Читать книгу Mega Sleepover 4 - Fiona Cummings, Louis Catt, Narinder Dhami - Страница 7

After Frankie had had her brainwave we were all eager to get home to design our creative masterpieces. The trouble is that I’m about as good at drawing as an elephant is at roller-skating. If we’d been competing for something like the Athlete’s Badge, then I would have started putting up the party streamers. As it was, I knew that I would be going somewhere else for the tenth birthday sleepover party. The question was, where?

My money was on Lyndz winning the competition. She’s brilliant at making things. I can sort of see things in my head, but when I try to put my ideas down on paper, they come out all wrong. Lyndz seems to have good ideas, and be able to carry them out. Fliss is very prissy and fussy about things. They never quite turn out as she expected them to, but they are always very neat and tidy. And adults always like that don’t they?

Frankie is a bit hit-and-miss. Once in art at school, she made this really great dinosaur out of papier-mâché. It was wicked. It stood outside Mrs Poole’s office for weeks. Parents would come into school and stand for ages admiring it, like it was by some famous sculptor or something. Then the next time Frankie made a model it was worse than one of those piles of junk you bring home when you’re in nursery class. She can be weird like that. You never know what to expect.

I’d never really seen much that Rosie had made. Her last sleepover invitation was pretty neat. But Adam had helped her design it on the computer, so that didn’t really count. All I knew for sure was that although I had tried my best with my birthday card, it wasn’t going to be good enough to win our competition.

We all met up at Frankie’s house a couple of days before Brownies. All the others seemed very confident that their card was going to be the best. But everybody acted like their design was the biggest secret in the universe. Frankie had even asked her father to lock hers away in his filing cabinet. I ask you, how ridiculous can you get?

“If it’s a birthday sleepover, are we going to buy presents?” asked Lyndz.

“Oh, we’ve got to, I love presents!” said Fliss. “This is great. It means we’ll all have two birthdays. Like the Queen.”

“Hang on one second!” I said, putting on a cheesy American accent. “I mean I love you guys and everything, but I have a serious shortage of dosh. You know what I’m saying?”

“Me too,” admitted Rosie. “I never seem to have any money.”

Frankie and Lyndz agreed.

A brainwave suddenly hit me:

“Why don’t we just give one present each? We don’t need to buy it either, we could make it,” I said. “I’m sure I could knock something up out of a washing-up bottle and a bit of string. I’ve seen ‘Blue Peter’ often enough!”

Who says Frankie should have all the bright ideas?

“I know it’s the thought that counts,” laughed Lyndz. “But would we really want something you’d made, Kenny?”

The cheek of it! I couldn’t let her get away with that. I wrestled her to the ground until she was hiccuping and begging for mercy.

“I’d, hic, love anything you made, hie, Kenny! Really I would!” she spluttered.

“But how would we decide who we were getting the present for?” asked Rosie whilst Frankie dealt with Lyndz’s hiccups. She tried a cold marble down her T-shirt for a change. And it worked!

“We could have a lucky dip,” said Frankie. “We’ll all write our names on a piece of paper, put them in a hat and pull one out. As long as no one picks their own name, it’ll be cool.”

“And we could keep it a secret. Whose name we’ve got I mean,” said Lyndz. “Then when we get the presents at the party, we’ll all have to guess who bought them.”

“That means we’ll all have to wrap them in the same paper and put them in a special place at the sleepover when nobody else’s looking,” said Frankie. She always thinks of things like that.

We were all pretty excited about our presents. We each wrote our names on scraps of paper, which Frankie tore out of a notebook. Then she got out her favourite purple velvet hat, and we put all the pieces of paper in it. We each took it in turns to pull out a name. I was the last to pick, so there was only one left. It said:

I looked round to try to figure out who had picked my name, but everyone was shoving the papers in their pockets, and had sort of secret smiles on their faces.

“I’ve seen some great earrings in that shop in the village,” said Fliss. “I just thought it might help to give someone a few ideas!”

Oh great! Now we’d have to listen to Fliss dropping hints about her present right up until the sleepover. And we didn’t even know when that would be.

