How to Get the Friends You Want

by Jenny Alexander

  Crack! Dad poked too hard and the cover fell off the smoke alarm.

  Smack! Mum burnt her fingers on the hot cake tin and dropped it on the floor.

  Thump! Dennis banged his back feet to warn any passing rabbits there was a flying cake hazard.

  Dad gave the smoke alarm a mighty prod with the broom handle. The battery bounced out and fell to the floor in a shower of plastic splinters.

  In the silence that followed, we looked down at the cake. Dad said at least it had landed right side up. Mum said that didn’t make any difference – the cake was dead. ‘Dead – and cremated,’ agreed Dad.

  After lunch, Dad went to watch Plymouth play at home and Mum and me got ready to go to Gran’s. It didn’t matter about the cake because Stella rang to say she was bringing a bag of doughnuts.

  Primrose was upstairs with Matt, watching a DVD. If it was a mushy one, they’d be all cuddled up together and if it was a scary one she’d be glued to him like a love-sick limpet. Either way, you did not want to go in there.

  We were just leaving when my mobile rang. It was Sasha. She sounded in a state. Something terrible had happened, she said. Abina and Tammy had come round for an emergency meeting and now they were on their way up to my house to talk to me.

  ‘I’m not at my house,’ I said, which was technically true since Mum had just shut the front door. ‘I could meet you somewhere. Are you near the harbour?’

  Mum took off up to Gran’s and I walked down the hill towards the harbour. Sasha, Tammy and Abina were waiting impatiently outside the Milk Bar and as soon as I got there we all went inside out of the cold. Sasha bought shakes for everyone.

  ‘It’s a disaster,’ she said, bringing them across to the table. ‘Abina’s cousins are coming over from America.’

  A disaster? What were these cousins – guntoting gangsters?

  ‘The problem is they can only come the day of the Young Voices competition,’ Tammy explained.

  ‘I’ll have to go out for dinner with them,’ Abina said.

  ‘So she won’t be able to be our Chair,’ Sasha and Tammy said together.

  They all looked expectantly at me. ‘That’s rotten luck,’ I said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  They all looked at each other.

  ‘We want you to do it,’ said Sasha. ‘You’ve heard my talk lots of times and watched us practise, so you know the Chairman’s speech already.’

  ‘Please say yes,’ said Tammy.

  ‘Pretty please,’ said Sasha.

  I didn’t think Jess would mind. I mean, I was only doing the vote of thanks for her and anyone could do that – it was just a few words at the end, nothing tricky. She would find someone else, no bother.

  So I said I would do it, and they straight away jumped up and gave me a big hug, which was kind of embarrassing but also very nice.

  If I was honest, it did feel good to know I was on the winners’ team, and instead of giving the vote of thanks for Jess’s talk about Fives I would be introducing the coolest girl in the class talking on the super-cool subject of The World of Fashion.

  Plus I wouldn’t have to worry about Toby turning up in shorts and everybody laughing.

  Chapter 10

  Jess in a Stress and the Other Garden Angel

  I bumped into Jess on the way into school and told her straight away. I wanted to give her as much time as possible to find someone else.

  She didn’t say anything. She stopped walking and sort of stared at me.

  ‘You don’t mind do you?’ I said. ‘I mean, Sasha was in a panic. It’s hard to get a new Chairperson at the last minute, and I already know the introduction speech because I’ve heard Abina do it lots of times.’

  She went on staring.

  ‘You can easily get someone else to do the vote of thanks,’ I said. ‘It’s only a few words.’

  Jess blinked, turned her back on me and walked away. What was her problem? It was just the vote of thanks. It was nothing. Anyone could do it. Maybe she had something else on her mind and it was just bad timing.

  I caught up with Toby on the way into class.

  ‘I can’t do the vote of thanks now because Sasha needs a new Chair,’ I said. ‘I’ve told Jess, but she was really off with me.’

  I explained about how it would be much harder to find a new Chair at the last minute than a new vote-of-thanks-person.

  ‘There isn’t even any need to practise the vote of thanks,’ I said. ‘You could drag someone out from the audience to do it.’

