As with all Stacey books, this one opens with Ms. McGill telling us how superior she is to the rest of Stoneybrook due to her Manhattanite background. To quote Stacey, “I’ve seen more (including sad things, such as homeless people, and terrific things, such as the Caribbean Day parade) and done more (not too many kids in my class can say they’ve been to the opera, or to an exhibit of French avant-garde painters) than a lot of Connecticut kids my age.” But don’t worry, she’s not a snob. Anyway, as Stacey is chilling and judging others in homeroom, an announcement is made that SMS is going to be having a Halloween masquerade dance, which is apparently a huge deal because it’s the first one in twenty-eight years.
First, I’m going to let the BSC nerd flag fly for a moment, but this makes zero sense to me. They’ve had Halloween Hops and dances before, and the kids all get dressed in costumes, so how is this different? Is calling it a masquerade somehow superior to a regular dance or costume party?
I digress. Stacey is psyched, and decides to volunteer for the decorations committee. At the same time, a new kid named Cary Reitlin (who is apparently hot, or hunky as Stacey says) comes to school. All of a sudden, a new group called the Mischief Knights exists, and they start pranking the school. Mischief Knight actions include:
- Switching the books between people’s lockers
- Leaving notes on the blackboards in different classrooms
- Stealing Mrs. Simon (an English teacher)’s gradebook
- Spilling marbles in the art room
Anyway, the decorations committee starts meeting, with new teacher Mr. Rothman as their faculty advisor. The committee decides on an Addams Family theme for the dance, which everyone except Cokie Mason loves. Things are moving full steam ahead, but then, because it’s a mystery things get weird, and then insane. There are rumors around town about a tragedy that happened at the last Halloween masquerade, and things start going wrong with the dance – materials are destroyed or stolen, the posters Claudia designs are ripped apart. For some reason the BSC doesn’t have enough to do, so they take it upon themselves to solve the mystery of who is sabotaging the dance.
The first round of detective work is questioning Mary Anne’s dad and Dawn’s mom, who reminisce about a dance when they were in middle school where a teacher wound up dying due to a stampede. Apparently there was a blackout during the dance and everyone panicked, a stampede broke out, and this teacher died as a result. As the girls delve into old yearbooks as part of their sleuthing, they figure out what Mr. Rothman, committee advisor, was also a student there at the time of the stampede. The stampede apparently had to do with some girl who was dumped at the dance. Rumor has it she left school as a result, so the girls run back to the yearbooks and figure out who wasn’t photographed twenty-eight years ago. One of the girls is named Elizabeth Connor, who, irony of ironies, lived in the Johansson’s house, and that very afternoon, Stacey is baby-sitting for Charlotte!
The girls go on a ‘ghost-busting’ hunt of the house, and Stacey finds a heart with the following inscription: LC + MR. In a moment of clarity that would literally never happen, she concludes that this stands for Liz Connor + Mike Rothman, the decorations committee faculty advisor. Stacey confronts him while decorating, and it turns out that back in the day, he was on the football team, and was very popular. Liz was a geek and was very unpopular, but Mike was nice to her, and wound up asking her to the dance. Except, middle school boys are jerks around the world, even in Stoneybrook, so he takes up a bet with his friends that he can last the whole night with her. Drama ensues that I won’t get into, but Liz was humiliated and it looks like she was the one who cut the lights and pulled the fire alarm. The girl never came back to school, but as Stacey and adult Mr. Rothman are decorating, they see a noose hanging from a basketball hoop with a dummy dressed in a fairy princess costume, the same costume this girl wore twenty-eight years ago. So that’s terrifying.
The dance goes on as planned.
The BSC masquerade costumes are as follows:
- Mary Anne – Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz (with Logan as the Scarecrow)
- Mallory and Jessi – are basically a couple too, so they trade stereotypes, and Mallory comes as a ballerina and Jessi is a cowgirl
- Abby – Lucy Ricardo
- Kristy – Amelia Earhart
- Claudia – a giant Twinkie
- Stacey – Morticia Addams (with Robert Brewster as Gomez)
At the dance, which Liz Connor of course crashes, things end anticlimactically. The woman goes to the trouble of stealing a costume, dancing with her former date, and all that happens is she gets led out of the gym.
And on that note, on to our awards:
Most Creative Idea From a non-Claudia BSC-er: Stacey deciding on a red/purple Halloween color scheme
Most Boring B-plot: All the kids of Stoneybrook taking up ghostbusting as a hobby
Best Halloween Candy: Snickers. Always.
Baby-Sitters Club Notebook 