Portrait Collection: Abby's Book
ABBYYYY! Wait, was Abby popular with BSC fans? I genuinely have no idea. I was phasing out of the series, age-wise, when she appeared. Plus, there was no internet where people could be regularly discussing these things. I know I love Abby, but it’s tough to be the new girl on the scene and I just hope she got the love she deserved.
ANYWAY. Here we are at our sixth and final Portrait Collection book. (New series idea for Ann M. Martin: do another set of Portrait Collection books in which the baby-sitters write the autobiography of their lives since eighth grade. Like, did Stacey become friends with Tavi Gevinson and work on Rookie before becoming an editor at Marie Claire? Did Claudia go on Project Runway and absolutely crush the unconventional materials challenge? Etc.)
In Abby’s eighth-grade autobiography, she focuses on three major things:
She and Anna didn’t realize until they started school that not everybody has an identical twin. They were a little freaked out about being separated, and then they were a little annoyed about no one ever being able to tell them apart. They call them both Abby-Anna, and then when their teacher requests that each girl has a signature color to wear so that people can tell them apart, they start calling Abby “Red” and Anna “Blue.” Eventually Abby’s dad has the best idea, which is that one of them just cuts their hair shorter. Anna volunteered as tribute and it worked and the rest is herstory!
Abby’s dad died tragically when she was nine. Aside from the inciting traumatic event, the ripple effects were tough too. Mrs. Stevenson checked the fuck out for a while, until Abby and Anna were like “we don’t know how to do laundry and we can’t go buy dishwasher detergent please help” and Mrs. Stevenson snapped back to it. Still, they all had a hard time dealing with things and Mrs. Stevenson is, like Stacey’s dad ol’ Ed McGill, a workaholic. Abby and Anna yearned for more family-together time, which they finally got when they all vacationed together on Sanibel Island (after a resort employee told Mrs. Stevenson he’d assumed she was there alone and she was like, “oh shit”). On that trip they also invented their own punch, which I also did as a kid (mine was called Periwinkle Punch even though it was not periwinkle in color at all). Here’s their recipe:
At the beginning of eighth grade, the Stevensons move to Stoneybrook to start fresh. (Interesting, since Abby and Anna don’t appear in any of the first 84 books in which the other girls are in eighth grade… hmmm. Time in Stoneybrook is a flat circle, as we know.) Mrs. Stevenson is hardcore about this, selling almost all of their furniture and hiring a decorator to do their new house from scratch. And their new house is… impressive. I feel like this is the first time we really get a full picture of it (literally; see below). And of course Abby and Anna fit right in and Abby joins the BSC as the resident pun queen and we’re all thrilled!
