Sleepover Club Eggstravaganza (2 page)

After that little showdown, there were loads of high fives all round for the Sleepover Club.

“Way to go, Franks!” beamed Kenny, banging me so hard on the back I practically swallowed my tongue.

“You sure showed ’em!” squealed Rosie, doing a couple of imaginary punches in mid-air.

Even Fliss was grinning. “You really do pull off amazing stuff when the chips are down, Frankie,” she gushed.

“Chips?” said Lyndz, who perked up immediately.

“DOH!” we all groaned. Lyndz’s mind was on food, as usual!

“So, what’s this top idea, then?” continued Kenny in excitement. “Come on, spill the beans! You sounded way excited back there, so I guess it’s a Super Spaceman Special, huh?”

“Er…” I faltered.

“Go on!” prompted Lyndz, leaping on Rosie’s back and resting her elbows on Rosie-Posie’s shoulders. “Tell us!”

“Well,” I said carefully, aware of four excited pairs of eyes resting on me, “when I said idea, I didn’t exactly mean
idea
…”

“You haven’t got an idea at all, have you?” said Fliss, cottoning on suddenly.

“Well…No, not an idea as such,” I confessed.

Kenny clutched her hair. “But we just challenged the M&Ms!” she yelled. “Francesca Thomas, I could kill you!”

“Well, I had to say something, didn’t I? The M&Ms were flattening you!” I shot straight back, looking her firmly in the eye. Her gaze
dropped first. “It’s not so bad!” I rallied them – they were looking like drooping flowers all of a sudden. “We’ll just look on it as a challenge, that’s all!”

“Great,” they all groaned.

A horrible silence fell as we racked our brains. How were we going to get out of this one?

“Doesn’t
anyone
know any poems?” said Lyndz at last. “Limericks? Nursery rhymes?”

“
Mary had a little lamb, the midwife fainted
,” said Kenny promptly. “Well,
I
thought it was funny!” she protested when we all punched her.

“
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day
,” began Fliss, looking all dreamy.

“Yuck,” I declared. “How does the rest of it go?”

Fliss blushed. “I don’t know. Something about temperatures.”

“Temperatures are good,” said Kenny, getting interested.

“Look, this is getting us nowhere!” said Rosie in irritation. “Let’s just do what Mrs
Weaver suggested, and go and ask Baloney at lunchtime.”

Baloney is our pet name for Miss Malone, the librarian. It’s a perfect name, as her skin’s a bit blotchy like a sausage and she talks rubbish half the time.

“Yeah!” we all agreed. “Baloney to the rescue!”

And we played Stuck In The Mud for the rest of the break.

“Poetry, gels?” said Baloney that lunchtime. She always calls girls “gels”, which sounds weird but kind of goes with the rest of her. She wears hairy tweed skirts, and those little glasses on a thin gold chain that just rest on the tip of your nose. “What kind of poetry?”

“We were hoping you’d be able to tell
us
, Miss Malone,” I said politely.

“Yeah, anything, Miss Malone,” the others all chorused.

“Well, poetry can never be ‘anything’, gels,” said Miss Malone, looking quite shocked. “There are so many poems and poets out there, you see. There’s…”

And she started wittering on about Keats and Yeats and loads of other poets who all seemed to end in – eets, as far as I could make out.

“But do any poems leap to mind when you think about Spring maybe, Miss Malone? You know – seasonal stuff, flowers and grass and that?” interrupted Rosie as soon as Baloney drew breath.

Baloney stopped in her tracks. “Ah, now Spring! Well, of course, there’s always Wordsworth,” she gushed, sounding quite misty-eyed. “
I wander’d lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills, when all at once I saw a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils
…”

“DAFFODILS!” I yelled, clutching the others. “Perfect! Think of all those daffodils out in the playground!”

“What about them?” said Fliss, looking confused.

Kenny and I rolled our eyes at each other. Fliss had absolutely no imagination.

“Well, we could…er…we could…” I began,
waving my arms around in search of inspiration.

“We could copy the shape of a daffodil and maybe write the poem inside it?” offered Lyndz shyly.

“Lyndsey Collins, you’re a genius!” roared Kenny, flinging her arms round all of us and launching into a little jig which had us all creased up within seconds.

“Come, come, gels!” said Baloney reprovingly. “This is a library, not a…”

“…circus, yes, we know Miss Balo—” As Lyndz began to choke with helpless laughter, Kenny quickly corrected herself. “Er, Miss
Maloney
I mean. Could you tell us where we can find the poem, please?”

Lyndz’s desperate attempts not to giggle at Kenny’s mega gaffe had resulted in…you guessed it…HICCUPS. We all took it in turns to bash her on the back as we followed Baloney’s tall shape towards the Poetry section. She hiccuped the whole way through Baloney’s explanation about looking after library books and returning it by the end of
the week, and – can you believe it? – was
still
hiccuping as we turned to leave.

