Читать книгу Trick or Treat - Jana Hunter - Страница 5

I raced to the front door, and yanked it open. With the force of a jet-propelled broomstick, the wicked witch herself fell across our hall floor in a heap.

“Come in!” I laughed as the rest of the Sleepover Club tumbled in on top of her. “Oh, I see you already did!”

“Heh, heh, heh…” cackled Frankie-the-witch, looking up at me from the pile of my friends. “Want a bite of my poisoned apple?”

“Save it for Molly,” I said. “She deserves it.” I helped Frankie with her pointed hat while the rest of the Sleepover Club tried to untangle themselves from the heap of sleeping bags, sweets, cuddly toys, pillows, bags and Hallowe’en costumes strewn across the floor.

“You look well ugly!” I told her, dead admiring.

“I know.”

“Molly’s face!” giggled Lyndz, crawling about the hall floor, collecting all the scattered sweets. “She thought it was a real witch come to cast a spell on her.”

“No such thing,” said Fliss in her usual bossy way, as she folded up her sleepover kit ultra neatly. Fliss is a bit scared of supernatural things and she tries to cover it up by acting superior. She’s also a total neatness freak, in case you didn’t know. “Hope you’ve not squashed my cake, Rosie,” she fussed.

“Oops.” Rosie, who’s known for being a bit of a klutz, went red. “Let me check…”

“Don’t bother, Rosie,” I told her glumly. “The Sleepover Club’s not stopping.”

“What!”

“But it’s sleepover night!”

“I know. It’s over at Frankie’s instead.”

“Mine?” Frankie’s voice sounded muffled behind her green plastic mask. “But we had it at mine last time.”

“I know. Molly’s messed everything up, as usual.”

There were moans of “typical” and “what a Monster”. But before we had a chance to think up any worse names for my meddling sister, the doorbell rang and the monster herself flounced out of the kitchen and pushed past me.

“Out the way, little kids,” she said, shoving Frankie-the-witch rudely. “I’m having my friend to stay over now. So your baby sleepovers are numbered…”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah!”

“What d’you mean?”

Molly looked smug as she delivered her killer blow. “Jilly’s staying here Fridays now. So the Sleepover Club’s out!”

We all gaped at her. Then Frankie piped up:

“That’s what you think! Our Sleepover Club has rights!” Frankie will always stand up for herself in a fight, especially if she’s wearing witch’s talons and a pointy hat.

“Rights for you load of babies? You must be joking!” sneered Molly.

“We’re not babies!”

“Yes you are!”

“No we’re not!”

As you can see, things were getting out of hand, and Total War probably would’ve broken out if Jilly’s mum herself hadn’t peeped through the letterbox.

“Hello,” she said, in a friendly voice. “Anyone going to let us in?”

This was definitely not the moment to start fighting. So we decided to cool it and plot our revenge over at Frankie’s instead.

Because something Had To Be Done.

It’s not that we minded sleeping over at Frankie’s for the second week running. Frankie’s got a huge bedroom with extra bunk beds, so it’s well nice having our sleepovers there. (And as Rosie said, a sleepover is a sleepover.) No, we didn’t mind so much about staying at Frankie’s. It’s just that, as Frankie said, “It’s the principle of the thing. If Molly starts messing up our sleepovers, who knows what will happen next?”

And the gang agreed.

That’s why I did what I did. The horrible, hairy deed itself. I mean, no point in letting a fat, juicy spider go to waste is there?

Carting our stuff through the streets was brilliantly creepy. It was so dark and silent that Frankie-the-witch kept cackling and pretending to put a spell on the houses.

“Eye of newt, toe of bat,

Light of the full moon,

Get lots of sweets for Trick-or-treat…

Cos we are coming soon!”

“Ooo, ooo…” I chanted, waving my hands. “We’ll put a spell on you, if you don’t!”