  ‘But Jess isn’t happy?’ said Toby.

  I held the classroom door open for him. ‘I don’t want to let you down but what am I supposed to do? Sasha’s in a fix and she needs me more than you do.’

  Toby said he would talk to Jess. He swivelled himself round on his crutches and dropped into his seat.

  At break time I looked at the list outside the library to see who was already in a Young Voices team. Loads of people weren’t, but by the time you crossed off all the ones who poked fun at Toby or thought Jess was a freak, that only left five.

  The best of the rest was the new girl, April Grey. She was a bit shy, as in no-one had ever heard her say anything, but she was bound to speak up on the day. It would be good for her. It would bring her out of her shell and help her to make new friends.

  She wasn’t keen at first. She whispered something about not liking standing up in front of people and never having done any public speaking before. I said in that case, giving a vote of thanks was the perfect place to begin! It was literally just a question of saying, ‘Thank you, Jess – that was a lovely speech.’

  You would have thought Jess would be grateful to me for finding a new vote-of-thanks-person but oh, no. She gave me the silent treatment again when I told her, as if I had done something wrong in trying to help.

  ‘If you’ll excuse us,’ she said, ‘we’ve got a presentation to practise.’

  Toby went after her, swinging off down the corridor on his crutches.

  It hadn’t gone the way I had expected it to. Jess never usually gets into a stress and Toby always understands. Maybe it was a problem for them after all, me having new friends. Maybe they were jealous.

  Well, it wasn’t my fault if they wanted to be unreasonable. I tried to forget about it, but it bugged me all day and it was still bugging me after school at Sasha’s.

  We had hot scones straight from the oven that Margaret had made, and watched Vampire Girl on DVD. Everyone was keen for me to practise my introduction speech, so we turned the TV off after one episode and Abina gave me her notes.

  ‘You won’t need notes on the day,’ they said. ‘But perhaps you should use them the first few times.’

  I stood up in front of them and delivered my introduction, and they pretended to be the audience. Even with notes, I was hopeless compared with Abina.

  ‘Could you hold your head up a bit?’ suggested Sasha. ‘That’s better!’

  ‘Could you maybe talk a little slower?’ suggested Tammy.

  ‘It’s bound to take time,’ Abina said. ‘Practice makes perfect!’

  We ran through it five times but I didn’t seem to get any better. They kept trying to encourage me like they did with the netball. They could have told me I was rubbish but instead they said things like, ‘It’s nearly there!’ and ‘It’s going to be so good!’

  The problem was my heart wasn’t in it, and that was Toby and Jess’s fault. Why couldn’t they just have been fine with me switching? Why couldn’t they have been happy with April? It shouldn’t be a Big Deal.

  I plodded home super-slowly up the hill. I felt like one of those donkeys that have to be rescued because they’re nearly dead from carrying huge heavy loads. I had Toby and Jess piling on the silent treatment and Sasha, Tammy and Abina expecting me to be brilliant like them and not let the side down.

  Mum spotted I wasn’t having a great day the minute I walked in.

  ‘Woah, Peony! Why the long face?’

  She and Stella were wo
rking on a garden design. They had pictures and plans spread out all over the kitchen table. I didn’t really want to talk about it with Stella there but I couldn’t stop myself. I opened my mouth and it all just spilled out.

  I told them the whole story, everything that had happened. Somehow they managed to totally miss the point. What was wrong with everyone today?

  ‘I’m a bit surprised you switched,’ Mum said. ‘I thought Jess’s talk sounded really interesting.’

  ‘What was it about?’ asked Stella.

  ‘Fives,’ goes Mum. ‘Jess likes the number five. That’s right, isn’t it, Peony?’

  ‘Maybe Sasha’s talk is even better,’ suggested Stella.

  ‘What’s Sasha’s about?’ asked Mum.

  ‘The World of Fashion, but that’s really not important,’ I snapped.

  ‘I didn’t know you were interested in fashion,’ said Mum.

  ‘Everyone’s interested in fashion,’ I said. ‘That’s why it’s fashionable.’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t know you were.’

  Was I?

