume a proposed philanthropic endeavor means someone’s hiding something or has an ulterior motive. I know dictators fear the people they oppress, K. Ron, but you’ll have a firm grip on them for another hundred-odd books. Your throne is safe for now.
The club decides that for the month Jessi will be working with the Kids Club (a month? They were going to shut down the entire club because one of its faculty supervisors was leaving for a month? And no other teacher was willing to step in?), the other members will lay off the baby-sitting (I initially wanted to rework that phrasing because it made baby-sitting sound like a drug, but then I realized that wasn’t too far off the mark) and do volunteer work.
“‘Maybe [Kristy] could work with autistic kids somehow.’”
Oh Jebus, Mary, and Joseph. I say this as someone who is mildly Aspie herself and is close to several others with the condition, so I hope my assessment carries some weight. You know what autistic kids need? Adults who are patient and open-minded and non-judgmental of neurological quirks. Adults who understand the single-minded intensity with which autistic and Aspie kids often approach their interests, show a little goddamn respect for those interests, and don’t try to shoehorn them into more acceptable avenues. K. Ron, I’m telling you right now that a softball team of autistic kids would not be a pretty sight. You’d probably have an easier time nailing Jell-O to a tree. Please stay the fuck out of this community and don’t attempt to rewire my neurology with elbow grease and Kid-Kits.
“Wow! I had sent us on a mission!”
…I’m suddenly imagining BSC missionaries. Someone should write a sociology thesis on parallels between the BSC’s approach to childcare and the culture-quashing imperialist missions of the 1800s.
Chapter 4
Jessi picks up Becca at school and stays behind to tell Mr. Katz about her Great Idea™. (Good thing every dad in Stoneybrook is a lawyer. You’re gonna need some good ones when K. Ron, with Watson’s dirty money behind her, brings a copyright suit on your ass. Play the race card if you have to; you’re good at that.)
“Mr. Katz smiled. ‘Jessi,’ he said warmly. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you from Becca and Charlotte. And several other students here. You’re a baby-sitter?’”
That. That is what’s fucked up about relating to your younger siblings solely as an authority figure. God forbid Jessi have anything to offer the club solely as Becca’s older sister - no, she has to have Baby-Sitting™ credentials coming out her ears. I wonder what psychological effect that’ll have in five or ten years if the sitters never learn to think of their siblings as family first, charges second. I’m imagining Becca going through her first big breakup and Jessi elbowing everyone else out of the way not because she wants to be there for her baby sister, but because she’s a Baby-Sitter and will know exactly what to do.
“‘Could I help out? I know I’m only eleven, and I know I can’t take Ms. Simon’s place, but I’d like - ’
‘It’s volunteer work, Jessi,’ Mr. Katz interrupted me. ‘We don’t get paid.’”
Points to Mr. Katz for anticipating realistic eleven-year-old concerns. It’s a shame he doesn’t seem to realize he lives in Stoneybrook.
So let me get this straight. Mr. Katz accepts Jessi as an assistant on a two-week trial basis, and somehow, suddenly, the club is saved. What exactly does a girl only one or two years older than most of the kids in the club and capable of probably about half Ms. Simon’s workload bring to the table that Mr. Katz couldn’t have done without? Wasn’t his big gripe that he couldn’t run the club by himself (for a month, mind - what kind of teacher is this guy? Does he not know how to hold down a classroom?)? How exactly is a temporary eleven-year-old handmaiden going to turn that around? She said herself that she “can’t take Ms. Simon’s place”.
The Sitters hold an emergency Saturday-afternoon meeting to discuss their volunteering plans. Apparently K. Ron expected them all to have found jobs in less than a week. Even in Stoneybrook time, that’s pushing it. K. Ron is helping out at a daycare (for neurotypical kids, THANK GOD). Claudia is teaching art, Stacey is volunteering at a diabetes clinic, and Dawn is tethering herself to a tree to protest Big Lumber straying from her character trait for once in her life and working with physically disabled kids at something called the Baker Institute.
