My dad, who used to do a lot of photography himself, had noticed how excited I was about my class. 'Tell you what," he'd said, one night after supper. "How about if we make you a temporary darkroom in the bathroom between your room and Janine's?" He'd rounded up all the equipment — some borrowed, some rented, some bought — arid helped me set up my very own wizard's den.

I'd been spending every spare minute in there ever since.

Well, maybe not every minute. As always, I'm also spending plenty of time on one of my other loves, baby-sitting. I belong to this cool club called the BSC, or Baby-sitters dub. My best pal Stacey McGill is in it, too, and so are a bunch of my other good friends. We all have different interests, but one thing we have in common is that we adore kids. That’s why the dub (it’s actually more of a business) works so well. But more about that later.

Back to that Friday morning, when my family kept me from "catching the moment." I'd barely finished my toast when my mother glanced at her watch and gave a little yelp. "It’s late!" she said. "I've got to run." She gave us each a quick kiss and/ grabbing an over-stuffed briefcase, headed out to her job as head librarian at the Stoneybrook Public Library. Soon after that my dad took off for his job, which has something to do with stocks and bonds and money. (I've never quite understood what he does, but apparently he's very good at it.)

Janine took one last sip of juice and picked up her backpack.

"Ready to crunch those numbers?" I asked, grinning. This summer, Janine had signed up for a work-study program that’s part of this supersonic academic fast track she's on. She's still in high school, but she takes a lot of college classes. For summer school, she was taking what she called a "light" schedule, light for an Einstein like her, maybe.

Janine's work-study program involved helping one of her professors with some research. When I first heard that, I thought she might be doing something halfway interesting, like teaching rats how to go through a maze. But no, all she was doing was sitting in front of a computer for hours at a time, typing in numbers. According to Janine, it was "utterly fascinating." I'd rather watch bread get stale, myself.