#17: Mary Anne's Bad-Luck Mystery
Oh, man, you guys. My computer fatally crapped out not once, but twice in the past six weeks. When I was finally notified that my data had been recovered, I didn't sob with relief for my 5000 mp3s, pictures of my family and friends, or novel I've been writing for five years. No, I was filled with the profound joy that I hadn't lost my folder of half-written BSC snarks. I tried to explain to the tech guy just how hard it is to recap a chapter 2, but I don't think he understood.
Without further ado, then, the snark.
“You know,” Kristy says, “If I got a whole bunch of peas and put them in the mashed potatoes - spread out evenly - and then took my fork and smushed them all down, my lunch would look exactly like -”
“Stop!” Mary Anne shrieks, thankfully saving us all from another clichéd lunchtime description. Oh, do go on, Kristy. What does it look like this time - cat vomit? Moldy gym socks? One of Claudia’s handmade brooches? Yeah, why don’t you come back when you’ve come up with something the Pike triplets haven’t already discarded on the grounds of being too insipid.
Mary Anne asks her why she buys the damn hot lunch every day when she’s just going to whine like a eight-year-old boy about it, and Kristy says that it’s more fun to buy the hot lunch to use for her hackneyed stand-up routine than it is to eat like a normal person. I have a theory that Kristy was the My First Schizophrenic for the 80’s preteen - I mean, is there ever any particular explanation given as to why she spends half the time as Joseph Stalin and half as Bart Simpson?
The rest of Mary Anne’s friends are eating lunch too, and what better time to tell us their entire life stories? Other than while we’re asleep or massively drunk or suffering from blunt head trauma, I mean. Speaking of blunt head trauma, Claudia is wearing an oversized white shirt with vegetables all over it. I don’t even know what that’s about. She’s also sporting “a very short jean skirt [emphasis Mary Anne’s…yeah, way to be “strict,” Kishis], white stockings, green anklets, and lavender sneakers, the kind boys wear.” The kind boys like Logan wear, maybe. “Wait, I’m not done.” Oh, sorry. “Claudia had pulled the hair on one side of her head back with a clip that looked like a yellow poodle. The hair on the other side of her head was hanging in her face. Attached to the one ear you could see was a plastic earring about the size of a jar lid.” Do you think Claudia even has earlobes anymore, or are they just a couple of spare sagging vaginas on either side of her head?
The baby-sitters excitedly start discussing Halloween - I don’t know what the fuss is about, since Stoneybrook celebrates Halloween about twice a month - and Mary Anne gets a creepy feeling like she’s being watched at the mention of the Halloween Hop. Seeing as how SMS routinely invites deranged women hellbent on revenge to their dances, she might actually have cause to worry there. She subtly looks over her shoulder to see Cokie and Grace unsubtly pointing and laughing at their table. She thinks they’re looking at Kristy “because she was wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing for the last seven weeks.” Because nothing says “I’m a trustworthy, reliable, responsible caregiver” like “I look and smell like a wino.”
Mary Anne hears Grace mumble something about “stuck up,” and for once, instead of defensively saying that just because they’re one of those exclusive groups that only hangs out with each other and doesn’t allow any outside friends of any kind doesn’t mean they’re stuck up, GAWD, she actually admits that there are hurt feelings from the old friends they started shunning. Last year she and Kristy used to hang out with the Shillaber twins, Claudia and Stacey used to hang with the popular group, and “Dawn, being an individual, would go back and forth between our group and the other one” (translation: Dawn, being pathetically insecure and desperate for approval, would try to hang out with anyone who would have her), but now everyone else feels left out by the BSC. Mary Anne says she feels “kind of bad about that, but I don’t know what to do.” Um, how about not ditching your old friends, genius? I mean, I don’t really care, but I love the way she acts like she had no choice in the matter. (…Well, okay, K. Ron probably did threaten her, but still.) “I guess the twins and Rick and Dorianne and everyone will have to be their own groups,” she concludes. Yes, it will be difficult, but the peons will just have to try to carry on without them. Perhaps they can cheer themselves up by throwing a “Hurray, that Creepy Wannabe-Hippie Chick Stopped Trying to Sit At Our Table and Lecture Us about Barley” party. And I’m sure the Shillaber twins will be happy to be able to breathe through their noses again now that Kristy and her filthy boxer shorts have found some new followers.
Chapter 2! Mary Anne just loves checking the mail. (I used to, too, until I graduated college and started getting thick scary envelopes from the government saying I owed them money for my education. Now I move house every few weeks in the hopes that the mail won’t catch me.) She gets a letter addressed to her - “Oh, wow!” she gee-willikers - but has to rush to the BSC meeting before she has time to open it.
“Oh, darn! Darn, darn, boring darn!” Mary Anne exclaims when she opens the letter at the meeting. She sounds like June Cleaver with Tourette’s. It turns out the missive is just a chain letter, which was the world’s most obnoxious form of communication up until the glurge email was invented. This one’s worse than usual, though, because unless she sends out twenty copies of the letter, “Bad luck will be visited upon you, the recipient of this letter, and your friends and loved ones. Harm will come your way.” Christ, that’s even worse than the pyramid scheme.
Kristy thinks the whole thing is bullshit and tells Mary Anne not to send it to her. Mary Anne says she won’t send any, because then twenty people will hate her for sending them stupid crap, which causes Mallory and Jessi to shit their Pampers. “That’s crazy! Thanks a lot!” Mallory yelps. Oh, yeah, the “bad luck on your friends and loved ones” thing. I can’t decide what’s sadder, that Mallory actually believes that her life is influenced by an anonymous chain letter, or the fact that her life is so pathetic she really can’t afford to take chances at this point. If Mary Anne throws that thing away, all Mallory’s hair will probably fall out or something. Also, Jessi fails basic comprehension, because she thinks that if Mary Anne breaks the chain, bad luck will be visited on the baby-sitters’ families. It doesn’t say that, sweetie.
They all want Mary Anne to send the letters, but Mary Anne sensibly points out that the copier at the library is fifteen cents a page, and that works out to “um, let’s see…well, a lot of change.” Stunning mathematical work, there, Holmes. It’s three bucks, or approximately 576 hours of babysitting. Jessi and Mallory beg her to send the letters and spare their eternal souls, but Mary Anne, displaying the last shred of common sense that will appear in this particular book, flings the letter in the trash on the way out. Somewhere, Mallory is bald and weeping.
The curse takes hold first thing the next morning, as Mary Anne falls out of bed, which is the most humiliating thing that could possibly happen. Her dad rushes in to see what the commotion is about and she wishes the floor would swallow her up, “or at the very least, wishing to die, which would at least put an end to the embarrassment.” She’s so embarrassed she could die about something that happened while she was alone in her room and no one but her father even knows about? Mary Anne has got such a rough life ahead of her.
Actually, it’s just going to be a rough day, because next she manages to spill orange juice all over her white dress and she jumps up and starts apologizing to her father for some reason. Is it alarmist of me that I find that kind of creepy? Like…what does she think Richard is going to do to her for spilling juice on her own dress? She can’t find her shoes either (they’re on top the TV, so obviously Sharon came by for a booty call in the middle of the night), and really, this sounds pretty much like an average morning for me.
Mary Anne makes a big deal out of her terrible morning to Claudia on the way to school in the hopes of inducing the Mechanic Commandment (“Thou’s car shalt stop making that clunking sound when thou takest it to thine mechanic”) but it’s a no-go. She can’t get her locker open, she left her math homework at home, and she spills macaroni everywhere at lunch. Seriously, those things are irritating, but I had three days worse than that just last week. At lunch Logan teases her about having to call the janitor a second time (first for the locker, then the macaroni) and Mary Anne explodes bitch juice all over him - I think this book should be called “Mary Anne Gets PMDD” - and stalks away to read Little Women, her favorite book, hoping it will comfort her. As a final punch in the ovary, it’s not on the shelf in the library. Oh, sob.
At home, Mary Anne gets out her own copy of Little Women and starts at the part where Beth dies, hoping that she “would feel cheered up if I read about someone who was having a worse time than I was.” Yeah, I know after I spill orange juice all over myself, all I have to do is remind myself that some people die after a protracted battle with scarlet fever and I’m dancing on a cloud. Mary Anne is fucking morbid. She doesn’t get too far, though, before Mrs. Newton calls all, “Where the hell are you?” Oops. I’m guessing Mary Anne is going to play a little game with Jamie called “Let’s Keep a Secret from K. Ron.” By the way, Mary Anne wants us to know, in case we were wondering, that she made up with Logan that night and the orange juice stain came out of her dress. Thank god, I can cancel that candlelight vigil now.
