"Hi, Mal!" I called.

"Hi!" she replied. "Guess what. I had to pay Jordan to carry my suitcase." Mallory pointed to one of the triplets.

"Well, you offered," said Jordan.

"I did not. You said, 'Want me to carry your suitcase?' and I said, 'Sure,' and you said, 'Okay, that'll be fifty cents.' " I giggled. "Hey, here come Mary Anne and Dawn." Mallory clapped her hand over her mouth. "I don't believe it. Mary Anne brought Tigger with her!" Tigger was mewing pitifully inside his carrier.

"Well, now I don't feel so bad/' I said. "Everyone's looking at Tigger." Ten minutes later, the rest of the BSC had reached the train station. There were Jessi, her parents, her Aunt Cecelia, and her younger sister and baby brother. There were Claudia, her sister, and her mom and dad. And there were Stacey and her mom.

My friends and I huddled together, away from our families.

"Do you think anyone knows we belong with them?" asked Claudia, indicating the knot of anxious parents, and the kids who were running around.

"I'm afraid so," I replied. "They even know the names of my brothers and sisters. We're hard to miss." Claud sighed.

Then Dawn spoke up. "This morning my mom asked Mary Anne and me if we really wanted to go to New York for two weeks. She said if we stayed here she'd take us on a shopping spree. I told her that New York was going to be one big spree all by itself, didn't I, Mary Anne? . . . Mary Anne?" Mary Anne had opened a booklet about New York and was gazing at it intently. "You know," she began, "if all the coffee shops in New York City were placed side by side, I bet they would — " ' Dawn groaned, and Mary Anne stopped talking. She went right back to the book, though, and immediately became lost in it again.