“‘Kids like me [Stacey] will talk with other kids who’ve recently found out they’re diabetic. The director - her name is Miss Arnell - told me about her two kids, an eight-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl, who just got diagnosed.’”
Miss Arnell? Do I detect a subtle endorsement of single motherhood?
“It came as no surprise to any of us that Claudia was going to help teach an art class, as she’d hoped she might.
…
Mallory began to laugh. ‘I think Margo’s taking that class.’
‘Great!’ exclaimed Claud.
‘Here’s more good news,’ said Kristy. ‘I think Karen’s signed up, too!’
‘I’ll be prepared,’ said Claud.’”
I bet Ann and Svengalerangis sentenced Miles to fifty lashes and a Hail Boo-Boo for improper worship at the altar of Karen Brewer.
“Mary Anne was going to be doing something different from the rest of us. ‘I won’t be working at an organization or a community center,’ she began. ‘See, my dad and Dawn’s mom are friends with this couple who have a little boy who’s brain damaged. They need people to come over to their house and work with their son, plus help out with their two other kids.’”
Cue a second round of JEBUS, MARY, AND JOSEPH. (That ought to be a mixed drink, composed of the sundry alcohols I’ve imbibed today and knocked back whenever Ann or a ghostie displays hideous ignorance of medical issues.) We’ll start with the minor annoyance first: Mary Anne is working with a brain-damaged kid PLUS helping out with the two others? Because I’m sure she’ll be able to give her utmost attention to all three and no one will burn the house down or shave the family goat.
Second, who in the name of sweet Chrimbus would hire a friend’s emotionally dysfunctional thirteen-year-old daughter to handle a brain-damaged child? Aside from the sobbingly obvious issue of Mary Anne not having a degree or even any kind of experience whatsofuckingever with brain damage, this is MARY ANNE we’re talking about. She’d probably waterworks so hard at the sight of the kid that the other siblings would up comforting HER.
Mallory gets a cursory paragraph about helping out with the park’s recreation program. Isn’t the point of the park a way to blow off steam for kids who aren’t into organized activities? Face it, park counselors know that as well as we do, and they tend to sport extra-large sticks up their asses to compensate for their uselessness. I guess Mallory’s finally found her tribe. Maybe she can organize the once-feral children into an anti-pageant.
Part 2!
I’m a longtime lurker here - going on two years now, I think. I’ve been here long enough to have favorites, but I’ve never until now tried my hand at my very own snark. Though I love writing, comedy has never been my forte, but today, after a few glasses of Christmas wine, I’ve decided to hammer out my very own holiday miracle.
(It might just be the wine inflating my assessment of my own humor. Odds are the disparity will look something like this.)
I pared down my BSC collection throughout high school and finally chucked most of the remaining ones when I moved out for college, so Jessi’s Wish was the only one I could find in my childhood bedroom. It’s not the most snarkable (spoiler alert: the titular Wish is for a kid with cancer to Get Well Soon [™ Hallmark]). No one with an ounce of tact should be mocking this, so I'm the perfect person for the job.
Cover! Were Hodges even remotely influenced by actual human aging patterns, the characters on the cover would be Jessi and her mom, not Becca and Jessi. I realize Jessi’s long and lean from her ZOMG!dancing, but goddamn, eleven-year-olds have barely hit puberty. Some of them are still under five feet. Not to mention that Jessi’s outfit, while hardly a string bikini, actually looks decently grown-up. I run a fashion blog in my spare time, and that shirt-earrings combo actually resembles something I’d post.
Chapter 1
“‘Whing, whing. Whing, whing.’”
Here we go again, Leran - wait, the acknowledgement in the front cover is to “the real Danielle”. Ann must’ve done this one herself. I’m now imagining Lerangis as some sort of Svengali, dreaming of the day he wields onomatopoeic control over the entire Scholastic community.