Chapter 4! Dawn’s babysitting for Jackie by himself while his brothers are at their various lessons, because Jackie isn’t allowed to take lessons anymore. He used to take piano, but then he broke his teacher’s metronome and her doorbell. The way this story trails off concerns me. So the piano teacher was like, “YOUR HELLBEAST MAY NEVER DARKEN MY DOORSTEP AGAIN his brother’s okay though”? You’re supposed to explain to a seven-year-old that he isn’t allowed to take the same lessons his brothers do because the teacher refused to have him anymore? That’s downright cruel.
Jackie wants to make a robot for his Halloween costume and, per the Jenny Prezzioso commandment (“Thou shalt never actually act as bratty as thine baby-sitters claim thouest are”), doesn’t actually do anything that horrible - just knocks over a stack of cardboard boxes while getting one to make a robot body with, then knocks over his mother’s sewing chest getting buttons for decoration. Today I tripped over the dog and fell into the coffee table, slammed my finger in the bathroom door, snagged the sleeve of my shirt on a hook sticking out of the wall and tore it, and sprayed ink everywhere just by inspecting the printer at work. And that is what we here at Casa Roo call a good day. Dawn needs to shut the fuck up. I feel like that’s not the first time I’ve said that.
Jackie actually gets his costume put together without major incident, but he puts it on before the glue’s dry and the whole thing comes apart. He’s not too fussed about it, though. I love Jackie, because he doesn’t let the fact that his baby-sitters treat him like shit get him down. Case in point - Dawn briefly wonders if Mary Anne’s letter caused all those horrible things to happen, then realizes that that makes no sense, because Jackie ALWAYS causes horrible things to happen. No, seriously, if the worst thing that Dawn can imagine happening on a sitting job is a stack of cardboard boxes falling over, bitch should count her damn blessings (“Bitch shalt counteth her damn blessings”).
Chapter 5! Mary Anne almost pees herself with excitement over an unexpected package, though I don’t know why, since the name and address have been constructed out of letters cut from a magazine. I feel like Mary Anne is the kind of girl that would hop in the back of a van with “FREE CANDY” spray-painted on the side. And when it finally dawns on her that something about this doesn’t seem totally legit, her first thought is that Tigger has been kitten-napped. Mary Anne really does live in her own little fantasy world, doesn’t she.
Once she realizes that Tigger’s fine, she hauls ass over to Claudia’s, where Kristy points out that the box isn’t addressed just to Mary Anne, but to “Mary Anne and the members of the Baby-Sitters Club.” There’s no return address - obviously; somehow using cut-and-pasted letters from a magazine sort of loses its edge when you also use your personalized return stamp - and Mary Anne “could see fear in [her] friends’ eyes.” For fuck’s sake, it’s not Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in the damn box. Just open it.
Kristy insists that Mary Anne be the one to open it, and she peels it open “as slowly and as carefully as if a bomb might be inside. (And these days, who knew?)” …Did they just make a Unabomber reference in a Baby-Sitters Club book? That’s kind of awesome.
Instead of a hastily assembled homemade explosive, however, the package is just a small jewelry box. Mary Anne rolls her eyes and gives everyone a “how fucking stupid are WE?” look, but Jessi is not relieved. “Anything could be inside,” she says, “and there are a lot of anythings I wouldn’t want to be within a mile of.” I like to imagine that even a fictional character could not deliver this line with a straight face, because I can’t think of a single anything that would be both remotely dangerous and small enough to fit in a jewelry box, other than perhaps a highly poisonous insect of some sort, which I would not even entertain as a possibility in this situation. Shaking, Mary Anne opens the box and then demands tweezers to peel back the tissue paper inside so she doesn’t have to touch it. Even Claudia thinks this is ridiculous and grabs the tissue paper, crumples it up, and tosses it on the bed. Dawn shrieks “EW!” and scrambles away, and this book does nothing but reinforce my belief that eighth grade is WAY too young to babysit if they’re still this immature about this kind of shit. And it ain’t looking good when Claudia is the only one in the room sane enough to leave a child alone with. They huddle around the box as though it might be radioactive, and inside the jewelry box is - horrors - a piece of jewelry. A necklace, to be exact, of a small glass ball with a mustard seed inside. Mary Anne picks it up as though “at any moment it might go up in a puff of smoke, or that we might go up in a puff of smoke.” Yeah, I think “puff of smoke” would explain a lot here, if you catch my drift. (I’m talking about marijuana.)
Claudia - the girl dressed as a goddamn radish - continues to be the sane one, by commenting that the necklace is kind of cool and she likes it. Mary Anne starts to tell her that she can have it when she notices that there’s a note in the box. It says, among some stupid things about Halloween, “Wear this bad-luck charm, Mary Anne - or else.” So she has to wear a charm that will bring her bad luck, or she’ll…have bad luck? The mere fact that the sender of this package obviously has no grasp on what makes a convincing threat should have been a huge tipoff, in my opinion. I mean, if you tell her that she’s going to have bad luck either way, where’s the incentive to wear an ugly necklace besides? If brains were dynamite, Cokie Mason couldn’t blow her fucking nose. (Yeah, of course it’s from Cokie. I actually remember reading this book for the first time when I was six or seven and thinking, “It’s Cokie, you idiot.)
Mary Anne shrieks that’s she’s already TOUCHED the necklace, OMG, and Dawn shrieks back that she’s got to WEAR it, OMFG. Mary Anne doesn’t want to, but Jessi reminds her what happened when she ignored the chain letter. You mean, nothing? Maybe I’m jaded, but I consider bad luck to be having someone die, getting fired, or losing a limb, not having your favorite book already checked out of the library. Mary Anne rather condescendingly, considering the position she’s in, thinks that Jessi and Mallory still believe in this stuff because they’re two years younger than the rest of them, but Dawn helpfully reminds us that they can all behave like second graders by telling her she ought to wear the necklace. Mary Anne protests that she thought they didn’t believe in this stuff, but I don’t know where she got that idea, since they immediately freaked the hell out when she brought the box in.
Dawn says that she had awful luck with Jackie Rodowsky and tells them all about the sitting job. Mary Anne sensibly points out that Jackie is always like that, but Dawn says that it was “worse than usual.” I will say it again, Dawn - a bad sitting job is having your charge get hurt, go missing, or break a priceless antique. Not knocking over some empty cardboard boxes. QUIT BEING A WHINY DRAMA QUEEN. Claudia chimes in that she flunked a spelling test too, and Mary Anne also sensibly points out that Claudia always fails spelling tests. AHAHAHAHAHAHA. HA. HA. Sniff - woo. Heh.
They all begin to speak up - Jessi fell in ballet class, Kristy lost her watch, Mallory got in trouble for talking in math, and Stacey, despite not even being IN this book, broke her father’s beloved paperweight. It’s a shame these bitches will never get past middle school so they can take an introductory psych course and learn about confirmation bias. Mary Anne admits she had the worst day of her life after she tossed that chain letter, and I’m a bit agog at this, because even though she can’t remember it, I feel like the day HER MOTHER DIED might rank a little higher than the day she snapped at her boyfriend and then apologized to him. Mallory talks a little bollocks about warding off evil spirits and Mary Anne closes out this shitfest of a chapter by wondering how to do that. The fact that it doesn’t occur to them to speculate about who would bother to send such a thing is a little worrying.
The bad luck continues into the next week: on Saturday, Mary Anne sits for Jamie Newton, who spills things, breaks shit, and skins his knee; then on Monday there’s a fire in a trash can, an explosion in the science lab, and Miranda Shillaber twists her ankle in gym. At lunch that day, Kristy glumly says that it has to all be a coincidence, but this sort of logic has no place in a BSC book, because Mary Anne stares at the necklace and decides that “it looked like something that was carefully, calmly planning terrible deeds.” …Fucking REALLY, Mary Anne? You think your NECKLACE is planning terrible deeds? And yet you’d still rather wear it around your neck than see what happens if you don’t? She replies that ONE bad thing would be a coincidence, but not ALL these things. I beg you, Mary Anne, once you’ve finished Psych 100, to pop in on a Logic class and take notes when they discuss The Law of Truly Large Numbers.
