Best Babysitters Ever. Caroline Cala

they aren’t home. We don’t even have to clean up after ourselves! And at the end of it, we get paid. All we have to do is make sure nobody, like, dies.”

      Slowly, her friends started nodding their heads.

      “Plus, just think about it. How nice will it feel to pool some of our earnings and put it towards our joint birthday party?”

      Bree’s parents usually sprang for some decorations and a cake in the shape of whatever was popular that year, but nothing had ever come close to creating the kind of excitement spawned by a rapper or a circus animal.

      “To have any chance of competing, we need to do something major,” Malia concluded. “This is the way.”

      “Well, when you put it that way, it sounds like a no-brainer,” said Bree. “I spend most of my time watching kids at home for free. I might as well get paid to do it for other people! Plus, um, I’ve kind of always wanted to be in a club.”

      Malia and Bree both stared at Dot, who was pretending to be transfixed by an ant making its way across the floor of the gazebo. Finally, she held up both hands in a sign of surrender. “Fine. I’m in. But I don’t change nappies.”

      “Aw, you guys! This is so fun. How do we do this?” asked Bree, flapping her hands like an excited penguin.

      “We should tell our school to post something on their Facebook page so parents know we’re in business,” Malia said. “If we hate it, we can always stop.”

      “Sounds fair enough,” agreed Dot, crossing her freckly arms. If Malia had Dot’s approval, clearly the idea was a winner.

      “Also, we should each have a specific job. Like, the Baby-Sitters Club had a president, a secretary, and a treasurer.” Malia was proud of herself for being so organized.

      “That’s . . . quaint,” said Dot. “But I believe in thinking big. We should have a CEO. And a chief operating officer. And a director of marketing.”

      Malia nodded and tried her best to look convinced. She didn’t want to admit that she had absolutely no idea what any of those jobs meant. Luckily, Dot kept rambling.

      “Malia, you can be the CEO, which is basically like the president.”

      “Alia,” she corrected her. “Remember? It’s Alia now.”

      Dot rolled her eyes, making absolutely no move to correct herself. “I’m probably the most creative, so I’m happy to head up marketing. I’ll come up with our mission statement and build our website. Bree, that means you’re in charge of operations. Does that sound okay?”

      “What does operations mean?” asked Bree. “We don’t, like, do surgery. Do we?”

      “I sincerely hope you’re kidding,” said Dot. Bree didn’t let on one way or another. “In our case, operations means you’re the one in charge of finding us actual jobs. Like, maybe you can hit up the parents of your little siblings’ friends, by getting the contacts off their class email lists.”

      Malia had to hand it to Dot – she was pretty good at figuring this stuff out.

      “Ewwwww!” shrieked Bree, pointing at something in the distance.

      Malia turned around expecting to find a tarantula the size of a 4x4. Instead she saw three kindergarten boys – Chase, Clark, and Smith – playing by a nearby bush. Malia’s parents loved to point out how they all had first names that sounded like last names. Because Malia’s parents were so awesome at picking names.

      The boys had built a circle out of rocks, with a stick propped up in the middle. Malia watched as one by one, the five-year-olds plunged their fingers deep into their noses, like they were digging to reach a foreign land. When they unearthed a decent enough treasure, they added it to a small pile of bogeys at the top of the stick.

      Malia stood up and walked a little closer to them. If she was going to babysit, she reasoned, she should probably figure out how to deal with kids. As a younger sibling, it wasn’t exactly her strong suit.

      “What are you doing, squirts?” Malia asked. The Baby-Sitters’ Club founder, Kristy Thomas, called her little brother squirt, and it seemed like a nice vintage thing to say.

      Smith looked up at her. “We’re making a sacrifice to the squirrel gods,” he said, like this was a completely normal endeavour. Then he turned back to the crew and plunged his index finger into his left nostril.

      “YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND! YOU’RE A GIRL!” Clark added, with a very unnecessary amount of rage.

      Ugh. Children were weird AND gross. Yet here Malia was encouraging her friends to spend time with them. On purpose. She made a mental note to negotiate rates that were worth it.

      Then again, everyone was a little gross. That was part of being a person. As usual, it made Malia think of Connor Kelly, who was about as perfect of a human specimen as one could find. Even he had his moments. The other day at lunch, he was eating a burrito when he laughed so hard he snorted a black bean out of his nose. It shot all the way across the table and hit Aidan Morrison in the eye. It should have been gross, Malia thought, but it wasn’t. It was cute.

      Malia turned back to her friends, who were smiling and laughing. They’d already moved on from the bogey incident, and were casually stalking someone’s whereabouts on Instagram.

      Everything was going to be great.

      What could possibly go wrong?

      Dot wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about this whole Baby-Sitters Club thing. Yes, she was drawn to the promise of a regular income. She wanted an amazing party just as much as her friends, and that was only the beginning. She’d already made a mental list of things she’d buy once they were in business, and it was not short. She could practically taste the limited-edition seasonal Oreos and smell the clouds of dry shampoo waiting in her future.

      But in the present, she felt anxious. No amount of money could change the fact that children were horrid. Starting a business was a lot of work. And despite the part where she had a pretty decent grasp of what makes people tick, she’d never actually held a marketing job before. Or any job, for that matter.

      “Our growing organization is stressing me out,” Dot announced as soon as Malia and Bree had settled in her bedroom for their first official club meeting. Malia sat backwards on Dot’s desk chair, while Bree sprawled out on her stomach across the bed. Dot nervously paced back and forth between them. “We have a lot of stuff to do if we’re going to get this business off the ground.”

      “Way to be a killjoy,” said Malia.

      “To get things rolling, I have a couple of ideas for the website,” Dot said. “I think it might be cool if we populate it with stills of babysitters from old movies, like from way back in the eighties and nineties, when it was cool for teenagers to babysit.”

      “Parents will probably love that, because they’re old,” added Malia.

      “Yes, I think it will totally resonate.” Dot nodded.

      Bree screwed up her face. “Huh?”

      “You know, resonate – when an idea stirs up feelings in somebody. Like, if Malia were to hear a pop song about unrequited love. That would resonate with her, because she loves Connor Kelly but he doesn’t care about her.”

      Malia shot her a death stare. “It’s Alia. Who Connor could have a secret crush on. And Alia would like to go back to talking about the website, please.”

      “Right, yes,” Dot continued. “So the site could also have an ‘about’ section, with a photo of us and a little bit of background about our unique skills.”

      “You