“Both of my parents work. They like their jobs a lot. In fact, Dad likes his so much that when his company told him he was being transferred to the branch office in Stamford, Connecticut, he picked up and moved us Ramseys to Stoneybrook, which is near Stamford.”
Keep telling yourself that, sweetie. I’m sure the reason he’s hiding out in been transferred to a small town has everything to do with how much he likes his job and nothing to do with having pissed off New Jersey’s finest Mafia enclave. (Speaking of which, who else, as a kid, read Jessi’s descriptions of her idyllically integrated Oakley neighborhood and imagined New Jersey as some post-racial paradise? I call a vote make a motion to amend the list of Things Ann Knows Nothing About.)
“Rebecca is eight. Just as I go by the nickname Jessi, she goes by the nickname Becca.”
I’m glad we got an example here, because otherwise I’m sure I would have absolutely no mental context in which to process the idea of a nickname. Also, is it common practice to introduce someone by their legal name and then qualify it with a nickname? Why not just introduce yourself as what you want to be called? You use a nickname because you’d rather not use your legal name, so why mention said legal name at all?
"She has a sense of humor and a neat imagination, although she's shy."
Dafuq is this "although"? I can practically taste Ann's self-loathing. (It tastes a lot like this red wine.)
“There are two other members of our household. One is Misty, our hamster. The other is Aunt Cecelia.”
Clearly you think the world of Aunt Cecelia: she’s worthy of being mentioned in the same chapter - nay, the same paragraph! - as Misty “Best All-Around Pet” Ramsey. I’m sure that’s exactly the kind of veneration she had in mind when she left behind her home and everything she knew to move into a cramped guest room with her overly permissive brother (Island Incident, anyone?) and his Nina-Sayers-in-training daughter.
“Before Aunt Cecelia came, I was always taking care of Becca and Squirt. Now I don’t have the chance very often, which is a shame because I love to baby-sit and (sorry for bragging) I’m really good at it.”
It seems really strange to me that every interaction these girls have with their younger siblings MUST take place within the context of an authoritarian relationship. Is there some unwritten rule (come to think of it, I wouldn’t put it past K. Ron to have actually written it down) that you can’t just play with your little siblings without getting paid for it? How healthy can it be to ALWAYS see your big sister as an authority and never as a friend, a peer, a mentor, etc.? I understand missing that feeling of autonomy and responsibility, but jeez, Aunt Cecelia isn’t forcibly depriving you of time with your siblings. Go out and push Becca on the swings without turning everything into a goddamn “teachable moment”.
“I heard a clank in our garage then and realized that Becca had come home from school. (The clank was the sound of the kickstand on her bicycle hitting the cement floor.)”
Thanks for clarifying, Jessica, otherwise I might’ve assumed Becca had anvils for feet. Also, I’ve changed my mind: I suspect this is a Miles book. Svengalerangis, like any good cult leader, probably has more pressing ghostwriting gigs than Jessi books, even Very Special Episode ones.
“‘[T]he toy drive is going really well. Bellair’s gave us one hundred dollars’ worth of new toys.’ (Bellair’s is Stoneybrook’s department store.)”
Okay, this is definitely a Miles book. Also, one hundred dollars’ worth of new toys is … four Special Edition Barbie dolls. In 1990, the year before this book was written, it’d be about five. It’s pretty low of Bellair’s to offer up a falsely impressive number to kids they know won’t realize how piddling it actually is. Jussayin’.
“‘We might not be able to have the club anymore. We might have to stop it.’
‘How come?’
‘Because Ms. Simon’s husband is going on a really long trip, and she decided to go with him. So she has to leave school for awhile. She can’t find anyone who’ll take her place at the club, and Mr. Katz doesn’t think he can run the club by himself.”