Mary Anne adds that there have been other signs of bad luck as well - her dad opened an umbrella inside, a black cat ran in front of them on the way to school, and she picked up a tails-up penny. I fail to see what this has to do with the size of Pam Anderson’s tits. Why don’t they just carry on and proclaim that all the war, famine, and suffering in the world is the necklace’s fault too? They all begin loudly discussing how the necklace is a CURSE and they have to WARD IT AWAY and don’t consider it the slightest bit suspicious that Cokie’s table is really interested in eavesdropping on this conversation. Come ON, you guys, people in comas are sitting bolt upright and yelling, “It’s Cokie, you idiots!” They decide, to Claudia’s consternation, to go to the library after school and look up curses and how to break them. Mary Anne says that Claudia doesn’t have to go along if she doesn’t want to and that it’s up to her. “No, it isn’t,” interrupts Kristy. “It’s not up to her. She’s going.” RUN, CLAUDIA! RUUUUN FROM K. ROOOOOON! DON’T DRINK THE KOOOOL-AIIIIIIIID!
Mary Anne, naturally, is all dreamy about white-haired old librarians leading them to some musty, forgotten shelf that will contain the answers to all their problems, which is funny considering that I go to my local library once a week or so and it’s always like Six Flags on Bring Five Screaming Children and Get Five More in Free day. Turns out Stoneybrook’s library is like that too, and they don’t even need to ask a librarian for help, since the Mallory and Jessi spend so much time there masturbating to horses reading. They even know how to use the card catalog! Even though, you know, they teach kindergartners to use the card catalog and it’s not exactly rocket science to start with. Kristy asks if they should try the children’s section or the adult’s, and I’d really like to know what kind of funding Stoneybrook gets to fill the children’s section of their library with books about voodoo and exorcism. Some of that shit is actually pretty fucked up even if you don’t believe in it, s’all I’m saying. Mallory thinks they’ll have better luck in the adult section, but they’ll have to behave, because librarians are always suspicious of kids in the adult section. That’s because they’re usually there to look up books with sex scenes in them, sweetie. Not everyone gets their rocks off on Misty of Chincoteague.
Claudia wants to go home because watching other people use the card catalog makes her feel faint, but Kristy firmly refuses. I would really like to know what she would do if Claudia just got up and left. It would probably involve busted kneecaps. Dragging Claudia along by the side ponytail, they manage to find the witchcraft books, and Mallory helpfully announces that they need to look for a spell. A spell. Hold on, I need to...just...a motherfucking SPELL. To defeat the evil forces of spilled macaroni and cheese. Mary Anne jokingly says that they should ask Karen for advice, but this only serves to illustrate my point - how exactly is it stupid to believe that your neighbor is a witch named Morbidda Destiny but not stupid to believe that a necklace is causing evil things to happen? They each check out one book, because Mallory the library genius doesn’t know that you’re allowed to check out more than one, and head back to Claudia’s accompanied by twin stormclouds of evil and stupid.
Chapter 7 interlude: Jessi babysits for Jamie Newton, who is scared of Halloween until Jessi reads him books about a friendly ghost. I despair of finding anything snarkable about this chapter and then fall asleep in the recliner. When I wake up, my dog is lying on the floor, dutifully chewing these pages out of my book. Editorial opinion? Your call.
Chapter 8 begins with Mallory and Claudia jointly writing up their babysitting job at the Pikes’ and disagreeing about what was the worst part of the job, which becomes notably stupid with: “Well lets not arg How on erth do you spell” “Argue?” “Right.” Essay question: Which is stupider, that Mallory probably just elbowed her out of the way to write down the word “argue” instead of spelling it out loud like a normal person, or that Claudia even bothered to ask, considering she had no qualms about referring to it as a “siting experyence” half a page before?
That was a trick question, by the way - the stupidest part is that Mary Anne spends several paragraphs insisting that this was the worst sitting job any of them have ever had, and then openly calls it worse than both the time that Jenny Prezzioso got so sick she had to be rushed to the hospital and the time that Buddy Barrett was kidnapped by his own father. The things she considers to be worse than having to tell a frantic mother her child is missing or deathly ill, by the way, turn out to be: burning dinner, a bird flying down the chimney, and one of the kids losing a tooth. BUT WAS IT WORSE THAN THE DAY YOUR MOTHER DIED, MARY ANNE? Jesus. Perspective: learn you some.
Backing up a bit, the Pikes leave Daddy Stew on the stove to feed the brood while they’re gone, which turns out to be a casserole of all the leftover crap in the fridge that was about to turn. My previously low opinion of Ma and Pa Pike’s parenting is not improving. Even Claudia the human trash compactor thinks this sounds revolting, so she isn’t even too upset when Byron decides that the Daddy Stew isn’t cooking fast enough and turns the stove up to flambé. The Pike kids, who were excited that their parents were feeding them at all, are disappointed about the ruination of dinner, but their despair doesn’t last too long before they’re distracted by a bird suddenly flapping into the room. Hey, that happened to me once. They chase it around for maybe five minutes, then Margo manages to scare it into flying out the open window. They don’t have time to celebrate, however, before Vanessa runs into the room with a bloody mouth from losing a tooth while chomping on a piece of candy. The rest of the evening, we are told, is “uneventful,” so basically, the worst sitting job ANY of them have EVER BEEN ON OMGELEVENTY!1! involved, respectively, a burned dinner that the babysitter didn’t want to eat anyway, a loose animal that got outside quickly with no damage to person or property, and a kid losing a baby tooth. I could grab any BSC book off the shelf at random and find a worse sitting job than that. I have to believe that AMM is deliberately trying to point out how batshit crazy these bitches are acting about their so-called “bad luck.” I have to believe that, or I’ll cry.
“This,” Kristy intones in her hearty baritone, “is an emergency meeting of the Baby-sitters Club. You all know why you’ve been called here.” Because Matt Braddock has a devastating ingrown toenail? Because they need to plan the Administrative Assistants Day Extravaganza? Because Claudia’s been put back to the third grade? Oh, no, wait, because Mary Anne “tempted fate” and is going to bring death and destruction raining down upon them all. No, seriously. Right there on page 74, Mary Anne actually fucking suggests that throwing away a chain letter is going to cause the end of civilization. There is not enough alcohol in the state to finish this book without developing an eye twitch.
They start going through the books to find a spell (coughsnort) to counteract the bad luck, and Kristy quite rudely tells Mary Anne that she fucked them all over, so she better find a way to fix it. Then she snaps at Jessi for actually finding the spell they need, because it takes time and ingredients to perform instead of magically neutralizing their bad luck just by being read aloud. I think all those sex-change hormones are making Kristy a biiiiitch. They keep looking, even though Jessi just FOUND the fucking spell they wanted and I doubt you’ll find one easier than pressing rose petals in a book for three weeks. Yeah, no, I’m totally right - Dawn finds another, but you need ox tails and scrapings from the underside of a sea snake. I can’t believe they think that mixing up a bunch of obscure crap is going to stop Jackie Rodowsky from knocking things over. Mercifully, they lose interest and start talking about the Halloween Hop, and Claudia unwittingly (as if Claudia ever does anything wittingly) beats the reader with a clue-by-four by informing us that Grace Blume hates Mary Anne because she’s love with Logan. Mary Anne thinks this is just more bad luck and utterly fails to make a connection that someone who hates her might send her anonymous hate mail.
Chapter 10, or: A Snarker’s Paradise! It’s time for the Halloween Hop, and Mary Anne and Logan are going dressed as Cats. No, not as cats. As Cats. Apparently, Mary Anne and Logan saw the musical and were “very impressed” by the costumes. Logan was just dying for an excuse to dress as an old glamourpuss, I expect. They made their own costumes - a “delicate kitten costume” for Mary Anne and a “rough, tough tomcat costume” for Logan, and here I was going to crack a joke with a link about the rough, tough tomcat part, but this totally fucking deserves to be in the main post:
This is what a TOTALLY STRAIGHT THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY is going to wear, PUBLICLY, to a SCHOOL EVENT, and this will in NO WAY haunt him for the rest of his life and possibly in further lives as well. (In the year 2130: “Hey, isn’t that the guy who went as Rum Tum Tugger to the Halloween Hop three lives ago? Let’s go flush his head in the toiletsphere!”)