  ‘That’s not the point!’ I said, trying not to shout. ‘The point is, I was just trying to help Sasha out of a tight spot and now Jess isn’t talking to me!’

  They exchanged a glance.

  ‘So, to get this straight,’ Mum said, ‘you told Sasha you would be her Chair, and then you told Jess you couldn’t do her vote of thanks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Finally!

  ‘Well the problem is, you got it the wrong way round,’ said Mum. ‘You should really have asked Jess if she would mind before you agreed to join Sasha’s team.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Imagine you’re Jess,’ Mum said. ‘Then you’ll know what the difference is.’

  I was so cross, I went to my room. I stretched out on my bed and looked at my wall of dogs. They might not be as cool as sports stars and supermodels but they had their uses. I started counting through them. 1, German Shepherd; 2, Border Terrier; 3, Dalmatian... By the time I’d got to 23, Golden Retriever, I was beginning to calm down.

  I tried to imagine how Jess felt when I told her I couldn’t do her vote of thanks, and then I imagined how she would have felt if I had asked her whether she minded first. It probably would have been better, but there still wasn’t any need for her to go off on one.

  When Stella left I went back downstairs to look for Dennis. Mum was tidying the table, putting the pictures and papers in a pile.

  ‘We were talking about Gran’s garden,’ she said. ‘Stella’s got some great ideas for the area round the pond.’

  I looked under Dennis’s hutch. He wasn’t there. I opened his door but he wasn’t inside either.

  ‘Stella knows someone who’s got a gazebo for sale.’

  What was a gazebo? I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I looked under the table. No Dennis.

  ‘I love talking to Stella about gardens!’ sighed Mum.

  Stella, Stella, Stella... Mum couldn’t half go on. I found Dennis under the window, hiding behind the curtain.

  ‘Anyone would think Stella was your best friend, not just someone you work with,’ I mumbled.

  Mum said Stella used to be just someone she worked with at the Green Fingers Garden Centre, but since the two of them had set up Garden Angels together she had become a real friend. In fact, that was one of the best things about setting up the business.

  ‘But she’s much older than you,’ I said.

  Stella’s children were all grown-up. She was skinny and stringy, with creases round her eyes and a strip of white down the middle of her hair like a badger.

  ‘That’s an odd thing to say,’ said Mum. ‘What difference does it make how old you are if you like spending time together?’

  I suddenly remembered Becky’s face when she overheard me telling Sasha, Tammy and Abina she was just someone I worked with.

  ‘Talking about ponds,’ Mum said. ‘Is it true you can’t put fish and frogs together?’

  Chapter 11

  The Great Mistake and the Golden Rule

  The next morning something happened that should have made everything OK. Mr Jimson called me, Sasha and Jess over to his desk and told us he’d checked the rules and we couldn’t change teams once the names were in.

  ‘You’ll have to find someone who isn’t already in a team to be your Chair, Sasha.’

  ‘So that’s all right,’ I said to Jess. ‘I can do your vote of thanks after all.’

  She blanked me and later, at lunchtime, when she and Toby went off to practise, she wouldn’t let me go with them.

  ‘Like you told us,’ she said sarcastically, ‘the vote of thanks is sooo easy, there really isn’t any need to practise.’

  Toby looked unhappy but he didn’t stick up for me.

  Trudging home down the zig-zag path after school, I still felt like that donkey, only worse. Besides the silent treatment from Toby and Jess, I was beginning to feel bad about Becky.

  When I reached the last bend before our house, I stopped to look over the stile. The sea was flat calm, not like my brain. A little way along the coastal footpath, Nash House stood looking gloomy behind its high wall.

  There was a pale smudgy line like a pencil mark rising straight up from the garden. It was only a few hundred metres away, so I went to investigate. I found Gran and Jane from the Happy Haddock standing either side of a shiny new burning-bin, having an argument.

  ‘I’m telling you, it isn’t going to work!’ said Jane.

  ‘And I’m telling you it is!’

  They both peered into the burning-bin, which was like a metal dustbin on feet, with little holes round the bottom. The smudgy line of smoke streamed up into the air from somewhere deep inside it.