“A really long trip.” Strike two of “keep telling yourself that, sweetie”. Next time you’re in the Cambodian wilds, do me a favor and see if you can get the Jewish guy with the Stoneybrook accent to tell you exactly what the mob did to him. It would be great for my first book.
Also, it doesn’t exactly bode well for a philanthropy club if not one teacher is willing to donate a couple afternoons a week to keep it running. JUSSAYIN’.
Becca then Very Special Episodes for a while about her former classmate Danielle Roberts, now in the hospital for leukemia and one of the beneficiaries of the toy drive. Jessi, of course, has nothing but reassurance to offer. Has Ellen Miles ever met an eleven-year-old in her life? Jessi provides a textbook definition of leukemia, something I wouldn’t trust some of my college classmates to do. (In my comparative religion seminar last semester, I had to explain on the first day to a sleepy-eyed freshman that Wicca is not a myth. And no, we don’t actually ride on broomsticks, except those of us who are into BDSM. Source: I’M GODDAMN WICCAN. /rage)
Also, what eleven-year-old has such a palliative bedside manner? I’m pretty sure that at eleven I would’ve gone ZOMG!cancer and joined my sister in her spaz attack until one of our parents could calm us both down. I’m pretty sure I’d still do that.
Anywho, Jessi calms down her sister and sends her off to play with Squirt. She watches them and ruminates about ways she could help out Becca’s club. Again, is this standard eleven-year-old behavior? I can imagine wanting to aid my [hypothetical - I’m an only child] sister, especially if we were close, but I don’t think I’d lose too much sleep over the plight of other neighborhood children, which is exactly what Jessi does: “The club is important to an awful lot of people". Also, it takes her a full page and a half to come up not even with a solution but with the Great Idea ™ to … call Mallory for advice. If that takes you a full page and a half - best friendship, you’re doing it so, so wrong.
Chapter 3
We pick up exactly where Chapter 1 left off, because Miles wasn’t even trying with this one: not only does she shoehorn in the standard Chapter 2 exposition right in the middle of a goddamn scene, she doesn’t even have the decency to make it a club-meeting scene. Jessi’s about to call Mallory when “I realized I’d been staring at the kitchen phone for about five minutes, while my mind wandered”. Because sometimes I’m just so eager to talk to my best friend that I spend five minutes reviewing our entire friendship and how it fits into the network of our baby-sitting cult, instead of, you know, actually calling her.
“I didn’t reach Mal until that evening. But I was glad I finally did. Mal is so practical. She said, ‘Why don’t you talk about the Kids Club at the next BSC meeting?’ What a simple, wonderful suggestion.”
I see the word “wonderful” is getting the “sophisticated” treatment.
You know, I once wrote a poem about how much I hate the watering down of words like “gorgeous” and “amazing” to describe things like ice-cream flavors or sales on fucking pantyhose. Does it actually amaze you? Does it inspire awe? No? THEN DON’T BLOODY CALL IT “AMAZING” OR “AWESOME”. Like most poems with an angsty note, it wasn’t that good, but I’m citing it to make clear just how a big a pet peeve this is.
That said, I should be more sensitive. I know Mallory doesn’t have a lot going for her, and if Jessi wants to make her believe that her suggestion of talking about childcare-related issues at a baby-sitting club is “wonderful”, I think we can all agree to pat Mal on the head and look the other way for a while.
“The club began awhile ago - before Dawn and I even lived in Stoneybrook. And when Mal was young enough so she was still a baby-sittee, not yet a baby-sitter.”
Grammatical atrocities aside (seriously, Miles, there’s not much of this wine left and it’s my dad’s super-expensive red holiday variety, so I hope you appreciate what you’re doing to me), color me unimpressed that a club has managed to exist for … a year? Eighteen months? Don’t you take that “reminiscing about the good ol’ days” tone with me, Miss “I’m Too Young to Have My Goddamn Ears Pierced”.
