Читать книгу Mega Sleepover 3 - Fiona Cummings, Louis Catt, Narinder Dhami - Страница 10

You’re in school with me now. It’s dinnertime. Come down the corridor with me. Ssh! Don’t make any noise. Careful, your shoes are squeaking! We don’t want anyone to hear.

Stop! We’re right outside the door of the studio. Can you hear the the din that’s going on in there? How could you miss it? It’s like a load of groaning hippopotamuses - or should that be hippopotami? It’s the M&Ms practising their Spice Girls routine. They’re doing Wannabe and it’s really pathetic.

Let’s push the door open a crack and watch them dancing. They look like hippos, don’t they, as well as sounding like them! Just look at them galumphing about!

They’ve got old Fatty-Bum-Bum with them, which is what we call Amanda Porter. The nickname may sound a bit cruel, but you don’t know Amanda. She’s a horrible person, really nasty to everyone. We wouldn’t care that she bought her dresses from Tents R us, if she was nice with it. But she hasn’t got the niceness gene in her entire vast body. I don’t know which Spice Girl she’s meant to be. There isn’t a Gross Spice, is there?

The only decent one among them is Regina Hill. She’s not only got a good voice, she’s obviously had some dancing lessons, too. Why did she have to offer to sing with them? They’d have been booed out of school if it hadn’t been for her. I wish she could have sung with us. If only the Spice Girls would suddenly add a sixth girl to their group. Then we’d definitely win.

Let’s tiptoe away now, before they spot us. Did you notice who’s playing the piano for them? It’s Dishy Dave. He’s the one who started this whole thing off by saying we were good. I wonder what he thinks of the Hippo Girls? And why didn’t we think of asking him to play the piano for us, instead of deciding to accompany ourselves? It just never crossed our minds, and it’s too late now. The M&Ms really would accuse us of copying them then!

None of us could wait for Friday to come. We were still arguing about which song to do, but we’d more or less decided on Mama, because it was slow. That made it easier for us to sing and play. There was no way my fingers on the guitar could have kept up with the pace of Wannabe!

I was hoping - really desperately hoping - that Stuart would be going out till late, so we could use his room. That’s what happened last time we had a sleepover at my place. His room is much bigger than mine, and he’s got a TV and video in there, so we could have played my Spice Girls video.

When I asked him, though, he said he wasn’t sure what he was doing that night.

“Meanie!” I told him.

“Who owes her big brother loads of money, eh?” he reminded me, with a yah-boo kind of expression on his spotty face. Then he held his hand up, saying, “Pay up and I might be able to afford to go out on Friday.”

He knew Dad didn’t give me my pocket money until Saturday, so there was no way that I could. I went to my room and had a quick sulk. Then I sorted out my sock drawer. I’d intended to do that for ages as I couldn’t find any proper pairs any more and had gone to school that morning wearing one white sock and one cream one.

I’d spent all day expecting the M&Ms to notice and make fun of me, but they were far too busy boasting about how brilliant they were at being the Spice Girls, and how no other Spice Girls act stood a chance against them. They didn’t know I’d seen their dancing hippos routine. They were so sad.

It got to Friday and we still didn’t know if Stu was going out or not.

Tom, my next oldest brother, wasn’t. He had made up his mind to enter a picture in an art competition in one of his weird magazines.

For a whole week, he’d spent every night in his room, drawing and painting. Every morning, he’d stagger down with his full waste-paper bin, dropping screwed up sheets of paper all down the stairs. I swooped on one and when I un-crumpled it, I saw it was an amazing science fiction type of picture, complete with space ships and aliens and weird creatures with horns and antennae and tentacles, all in brilliant orange and slime green.

“Hey! Give me that back!” he shouted, and went all red with embarrassment.

“It’s good,” I told him. “Can I keep it?”

He looked pleased. “All right,” he agreed.

I un-crumpled another one. It was seriously loony, with lots of funny purple creatures and bright red cactus plants.

“It was supposed to be Life On Mars, but it went wrong,” he explained.

He snatched it out of my hand and tore it to shreds. Buster came bounding up the stairs and ate them.

“He’ll be sick now. Red and purple sick, all over the carpet,” Tom said, putting me right off my Coco Pops.

The first big disaster of our rehearsal was that Fliss hadn’t brought the guitar.

“I looked in the shed but it wasn’t there. Andy drove me here, anyway. I couldn’t have brought it because he’d have seen it,” she said.

At least Frankie had remembered her keyboard, so all was not lost. She reckoned it wouldn’t take long to learn the tune from my tape. At least we’d still be able to practise.

Last time we’d held a sleepover at my house, we’d all been seriously into cucumber. We’d gone off it now. Celery was our new thing. It was so nice and crunchy and didn’t give you the burps like cucumber did. So when Mum had asked me yesterday what kind of food we’d like, I’d told her to give us lots of celery.

Mum had made cheese and celery sandwiches, baked potatoes with pineapple and celery stuffing, and a big salad with loads of celery in.

There were two pizzas, one vegetarian, as both Frankie and I are veggie, and a ham and mushroom one for the others, plus all the usual crisps and cakes, and a huge bag of popcorn. Oh, and lots of lemonade and Coke.

“What’s that?” Rosie asked, pointing to the plate in the middle of the kitchen table.

We all looked where Rosie was pointing. I’d thought it was a bit of Dad’s wonky pottery which Mum had turned into a table decoration, but on close inspection, which involved prodding it a bit, it turned out to be a pile of celery sticks, arranged as a kind of mountain with the curly leaves looking like bushes on top, and tiny flakes of carrot stuck on like flowers.

“Weird!” said Frankie. “Really weird.”

I had to agree with her. It was very weird indeed.

We weren’t sure whether it was intended to be eaten, or just looked at, but Fudge solved it for us by leaping on the table, which she wasn’t supposed to do, striding between our plates and knocking the celery heap over with her tail. After that, none of us wanted to eat it at all, as it was covered in cat hairs.

I’d told everyone to bring some Spice Girls costumes with them, so after we’d eaten the proper food, we took the crisps and things up to my room and got down to sorting out our clothes.

The bathroom’s next to my bedroom. It soon got turned into an extra changing room, as it’s got a big mirror in it. Fliss and Rosie were in there when suddenly we heard an ear-splitting scream!

Had they found a humongous spider in there, or was it something worse…?