Karen's Eighth Birthday

I was at a used bookstore today and I was looking at It's Great to Be Eight, which I'd seen before. It has a bunch of stories about, well, being eight. There's a series of books — It's Heaven Being Seven, It's Fine to Be Nine, etc. I knew Ann M. Martin had a story in it, but since almost all of the "stories" in these are excerpts from books, I'd assumed Ann's story was something that had been previously published in a longer work that I'd already read. But I actually bothered opening the book today, and the Ann M. Martin story is something that hadn't been published elsewhere... and it's BSC-related!

It's called "8 x 2 = Sweet Sixteen" and it's also not much of a "story," just a long internal monologue. It takes place three weeks before Karen Brewer's eighth birthday, and since Karen Two-Two is of course having two eighth birthday parties, she thinks that it's sort of like turning sixteen, and she's thinking about all the things she would want if she really were turning sixteen. Obviously, it's very classic Karen! There's an inconsistency in it that irks me, though. Karen talks about Charlie being sixteen "last year," but if she were turning eight, he should already be eighteen. On the other hand, it's not as if I'm not used to time warps in BSC-land.

x-posted to babysittersclub