“Here is Kristy at her brilliant best! … [Kid Kits] are great for rainy days, for entertaining new sitting charges, and sometimes for absolutely no special reason! … Whew! Sometimes Kristy’s brain is hard to keep up with.”
You know, Jessica, after your toes go to shit and some pretty young thing from San Francisco inspires your inevitable Nina Sayers breakdown, consider a career in infomercials when you get out of rehab. You’ve got a real deftness with exclamation points.
I’ll also never understand the idea that books and games are only for rainy days. How much can you really do on half an acre of suburban Connecticut lawn? Hell, I grew up on ten acres in rural New England, with a forest full of cool stuff like remains of old homesteads and a stream you could follow from my backyard several miles to a huge swimming hole, and I still managed to get bored every other day.
I’m choosing not to say much of the fact that Jessi thinks a box of old toys is “Kristy at her brilliant best”, partially because that joke pretty much writes itself and partially as a moment of silence for Jessi’s small, small life. I knew she and Mallory had something in common.
“I know that makes us sound busy, and we are. Busy, I mean.”
Now I’m out of wine, Miss “Doesn’t Understand How Antecedents Work”. You’re certainly racking up a lot of nicknames today.
“‘I can’t believe no one will volunteer to take Ms. Simon’s place,’ said Dawn.
‘Me neither….But I have this idea.’
‘What?’ asked Mary Anne.’
‘I could take Ms. Simon’s place.’
Silence.
‘I want to help out,’ I began.
‘Jessi, what aren’t you telling us?’ said Kristy.”
It takes a special kind of paranoid to immediately assume a proposed philanthropic endeavor means someone’s hiding something or has an ulterior motive. I know dictators fear the people they oppress, K. Ron, but you’ll have a firm grip on them for another hundred-odd books. Your throne is safe for now.
The club decides that for the month Jessi will be working with the Kids Club (a month? They were going to shut down the entire club because one of its faculty supervisors was leaving for a month? And no other teacher was willing to step in?), the other members will lay off the baby-sitting (I initially wanted to rework that phrasing because it made baby-sitting sound like a drug, but then I realized that wasn’t too far off the mark) and do volunteer work.
“‘Maybe [Kristy] could work with autistic kids somehow.’”
Oh Jebus, Mary, and Joseph. I say this as someone who is mildly Aspie herself and is close to several others with the condition, so I hope my assessment carries some weight. You know what autistic kids need? Adults who are patient and open-minded and non-judgmental of neurological quirks. Adults who understand the single-minded intensity with which autistic and Aspie kids often approach their interests, show a little goddamn respect for those interests, and don’t try to shoehorn them into more acceptable avenues. K. Ron, I’m telling you right now that a softball team of autistic kids would not be a pretty sight. You’d probably have an easier time nailing Jell-O to a tree. Please stay the fuck out of this community and don’t attempt to rewire my neurology with elbow grease and Kid-Kits.
“Wow! I had sent us on a mission!”
…I’m suddenly imagining BSC missionaries. Someone should write a sociology thesis on parallels between the BSC’s approach to childcare and the culture-quashing imperialist missions of the 1800s.
Chapter 4
Jessi picks up Becca at school and stays behind to tell Mr. Katz about her Great Idea™. (Good thing every dad in Stoneybrook is a lawyer. You’re gonna need some good ones when K. Ron, with Watson’s dirty money behind her, brings a copyright suit on your ass. Play the race card if you have to; you’re good at that.)
“Mr. Katz smiled. ‘Jessi,’ he said warmly. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you from Becca and Charlotte. And several other students here. You’re a baby-sitter?’”
That. That is what’s fucked up about relating to your younger siblings solely as an authority figure. God forbid Jessi have anything to offer the club solely as Becca’s older sister - no, she has to have Baby-Sitting™ credentials coming out her ears. I wonder what psychological effect that’ll have in five or ten years if the sitters never learn to think of their siblings as family first, charges second. I’m imagining Becca going through her first big breakup and Jessi elbowing everyone else out of the way not because she wants to be there for her baby sister, but because she’s a Baby-Sitter and will know exactly what to do.
