Hi everyone. This idea for a story has been playing on my mind for a while…let's see where it goes! I haven't written any fiction for a while either, so it's a way of getting back into it. Yes, I am aware that my title sucks. I can't do titles.

Blah blah, BSC Characters are property of Ann M Martin.

"Yo, Anna! Turn that down!" I yelled.

My sister stuck her head around my bedroom door. "What?"

"Turn it down! Bozart doesn't need to be played that loudly."

Anna narrowed her eyes at me. "Mozart, not Bozart. And it's Bach playing, anyway."

"Batch?"

"Doofus," she replied.

"Doofus? Is he some new composer?" I wrinkled my nose.

"Auuuuuughhhhhhhh!" She ran screaming next door, but sure enough the music was turned down.

Hi, I'm Abby Stevenson and I'm 14 years old and attend Stoneybrook High. I'm also a member of this club called the Babysitters Club – more about that later. I live in Stoneybrook in a pretty nice neighbourhood in a big house, but not as big as the house my friend Kristy lives in. Her step-father is a real, live millionaire. I have a burst of curly hair which refuses to be tamed and I love sports. I'm also allergic to life. Seriously. Like makes me sneeze. Tomatoes? Bring me out in hives. Shellfish? Makes me vomit. Dust? Get me out of there – it can bring on an asthma attack.

My classical music obsessed sister Anna is my twin. We're identical, but we don't look so similar these days. She wears her hair cut shorter than mine and is more serious in her approach to life. Me? I love to laugh! Anna also has scoliosis and has to wear a back brace to help straighten the curve in her spine. It's not noticeable, she just looks like she's a size or two larger than me.

Mom works for a publishing company in New York, so Anna and I are pretty independent. Mom commutes most days so we don't see much of her during the week. This has plus points, but sometimes I miss her.

My dad is dead.

I didn't laugh for a long time after he died. It seemed so wrong. My dad was special. He was funny and clever and loving and one day he was there and then he was gone. Mindlessly killed in a car crash. They say he never knew about it.

I wish we'd never known about it. I wish it had never happened. I was 9 when he died. They say it gets easier, but that's bull. You learn to adapt and enjoy life again, but you never stop missing and sometimes it gets me when I least expect it. It was hard on all of us, especially Mom. She was on her own and had two grief-stricken daughters to cope with. She threw herself into her work and eventually got a really good promotion and made us up sticks from good ol' Long Island to Stoneybrook, Connecticut.

I sighed and looked at my wall clock. 4.30pm. Cool. Just enough time for a little R&R before I had to leave for the BSC meeting. I kicked off my Converse, propped up my pillows and reclined on my bed. From down the hall, the faint notes of Bach reached me, but I tuned out. Oh sorry, that's another thing about me – I love puns. The worse they are the more I love them. I sighed and leaned back, lost in thought.

See, when I said I attend Stoneybrook High, I meant that I only just started attending today. Pretty big deal, huh? At one point, I think I'd never make it out of middle school, but we all got there in the end. I'm usually pretty confident, but I'd been nervous about the transition. So nervous that I even re-joined the reformed BSC.

I guess now is a good time to tell you briefly about the Babysitters Club, or BSC as we all call it. My friend Kristy Thomas had the idea when she was back in the seventh grade after her Mom struggled to find a babysitter for her little brother, David Michael. "Wouldn't it be a good idea," thought Kristy, "if Mom could phone just one number and reach a group of sitters." Truthfully, it was a great idea, but I'm pretty sure that Kristy isn't the only person in the world to think up a babysitting club, although the way she carries on sometimes, you'd think she had copyright on the idea. Anyway, she phoned her best friend Mary Anne and their neighbour Claudia who introduced them to a new girl, Stacey and lo and behold, the Babysitters Club was born!

The BSC has been through lots of changes with members moving and leaving and re-joining again. We were all swept up in the excitement of starting high school too and after the club scaled back to the original 4 members (yeah, I left too), the girls took the decision to break up the club. However, we did a lot of hanging out over the summer and decided to restart the club again. I'll be honest, the reason I joined again is so that I've got a group to belong to.

Yeah. I'm not proud of myself. But I've always been a bit of a loner and everyone else in the BSC is already paired off into BFFs. I'm really ok with this, but I'm uncharacteristically nervous about making new friends in high school and I don't want to turn people off me by looking like a loner. I know everyone thinks I'm confident and mostly I am, I'm cool with my own company most of the time, but I don't want to always be on my own. The BSC girls are cool and I like them, but I don't think they'll ever be my BFFs. I think they can be kinda mean sometimes.

There. I said it.

"Abby!"

"Huh?" I jumped back to reality at the sound of Anna yelling.

"It's 5.00!"

Oops. I'd been thinking too long. Time to go to the BSC meeting! I dashed down to grab my bike and make the ride to Claudia's.