They did cheat and rent a couple of fur headdresses to go with the homemade leotards, and at this point I think Mary Anne and Logan are officially a lesbian couple. Maybe a lesbian couple that met while working together as Vegas showgirls. Mary Anne scares the shit out of Tigger and her dad on the way out the door and Mrs. Bruno pronounces their costumes “wunduhful,” because Ann M. Martin has never actually heard anyone speak with a southern accent before, and then they’re off to the dance.
Shockingly, the entire building does not collapse from shame upon their entrance. They dance and gossip awhile until Cokie dances by Mary Anne, looks at the necklace, and sneers, “Nice bad luck charm.” AND MARY ANNE DOES NOT FUCKING THINK ANYTHING OF THIS. It does not occur to her that it’s the SLIGHTEST BIT STRANGE that she anonymously received a bad-luck charm, and, despite the fact that she told no one but her closest friends about it, a girl who just so happens to hate her just so happens to know about it. Jesus, CLAUDIA would have figured this out by now.
When Mary Anne gets home, there’s another Unabomber note on the front door, and instead of alerting the Brunos, who are waiting in the car to see she gets inside okay, or her father, who is waiting just inside, she just pockets the thing until she’s alone in her room. Reason number 158 why I would never hire a member of the Baby-sitters Club - remarkably poor judgment in potentially dangerous situations. The note is some standard wording about coming to Old Hickory’s grave at midnight on Halloween (because it doesn’t occur to Cokie the genius that if it’s midnight, it isn’t actually Halloween anymore) under the full moon or beware and some shit. I am, admittedly, the world’s biggest baby, but even I would find that whole setup too clichéd to be remotely scary. A note in my boss’ handwriting saying that I need to come to her office, now THAT’S a pants-pisser.
The next day K. Ron calls another emergency meeting, and they all get the vapors at the mere sight of the letter. …I just…I’m pretty much just kicking the shit out of the dead horse at this point, but SERIOUSLY? Aside from being laughably unscary, it NEVER occurs to them that this might be some kind of setup? If not Cokie, then Alan Gray or Sam? They REALLY THINK it’s more likely that an otherworldly being with a bunch of back issues of Readers’ Digest is demanding that they come to the graveyard on Halloween than maybe, just maybe, one of the several people ALREADY KNOWN for playing practical jokes on them is having a laugh?
Kristy says seriously that they have to go to the graveyard like the note says, and I cannot believe that any self-respecting cult leader would take orders from an anonymous piece of paper. Tsk tsk, K. Ron. Jessi wants to know on behalf of all the new BSC readers who the hell Old Hickory is anyway, and Dawn - who at this point has lived in Stoneybrook for maybe three weeks longer than Jessi - tells her all about the geriatric fuck that hangs around his grave to yell at kids for stealing his newspaper. Jessi squeaks that she can’t believe they’re supposed to go to a haunted grave at midnight on Halloween under the full moon, and when she puts it like that it sounds even dumber. Like a spirit that wants to hurt them can’t do so without relying on Handbook of Clichéd Scary Crap.
Kristy says they have to go because she feels that something meaningful is going to happen at the graveyard, and Claudia pipes up that they’re all going to die. She thinks. They are going. To die. From a spooky letter. There’s just nothing about the sentence that makes sense to me. Kristy says that isn’t what she meant, but they “have to be together on this...If anyone isn’t behind me, well, who knows what might happen.” No, do tell, Kristin. What WILL happen if someone disobeys you? She asks for a show of hands on who’s in and, imagining what horrors might lay ahead if they don’t, everyone unenthusiastically ponies up.
“Great. Thank you,” Kristy says, because somehow she became leader of the Old Hickory Desecration Team even though she didn’t even believe in this stuff at first and then blamed it all on Mary Anne. She figures they should sneak out of their houses around 11:30 and it finally dawns on Mary Anne that they aren’t actually allowed to wander around the graveyard at midnight. Dawn thinks she’ll be able to walk right out of the house, because at 11:30 Sharon will still be wandering the streets, carrying a blender as a purse, trying to remember where she lives. Mary Anne thinks she’ll be able to climb down the tree next to her window, and, because this wouldn’t be a BSC book if someone didn’t mention a Hayley Mills movie, Mallory shrieks that that’s how Pollyanna broke her neck.
Kristy can’t bear the thought of one of her faithful followers getting hurt, of course, so she decrees that they are going to tell their parents that they’re going to a late-night slumber party at her house. Charlie will pick them up at 10:30, drive them around in circles until midnight, drop them at the graveyard, wait around for them, and then take their remains back to the Brewer spread once it’s over. Of course he fucking will. No one can find any fault with this plan - I think I can spot a big one - so they grudgingly agree. Kristy adjourns them with an ominous, “Tell no one about tonight.” Not even Charlie, apparently; she’s just planning to poke a knife in his back and tell him to drive wherever she says and not to ask questions.
Chapter 12! Kristy takes Karen, Andrew, and David Michael trick-or-treating. I can’t believe she didn’t invite them and the rest of the neighborhood kids to come to Old Hickory’s and call it The BSC Spooktacular or something.
Chapter 13 - Mary Anne is going to have to tell her father about the party, even though she’s sure there won’t be a party because they’ll all be dead. Oh, for fuck’s sake. She manages to blurt it all out, though, and Richard is quite happy with the idea, because now he can invite Sharon over and have screamingly loud sex. He does find it a little suspicious, though, that Mary Anne has to get up and change her underwear every time a trick-or-treater rings the doorbell and asks if she’s jumpy because it’s Halloween. Instead of saying a tearful goodbye to him as one would normally do when one honestly believes that death is imminent, Mary Anne makes up a story about how she bought this necklace and then some girl told her it was bad luck. Richard asks her why she doesn’t just take it off then. That Richard. You can’t pull anything over on him. Instead of telling her she’s full of crap, he just asks to see it and tells her that a mustard seed is a symbol of faith, not a bad-luck charm.
Mary Anne thinks that Cokie’s a fucking idiot for telling her that the necklace was a bad luck charm - HEY WAIT! They never told Cokie it was a bad luck charm! This seems suspicious! Could she have possibly had something to do with it?
...THERE you go, sweetie.
She calls Kristy to tell her what she figured out and they make some plans to go to the graveyard early and bring flashlights and white sheets and string. I really can’t imagine what they’re planning. It sounds so mysterious.
Chapter 14! Everything is a go as they cruise toward the graveyard in the Junk Bucket, until Mallory announces that she has a problem - she always holds her breath when she passes graveyards, but she can’t spend an hour in a graveyard holding her breath. Oh, dear. They all try unsuccessfully not to start laughing and pelting her with vegetables, which seems a bit hypocritical considering their recent behavior. Jessi says she used to, but nothing happened when she stopped doing it. Nothing happened when she stopped saying “Rabbit, rabbit,” on the first of the month either. Uh...what?
They get there and rig up their ghosts in the trees while Charlie jerks it alone in the car and dies a little inside. They finish not a moment too soon; when Cokie and cronies show up, the baby-sitters start waving around flashlights, making spooky noises, and surround them while wearing masks. If someone wearing a mask, wielding a flashlight, and going “wooooooooo” jumped out at me, I’d be freaked out too, but not for the reason they think.
Finally they whip off their masks and Cokie gets the chance to snarl what little sneaks they are. The fact that they have showed up to do exactly the same thing pretty much escapes her, I think. Before things can escalate to eye scratching and weave yanking, unfortunately, Logan steps out of the trees and wants to know what the hell is going on. Mary Anne wants to know the same thing. Thinking quickly so that Mary Anne won’t find out that he was meeting up with his boyfriend Carl for a midnight tryst, Logan makes up a story about how someone called him anonymously and told him to come to the graveyard to see something cool. He can’t stop himself from saying, “I’m curious and I like a little adventure,” though. Good try, Logan.
Cokie says that they sent Mary Anne the necklace - she doesn’t know anything about the chain letter, though - and Grace admits that she invited Logan so he’d see Mary Anne acting like a baby, because nothing makes a guy want to dump his girlfriend for you like seeing you treat her like shit. Logan says that he’d never dump such a faithful beard, and they all smugly stomp back to the Junk Bucket. I wonder if they noticed all the sticky tissues crammed in the ashtray.
Chapter 15! At the Brewer’s, they all laugh hysterically in relief, until Jessi says the mystery’s not over. God, she is such a downer. If Cokie didn’t send the chain letter, who did? Mary Anne adds that maybe the whole necklace thing wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t broken the chain. They have hysteria for a moment that the bad luck is still upon them, until Mary Anne points out that things have actually been going pretty well. Besides, the necklace will protect them from any more bad luck, because she has learned absolutely nothing from this little adventure. “So go ahead, you guys. Break all the mirrors you want!” Over K. Ron’s head? All the better.