“‘Could I help out? I know I’m only eleven, and I know I can’t take Ms. Simon’s place, but I’d like - ’
‘It’s volunteer work, Jessi,’ Mr. Katz interrupted me. ‘We don’t get paid.’”
Points to Mr. Katz for anticipating realistic eleven-year-old concerns. It’s a shame he doesn’t seem to realize he lives in Stoneybrook.
So let me get this straight. Mr. Katz accepts Jessi as an assistant on a two-week trial basis, and somehow, suddenly, the club is saved. What exactly does a girl only one or two years older than most of the kids in the club and capable of probably about half Ms. Simon’s workload bring to the table that Mr. Katz couldn’t have done without? Wasn’t his big gripe that he couldn’t run the club by himself (for a month, mind - what kind of teacher is this guy? Does he not know how to hold down a classroom?)? How exactly is a temporary eleven-year-old handmaiden going to turn that around? She said herself that she “can’t take Ms. Simon’s place”.
The Sitters hold an emergency Saturday-afternoon meeting to discuss their volunteering plans. Apparently K. Ron expected them all to have found jobs in less than a week. Even in Stoneybrook time, that’s pushing it. K. Ron is helping out at a daycare (for neurotypical kids, THANK GOD). Claudia is teaching art, Stacey is volunteering at a diabetes clinic, and Dawn is tethering herself to a tree to protest Big Lumber straying from her character trait for once in her life and working with physically disabled kids at something called the Baker Institute.
“‘Kids like me [Stacey] will talk with other kids who’ve recently found out they’re diabetic. The director - her name is Miss Arnell - told me about her two kids, an eight-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl, who just got diagnosed.’”
Miss Arnell? Do I detect a subtle endorsement of single motherhood?
“It came as no surprise to any of us that Claudia was going to help teach an art class, as she’d hoped she might.
…
Mallory began to laugh. ‘I think Margo’s taking that class.’
‘Great!’ exclaimed Claud.
‘Here’s more good news,’ said Kristy. ‘I think Karen’s signed up, too!’
‘I’ll be prepared,’ said Claud.’”
I bet Ann and Svengalerangis sentenced Miles to fifty lashes and a Hail Boo-Boo for improper worship at the altar of Karen Brewer.
“Mary Anne was going to be doing something different from the rest of us. ‘I won’t be working at an organization or a community center,’ she began. ‘See, my dad and Dawn’s mom are friends with this couple who have a little boy who’s brain damaged. They need people to come over to their house and work with their son, plus help out with their two other kids.’”
Cue a second round of JEBUS, MARY, AND JOSEPH. (That ought to be a mixed drink, composed of the sundry alcohols I’ve imbibed today and knocked back whenever Ann or a ghostie displays hideous ignorance of medical issues.) We’ll start with the minor annoyance first: Mary Anne is working with a brain-damaged kid PLUS helping out with the two others? Because I’m sure she’ll be able to give her utmost attention to all three and no one will burn the house down or shave the family goat.
Second, who in the name of sweet Chrimbus would hire a friend’s emotionally dysfunctional thirteen-year-old daughter to handle a brain-damaged child? Aside from the sobbingly obvious issue of Mary Anne not having a degree or even any kind of experience whatsofuckingever with brain damage, this is MARY ANNE we’re talking about. She’d probably waterworks so hard at the sight of the kid that the other siblings would up comforting HER.
Mallory gets a cursory paragraph about helping out with the park’s recreation program. Isn’t the point of the park a way to blow off steam for kids who aren’t into organized activities? Face it, park counselors know that as well as we do, and they tend to sport extra-large sticks up their asses to compensate for their uselessness. I guess Mallory’s finally found her tribe. Maybe she can organize the once-feral children into an anti-pageant.
Part 2!