Читать книгу The Sleepover Club Bridesmaids: Wedding Special - Angie Bates, Narinder Dhami - Страница 7

Wouldn’t it be great if life was like films? Just imagine if you woke up each morning to your very own movie soundtrack! Then, the minute you heard those creepy durn durn DURN chords, you’d instantly know to avoid the very bad thing which was lying in wait for you around the corner.

As it was, one of the worst days of my life came without warning.

Actually, it started out great. The sun shone. Mum and Andy giggled over breakfast like two love-birds. I didn’t think it was possible for my wildly happy mum and soon-to-be-official step-dad to get any happier, but they were practically GLOWING! And my little brother was in such a sweet mood that he presented me with a truly bizarre drawing.

“Ooh, that’s erm, lovely, Callum,” I said cautiously. I had no idea why Callum had given me a drawing of five orange space aliens, but like Mum says, it’s the thought that counts.

“That’s you and that’s Kenny,” he said proudly. “There’s Frankie and that’s Rosie and Lyndz. You’re all wearing your bridesmaids’ frocks, look!”

“And what’s that?” I asked, pointing at a green figure lurking in the corner of the page.

“Oh, that’s a dinosaur out to kill you all,” Callum said airily.

Well, he IS seven! But when I bluetacked his drawing to our fridge alongside his other masterpieces, Callum looked really hurt.

“Don’t you want to show my brilliant drawing to your friends, Fliss?”

“Oh, silly ole me, what was I thinking of,” I said, and I stuffed it into my school bag instead.

I showed it to the others before we went into school, and not surprisingly they fell about.

“Which one’s me again?” asked Kenny.

“Isn’t it obvious? The one with three eyes,” giggled Lyndz.

“Duh,” said Rosie. “Anyone can see that’s not an eye, it’s a nose.”

Kenny looked uneasy. “We’re not really going to wear dayglo orange dresses, Fliss, are we?”

Honestly, that girl is so impossible! She can describe just about every goal scored by Leicester City football team ever since there’s BEEN a Leicester City football team, but when it comes to style, she hasn’t got a clue!

“No, we are NOT wearing dayglo orange,” I said patiently. “I’ve told you about a billion times. We’re wearing this really pretty shade of peach, OK? Orange was just the closest colour Callum could find in his crayon box.”

Kenny pulled a face. “I can’t believe you’re putting us through this, Fliss,” she moaned. “We’re going to look totally stoo-pid. Like a bunch of icky meringues, or something.”

But Kenny didn’t fool anybody. She’d never admit it, but Miss Cool ’n’ Sporty was every bit as keyed-up about Mum’s wedding as the rest of us.

Frankie had gone misty-eyed. “Just think,” she breathed. “One day Izzy will be doing cute little drawings for me!”

Frankie’s baby sister must be about six months old now, but Frankie’s still totally mushy about her.

Rosie gave me a nudge. “Fliss, quick! Check out the M&Ms!”

Now there’s two girls who should definitely come with a warning soundtrack. In case you’ve forgotten, Emma Hughes and Emily Berryman are the Sleepover Club’s deadliest enemies. They’re also completely two-faced, which is why grown-ups never believe us when we tell them how mean the M&Ms are. In fact, like Kenny says, most grown-ups think the sun shines out of the M&Ms’ you-know-whats!!

I sneaked a look over my shoulder, in time to catch Emma and Emily madly pretending they weren’t eavesdropping on our conversation. You should have seen their faces. They looked exactly like they’d been sucking lemons! The M&Ms can’t stand anyone else being the centre of attention.

“Heh heh heh,” chortled Lyndz. “They must have heard about your mum’s wedding. One-nil to you, Flissy.”

I’ve got to admit, it gave me a definite boost, seeing my ten minutes of bridesmaid fame get under our enemies’ skins like that. You know, sometimes I think us Sleepover Club girls must be telepathic, because we didn’t have to say a single word! We just stalked past the M&Ms, as if we were wearing our long floaty dresses and flowery crowns already!

For the rest of that day, whenever the M&Ms were in earshot, we kept up a nonstop gush of bridesmaid talk. And that’s where everything started to go wrong. I’m so sure of this, that if I was making a film of my life, that is definitely the part where I’d put in some doomy durn durn DURN chords.

You see, the M&Ms are our sworn enemies for one very good reason.

