Jessi and Mal both love to read, especially horse stories by Marguerite Henry. Beyond that, they're quite different. Jessi's passion is ballet, and boy, is she good. She takes special classes at a dance school in Stamford, where she had to audition just to get in, and she has danced lead roles in productions before hundreds of people. Mal's passions are writing and drawing, and she thinks she'd like to be an author and illustrator of children's books when she grows up. Jessi comes from an average-sized family - her parents, an eight-year-old sister named Becca, and a baby brother nicknamed Squirt - while Mal comes from a huge family. Her parents have eight children! Mal has four brothers (three of them are identical triplets) and three sisters. An- other difference is that Jessi is black and Mal is white. This doesn't matter to them, or to any of us in the BSC, but Jessi's skin color bothered a lot of people in Stoneybrook, I'm ashamed to say. The Ramseys' neighbors gave them a really hard time at first, although they've calmed down now. They've found that there's not a thing to dislike about the Ramseys.
Oh, I forgot one other similarity between Jessi and Mal. Each of their families has a pet hamster! Okay. So now you know the members of the Baby-sitters Club. A meeting was about to begin. I put on my visor, sat down in Claud's director's chair, stuck a pencil over my ear, and called the meeting to order.