Читать книгу Mega Sleepover 1 - Rose Impey - Страница 5

Well, come in, if you’re coming in. And sit down. This time we’re in deep trouble. This time we could be in doom for ever. And this time it was not my idea. Uh-oh! There’s the phone.

“Frankie! It’s for you.”

“Coming, Mum.”

You’d better come down and listen in. I’ve got a feeling this could be bad news.

“Hello?”

“Frankie, is that you?”

“No, it’s Betty Boop.”

“Look, be serious for once. Has Brown Owl been round to your house?”

“No! Why?”

“She’s been here already, so you’d better look out.”

“What happened? Go on, tell me the worst.”

“I can’t, my mum’s coming. I’ve been grounded and that includes the phone.”

“Oh, help, Kenny! I think she’s at the door now. What should I do?”

“Hide. Run away. Emigrate. But disappear!”

Come on. 5–4–3–2–1, let’s get gone! Upstairs, quick!

Right, close that door. On second thoughts, lock it, we don’t want to be disturbed. This is seriously serious. What do you think she’ll tell them? Oh, p-lease, not everything! I mean, we haven’t done anything terrible. It’s not as if we meant to wreck the supermarket. We were just trying to be helpful, which is what she’s always telling us Brownies are supposed to be.

I blame Rosie. None of this would have happened if we hadn’t let her join the Sleepover Club. That was the start of it all. Oh, flipping Ada, as my grandma says, pull up a pew. I suppose I’d better tell you exactly what happened.

To begin with there were just the four of us.

There was me, Francesca Thomas. But you can call me Frankie.

And there was Laura McKenzie. We call her Kenny. She’s my best friend. That doesn’t mean we never fall out – we argue at least once a day – but we always make it up.

And Fliss. Her real name’s Felicity Sidebotham, but please don’t bother with the jokes, she’s heard them all before. And, as everybody knows, Fliss doesn’t have much of a sense of humour.

And Lyndsey Collins. Now she does. Lyndz is a great laugh.

So that’s how it used to be.

Now there’s Rosie as well, which, in case you can’t count, makes five.

Rosie’s only recently moved round here; she doesn’t know many people yet, so we thought we’d be friendly. OK, we were curious as well. She’d moved into that big house at the end of Welby Drive, the one with the massive garden with an orchard, so we were expecting someone really posh. But Rosie is not posh. Up to now we haven’t been inside, but we’re working on it.

It was Lyndsey who suggested we let Rosie sit with us in class and hang around with us at dinner, which was cool with us, but then, the next thing, she said, “I think we should let Rosie join the Sleepover Club.”

I said, “What for?” as if I needed to ask.

“Well, I feel sorry for her; she’s got no friends.” Lyndz is the sort of person that would rescue a fly if it fell in a puddle.

“That’s not our problem,” said Fliss. “Anyway it would make five and five’s an odd number and odd numbers never work.” Fliss likes everything to be tidy. She even lifts hairs off your cardigan while she’s talking to you.

But for once I agreed with her. “We don’t really know her, do we? She might be a drip. She might be a scaredy cat. She might be really boring.”

“She’s not,” said Lyndz. “She passed the test, didn’t she?”

I suppose she did. We wouldn’t even have let her hang around with us at school otherwise. We do these naughty things: you know, like screwing up paper pellets and stuffing them down the back of the art cupboard to feed Muriel, our pretend pet monster. Sometimes we tie one of us to a tree behind the mobile classroom, then knock on the door and run away. If you want to be in the gang you have to do a dare and get sent to Mrs Poole’s office. We dared Rosie to take a bite out of a biscuit in the teachers’ tin on the staff-room table and then put it back. She ate half the biscuit, so we had to let her join. But there’s something about her I’m still not sure about.

“Well, I don’t care who joins,” said Kenny, “as long as we have a laugh.”

“But she doesn’t laugh, that’s the trouble,” I said. “She’s a bit of a sad case, really.”

“That’s because her dad’s left,” said Lyndz.

“So’s mine,” said Fliss.

“Yes, but you’ve got another one,” Kenny pointed out.

“Andy is not my dad,” Fliss insisted.

We argued for ages until Fliss said, “Let’s stop bickering and have a vote and settle it once and for all.” She can be so bossy sometimes. “Those in favour.”

Lyndz and Kenny put up their hands.

“Those against.”

Me and Fliss put up ours.

“Oh, well, that really settles it,” I said. “Now what do we do?”

Well, we didn’t do anything, until the following week when we were all at Brownies. We were sitting on the wall outside, waiting for Kenny’s dad to pick us up. We were talking about our next sleepover, which was at my house the following weekend. Just then Rosie came over, because she’s started Brownies too.

“I’ve got these really cute Forever Friends jimjams,” Fliss was telling us. “You’ll see them at the sleepover on Saturday.”

“What’s that?” asked Rosie.

Suddenly everyone went quiet. Kenny started to whistle, which she always does when she’s nervous. I looked at my feet, which are pretty fascinating. No, really, they are, because they’re the biggest feet you’ve ever seen. I take size sixes already. Of course I’m tall for my age and, as my mum says, if I didn’t have big feet I’d be for ever falling over. Fliss sucked her cheeks in, which is a silly habit and makes her look like a gerbil. Then, out of the blue, we all heard Lyndz say, “Oh, it’s our Sleepover Club. It’s at Frankie’s house on Friday. Do you want to come?”

After Rosie had gone, Fliss turned on her and said, “Why did you say that?”

But she needn’t have asked. We all said together, “Because she felt sorry for her!”

So that was it. Thanks to big-hearted Lyndsey, with a mouth to match, we now had five in the Sleepover Club.