  Gran glanced up and, catching sight of me, said, ‘What do you think, Peony?’

  I picked my way between a heap of fallen leaves gathered up ready for burning and a mountain of branches Mum and Stella had cut down when they were clearing the garden on Sunday.

  ‘Don’t put your granddaughter in a tight spot like that,’ Jane said to Gran. ‘Anyone can see this fire is a non-starter.’

  Gran stuck her garden fork into the burning-bin and hauled out a big bunch of smoky sticks and leaves.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘You just put too much in. You were deliberately trying to put it out!’

  Jane rolled her eyes.

  ‘Your gran and her great ideas,’ she said. ‘You know what this reminds me of?’

  ‘That was your fault too,’ said Gran. ‘It would have worked fine if you’d done it properly.’

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘What are you talking about?’

  They both turned to look at me, as if they’d momentarily forgotten I was there.

  ‘When your gran and I were at school, we found a box of matches in the playground.’

  ‘All the teachers smoked in those days,’ Gran said. ‘It probably fell out of one of their pockets.’

  ‘I wanted to hand it in,’ said Jane. ‘Only madam here had a better idea. “Let’s do smoke signals like cowboys and Indians,” she says.’

  ‘All the films were about cowboys and Indians when we were young,’ said Gran.

  ‘We went into the gap behind the play-sheds, where lots of leaves had got blown, and we pulled them into a heap. It was a warm dry day, not a damp drizzly one like today. If it had been a day like today we’d have been fine, because nothing’s going to burn on a day like this, is it?’

  Gran muttered something. Jane took no notice.

  ‘So we strike a match and put it under the leaves, and they start to smoulder, little bits of smoke at first, and then a steady stream. Your gran says, “Use your sweater to make the signals. Lay it over to stop the smoke, then pull it away. I’ll go to the other side of the playground and count the puffs.” I think you can guess what happened next.’

  ‘You were only supposed to lay your sweater over it for a second,’ Gran said.

  ‘I did, but i
t happened to be the second the flames broke through, and it was bye-bye school sweater, hello Headmaster’s Office.’

  ‘I got detention too.’

  ‘Yes, but you didn’t ruin your sweater. I got grounded for a fortnight because of that.’

  ‘Getting grounded wasn’t really too much of a punishment for you though, was it?’ Gran said.

  ‘Not really,’ agreed Jane. ‘Living in the sticks doesn’t do much for someone’s social life.’

  They suddenly stopped arguing and laughed, remembering.

  ‘So you didn’t go round each other’s houses after school?’ I said.

  ‘I couldn’t,’ Jane said. ‘We didn’t have a car, and anyway, there’s only so much of your gran’s good ideas a person can take!’

  ‘And I didn’t really want to,’ said Gran. ‘I was never that sociable as a girl. I liked messing around on my own.’

  ‘I’m like that,’ I said, without even thinking about it.

  As soon as the words came out, I saw that it was true. I liked seeing Becky at the kennels and doing outdoors things with Toby; I liked talking about interesting stuff with Jess. But I also liked lying around reading, or watching David Attenborough, or finding new dogs for my wall. I liked talking to Sam and playing with Dennis.

  That’s when I saw my great mistake. I had thought I wanted to be friends with Sasha, Tammy and Abina because everyone did. They were the coolest girls in class; they were clever and nice. But they wanted to do everything together – and they were wearing me out!

  The thing was, everybody was different, and that meant they wanted different kinds of friends. Matching-set friends were great for sociable people like Sasha, Tammy and Abina. But interesting friends who weren’t too demanding, like Becky, Toby and Jess... they were the perfect friends for me.

  Except I’d really upset them.

  ‘Are you alright, Peony?’ Gran said. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘It was probably the ghost of this dead bonfire,’ said Jane.

  ‘All it needs is some firelighters.’

  I walked down to the shop to get some firelighters for Gran. Things were a mess, friends-wise, but at least I knew what I wanted now. Mr Kaminski says knowing what you want is the first step to getting it. He says you have to know exactly what you want, and write it down – that’s the golden rule.