“Lyndsey Collins, this is a library, not a circus,” I said solemnly, which only made Lyndz worse.

“Frankie, you’re not helping,” hissed Rosie. “Try holding your breath, Lyndz.”

“Hold your breath and think of the moon,” said Fliss suddenly, as we emerged into the playground.

“What?!” we all shrieked.

“Fliss, you nutcase, how’s that supposed to work?” scoffed Kenny.

Fliss shrugged her shoulders, all annoyed. “Don’t ask
me
. I just know that’s what Mum told Callum to do the other day, and his hiccups stopped.”

“Phew – hic – so long as ali – hic – aliens don’t come into it,” quavered Lyndz. “Might as well give it a go.”

She seized her wrist and closed her eyes. “Moon,” she began intoning. “Hic. Moon. Moon.”

“Come on,” said Kenny, grabbing my hand.
“Let’s go and get ourselves a daffodil.” And she dragged me over to the school flowerbed, leaving Fliss and Rosie making encouraging moon noises at Lyndz.

“Hey, wait a sec,” I said, warning bells ringing. “What do you mean, get ourselves a daffodil? We aren’t allowed to pick any of these flowers, you know that. Anyway, what do you want an actual daffodil for?”

“So we can copy it, of course!” groaned Kenny. “You can be dead thick sometimes, Franks. How else are we going to draw a good daffodil shape to write the poem in? They won’t miss one itsy-bitsy flower. See, there’s
thousands
of them!”

“But…” I bleated anxiously. I had a
really
bad feeling about this.

“Come
on
, Frankie! Stop being so wet!” scorned Kenny. “Look, there’s a perfect one over there.”

She pointed at this gorgeous, velvety, trumpety yellow daffodil, sitting temptingly right in the middle of the flowerbed.

“Just keep watch, will you?” Kenny said,
and started moving purposefully towards her goal.

“No Kenny, don’t…” I began.

“Hey, that stupid idea of Fliss’s actually worked!” Rosie said, panting over to me, with Fliss and Lyndz following behind her. “I couldn’t believe…Er, what’s Kenny doing?”

“Picking a daffodil,” I said wretchedly. “To copy.”

Fliss took in the situation in one second flat, and turned papery-white. She hates getting into trouble. And this could
really
get us into trouble. “Kenny!” she screeched. “Don’t you dare! Mrs Poole will go
mental
!”

Kenny was tiptoeing daintily across the flowerbed, her eyes firmly on the trophy daffodil in the middle. I stared around desperately, hoping that no members of staff would look over in this direction.

Wait a second. What was going on? There were two familiar figures crouching down at the other end of the flowerbed. And it looked very much like they were about to…

“Psst, Kenz!” I hissed. “M&M alert! Are you
thinking what I’m thinking?”

Kenny turned. Her eyes narrowed into little Ninja slits when she saw Emma Hughes wrapping her grubby little fingers around the stem of a daffodil. “Why, the crawly creeps!” she breathed. “I’ll bet you my Leicester City scarf that they’re copying our idea!! I’ll bet they were hiding in the library when we were talking to Baloney –
typical
!”

At that exact moment, Emma Hughes saw us. She jumped like she’d been stung (I wish), and came stomping over to us. We just stood and gawped as Kenny and Emma thrust their faces right up close to each other.

“Hey, you copycat
worm
!” Emma stormed at Kenny. “Don’t you dare tell me you’re going to do that poem,
I wander’d lonely as a
—”

“I might say the same of you, Queen Quasimodo!” hissed Kenny. “Can’t you ever think for yourself? We had the idea first!”

“This was
our
idea first!” Emma spluttered, her hands balling up into fists. “So get out of it!”

Emily Berryman and dozy old Alana ‘Banana’ Palmer came running up just then.

“You tell her, Ems!” squealed Emily.

“I’ll bet you anything Sausage Brain Baloney told the M&Ms exactly the same as she told us,” groaned Lyndz, chewing her fingernails anxiously and looking round the playground for any marauding teachers.

“Duh! I didn’t know she was that stupid!” muttered Rosie.

“Well…no one said anything to Baloney about it being a secret,” Fliss pointed out.

“Well,
now
look! We’ve got a serious situation on our hands here, guys,” I moaned, twisting great handfuls of hair up in my hands.

Then, if you can believe it, things got worse. Kenny reached down and grabbed her trophy daffodil, pulling it right up by the roots and waving it in Emma’s face.

“Well, I’m the first to pick a daffodil, so I think you could say we’re the winners on this one, Emma!” she said triumphantly.

“Oh yeah?” shouted Emma, enraged. And bent down and grabbed TWO!