They are NOT nice people, OK?

By the end of the day, we’d managed to get so far up their noses that those girls were practically spitting with envy. If we’d had any sense, we’d have let it go at that. Instead, we decided to carry on flaunting our bridesmaid superstar status to the max.

For obvious reasons, we usually avoid walking home the same way as the M&Ms. But today we trailed them so closely, we were practically walking in their shoes!! We all knew we were playing with fire really, but we were having such a great laugh, we didn’t care.

We skipped along arm in arm, swanking loudly about how we were going back to my house for a dress fitting, and how our dresses were totally lush and how Mum and Andy’s wedding was going to be at this mega-posh country house.

Then all of a sudden, the M&Ms darted across to the other side of the street, giggling like idiots. And at the same moment Frankie flashed me a worried look. The kind that says “uh-oh.”

And there it was, blocking our path. An absolutely MASSIVE ladder.

I don’t think the bloke was much of a decorator, because there were paint drips everywhere. I could hear the ladder creaking and swaying like a ship in a storm, as the painter sloshed white gloss on the gutterings and anything else within splattering distance.

The others have probably told you that I’m really superstitious. Everyone knows this. So you won’t be surprised to hear that walking under ladders is not normally my idea of a fun time. And so this was definitely a durn durn DURN moment.

I stopped dead a few metres from the ladder and swallowed hard. I could hear the Gruesome Twosome whispering on the other side of the street, and I just KNEW they were cooking something up.

Suddenly Emily squawked:

“I dare you to walk under that ladder, Felicity Sidebotham!”

“Yeah, right,” jeered Emma. “And pigs might fly!”

And from the way the M&Ms smirked, you could tell they thought they’d totally trapped me.

I can’t explain what got into me then. It’s not like I’ve ever been the daredevil type. It’s true that I was on a serious wedding high, but it was more than that. Maybe I was just fed up with people calling me a wimp all the time.

I gave the M&Ms my iciest stare. “OK,” I snapped. “Then you’d better start looking up and checking for flying pig poo!”

The others gasped and Frankie actually made a grab for me, but they were all much too late.

I sailed under that ladder, as smooth as butterscotch. I didn’t even cross my fingers inside my pockets. In fact I moved so fast, the others had to put on a real spurt to catch up.

No-one spoke after that. We just kind of marched along in deadly silence. The others looked a bit stunned. The M&Ms had totally vanished. I suppose they’d slithered off to their coffins, or whatever the undead normally do after school.

Finally Frankie said, “Personally, Fliss, I wouldn’t have done that. Not this week.”

“Me neither,” said Rosie in an awed voice.

Kenny shook her head. “What got into you, Fliss?”

Lyndz had turned deadly pale. “If that was me, I’d have been wetting myself in case I jinxed the entire wedding.”

“Yeah,” agreed Frankie. “Walking under ladders pretty much guarantees seven days’ bad luck. Everyone knows that.”

“Rubbish,” I said uneasily.

Lyndz practically wrung her hands. “But it’s true,” she said.

Rosie had been counting on her fingers. “Seven days,” she squeaked. “But that takes you right up to the eve of the actual wedding! I mean, Fliss, anything could happen. Your house could be struck by a meteorite or something!”

Rosie’s words went through me like a knife. And suddenly I totally went to pieces.

“Why didn’t you guys stop me?” I wailed. “I don’t want Mum and Andy to have bad luck. I want everything to go BRILLIANTLY for them!” I covered my face. “I can’t believe it. I just hexed my mother’s future happiness!!”

Usually when I start one of my major doom monologues, the others say sensible things like, “Don’t be stoo-pid, Fliss. Have a Cheesy Wotsit and look on the bright side.”

But this time, I couldn’t help noticing that no-one exactly rushed to contradict me. In fact, no-one said a WORD.

I looked up in a panic, and saw four worried faces staring back at me. This was terrible. All my friends thought I’d ruined Mum’s wedding too!!

That DID it. I had the howling heebie jeebies right there in the middle of the street. “I’m such a bad person! I ruin everything. I should never have been born!”

The others didn’t know what to do. They made sympathetic noises and someone patted me once or twice, but I was in such a state it didn’t register. At least, not until Kenny suddenly whacked me really hard.

“Will you shut up!” she yelled. “I’m going to tell you how to cancel the bad luck, OK?” And she fished a clean tissue out of her pocket and handed it over.

