Chapter 1.

Pike's Peak.

The two words just jumped into my head as I watched Mallory Pike's seven younger siblings and Pow Barrett Pike, the Pikes' basset hound, playing a game of freeze tag.

Pike's Peak is this famous mountain out west that was a sort of landmark for the European settlers who were headed for the coast.

But the Pike's Peak I was thinking about is written this way: Pikes' Peak.

Because the Pikes were at the peak of their energy and activity. Okay, it's a pretty dumb pun, but peak is an almostquiet way of describing what I was watching. Adam, Byron, and Jordan, who are ten and are identical triplets (although they weren't dressed alike — they'd die these days before they'd dress alike, except maybe for a practical joke), were charging around making wild grabs at everybody. Vanessa, who is a budding poet, was dodging

madly and shrieking,"Freeze, freeze, if you please!" Nicky, who is eight, and Margo, who is seven, had hunched themselves into horrible, contorted, frozen shapes. Claire, who is five, was laughing and jumping out of the way as everyone pretended they were about to grab her and then "missed." And Pow was racing in and out among them all howling "Hoo, hoo, hoo!," his big, long ears flapping as he ran.

Mallory, who is eleven and a junior member of the Baby-sitters Club (of which I am the secretary, but more about that later) as well as the senior sibling of the Pike family, nudged me with her shoulder. "You're it," she said with a grin.

I grinned back. We were sitting on the back steps of their house. What were we doing? You guessed it. Baby-sitting. Pike-sitting. The Pikes always ask for two sitters when they call the Baby-sitters Club. Not that the Pikes are .bad kids or hard to handle or anything like that. But thereare a lot of them and they have tons of energy (see above).