Three, four, seven,
ten
daffodils…Kenny and Emma just kept picking the flowers like
they were mad or something. It all became a blur of yellow, white and orange – and earth showered down from the flower roots as they got madder and madder, grabbing flowers left, right and centre.

“I’VE…GOT…MORE…THAN…YOU!” panted Kenny.

“NO…WAY…JOSE!!!” Emma roared in reply.

I saw what Kenny was about to do before anyone else did.

“No, Kenny!” I yelled, launching myself at her just as she rugby-tackled Emma. Fliss grabbed me. Rosie grabbed Fliss. And Lyndz grabbed Rosie. And in one massive jumble, we fell.
Right across the middle of Mrs Poole’s prize flowerbed
.

“Stop, stop, stop!” I panted, wrestling with Kenny’s flailing arms. Mud and petals were squashed into the grass, and everyone was shrieking fit to wake the dead.

A very tall, menacing shadow fell across the tangle of arms and legs and flowers.

“Just What Exactly,” said a terrifyingly familiar voice, “Is Going On Here?”

Holy moley. Nuclear war had nothing on Mrs Poole. You could see this huge thundercloud over her head, complete with forked lightning zigzagging out of it. We all leapt up in one terrified huddle, and followed her in silence as she stormed across the playground, virtually pushing over all the small kids who were standing in the way and staring.

She marched us straight down the corridor, where we trailed earthy muck all over the clean floor-tiles, and straight into her office. Once there, she went and stood behind her desk, breathing deeply, her knuckles resting on the desktop. She looked like a crazed bull,
facing a row of petal-strewn mud monsters. It would have been quite funny if it hadn’t been so totally awful.

When she had calmed down a bit – which took a good minute or two and felt like forever – she began to speak.

“Explain.”

Everyone started talking at once.

“Miss, it was Kenny…”

“It was Emma who started it, Miss…”

“We were just trying to stop them…”

“We only wanted one daffodil…”

“One – at – a – time,” she said, pegging each word out like clothes on a washing line. “Francesca Thomas. Speak.”

I stared helplessly at Kenny, not wanting to land her in it.

“Please, Mrs Poole,” said Kenny, “it wasn’t Frankie’s fault. She was trying to stop the fight between Emma and me.”

I looked at her in mute thanks.

“Fliss, Rosie and Lyndz were trying to stop the fight too,” continued Kenny bravely. She’s got serious guts, that girl. “But I wouldn’t
listen. Don’t blame them, Miss.”

Mrs Poole swung round to Emma with gimlet eyes. “And Miss Hughes, where do you come into this?”

Emma shrivelled on the spot, and started sobbing. “Miss, it was Kenny, Miss! She jumped on me, Miss, it wasn’t my fault! I didn’t do anything!”

“Seeing as it takes two to fight,” said Mrs Poole in an ice-and-steel kind of voice, “I find that extremely hard to believe. I also find your wailing quite pathetic, Emma. Stop it immediately.”

Emma sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand, smearing the mud even further across her face (heh heh heh). Emily and Alana Banana, the only clean ones in the room (apart from Mrs Poole, of course), patted Emma awkwardly on the shoulder and avoided Mrs Poole’s eye.

“I have never been so disappointed in Cuddington Primary pupils in my life,” said Mrs Poole coldly. “Laura and Emma, you will be consigned to the Reception class for the
rest of the week, and letters will go to your parents. You will also replant the school daffodil bed in your own time, with bulbs purchased with your own pocket money. The others are free to go. I hope I never see such atrocious behaviour again. Now return to your classroom.”

The class was dead quiet that afternoon. Everyone had either seen or heard about the fight, and everyone was seriously keeping their heads down.

With all the trouble about the daffodil bed and no Kenny, the Wordsworth poem idea wilted and died on the spot. Kenny was the only one of us who could draw, anyway – and none of us wanted to
look
at a daffodil ever again. So we did a string of limericks, and decorated them as best we could. You might say our hearts weren’t really in it, though.

Straight after school, we waited for Kenny. When she came out of Reception, she looked really fed up.

“Don’t talk to me,” was all she said. “I’m not
in the mood.” And she walked over to her bike, strapped on her helmet, and pedalled slowly out of the school gates.

Fliss was practically in tears. “Kenny’s parents are going to go absolutely mad when they read that letter!” she wailed.

“Rather her than me,” shuddered Lyndz.

“She brought it on herself,” said Rosie primly.

“Don’t say that!” I said, swinging round and glaring at Rosie. “She saved our skins in Mrs Poole’s office, you know. That took serious courage.”

Rosie shrugged and wouldn’t look at me. “She told the truth, that’s all. The others agree with me, don’t you, guys?”

“Is that what you all think?” I said, turning on the others. “That Kenny deserves her punishment?”

Fliss and Lyndz both looked at the ground and refused to answer my question.

