I was contemplating the unthinkable. I was about to do something so vile, so sickeningly heinous that it made my insides crawl just imagining it. How did I get to this point? Well, it all started last night.

It was just after dinner. I had the living room to myself – Mary Anne was in her room, Richard was colour sorting the trash and mom was staring blankly at the tampons in her make-up case and wondering what happened to her favourite lipstick. I settled myself in for a night of uninterrupted Discovery Channel viewing.

After a poignant episode of Animal Cops: Ames, Iowa, it was time for the documentary of the night – Carnivores: Murderers, or Just People With Half a Fucking Brain?

It was the most thought provoking sixty minutes of my entire life. I learned so much. Apparently, humans are supposed to eat meat. Like, it has iron and stuff that keeps us healthy and we have these teeth in the back of our heads so that we can chew it and other animals eat meat! Like lions and bears and lizards and stuff. I never knew! Turns out, eating meat is one of the most natural things in the world.

So that's why, the next morning, I was at the Rosebud Café with a chicken caeser salad.

I knew I had to just do it,that if I stopped to think about it, I would lose my nerve. I grabbed my fork, speared a small piece of chicken and shoved it into my mouth.

I chewed. Once. Twice. Three times. And it wasn't really that bad. In fact, it tasted kind of good. I tried another piece. Then another. Before I knew it, I had finished the entire thing.

The waitress came back to the table and took my plate. "Can I get you anything else?" she asked.

I took a deep breath. "I'd like… a hamburger," I told her.

The room fell silent. People stopped talking and turned to stare at me incredulously. The jukebox switched off. The phone stopped mid ring. On the television, the news anchors stopped talking and stared at each other in shock. Outside, cars stopped in the street and planes fell from the sky.

Well,it was a pretty big deal.

Minutes later, the waitress brought out the hamburger. Everyone watched anxiously as I took a small bite.

"Well?" someone asked.

I nodded slowly. "It's pretty good."

The room erupted in cheers. The news anchors hugged each other and people danced out in the streets. The entire town celebrated the new that Dawn Shafer had been converted.

I was a carnivore.

Kristy called later to remind me that we were neglecting the baby-sitting subplot. "I'm sending a few of the charges round to your place," she told me.

"Sure Kristy, it's not like I was doing anything," I mumbled sarcastically.

"What else would you be doing?" she asked, genuinely baffled. She had a point.

Half an hour later, I had the Three Musketeers (that's Karen Brewer, Hannie Papadakis and Nancy Dawes, in case you never read the Little Sister books) and Maria Kilbourne (Tiffany was going to come, then she remembered that she was eleven, just like Mallory and Jessi, and too old to need a baby-sitter) gathered in my living room.

"Okay what do you want to do?" I asked.

"Look for clues!" Maria answered.

"Yeah!" Karen cried. "Let's wear disguises and stake out downtown."

The other girls trilled their agreement so I pulled out my old dress up box and they put together their disguises. I even allowed them to use some of my old make up. I think we did a pretty good job. I barely recognised any of them under the layers and layer of foundation and lipstick.

Karen laid out the plan as we walked into town. "We'll each take a corner of Main Street," she ordered. "Dawn, you take up position at Thelma's and watch everything." She was pretty systematic for a seven year old.

We reached our location and took our posts. I grabbed an outside table at Thelma's while the girls settled into their respectivecorners. They looked so sassy, with their sparkly dresses and colourful make up. I watched with amusement as they asked passing businessmen for information. Most of the businessmen ran away as soon as they approached!

"Are you ordering?" a waitress asked.

I picked up the menu and scanned it quickly. "I'll have a BLT," I told her. Bacon was something I still hadn't tried.

I had just taken the first bite of my sandwich when a hand fell on my shoulder. I turned and looked up. A police officer was staring down at me, his face grim.

I dropped the sandwich. "It's not how it looks!" I cried. "I'm just… experimenting."

"I've received complaints about under aged prostitutes working the corners of Main Street," he said. "The girls tell me you're in charge of them." He pulled me to my feet and slapped a pair of handcuffs around my wrists. "You're under arrest."

I gulped. I was a carnivorous pimp!