Selena Kitt

Crazy About the Baumgartners

Chapter One

I didn’t become a nanny because I loved kids. I wasn’t one of those girls who started babysitting when I was ten and fell in love with children and decided to spend the rest of my life playing Mary Poppins. I became a nanny because I hated school, anything involving retail, and working in fast food. Being a nanny required that I know how to cook and how to do CPR. Basically, I needed to know how to keep kids alive.

Sometimes I thought a monkey could do my job.

Not that I advertised that fact during interviews.

I’d been a nanny for five years and had gone through three families, when I finally found the perfect job. Thank God I found the Baumgartners. Or they found me. I was crazy about the Baumgartners. They were my favorite people in the world. And their kids were great, which is something I couldn’t say about the three families I’d played nanny to before them.

Although they had their moments.

“Henry did it!” Janie, who was eleven, blond and blue-eyed like her mother, stomped into the kitchen where I was making their after school snack-“ants on a log.” They were just celery sticks spread with peanut butter, raisins dotted on top, and looked more like turds on sticks to me, but whatever.

“Henry did what?” I licked peanut butter off the knife and slid it into the sink. Henry, almost ten, was always doing something to annoy his older sister.

“Look!” Janie held her ponytail up to me, showing me a wad of gum so big I couldn’t imagine how anyone even got it in their mouth in the first place.

“Great.” I sighed, putting the ants and logs on a plate in the middle of the kitchen table. There was no point yelling for Henry. He was likely out back, hiding in the tree house his father had built, which is always where he “hid” whenever he’d done something he knew he might get in trouble for.

So I was standing in the middle of the kitchen with a sobbing Janie, Googling “how to get gum out of hair” on my iPhone, when the house phone rang. Of course, the cordless wasn’t on its base where it should have been. I ran through the house, stopping every few moments when it rang again, trying to pinpoint the sound. I finally found it buried between the couch cushions, where I also found a wad of yellow Silly Putty with a penny stuck into it.