“Call me picky…” I said

“Hello Picky!” said the others together.

“Ha! Ha!” I said. “What I was going to say was, call me picky but it would be nice to know when we’re going to have this sleepover. Some of us have lives to plan you know!

“Right! You mean your hectic social life of showbiz premieres and parties I take it!” laughed Frankie.

“I wish!” I said. “I just want to know, that’s all.”

“Well, I say we should wait until after Brownies on Thursday,” said Frankie. “At least then we’ll know whose house the sleepover’s going to be at. Everything else should be easy to decide after that.”

“Right as usual Batman!” I said.

We never usually take this long to plan our sleepovers. I was beginning to think that this one would never happen.

When we saw each other at Brownies on Thursday, we finally showed each other the cards we had been working on for the Artist’s Badge. Mine was by far the worst, but that was no surprise. The others were good, but as soon as we saw all our cards together, it was obvious who would be holding the sleepover.

For the Artist’s Badge we could design any kind of card. Frankie, Fliss, Lyndz and I had just made ordinary birthday cards. Rosie had made a special ‘Happy Tenth Birthday Sleepover Club’ card, complete with a badge.

Coo-ell!

“Wow, Rosie. That’s brilliant!” I said.

“You’re bound to win! Yours is the best card by miles,” said Frankie.

“Thanks very much!” said Fliss.

Frankie ignored her.

“Why don’t we just agree that the tenth birthday sleepover will be at Rosie’s place?”

Lyndz and I nodded. But Fliss wasn’t having that.

“You said that we would ask the Tester to judge the cards,” she moaned. “So that’s what we should do. She might like something different.”

“Like yours you mean?” I asked.

“Maybe,” said Fliss.

When we saw who was testing us for our Artist’s Badge, we realised why Fliss had been so keen to wait for her opinion. It was Sally Davies, Snowy Owl’s best friend. And as I’m sure you remember, Snowy Owl is none other than Fliss’s auntie, Jill!

We’d had to do other things for the badge, besides our card. We’d had to design a pattern in three colours and paint or draw a picture. As well as the card, I’d made a bookmark. (I’d painted fluorescent squiggles on it with some of Molly’s special paint. She wasn’t very happy about that. One-nil!)

Sally looked at all our things separately, then all the Brownies who were taking the badge had to sit at a table together and draw a vase of flowers. I went for the big and colourful look, the others copied what they saw. But that’s art isn’t it? Everybody looks at things differently.

Sally seemed pleased with everybody’s work. She complimented me on my ‘bold’ style, which sent Frankie into hysterics. When Sally had signed all our forms to say that we had gained the Artist’s Badge, Frankie explained about our cards and about the competition we were holding.

“Would you just tell us which card is the best?” she asked.

We’d laid them all out on the table, so it wasn’t obvious who had made each one. Although of course she had seen them before and could probably remember.

“I’m not sure that picking out one from the rest is a good idea girls,” said Snowy Owl. “You know that everybody’s work is as valuable as everybody else’s.”

We all rolled our eyes to the ceiling.

“No really Auntie Jill, we want Sally to choose,” explained Fliss. “We can’t decide where to hold our next sleepover, and whoever made the best card gets to hold it at her house. So you see, we really need her help.”

Frankie and I nearly cracked up when she said ‘Auntie Jill’ in that sweet way of hers. She was obviously trying to influence Sally’s decision.

“Alright then,” said Sally, picking up all the cards and looking at them very carefully. “I think you’ve all done a fantastic job. But I have to say that this one really stands out because it’s so different.”

She picked up Rosie’s card.

“Putting the badge on there was a very clever idea.”

We all patted Rosie on the back. All except Fliss, who scowled at Snowy Owl.

So we finally knew that our tenth birthday sleepover was going to be held at Rosie’s house, and that was pretty cool. Not only does she have a humungous house with about a million rooms, but her mum is really great, really young and trendy and a real laugh. The best bit though, is that we can actually write on Rosie’s bedroom walls!

I really thought that once we knew where the birthday sleepover was going to be held all our problems were over. How wrong can you be! They were only just beginning!