Chapter 1.

The evening was gloomy and windy, with rain streaming down from heavy clouds that blocked the moon. I thought it was the perfect night to a) curl up with The Phantom of Pine Hill — a really spooky Nancy Drew mystery — and the licorice whips I'd hidden in my desk, or b) work on the still life I'd started and daydream about Trevor Sandbourne. But "No," my dad said, "homework first, Claudia," and there's no arguing with Dad. Besides, we have an agreement, my parents and I. The agreement is that if I get all my homework done every night (with someone in my family supervising me), I can continue to take my art classes. More important, I can stay in the Babysitters Club.

The Baby-sitters Club is something my friend Kristy Thomas thought up a little while ago at the beginning of seventh grade. Kristy, who lives across the street from me, does a lot of

baby-sitting. So do I, Claudia Kishi, and so does Kristy's best friend, Mary Anne Spier, who lives next door to Kristy. So Kristy had this idea that the three of us should get together to form a group of baby-sitters, advertise ourselves, and have a little business, which is just what we did. Plus, we asked a new friend of mine, Stacey McGill, to join, which she did. The Baby-sitters Club is working really well. People know about us and call us all the time, and each of us has more jobs now than before the Baby-sitters Club, so it was important that I be allowed to stay in it. But I almost blew it when the school sent a letter home to my parents saying that I wasn't working up to potential and stuff like that. My parents are used to those letters — they get them about twice a year — but what they hadn't expected to find out was that I had done almost none of my homework since school started. That was when Mom and Dad laid down the law. The thing about homework is that it is just so boring I can barely concentrate on it. And it's useless. Who cares whether > means greater than or less than, or what x equals? (Besides, why bother finding out, since x equals something different every time?) The only school thing I like to do is read, and the teachers even take the fun out of that. They don't care that