But Fliss, whose mum doesn’t approve of spells and stuff, was not having any of this. “Why don’t we practise our 5ive routine?” she said, ignoring our class act.

“Not now!”

“Why? We’ve got loads of room out here…”

“NO!”

Course, in the end Lyndz, seeing that Fliss was desperate to get off the scary subject of spells and witches, saved her as usual. Lyndz loves to rescue things. If there was a flea drowning in her tea, she’d probably fish it out and give it the kiss of life. “Come on, you two,” she said, doing a 5ive-type kick. “Fliss is right. We’ve got loads of room to practise our routine here.”

So we gave in.

At least, we tried. We tried five times to dance down the street and sing like our current favourite boy band, but we were so loaded up with stuff it was impossible to do the movements properly. Frankie of course was determined to put some witchy bits into our routine, so she stuffed her rolled-up sleeping bag between her legs and pretended to fly on it down the street. She made us laugh so much our singing went warbly. It was well funny.

Rosie kept dropping things too. She couldn’t dance two steps without offloading something. While she was picking up one thing she’d drop two, then three… In the end she just threw everything down in a pile and plonked herself on top. “I give up.”

“Me too,” said Frankie, unrolling her sleeping bag right there on the pavement as if it was the most normal thing in the world. “It’s way past my bedtime.” Then, cool as a cucumber, she climbed into her sleeping bag, pulled her pointy hat down to her nose, and pretended to go to sleep.

I told you Frankie was a laugh, didn’t I?

Everyone cracked up and poor Lyndz was almost wetting herself. “Oh, stop, stop…” she gasped, clutching her stomach.

“Hey!” Frankie-the-witch stuck her long nose over the edge of her sleeping bag. “Can’t a person get some sleep round here?”

That did it. On a silent signal, we unrolled our sleeping bags and laid them out on the pavement, alongside Frankie. All of us except Fliss, Chief Inspector of the Dirt Patrol, that is.

“You’ll catch a disease,” she predicted darkly.

“Good. Then Molly will be in deep doom forever,” I said, pretending to wash my face and brush my teeth before settling down for the night. “It’s Molly’s fault we’ve been thrown out on to the streets, anyway. I think we should get the papers to come and take a photo, then she’d really get it.”

“Yeah,” giggled Lyndz. “I can see the headlines now: “Sleepover Club Is Streets Ahead.”

We laughed, but Fliss was still in a flap, going on about us ruining our clothes. She’s the only one in our gang who’s into clothes and icky romantic stuff, probably because of her Barbie-doll looks. “Get up, ple-ease,” she tried in the end. “I bet dogs have weed on that pavement…”

“Not at this luxury hotel,” said Rosie, who was making a night table out of her flattened bag by neatly laying out her hairbrush, headband, toilet bag and diary.

“It’s not a hotel.”

“’Tis to us.”

“Well, I’m not stopping,” announced Fliss. “And you’ll be sorry if you do!” And with that she grabbed her sleepover kit, and marched off down the street with her nose in the air.

“She’ll be back,” said Frankie without moving. Actually Frankie hadn’t moved since she’d rolled over and pretended to be asleep. “Fliss can’t bear to miss a sleepover.”

“Maybe she’s gone to tell the papers,” I offered hopefully.

“Tell her mum, more like.”

But Fliss wasn’t doing either. In fact, she hadn’t gone very far at all.

We went on wondering where she was for a bit, but there’s only so much time you can waste worrying at a sleepover. So soon we were telling jokes and sharing black sweets, there on the pavement, as if it was the most normal sleepover in the world. And we got so carried away by our street camp-out that by the time the ghost appeared, Fliss was the last thing on our minds.

“Whhhhoooo-ooooo…”

“Omigosh it’s…!”

“Hooo-whhooooo…”

“Quick!”

“Run!”

And in a crazy jumble of sleeping bags, trapped feet and panic, the four of us did the Sack Race of the Century right up to Frankie’s front doorstep, screaming loud enough to wake the dead.