“Some friends
you
are!” I flung at them angrily, and stalked off down the road on my own, ignoring Fliss’s pathetic little cry of
“Well, she
did
ruin my new trousers with all that muck!”

Everything was going totally wrong. Everyone was mad with Kenny. And even though I was defending her, I was kind of mad with Kenny too, and feeling awful about it. She
was
my best mate, after all, no matter what she’d done. So why was I feeling like this?

The sleepover at Kenny’s was banned that weekend, surprise, surprise. We hardly saw Kenny, what with all her classes being in Reception and all her free time taken up with re-planting the daffodil bed. The others began to feel really sorry for Kenny when they saw what an awful time she was having, and we ended up spending most of our break times chatting to her as she worked.

“Cheer me up, guys,” groaned Kenny. “My back’s killing me, and I’m sure I’m forgetting all my footie skills, ’cos I don’t have any time to practise these days.”

“Nah,” said Rosie encouragingly. “You’re a natural. Naturals don’t forget.”

“That’s elephants,” said Lyndz. “
Elephants
don’t forget.”

“Hey, are you calling me an elephant, Lyndsey Collins?” demanded Kenny with a grin. “Charming!”

And so the week passed. I noticed that Emily and Alana Banana weren’t being quite so supportive of Emma, who ended up spending most of her free time alone with her daffodil bulbs, her back turned firmly towards us. I felt quite sorry for her, really.

The weekend promised to be deadly dull without our regular sleepover. Kenny was grounded that weekend, and to have a sleepover without her wouldn’t have been fair. So I slobbed around the house, getting under my parents’ feet.

Eventually, Mum took pity on me. “You look like a crocodile,” she said on Saturday afternoon.

“Huh?” I said drearily.

“That long face of yours,” said Mum, giving me a dig in the ribs. “Here, hold Izzy for me, will you?”

That cheered me up a little. Izzy’s at a really gorgeous age at the moment, all chubby and smiley. One of her favourite things is her fish mobile, which swings over the top of her cot and twinkles in the light. She stares at it for hours, giggling away to herself. It’s serious magic, this sister business.

Dad looked up from some work he was doing at the kitchen table. “Hey, Helena – have you told Frankie the good news yet?” he said suddenly.

“What?” I perked up immediately. Man, I could use some good news!

“Not yet,” laughed Mum. “But I guess we’d better tell her now. We’ve fixed a date for Izzy’s naming party, Frankie. It’s going to be the first Saturday of the holidays – in a couple of weeks’ time, in fact.”

“Cool!” I breathed. “A party? Like, with cake and music and stuff?”

“Indeed, with cake and music and stuff,” said Dad gravely. “And champagne for the grown-ups too, of course.”

“Can I…” I began.

Mum and Dad looked at each other. “Yes Frankie, you can invite your friends!” they said together.

“And you can have them over for a sleepover the night before, if you like,” offered Mum.

“Their parents have all accepted the party invitation already,” said Dad.

“That’s brilliant news!” I said happily. Then my face fell. “But what if Kenny’s still grounded?”

“Oh, I don’t suppose her parents will stay angry with her for long. She’s been punished enough, from what I hear,” said Mum.

I planted a smacking great kiss on Izzy’s downy head. “Oh, Izzy Thomas, you’ll look so cute in a little party dress too, won’t you?” I cooed.

“Almost as cute as you did, Frankie!” grinned Mum.

“Hey, where are those old photos?” said Dad, standing up from the kitchen table with a gleam in his eye. “Let’s see how adorable our elder daughter looked in those days, shall we?”

“
Aw, Dad
!” I muttered, though I was secretly pleased. “Do we have to?”

Down came the photos from the top shelf in the living room cupboard – a huge box of them. Dad kept promising to put them all in albums one day, but somehow he never got round to it.

Mum sighed and swooned through the lot. “Oh yes! That little primrose-yellow dress!” she gushed. “And that gorgeous frilly bonnet – do you remember that bonnet, Gwyn? Ah, your fingers and toes were so tiny, Frankie! I couldn’t believe you were real. Gwyn was too scared to hold you for the first few days, in case he dropped you!”

Dad blushed and shot out of the room, muttering something about putting the kettle on.

There were a couple of really hilarious ones of me, all bundled up in padded babysuits that just made me look like the Michelin Man with my arms and legs sticking out all over the place. And a poptastic one of me in the bath too, with this blob of bath foam on my head.

“Mum, do you think I could take a couple of these to show the gang on Monday?” I pleaded. “They’d think it was a right laugh.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Frankie,” said Mum, shaking her head dubiously. “They’re the only photos we’ve got – we lost the negatives years ago. I don’t really want them to leave the house.”

“Oh please, please! I’ll look after them, I promise!”

And that’s how I ended up going to school on Monday, armed with the photos. But if I’d known what trouble they were going to cause, I’d have burned the lot, there and then…