Based on Ann M. Martin's The Baby-Sitters Club and The California Diaries, although I must admit that I never read all the California Diaries, so some of this might not be accurate according to that canon. This is slash, specifically Dawnslash. Dawn/Sunny. That means that yes, Dawn is dating Sunny. Yes, that means that Dawn is kissing Sunny. Among other things. Set in California, three years after The Baby-Sitters Club, making Dawn and Mary Anne sixteen and juniors in high school, and Jeff thirteen and in eighth grade.
* * *
She tells her stepsister everything.
Within reason, of course. She doesn't tell her about the pressed-tofu salad with fresh-ground nutmeg that she made the other night. Mary Anne might throw up over the phone.
But she tells her about Jeff's first date – with Holly Bearer, one of his eighth-grade classmates, and how he took her to see the movie "Toy Story 2" along with Holly's little brother, and it didn't sound like much of a date to Dawn but she told him to have fun anyway – and Mary Anne giggles and shrieks at the idea that Jeff Schafer has an actual date.
She tells her that after the fire, she actually considered moving back to Connecticut. That she couldn't stand the idea of her mother and sister and stepfather dealing with all that by themselves. That it feels weird to go "home" to Stoneybrook and ride in the car while everyone studiously avoids driving past Burnt Hill Road. "But you did come back after the fire," Mary Anne says.
"But not to live," Dawn points out.
"It's good you didn't come back to live," Mary Anne says seriously. "We didn't have any place to live. You would've had to come crowd into Kristy's with us."
They laugh, a good sign that they can laugh about it three years later, and Mary Anne reminds her that if she had come back to Stoneybrook out of guilt, or pity, then at the first tragedy on the west coast, she would have been right back in California. "You need to live where you want to live, not where you feel guilty about not living," she says.
Dawn even tells Mary Anne about how Dad and Carol are talking about having a baby, how she can hear the quiet living-room conversations late at night, and how nervous and excited that makes her, because children must mean forever, and yet Dawn and Jeff didn't keep Mom and Dad together forever. She wonders if this was how Kristy felt when they adopted Emily Michelle, who is nearly six now, and if she was this uncertain and anxious about everything in her life changing so radically. Mary Anne points out that after going from a family of five in a little house to a family of ten in a mansion, no change would be quite so radical by comparison – even the addition of one small Vietnamese girl – and the sisters giggle again.
So yes, Dawn tells her stepsister everything.
Almost.
She doesn't tell her that she's thinking about going to college abroad, in England or Australia or Belgium, that if she leaves the country she might never come back, particularly if the Great Barrier Reef is as bright and beautifully warm as they say.
And she certainly doesn't tell her about Sunny.
Oh, Mary Anne knows Sunny Winslow, of course. She knows that Sunny is Dawn's next-door neighbor and best California friend; she knows that Sunny founded the We Love Kids Club years ago; she knows that Sunny's mother died of cancer, and perhaps that is what Mary Anne understands best, the not having a mother.
But there's very little else that Dawn thinks Mary Anne would understand.
Like the way Sunny spreads her fingers over Dawn's stomach, and the backs of her hands look quite dark against pale skin that never tans quite as well as a California girl's should. Or the way her lips make Dawn squirm and quake and shiver just a little in the breeze of a cool breath. How they defile Sunny's sheets every Saturday and Sunday morning, blushing over the fact that they have to wash them every week, and Sunny says with a relieved laugh that she's glad her mother isn't here anymore to wonder why her only child has developed such an interest in laundry, and then she bites her lip and her eyes spill over and Dawn puts her arms around her.
Sometimes at night, when the moonlight pours through the widely cut skylights in Sunny's bedroom, Dawn rolls over and pats her bare shoulder with tentative fingertips. Sunny's hair streams across her pillow in sleep, working its way into Dawn's mouth when she breathes. Dawn's hair is still very long and very pale – Mary Anne would understand why she's kept it that way, because she always loved Dawn's hair – but Sunny's is shorter and darker, thicker. The ends of her hair look like old gold, a very deep blonde and each one exactly the same length as the one next to it.
She wonders if Mary Anne would understand that she doesn't mean to scream when Sunny touches her, but it doesn't matter really because Sunny's dad is never home and so it's just the two of them, alone in a quiet moon-filled house pretending to be grown-up and in love. She wonders if Mary Anne would understand how much she loves the sighs, the moans, the half-vacant expression in Sunny's rolled-back eyes when she comes. She wonders if Mary Anne would understand that when Sunny runs her fingers over Dawn's collarbone, she feels like her brain is about to short-circuit, explode its way out her ears, and you could probably feed her a hot dog then and she wouldn't even notice.
She wonders if Mary Anne would understand that this is more than sex, but maybe not love; it's not just because Sunny's her best friend, but she's certainly not experimenting. She wonders if her friends in the Baby-Sitters Club, or what used to be the Baby-Sitters Club, if any of them would understand, or if they would just write it off as part of Dawn's unique individual nature, her personality that they summed up with the phrase "California casual."
Sometimes Dawn stops thinking about Mary Anne and starts wondering what Stacey, or Mallory, or Claudia would say. Stacey – she's almost certain that Stacey would at least be open and friendly even if she didn't quite understand. New York City is home to Stacy McGill, after all. She thinks that Claudia might understand, too, since as an artist she's always so freethinking – and she knows what it feels like to hide things from parents. Mal – well, Mal is still at boarding school in Massachusetts, a freshman now, and lately her emails have gotten more and more vague on the subject of her love life, and Dawn can't help wondering, with a smile …
There are other people to worry about, too – her mother and father, her brother, even Carol and Richard, although she doesn't worry about them as much as she worries about her parents. Dawn misses her mother, and thinks sometimes that Mom might understand, since she knows, too, what it's like to love someone your parents disapprove of.
As for Dad and Jeff, well, they're harder. She's been living with them for three years now, but sometimes it seems like the time she spent in Connecticut has changed her enough that they don't quite know her. Dad wants so desperately for her to be his little innocent baby girl again, and Jeff is still thrilled to have his wonderful big sister back again, and she will never be quite the little big sister they want her to be. She knows that, and so she tries not to wonder what it would be like if she told them.
But mostly Dawn thinks about her stepsister, and wonders if Mary Anne would understand. This isn't like the way Mary Anne feels about Logan. Sunny does not reminds Dawn one bit of Gillian Anderson, her favorite movie star, and she doesn't have a cute accent or a little brother and a sister. There are none of those things about Sunny Winslow that anyone else would necessarily swoon over, and yet when Dawn looks at her she sees more than her best friend, but without quite as much adoration as the way her stepsister looks at Logan.
There are times when they giggle together over the phone, laughing and remembering, and Dawn feels twelve years old again, a lifetime ago – which it was, in a way. They remember the first day they met in the Stoneybrook Middle School cafeteria, and the time they flipped through yearbooks and realized that their parents once dated, and the day their parents got married, and in the midst of all the things they share, those are the times that Dawn thinks Mary Anne might understand.
But most of the time she isn't sure.
And so she doesn't tell her stepsister quite everything.
finis