Now Jeff lives in California again with my father (he just wasn't happy in Connecticut), and sometimes I go back to visit. What else would you like to know? Well, I love the outdoors, I'm a vegetarian, and I try to eat a healthy diet. (Unlike Claudia, who thinks Gummi Bears are nature's perfect food.) Claudia is a beautiful, dramatic-looking Japanese-American who loves exotic clothes. (She's also the vice-president of the BSC.) Claudia's one of those people who can wear anything and get away with it. Today, for example, she had stuck to two colors: black and white. Black cotton bib overalls over a white turtleneck with a shiny black patent leather belt looped around her waist. Black suede ankle boots and white cotton socks. Long black hair swept off her face with giant white plastic barrettes. Anyone else would look like a penguin in that get-up, but Claudia looked great.

"What do you think?" she asked, holding up a white hoop earring next to her face. "Too much?" I nodded. "Maybe just a little." The earring was the size of a doorknob.

"Hey, Dawn, will you take a look at my hair?" asked Mary Anne. Mary Anne Spier is my stepsister (my mother married Richard, her father) and she is also my best friend. Mary Anne is a lot less daring with clothes and makeup than I am, but she has grown up quite a bit in the past year.

When I first met Mary Anne, she looked like a little girl. She was wearing little-girl clothes and, worst of all, she was wearing her brown hair in two long pigtails. Awful! When I got to know her better, I realized that she's really sweet and very sensitive, and that she dressed that way because her father picked out her clothes. See, Mary Anne's mother died when Mary Anne was just a baby, so her father has always been very protective of her. Luckily, he's loosened up a lot since he married my mom, and Mary Anne looks like a regular thirteen-year-old now. And she even has a steady boyfriend. She's the only one of us BSC members who can make that claim. Her boyfriend is named Logan Bruno, and he's part of the club, too. Mary Anne is the club secretary.