Thoughts before reading:
I've never read this one before, but it looks like a gem.
The basics:
SMS announces that it's holding the first Halloween masquerade in 28 years. Stacey's excited about the news, and starts daydreaming about costumes. She also decides to join the decorations committee, wanting something new in her life. To add to the excitement, there's a cute new boy in Stacey's English class, Cary Retlin.
A group of kids calling themselves the Mischief Knights start playing pranks all over SMS around this same time. Lockers are broken into and items switched, gradebooks are hidden, marbles are stuffed into cabinets, etc.
Stacey enjoys the decorating committee, even though Cokie's also on it. They come up with the Addams Family Reunion as a theme, and a red and purple color scheme. Things at school are getting tense though, between the Mischief Knights, an older man who's protesting the dance, and Cokie bugging Stacey with a theory that she has about Grace having invented her date for the dance. Then someone also starts sabotaging the decorations. Supplies are ripped and smashed, dance posters are torn down. One of them also has "Will you still love me tomorrow?" written on it in red. Someone then spray paints a giant "$10" on a school wall. There's also a rumor that all this is happening because something horrible happened at the masquerade 28 years ago, and so someone doesn't want the dance to happen ever again. (Sounds just like a slasher movie plot.)
Some of the BSC members ask Richard and Sharon about the rumor, since they also went to school in Stoneybrook. They can't remember much except that a teacher named Mr. Brown was hurt at the dance. The girls then look in old newspapers at the library, and learn that during that last masquerade, there was a power outage, then someone pulled the fire alarm, The students panicked, resulting in a stampede. Mr. Brown suffered a heart attack and died as a result. Police thought both the black out and the fire alarm were pranks, but no one was ever caught.
Looking at a yearbook from the year of the dance, Stacey sees that the new teacher, who's heading the decorations committee, also went to SMS that year. The older man who's been around protesting the dance also did. (Mr. Rothman and Mr. Wetzler, respectively.)
Not long after, there's an assembly at school. The lights go out, everyone panics, and there's another stampede.
Stacey interviews Mr. Wetzler, who mentions something cryptic to her about the havoc 28 years ago being caused by an 8th grade girl who was jilted at the dance. (Of course, it's always a hysterical woman's fault.) After the interview, the girls find a list in an old yearbook of girls who left school before the year was over, thinking one must be the girl from the story. They then sneak down to the SMS basement after school to look through old student files. The girl was Elizabeth Conner, and she used to live in Charlotte's house.
While she's supposed to be babysitting, Mary Anne and Stacey instead snoop around Charlotte's house until they find an "L.C+M.R." heart in the basement cement. Stacey realizes that those are her teacher's initials: Mark Rothman. LC would of course be Liz Conner.
The next time she sees him, Stacey asks Mr. Rothman about Liz Conner, and he tells her they went to school together. She had a huge crush on him, and everyone knew. He was popular, and she was shy and got teased a lot. His friends dared him to invite her to the dance, and bet him $10 that he wouldn't last the whole evening with her. He went along with it because he wanted to impress his friends. Liz was really excited, having no idea the whole thing was a joke, and she unknowingly made things worse by wearing a babyish fairy princess costume. During the last dance of the night, the band was playing "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" when he decided he couldn't go along with the ruse anymore, threw the $10 on the floor, and left. Everyone stood around laughing at Liz. She stormed out, and moments later, the power went out.
The following day, in the partially decorated gym, there's a dummy dressed in a fairy princess costume hanging from the basketball hoop by a noose.
Despite this, the dance proceeds like normal. When it starts, Stacey notices Cary Retlin dressed as a knight chess piece and realizes he must be behind the Mischief Knights. She confronts him, but he basically just laughs. Beyond that things go smoothly until the end, where there's supposed to be a big unmasking, where everyone reveals who's who. Once it starts, Liz Conner shows up wearing a tattered fairy princess costume. She laughs hysterically until Mr. Rothman escorts her out, where she confesses to all the vandalism. Turns out, she's been in and out of mental health facilities for years, unable to get over the events of that dance.
Side plot: the BSC charges are all going through a Ghostbusters phase. (Literally, that's all. Dumbest and dullest one yet.)
Timeline:
October, Halloween.
Misc. thoughts:
*Ghostwritten by Ellen Miles.
*Stacey's doodling her and Robert's initials with hearts in homeroom, haha.
*SMS's football team is the Chargers.
*Now Stacey herself says she treated her old BSC friends horribly and is ashamed. She didn't handle things as well as she could have, but I don't think she treated anyone horribly, and she wasn't the only one at fault. Does she really feel this way now, or has she been made to feel so guilty that she now thinks it was what happened?
*Since everyone seems to be looking forward to wearing costumes, Stacey says she "guesses there's a lot of kid in all of us." 13 is still a kid! But I remember feeling really grown up at that age too.
*Everyone's complaining about being tired of the Ghostbusters movie. My brothers used to watch it almost every day, so I can relate.
*This book was harder to summarize than most, because it was rather all over the place.
*The assembly was about peer pressure. Since this was the DARE era, that sounds pretty fitting to me.
*I was really annoyed by the multiple incidents of kids panicking and stampeding in here because of the lights going out. I really can't picture 11-13 year old's crying and racing out just because of that. Some kids would be scared, yes, but plenty would also be screwing around and trying to look cool instead.
*All the characters were written really clueless and dense in here for some reason. Like when Logan says the school basement is full of old records, Stacey thinks he means Bee-Gees albums. Wtf. It's condescending to the reader, not to mention out of character... and this happens several times during this book with various characters.
*Also, the writing is clunky, awkward, and just bad in this one. Ellen Miles is usually one of the better ghostwriters, so I don't know what happened.
*Stacey and Robert attend the dance as Morticia and Gomez Addams.
*I'm surprised that Mr. Rothman admitted such a terrible story to a student. Also, again this is SUCH an 80's slasher movie set up! Stacey even says they don't want to go to the police because their story is like something out of a bad horror movie.
*Costumes:
Mary Anne: Dorothy
Logan: the Scarecrow
Jessi: a cowgirl
Mallory: ballerina
Grace: Snow White
Abby: Lucy Ricardo
Kristy: Amelia Earhart
Claudia: a twinkie
Cokie: Little Bo Peep
*The plot reminded me of Carrie, and Stacey/Claudia mention it at the beginning of the book too.
Books mentioned:
None
My rating:
2 stars. This was really just terrible: poorly written, all over the place, and trying too hard.
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