M#22, Stacey and the Haunted Masquerade

Oh look, we get our Wizard of Oz reference out of the way on the cover on this one! What middle schooler doesn't want to go as Dorothy, I ask you. Sadly, I'm 15 years too late to join the NEW BSC FAN CLUB!

SMS is having a Mischief Night Masquerade dance, and Stacey's been feeling like she needs to be involved in something, so she signs up on the decorations committee, whose faculty advisor is Mr. Rothman, a new teacher. Stacey suggests a red and purple color theme to change things up from orange and black and a dance theme of Addams Family Reunion, which everyone else on the committee loves except for Cokie Mason, but it's okay, because Cokie is shouted down and the committee carries on and I am yelling that purple is not a Halloween color. Stacey claims that the red and purple will give things a gothic look, but I don't know, because there are only so many ways you can decorate a gym, so they'll probably hang up streamers, and red and purple streamers do not look gothic in any way. Also, even though Claudia is not on the decoration committee, Stacey keeps volunteering her to do things like make posters and do artwork for fake portraits to hang on the walls. And Claudia is totally cool with it, when we hear it from Stacey's perspective, but maybe if this was a Claudia book, we'd be hearing a little more about how busy she is with homework and baby-sitting and her own art and how if she wanted to make decorations she would have maybe signed up for the fucking committee. I'm just saying.

There's a new kid in Stacey's English class, and his name is Cary Retlin. Cary is confident and self assured, not to mention a bit of a joker. Cary is pretty universally reviled by BSC fans. He's supposed to come off like a cool guy who makes life more interesting, but a lot of times, he just seems like a psychopath. Stacey's first impression of him is as follows:

He was cute (but not nearly as cute as Robert), with straight blond hair and brown eyes. He wore a blue denim shirt and khakis, and he was leaning his chair back on two legs, looking totally mellow. I was impressed. I doubt I ever appeared that relaxed when I was new at SMS.

She passes a note to a classmate referring to Cary as "hunky" which is a very BSC word to use to describe a cute guy.

Shortly after Cary's arrival, a bunch of pranks begin to be played at SMS. The pranks don't physically hurt anyone, they're just annoying. Stacey opens her locker to find that her books have been switched with another student's. A teacher's grade book is switched with a blank one. Messages are written on blackboards. A bunch of marbles fall out when someone opens a cabinet in the art room. All of these pranks are accompanied by a slip of paper reading Mischief Knights or just MK. Except the ones written on the blackboards, those just have Mischief Knights written right in the text of the message. Also this book was published in October of 1995. I graduated from high school in 1996, and by that time, the only classrooms in my high school that still had blackboards were the math and science ones. All the rest had gone to whiteboards. The Mischief Knights TP the school and soap the windows of the teachers' cars in the parking lot and put peanut butter on doorknobs. The students think this is great and makes life interesting. The teachers and administration are pissed. But nobody knows who the Mischief Knights are, so the pranks continue.

Then more pranks happen, but these ones aren't accompanied by MK initials. Some decorations bought for the dance are smashed. Posters that Claudia made are ripped to shreds. The lights are turned off while the school is at an assembly in the auditorium. A dummy is hanged from a basketball hoop. Everyone is quick to agree that this isn't the Mischief Knights' style. I wonder how they know. The MKs are a new phenomenon at SMS, and it's very possible that the earlier less harmful pranks were just a buildup to these new more aggressive ones.

The dance that's going to be held is the Mischief Night dance. The BSC speculates that part of the reason the school is having the dance on Mischief Night is to keep kids from going out and playing pranks. I did not grow up in a part of the U.S. that has this particular tradition so I found the wiki article about Mischief Night to be a helpful source of background information. This is the first Mischief Night dance the school has had in 28 years. There is vague mention of a tragedy at the last one, and as the pranks escalate, the club investigates (by using microfiche to read old newspaper articles) and discovers that at that dance nearly 30 years ago, the lights went out, and there was a stampede out of the gym, and a teacher had a fatal heart attack. They also find out that there was something to do with a girl named Liz Connor getting dumped at the dance and then moving away immediately afterward.

Oh hey, guess what! It just happens that Liz Connor lived in the house the Johanssens now occupy, and Mary Anne has a sitting job for Charlotte and Stacey brings over Matt and Haley Braddock and they search the house while letting the kids think they are just playing ghostbusters. The subplot in this book FYI is that one of the cable channels is playing Ghostbusters a bunch that month and all the kids the club sits for are obsessed with the movie and pretending to be Ghostbusters and they all dress as Ghostbusters for Halloween. In 1995, remember. Ghostbusters came out in 1984. The Stoneybrook children are like decades ahead of schedule, since they should all be dressing as Lucy Ricardo and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and the Three Stooges and Groucho Marx. Anyway while babysitting Stacey and Mary Anne are trying to find clues, which I think is really stupid. Are they expecting a box in the attic marked "THE TRUE STORY OF THE MISCHIEF NIGHT DANCE" or some shit? They find a heart drawn on the wall in the basement with the initials LC and MR.

Stacey deduces that MR is Mike Rothman, the faculty advisor to the dance committee, and talks to him, and he tells her a story about how Liz was an odd girl who got teased a lot, but she had a crush on him, and his friends paid him ten bucks to take her to the dance, and she wore a babyish embarrassing fairy princess costume, and freaked out when she found out he took her to the dance for money. Then she moved away and he hasn't seen her since. He describes himself in the most BSC book way, too.

"I was one of the most popular kids in school," Mr. Rothman continued. "I was good-looking, I was fun to be with, and I was an excellent athelete." He looked up at me. "I don't mean to sound stuck up, but it's true. That's just the way it was."

Don't worry, Mike. That doesn't sound stuck up at all. Honest.

It is the night of the dance. Here are the costumes the club wears: Stacey and Robert are Morticia and Gomez Addams. Mary Anne and Logan are Dorothy and the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. Abby is Lucy Ricardo from I Love Lucy. Good to know they're picking up the super dated costume slack from the kids. Jessi is a cowgirl and Mallory is a ballerina. Kristy is Amelia Earhart. Claudia is a giant Twinkie. Cary Retlin is wearing a horse's head mask and Stacey realizes that he's not dressed as a horse, he's dressed as a chess piece: a knight. His costume is basically a veiled reference that he is the Mischief Knight. She dances with him and he neither confirms nor denies that he is the leader of the Mischief Knights. He does this in what is supposed to be smooth dialogue that sounds ridiculous and vaguely creepy coming from a middle schooler.

Mr. Rothman is dancing with a substitute Home Ec teacher (I swear I am not making that up) in a long black cloak all night, but toward the end of the night, Stacey finds the teacher in the bathroom and she says someone stole her cloak. Stacey rushes back to the gym to warn Mr. Rothman, but before she can, the lights go out for the unmasking because it is supposed to be a masquerade ball, not that anyone on the cover actually has their face obscured. When they come back on, Liz Connor is standing there in a tattered fairy princess costume and laughing like a crazy person. Apparently she's been in and out of mental institutions for years and has fixated upon the Mischief Night dance, and when she heard that the middle school was having one again after all these years she tried to sabotage it. She was the one who played the destructive pranks. She ends up going back to an institution and I feel kind of sad for her.

I never read the mysteries much when they came out, especially the later ones, which were mostly printed after I'd stopped reading the series, but I enjoy them quite a bit now. They do tend to be a bit far-fetched but they're fairly engaging and the plots aren't as thin as some of the later regular series books. This one in particular is a pretty good read with a lot going on.