Without further ado, then, the snark.
“You know,” Kristy says, “If I got a whole bunch of peas and put them in the mashed potatoes - spread out evenly - and then took my fork and smushed them all down, my lunch would look exactly like -”
“Stop!” Mary Anne shrieks, thankfully saving us all from another clichéd lunchtime description. Oh, do go on, Kristy. What does it look like this time - cat vomit? Moldy gym socks? One of Claudia’s handmade brooches? Yeah, why don’t you come back when you’ve come up with something the Pike triplets haven’t already discarded on the grounds of being too insipid.
Mary Anne asks her why she buys the damn hot lunch every day when she’s just going to whine like a eight-year-old boy about it, and Kristy says that it’s more fun to buy the hot lunch to use for her hackneyed stand-up routine than it is to eat like a normal person. I have a theory that Kristy was the My First Schizophrenic for the 80’s preteen - I mean, is there ever any particular explanation given as to why she spends half the time as Joseph Stalin and half as Bart Simpson?
The rest of Mary Anne’s friends are eating lunch too, and what better time to tell us their entire life stories? Other than while we’re asleep or massively drunk or suffering from blunt head trauma, I mean. Speaking of blunt head trauma, Claudia is wearing an oversized white shirt with vegetables all over it. I don’t even know what that’s about. She’s also sporting “a very short jean skirt [emphasis Mary Anne’s…yeah, way to be “strict,” Kishis], white stockings, green anklets, and lavender sneakers, the kind boys wear.” The kind boys like Logan wear, maybe. “Wait, I’m not done.” Oh, sorry. “Claudia had pulled the hair on one side of her head back with a clip that looked like a yellow poodle. The hair on the other side of her head was hanging in her face. Attached to the one ear you could see was a plastic earring about the size of a jar lid.” Do you think Claudia even has earlobes anymore, or are they just a couple of spare sagging vaginas on either side of her head?
The baby-sitters excitedly start discussing Halloween - I don’t know what the fuss is about, since Stoneybrook celebrates Halloween about twice a month - and Mary Anne gets a creepy feeling like she’s being watched at the mention of the Halloween Hop. Seeing as how SMS routinely invites deranged women hellbent on revenge to their dances, she might actually have cause to worry there. She subtly looks over her shoulder to see Cokie and Grace unsubtly pointing and laughing at their table. She thinks they’re looking at Kristy “because she was wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing for the last seven weeks.” Because nothing says “I’m a trustworthy, reliable, responsible caregiver” like “I look and smell like a wino.”
Mary Anne hears Grace mumble something about “stuck up,” and for once, instead of defensively saying that just because they’re one of those exclusive groups that only hangs out with each other and doesn’t allow any outside friends of any kind doesn’t mean they’re stuck up, GAWD, she actually admits that there are hurt feelings from the old friends they started shunning. Last year she and Kristy used to hang out with the Shillaber twins, Claudia and Stacey used to hang with the popular group, and “Dawn, being an individual, would go back and forth between our group and the other one” (translation: Dawn, being pathetically insecure and desperate for approval, would try to hang out with anyone who would have her), but now everyone else feels left out by the BSC. Mary Anne says she feels “kind of bad about that, but I don’t know what to do.” Um, how about not ditching your old friends, genius? I mean, I don’t really care, but I love the way she acts like she had no choice in the matter. (…Well, okay, K. Ron probably did threaten her, but still.) “I guess the twins and Rick and Dorianne and everyone will have to be their own groups,” she concludes. Yes, it will be difficult, but the peons will just have to try to carry on without them. Perhaps they can cheer themselves up by throwing a “Hurray, that Creepy Wannabe-Hippie Chick Stopped Trying to Sit At Our Table and Lecture Us about Barley” party. And I’m sure the Shillaber twins will be happy to be able to breathe through their noses again now that Kristy and her filthy boxer shorts have found some new followers.
Chapter 2! Mary Anne just loves checking the mail. (I used to, too, until I graduated college and started getting thick scary envelopes from the government saying I owed them money for my education. Now I move house every few weeks in the hopes that the mail won’t catch me.) She gets a letter addressed to her - “Oh, wow!” she gee-willikers - but has to rush to the BSC meeting before she has time to open it.
“Oh, darn! Darn, darn, boring darn!” Mary Anne exclaims when she opens the letter at the meeting. She sounds like June Cleaver with Tourette’s. It turns out the missive is just a chain letter, which was the world’s most obnoxious form of communication up until the glurge email was invented. This one’s worse than usual, though, because unless she sends out twenty copies of the letter, “Bad luck will be visited upon you, the recipient of this letter, and your friends and loved ones. Harm will come your way.” Christ, that’s even worse than the pyramid scheme.
Kristy thinks the whole thing is bullshit and tells Mary Anne not to send it to her. Mary Anne says she won’t send any, because then twenty people will hate her for sending them stupid crap, which causes Mallory and Jessi to shit their Pampers. “That’s crazy! Thanks a lot!” Mallory yelps. Oh, yeah, the “bad luck on your friends and loved ones” thing. I can’t decide what’s sadder, that Mallory actually believes that her life is influenced by an anonymous chain letter, or the fact that her life is so pathetic she really can’t afford to take chances at this point. If Mary Anne throws that thing away, all Mallory’s hair will probably fall out or something. Also, Jessi fails basic comprehension, because she thinks that if Mary Anne breaks the chain, bad luck will be visited on the baby-sitters’ families. It doesn’t say that, sweetie.
They all want Mary Anne to send the letters, but Mary Anne sensibly points out that the copier at the library is fifteen cents a page, and that works out to “um, let’s see…well, a lot of change.” Stunning mathematical work, there, Holmes. It’s three bucks, or approximately 576 hours of babysitting. Jessi and Mallory beg her to send the letters and spare their eternal souls, but Mary Anne, displaying the last shred of common sense that will appear in this particular book, flings the letter in the trash on the way out. Somewhere, Mallory is bald and weeping.
The curse takes hold first thing the next morning, as Mary Anne falls out of bed, which is the most humiliating thing that could possibly happen. Her dad rushes in to see what the commotion is about and she wishes the floor would swallow her up, “or at the very least, wishing to die, which would at least put an end to the embarrassment.” She’s so embarrassed she could die about something that happened while she was alone in her room and no one but her father even knows about? Mary Anne has got such a rough life ahead of her.
Actually, it’s just going to be a rough day, because next she manages to spill orange juice all over her white dress and she jumps up and starts apologizing to her father for some reason. Is it alarmist of me that I find that kind of creepy? Like…what does she think Richard is going to do to her for spilling juice on her own dress? She can’t find her shoes either (they’re on top the TV, so obviously Sharon came by for a booty call in the middle of the night), and really, this sounds pretty much like an average morning for me.
Mary Anne makes a big deal out of her terrible morning to Claudia on the way to school in the hopes of inducing the Mechanic Commandment (“Thou’s car shalt stop making that clunking sound when thou takest it to thine mechanic”) but it’s a no-go. She can’t get her locker open, she left her math homework at home, and she spills macaroni everywhere at lunch. Seriously, those things are irritating, but I had three days worse than that just last week. At lunch Logan teases her about having to call the janitor a second time (first for the locker, then the macaroni) and Mary Anne explodes bitch juice all over him - I think this book should be called “Mary Anne Gets PMDD” - and stalks away to read Little Women, her favorite book, hoping it will comfort her. As a final punch in the ovary, it’s not on the shelf in the library. Oh, sob.
At home, Mary Anne gets out her own copy of Little Women and starts at the part where Beth dies, hoping that she “would feel cheered up if I read about someone who was having a worse time than I was.” Yeah, I know after I spill orange juice all over myself, all I have to do is remind myself that some people die after a protracted battle with scarlet fever and I’m dancing on a cloud. Mary Anne is fucking morbid. She doesn’t get too far, though, before Mrs. Newton calls all, “Where the hell are you?” Oops. I’m guessing Mary Anne is going to play a little game with Jamie called “Let’s Keep a Secret from K. Ron.” By the way, Mary Anne wants us to know, in case we were wondering, that she made up with Logan that night and the orange juice stain came out of her dress. Thank god, I can cancel that candlelight vigil now.