I stopped yelling immediately. “Really?” I quavered. I gave my nose a big comforting blow. Then I gazed at Kenny like a hopeful puppy, while she told me what I had to do.

I have no idea where that girl picked up her wedding know-how, but I bet it wasn’t at Leicester City football club! I was impressed. I mean, I’m the girly superstitious one, right?

Apparently, all I had to do was find four mysterious “somethings” by the actual wedding day and give them to Mum, and the jinx would be like, cancelled!

“Find four what?” frowned Rosie. “Speak English, Kenny.”

Kenny sighed and gabbled a quaint little rhyme that went: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”

“Oh, those somethings,” the rest of us said immediately.

I wiped my eyes. “I didn’t know that was like a good luck thing,” I sniffled.

Lyndz wasn’t too impressed. “Fliss’s mum seems like the mega-organised type to me,” she objected. “She probably had her somethings sorted ages ago.”

I gave my nose another big blow. “Uh-uh,” I said. “She’s been too busy organising all the dresses and the reception and everything to even think about good luck stuff.”

“Well, there you go,” said Kenny smugly. “Now you can take care of them for her. That way you get to be a good daughter AND cancel the wicked M&Ms’ ladder spell all in one go.”

“Yippee!” grinned Rosie. “Now let’s go and try on our meringues – I mean, dresses!”

“You’d better not call them that in front of my mum,” I warned, cheering up a bit more.

Mum was making our bridesmaid dresses herself. I helped pick out the colour, actually. It was also my idea to have like, cute little ballet shoes dyed to match. Mum had gone to loads of trouble, sitting up night after night, stitching away, and now the dresses were almost ready. The fitting was just for Mum to check the hems before she finished them on her machine.

Actually, I think Mum was as excited about the dresses as we were, because she whipped open the door before I could even get my key out.

“Do you girls fancy a little snack,” she said, “before we do the fitting?”

Frankie giggled. “Maybe we should have the fitting and then have our little snack,” she said. (I don’t know if the others have told you, but my mum’s snacks are sometimes a wee bit over the top and take forever to prepare!)

“Good point,” agreed Kenny.

“Oh, well, if you’re sure.” Mum flew upstairs to fetch the dresses. She called down to us from the landing: “Shut your eyes, girls!”

“Mu-um!” I moaned. “We’re not five years old.”

We shut our eyes all the same. There was loads of mysterious rustling as Mum came back downstairs. Suddenly I got this wildly excited feeling, like you do just before you open your eyes on Christmas morning.

“You can look now,” said Mum, sounding breathless.

She had draped the dresses over the sofa, so we could see them properly. We gasped.

“Oh, they are so-o gorgeous,” breathed Rosie.

The last time I’d seen the fabric, Mum was struggling to cut out gazillions of fiddly little pattern pieces on our living-room floor. So I was every bit as dazzled as the others.

“We’re going to look like fairy-tale princesses,” whispered Lyndz.

“Some of us, maybe,” muttered Kenny. “The rest of us will look like total—”

“You first, Kenny dear,” said Mum brightly.

Good ole Kenny! We could tell she was absolutely freaking out inside, but she stood there like a docile little lamb and let Mum slip her rustly satin dress over her head. Though it was just as well Mum was concentrating on Kenny’s hemline, because Kenny’s face was a total picture.

The minute Mum disappeared to hunt for a tape measure, Kenny clenched her fists. “Don’t any of you say a WORD,” she hissed. “I KNEW I’d look like a meringue.”

Frankie frowned. “Actually,” she said, “you look really pretty.”

“Pretty!” Kenny snarled. “Huh! Don’t make me laugh!”

Honestly, I wish you could have seen that girl, pulling hideous troll faces at us in her frothy peachy bridesmaid’s dress. We all cracked up.

Naturally, Kenny thought we were laughing because she looked awful in the dress. She clawed at it furiously, trying to get it off, but Mum had pinned the material at the back, so she was basically trapped.

Luckily, just then Mum walked back in and said a totally perfect thing.

“Oh, Kenny,” she said softly. “You make that dress look so special.”

We could see Kenny struggling to figure out if “special” was some kind of polite adult code for “weird”. Then she gave my mum a shy little grin.

“Hey, thanks Mrs Sidebotham,” she said. “Erm – about that snack?”