Chapter 4! Dawn’s babysitting for Jackie by himself while his brothers are at their various lessons, because Jackie isn’t allowed to take lessons anymore. He used to take piano, but then he broke his teacher’s metronome and her doorbell. The way this story trails off concerns me. So the piano teacher was like, “YOUR HELLBEAST MAY NEVER DARKEN MY DOORSTEP AGAIN his brother’s okay though”? You’re supposed to explain to a seven-year-old that he isn’t allowed to take the same lessons his brothers do because the teacher refused to have him anymore? That’s downright cruel.
Jackie wants to make a robot for his Halloween costume and, per the Jenny Prezzioso commandment (“Thou shalt never actually act as bratty as thine baby-sitters claim thouest are”), doesn’t actually do anything that horrible - just knocks over a stack of cardboard boxes while getting one to make a robot body with, then knocks over his mother’s sewing chest getting buttons for decoration. Today I tripped over the dog and fell into the coffee table, slammed my finger in the bathroom door, snagged the sleeve of my shirt on a hook sticking out of the wall and tore it, and sprayed ink everywhere just by inspecting the printer at work. And that is what we here at Casa Roo call a good day. Dawn needs to shut the fuck up. I feel like that’s not the first time I’ve said that.
Jackie actually gets his costume put together without major incident, but he puts it on before the glue’s dry and the whole thing comes apart. He’s not too fussed about it, though. I love Jackie, because he doesn’t let the fact that his baby-sitters treat him like shit get him down. Case in point - Dawn briefly wonders if Mary Anne’s letter caused all those horrible things to happen, then realizes that that makes no sense, because Jackie ALWAYS causes horrible things to happen. No, seriously, if the worst thing that Dawn can imagine happening on a sitting job is a stack of cardboard boxes falling over, bitch should count her damn blessings (“Bitch shalt counteth her damn blessings”).
Chapter 5! Mary Anne almost pees herself with excitement over an unexpected package, though I don’t know why, since the name and address have been constructed out of letters cut from a magazine. I feel like Mary Anne is the kind of girl that would hop in the back of a van with “FREE CANDY” spray-painted on the side. And when it finally dawns on her that something about this doesn’t seem totally legit, her first thought is that Tigger has been kitten-napped. Mary Anne really does live in her own little fantasy world, doesn’t she.
Once she realizes that Tigger’s fine, she hauls ass over to Claudia’s, where Kristy points out that the box isn’t addressed just to Mary Anne, but to “Mary Anne and the members of the Baby-Sitters Club.” There’s no return address - obviously; somehow using cut-and-pasted letters from a magazine sort of loses its edge when you also use your personalized return stamp - and Mary Anne “could see fear in [her] friends’ eyes.” For fuck’s sake, it’s not Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in the damn box. Just open it.
Kristy insists that Mary Anne be the one to open it, and she peels it open “as slowly and as carefully as if a bomb might be inside. (And these days, who knew?)” …Did they just make a Unabomber reference in a Baby-Sitters Club book? That’s kind of awesome.
Instead of a hastily assembled homemade explosive, however, the package is just a small jewelry box. Mary Anne rolls her eyes and gives everyone a “how fucking stupid are WE?” look, but Jessi is not relieved. “Anything could be inside,” she says, “and there are a lot of anythings I wouldn’t want to be within a mile of.” I like to imagine that even a fictional character could not deliver this line with a straight face, because I can’t think of a single anything that would be both remotely dangerous and small enough to fit in a jewelry box, other than perhaps a highly poisonous insect of some sort, which I would not even entertain as a possibility in this situation. Shaking, Mary Anne opens the box and then demands tweezers to peel back the tissue paper inside so she doesn’t have to touch it. Even Claudia thinks this is ridiculous and grabs the tissue paper, crumples it up, and tosses it on the bed. Dawn shrieks “EW!” and scrambles away, and this book does nothing but reinforce my belief that eighth grade is WAY too young to babysit if they’re still this immature about this kind of shit. And it ain’t looking good when Claudia is the only one in the room sane enough to leave a child alone with. They huddle around the box as though it might be radioactive, and inside the jewelry box is - horrors - a piece of jewelry. A necklace, to be exact, of a small glass ball with a mustard seed inside. Mary Anne picks it up as though “at any moment it might go up in a puff of smoke, or that we might go up in a puff of smoke.” Yeah, I think “puff of smoke” would explain a lot here, if you catch my drift. (I’m talking about marijuana.)
Claudia - the girl dressed as a goddamn radish - continues to be the sane one, by commenting that the necklace is kind of cool and she likes it. Mary Anne starts to tell her that she can have it when she notices that there’s a note in the box. It says, among some stupid things about Halloween, “Wear this bad-luck charm, Mary Anne - or else.” So she has to wear a charm that will bring her bad luck, or she’ll…have bad luck? The mere fact that the sender of this package obviously has no grasp on what makes a convincing threat should have been a huge tipoff, in my opinion. I mean, if you tell her that she’s going to have bad luck either way, where’s the incentive to wear an ugly necklace besides? If brains were dynamite, Cokie Mason couldn’t blow her fucking nose. (Yeah, of course it’s from Cokie. I actually remember reading this book for the first time when I was six or seven and thinking, “It’s Cokie, you idiot.)
Mary Anne shrieks that’s she’s already TOUCHED the necklace, OMG, and Dawn shrieks back that she’s got to WEAR it, OMFG. Mary Anne doesn’t want to, but Jessi reminds her what happened when she ignored the chain letter. You mean, nothing? Maybe I’m jaded, but I consider bad luck to be having someone die, getting fired, or losing a limb, not having your favorite book already checked out of the library. Mary Anne rather condescendingly, considering the position she’s in, thinks that Jessi and Mallory still believe in this stuff because they’re two years younger than the rest of them, but Dawn helpfully reminds us that they can all behave like second graders by telling her she ought to wear the necklace. Mary Anne protests that she thought they didn’t believe in this stuff, but I don’t know where she got that idea, since they immediately freaked the hell out when she brought the box in.
Dawn says that she had awful luck with Jackie Rodowsky and tells them all about the sitting job. Mary Anne sensibly points out that Jackie is always like that, but Dawn says that it was “worse than usual.” I will say it again, Dawn - a bad sitting job is having your charge get hurt, go missing, or break a priceless antique. Not knocking over some empty cardboard boxes. QUIT BEING A WHINY DRAMA QUEEN. Claudia chimes in that she flunked a spelling test too, and Mary Anne also sensibly points out that Claudia always fails spelling tests. AHAHAHAHAHAHA. HA. HA. Sniff - woo. Heh.
They all begin to speak up - Jessi fell in ballet class, Kristy lost her watch, Mallory got in trouble for talking in math, and Stacey, despite not even being IN this book, broke her father’s beloved paperweight. It’s a shame these bitches will never get past middle school so they can take an introductory psych course and learn about confirmation bias. Mary Anne admits she had the worst day of her life after she tossed that chain letter, and I’m a bit agog at this, because even though she can’t remember it, I feel like the day HER MOTHER DIED might rank a little higher than the day she snapped at her boyfriend and then apologized to him. Mallory talks a little bollocks about warding off evil spirits and Mary Anne closes out this shitfest of a chapter by wondering how to do that. The fact that it doesn’t occur to them to speculate about who would bother to send such a thing is a little worrying.
The bad luck continues into the next week: on Saturday, Mary Anne sits for Jamie Newton, who spills things, breaks shit, and skins his knee; then on Monday there’s a fire in a trash can, an explosion in the science lab, and Miranda Shillaber twists her ankle in gym. At lunch that day, Kristy glumly says that it has to all be a coincidence, but this sort of logic has no place in a BSC book, because Mary Anne stares at the necklace and decides that “it looked like something that was carefully, calmly planning terrible deeds.” …Fucking REALLY, Mary Anne? You think your NECKLACE is planning terrible deeds? And yet you’d still rather wear it around your neck than see what happens if you don’t? She replies that ONE bad thing would be a coincidence, but not ALL these things. I beg you, Mary Anne, once you’ve finished Psych 100, to pop in on a Logic class and take notes when they discuss The Law of Truly Large Numbers.
Mary Anne adds that there have been other signs of bad luck as well - her dad opened an umbrella inside, a black cat ran in front of them on the way to school, and she picked up a tails-up penny. I fail to see what this has to do with the size of Pam Anderson’s tits. Why don’t they just carry on and proclaim that all the war, famine, and suffering in the world is the necklace’s fault too? They all begin loudly discussing how the necklace is a CURSE and they have to WARD IT AWAY and don’t consider it the slightest bit suspicious that Cokie’s table is really interested in eavesdropping on this conversation. Come ON, you guys, people in comas are sitting bolt upright and yelling, “It’s Cokie, you idiots!” They decide, to Claudia’s consternation, to go to the library after school and look up curses and how to break them. Mary Anne says that Claudia doesn’t have to go along if she doesn’t want to and that it’s up to her. “No, it isn’t,” interrupts Kristy. “It’s not up to her. She’s going.” RUN, CLAUDIA! RUUUUN FROM K. ROOOOOON! DON’T DRINK THE KOOOOL-AIIIIIIIID!
Mary Anne, naturally, is all dreamy about white-haired old librarians leading them to some musty, forgotten shelf that will contain the answers to all their problems, which is funny considering that I go to my local library once a week or so and it’s always like Six Flags on Bring Five Screaming Children and Get Five More in Free day. Turns out Stoneybrook’s library is like that too, and they don’t even need to ask a librarian for help, since the Mallory and Jessi spend so much time there masturbating to horses reading. They even know how to use the card catalog! Even though, you know, they teach kindergartners to use the card catalog and it’s not exactly rocket science to start with. Kristy asks if they should try the children’s section or the adult’s, and I’d really like to know what kind of funding Stoneybrook gets to fill the children’s section of their library with books about voodoo and exorcism. Some of that shit is actually pretty fucked up even if you don’t believe in it, s’all I’m saying. Mallory thinks they’ll have better luck in the adult section, but they’ll have to behave, because librarians are always suspicious of kids in the adult section. That’s because they’re usually there to look up books with sex scenes in them, sweetie. Not everyone gets their rocks off on Misty of Chincoteague.
Claudia wants to go home because watching other people use the card catalog makes her feel faint, but Kristy firmly refuses. I would really like to know what she would do if Claudia just got up and left. It would probably involve busted kneecaps. Dragging Claudia along by the side ponytail, they manage to find the witchcraft books, and Mallory helpfully announces that they need to look for a spell. A spell. Hold on, I need to...just...a motherfucking SPELL. To defeat the evil forces of spilled macaroni and cheese. Mary Anne jokingly says that they should ask Karen for advice, but this only serves to illustrate my point - how exactly is it stupid to believe that your neighbor is a witch named Morbidda Destiny but not stupid to believe that a necklace is causing evil things to happen? They each check out one book, because Mallory the library genius doesn’t know that you’re allowed to check out more than one, and head back to Claudia’s accompanied by twin stormclouds of evil and stupid.
Chapter 7 interlude: Jessi babysits for Jamie Newton, who is scared of Halloween until Jessi reads him books about a friendly ghost. I despair of finding anything snarkable about this chapter and then fall asleep in the recliner. When I wake up, my dog is lying on the floor, dutifully chewing these pages out of my book. Editorial opinion? Your call.
Chapter 8 begins with Mallory and Claudia jointly writing up their babysitting job at the Pikes’ and disagreeing about what was the worst part of the job, which becomes notably stupid with: “Well lets not arg How on erth do you spell” “Argue?” “Right.” Essay question: Which is stupider, that Mallory probably just elbowed her out of the way to write down the word “argue” instead of spelling it out loud like a normal person, or that Claudia even bothered to ask, considering she had no qualms about referring to it as a “siting experyence” half a page before?
That was a trick question, by the way - the stupidest part is that Mary Anne spends several paragraphs insisting that this was the worst sitting job any of them have ever had, and then openly calls it worse than both the time that Jenny Prezzioso got so sick she had to be rushed to the hospital and the time that Buddy Barrett was kidnapped by his own father. The things she considers to be worse than having to tell a frantic mother her child is missing or deathly ill, by the way, turn out to be: burning dinner, a bird flying down the chimney, and one of the kids losing a tooth. BUT WAS IT WORSE THAN THE DAY YOUR MOTHER DIED, MARY ANNE? Jesus. Perspective: learn you some.
Backing up a bit, the Pikes leave Daddy Stew on the stove to feed the brood while they’re gone, which turns out to be a casserole of all the leftover crap in the fridge that was about to turn. My previously low opinion of Ma and Pa Pike’s parenting is not improving. Even Claudia the human trash compactor thinks this sounds revolting, so she isn’t even too upset when Byron decides that the Daddy Stew isn’t cooking fast enough and turns the stove up to flambé. The Pike kids, who were excited that their parents were feeding them at all, are disappointed about the ruination of dinner, but their despair doesn’t last too long before they’re distracted by a bird suddenly flapping into the room. Hey, that happened to me once. They chase it around for maybe five minutes, then Margo manages to scare it into flying out the open window. They don’t have time to celebrate, however, before Vanessa runs into the room with a bloody mouth from losing a tooth while chomping on a piece of candy. The rest of the evening, we are told, is “uneventful,” so basically, the worst sitting job ANY of them have EVER BEEN ON OMGELEVENTY!1! involved, respectively, a burned dinner that the babysitter didn’t want to eat anyway, a loose animal that got outside quickly with no damage to person or property, and a kid losing a baby tooth. I could grab any BSC book off the shelf at random and find a worse sitting job than that. I have to believe that AMM is deliberately trying to point out how batshit crazy these bitches are acting about their so-called “bad luck.” I have to believe that, or I’ll cry.
“This,” Kristy intones in her hearty baritone, “is an emergency meeting of the Baby-sitters Club. You all know why you’ve been called here.” Because Matt Braddock has a devastating ingrown toenail? Because they need to plan the Administrative Assistants Day Extravaganza? Because Claudia’s been put back to the third grade? Oh, no, wait, because Mary Anne “tempted fate” and is going to bring death and destruction raining down upon them all. No, seriously. Right there on page 74, Mary Anne actually fucking suggests that throwing away a chain letter is going to cause the end of civilization. There is not enough alcohol in the state to finish this book without developing an eye twitch.
They start going through the books to find a spell (coughsnort) to counteract the bad luck, and Kristy quite rudely tells Mary Anne that she fucked them all over, so she better find a way to fix it. Then she snaps at Jessi for actually finding the spell they need, because it takes time and ingredients to perform instead of magically neutralizing their bad luck just by being read aloud. I think all those sex-change hormones are making Kristy a biiiiitch. They keep looking, even though Jessi just FOUND the fucking spell they wanted and I doubt you’ll find one easier than pressing rose petals in a book for three weeks. Yeah, no, I’m totally right - Dawn finds another, but you need ox tails and scrapings from the underside of a sea snake. I can’t believe they think that mixing up a bunch of obscure crap is going to stop Jackie Rodowsky from knocking things over. Mercifully, they lose interest and start talking about the Halloween Hop, and Claudia unwittingly (as if Claudia ever does anything wittingly) beats the reader with a clue-by-four by informing us that Grace Blume hates Mary Anne because she’s love with Logan. Mary Anne thinks this is just more bad luck and utterly fails to make a connection that someone who hates her might send her anonymous hate mail.
Chapter 10, or: A Snarker’s Paradise! It’s time for the Halloween Hop, and Mary Anne and Logan are going dressed as Cats. No, not as cats. As Cats. Apparently, Mary Anne and Logan saw the musical and were “very impressed” by the costumes. Logan was just dying for an excuse to dress as an old glamourpuss, I expect. They made their own costumes - a “delicate kitten costume” for Mary Anne and a “rough, tough tomcat costume” for Logan, and here I was going to crack a joke with a link about the rough, tough tomcat part, but this totally fucking deserves to be in the main post:
This is what a TOTALLY STRAIGHT THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY is going to wear, PUBLICLY, to a SCHOOL EVENT, and this will in NO WAY haunt him for the rest of his life and possibly in further lives as well. (In the year 2130: “Hey, isn’t that the guy who went as Rum Tum Tugger to the Halloween Hop three lives ago? Let’s go flush his head in the toiletsphere!”)
They did cheat and rent a couple of fur headdresses to go with the homemade leotards, and at this point I think Mary Anne and Logan are officially a lesbian couple. Maybe a lesbian couple that met while working together as Vegas showgirls. Mary Anne scares the shit out of Tigger and her dad on the way out the door and Mrs. Bruno pronounces their costumes “wunduhful,” because Ann M. Martin has never actually heard anyone speak with a southern accent before, and then they’re off to the dance.
Shockingly, the entire building does not collapse from shame upon their entrance. They dance and gossip awhile until Cokie dances by Mary Anne, looks at the necklace, and sneers, “Nice bad luck charm.” AND MARY ANNE DOES NOT FUCKING THINK ANYTHING OF THIS. It does not occur to her that it’s the SLIGHTEST BIT STRANGE that she anonymously received a bad-luck charm, and, despite the fact that she told no one but her closest friends about it, a girl who just so happens to hate her just so happens to know about it. Jesus, CLAUDIA would have figured this out by now.
When Mary Anne gets home, there’s another Unabomber note on the front door, and instead of alerting the Brunos, who are waiting in the car to see she gets inside okay, or her father, who is waiting just inside, she just pockets the thing until she’s alone in her room. Reason number 158 why I would never hire a member of the Baby-sitters Club - remarkably poor judgment in potentially dangerous situations. The note is some standard wording about coming to Old Hickory’s grave at midnight on Halloween (because it doesn’t occur to Cokie the genius that if it’s midnight, it isn’t actually Halloween anymore) under the full moon or beware and some shit. I am, admittedly, the world’s biggest baby, but even I would find that whole setup too clichéd to be remotely scary. A note in my boss’ handwriting saying that I need to come to her office, now THAT’S a pants-pisser.
The next day K. Ron calls another emergency meeting, and they all get the vapors at the mere sight of the letter. …I just…I’m pretty much just kicking the shit out of the dead horse at this point, but SERIOUSLY? Aside from being laughably unscary, it NEVER occurs to them that this might be some kind of setup? If not Cokie, then Alan Gray or Sam? They REALLY THINK it’s more likely that an otherworldly being with a bunch of back issues of Readers’ Digest is demanding that they come to the graveyard on Halloween than maybe, just maybe, one of the several people ALREADY KNOWN for playing practical jokes on them is having a laugh?
Kristy says seriously that they have to go to the graveyard like the note says, and I cannot believe that any self-respecting cult leader would take orders from an anonymous piece of paper. Tsk tsk, K. Ron. Jessi wants to know on behalf of all the new BSC readers who the hell Old Hickory is anyway, and Dawn - who at this point has lived in Stoneybrook for maybe three weeks longer than Jessi - tells her all about the geriatric fuck that hangs around his grave to yell at kids for stealing his newspaper. Jessi squeaks that she can’t believe they’re supposed to go to a haunted grave at midnight on Halloween under the full moon, and when she puts it like that it sounds even dumber. Like a spirit that wants to hurt them can’t do so without relying on Handbook of Clichéd Scary Crap.
Kristy says they have to go because she feels that something meaningful is going to happen at the graveyard, and Claudia pipes up that they’re all going to die. She thinks. They are going. To die. From a spooky letter. There’s just nothing about the sentence that makes sense to me. Kristy says that isn’t what she meant, but they “have to be together on this...If anyone isn’t behind me, well, who knows what might happen.” No, do tell, Kristin. What WILL happen if someone disobeys you? She asks for a show of hands on who’s in and, imagining what horrors might lay ahead if they don’t, everyone unenthusiastically ponies up.
“Great. Thank you,” Kristy says, because somehow she became leader of the Old Hickory Desecration Team even though she didn’t even believe in this stuff at first and then blamed it all on Mary Anne. She figures they should sneak out of their houses around 11:30 and it finally dawns on Mary Anne that they aren’t actually allowed to wander around the graveyard at midnight. Dawn thinks she’ll be able to walk right out of the house, because at 11:30 Sharon will still be wandering the streets, carrying a blender as a purse, trying to remember where she lives. Mary Anne thinks she’ll be able to climb down the tree next to her window, and, because this wouldn’t be a BSC book if someone didn’t mention a Hayley Mills movie, Mallory shrieks that that’s how Pollyanna broke her neck.
Kristy can’t bear the thought of one of her faithful followers getting hurt, of course, so she decrees that they are going to tell their parents that they’re going to a late-night slumber party at her house. Charlie will pick them up at 10:30, drive them around in circles until midnight, drop them at the graveyard, wait around for them, and then take their remains back to the Brewer spread once it’s over. Of course he fucking will. No one can find any fault with this plan - I think I can spot a big one - so they grudgingly agree. Kristy adjourns them with an ominous, “Tell no one about tonight.” Not even Charlie, apparently; she’s just planning to poke a knife in his back and tell him to drive wherever she says and not to ask questions.
Chapter 12! Kristy takes Karen, Andrew, and David Michael trick-or-treating. I can’t believe she didn’t invite them and the rest of the neighborhood kids to come to Old Hickory’s and call it The BSC Spooktacular or something.
Chapter 13 - Mary Anne is going to have to tell her father about the party, even though she’s sure there won’t be a party because they’ll all be dead. Oh, for fuck’s sake. She manages to blurt it all out, though, and Richard is quite happy with the idea, because now he can invite Sharon over and have screamingly loud sex. He does find it a little suspicious, though, that Mary Anne has to get up and change her underwear every time a trick-or-treater rings the doorbell and asks if she’s jumpy because it’s Halloween. Instead of saying a tearful goodbye to him as one would normally do when one honestly believes that death is imminent, Mary Anne makes up a story about how she bought this necklace and then some girl told her it was bad luck. Richard asks her why she doesn’t just take it off then. That Richard. You can’t pull anything over on him. Instead of telling her she’s full of crap, he just asks to see it and tells her that a mustard seed is a symbol of faith, not a bad-luck charm.
Mary Anne thinks that Cokie’s a fucking idiot for telling her that the necklace was a bad luck charm - HEY WAIT! They never told Cokie it was a bad luck charm! This seems suspicious! Could she have possibly had something to do with it?
...THERE you go, sweetie.
She calls Kristy to tell her what she figured out and they make some plans to go to the graveyard early and bring flashlights and white sheets and string. I really can’t imagine what they’re planning. It sounds so mysterious.
Chapter 14! Everything is a go as they cruise toward the graveyard in the Junk Bucket, until Mallory announces that she has a problem - she always holds her breath when she passes graveyards, but she can’t spend an hour in a graveyard holding her breath. Oh, dear. They all try unsuccessfully not to start laughing and pelting her with vegetables, which seems a bit hypocritical considering their recent behavior. Jessi says she used to, but nothing happened when she stopped doing it. Nothing happened when she stopped saying “Rabbit, rabbit,” on the first of the month either. Uh...what?
They get there and rig up their ghosts in the trees while Charlie jerks it alone in the car and dies a little inside. They finish not a moment too soon; when Cokie and cronies show up, the baby-sitters start waving around flashlights, making spooky noises, and surround them while wearing masks. If someone wearing a mask, wielding a flashlight, and going “wooooooooo” jumped out at me, I’d be freaked out too, but not for the reason they think.
Finally they whip off their masks and Cokie gets the chance to snarl what little sneaks they are. The fact that they have showed up to do exactly the same thing pretty much escapes her, I think. Before things can escalate to eye scratching and weave yanking, unfortunately, Logan steps out of the trees and wants to know what the hell is going on. Mary Anne wants to know the same thing. Thinking quickly so that Mary Anne won’t find out that he was meeting up with his boyfriend Carl for a midnight tryst, Logan makes up a story about how someone called him anonymously and told him to come to the graveyard to see something cool. He can’t stop himself from saying, “I’m curious and I like a little adventure,” though. Good try, Logan.
Cokie says that they sent Mary Anne the necklace - she doesn’t know anything about the chain letter, though - and Grace admits that she invited Logan so he’d see Mary Anne acting like a baby, because nothing makes a guy want to dump his girlfriend for you like seeing you treat her like shit. Logan says that he’d never dump such a faithful beard, and they all smugly stomp back to the Junk Bucket. I wonder if they noticed all the sticky tissues crammed in the ashtray.
Chapter 15! At the Brewer’s, they all laugh hysterically in relief, until Jessi says the mystery’s not over. God, she is such a downer. If Cokie didn’t send the chain letter, who did? Mary Anne adds that maybe the whole necklace thing wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t broken the chain. They have hysteria for a moment that the bad luck is still upon them, until Mary Anne points out that things have actually been going pretty well. Besides, the necklace will protect them from any more bad luck, because she has learned absolutely nothing from this little adventure. “So go ahead, you guys. Break all the mirrors you want!” Over K. Ron’s head? All the better.