“OK. Time out!” shouted Sergeant Major Francesca Thomas. “Have you two any idea what you look like? It’s pathetic!”
Fliss and I stopped yelling and looked at each other. Her face was bright red and she looked mad! I must have looked like that too, because when we caught sight of each other we just cracked out laughing.
There was a knock at the door.
“I told mum that I’d need danger money to come into a room full of weird women!” Stuart, Lyndz’s eldest brother, carried in a tray of orange juice and biscuits.
“Come on Lyndz. Shift some of this stuff from your desk. This tray is heavy you know.” Lyndz is nearly as untidy as I am. There was so much stuff piled on her desk that when she tried to move it, it fell on to the floor.
“Hey what’s this?” asked Rosie, picking something up.
“Oh that’s just a card I’m working on for my Artist’s Badge at Brownies,” said Lyndz taking it from her.
“Oh no! I’d forgotten!” gasped Rosie. “I’ll have to start planning it tonight. What else do we have to make? Is it a bookmark?”
“Or a poster,” said Fliss.
I hadn’t even thought about what I was going to make, and the Badge Tester was coming to Brownies the following Thursday.
“That’s it!” shrieked Frankie, grabbing me by the shoulders. “I’ve done it again! I am a genius!”
“Oi! Let go of me Big Head!” I gasped. “What cunning plan have you thought of now?”
“Well,” spluttered Frankie. “We’re all doing the Artist’s Badge right? If we all design a birthday card for the Sleepover Club, then get the Tester to decide which one is the best, whoever designed the best card gets to hold the tenth birthday sleepover party. I told you I was clever didn’t I?”
Frankie was talking so fast that all her words had fallen over each other. So it took the rest of us a little while to work out what she had said. But when we did, we had to admit that the girl’s got brains.
Of course, we still had the problem of deciding exactly what we were going to do at this party. But first we were all determined to win the competition.
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!
You know the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, where the guy has two completely different personalities? Well that was Rosie as soon as she knew that the birthday sleepover was going to be at her place. She was like some power-crazed monster. No one had ever seen her like that before. And I’m certainly not in a hurry to see her like that again.
We all met up at the shops in Cuddington on the Saturday after Brownies. They’re easy for us all to get to, apart from Lyndz who lives a little bit further out than the rest of us. And our parents are quite happy for us to go there by ourselves. You know what parents are like! Always worrying about something. But at least they know we’re safe there. Apart from the threat of Fliss driving us all crazy by telling us about some great earrings she’s just seen, and the cool nail varnish she ‘just has to have’. P-lease!
We always meet on the same bench outside the newsagents. Rosie was the last to arrive. When she did appear, she was carrying a mountain of paper.
“What on earth have you got there?” asked Lyndz.
“Plans for the sleepover. Is next Saturday alright?” asked Rosie, flopping down next to us.
“Now, let me just consult my diary,” I said, pretending to flick through some imaginary pages. “Let me see. Next Saturday you say? Hmm. I think I can squeeze you in!”
“Sounds good to me!” said Lyndz.
“Fine by me,” agreed Frankie.
“So we’ve got a week to sort the presents out!” said Fliss. The rest of us groaned.
From the pile she was carrying, Rosie pulled out four invitations. Pinned to each one was a copy of the badge she’d made for Brownies.
“Cool!” we all gasped.
“Adam did these on the computer for me. I thought it would be nice if we could all wear one for the sleepover,” she seemed very pleased with herself. “All you’ve got to do is cut them out and make them into a badge. Is that OK?”
“Yep, I think even we can manage that!” I laughed, pulling a face at Frankie.
“Now,” said Rosie, reading from one of her larger sheets of paper. “What I thought was: arrive at 5pm, put things in my room until 5.15pm, games outside until 6.15pm, make-up and hair, (possibly a fashion show if we can fit it in) until 7pm, food until 7.45pm, Twister until 8.15pm, then disco until mum sends us to bed, which she says will be about 10pm – if we’re lucky! Washing and undressing until 10.30pm, giving out presents until 11pm, then midnight feast. Everybody OK with that?”
We were all sitting round with our jaws scraping the pavement. Was this girl for real? This was more like a military exercise than a sleepover. It was supposed to be fun for goodness sake!
“Erm, Rosie, I think you’ve forgotten one thing,” I said very seriously.
“No, I can’t have. I was up all night planning this. What have I forgotten?” she said, furiously reading through her timetable.
“What about toilet breaks?” I giggled. “I mean what if we need to go to the loo in the middle of the outdoor games? Should you plan for us to all to go together just to be on the safe side? Then we won’t mess up your timetable.”
“Like at school you mean?” Rosie looked very thoughtful. “That’s not a bad idea. I’ll see where I can fit it in.” The rest of us cracked up. Even Fliss knew that I was joking and Fliss has a sense of humour the size of a pea.
“And I’m not sure about the beginning bit,” said Lyndz. Rosie flicked through her notes. “You mean ‘arrive at 5pm put things in my room at 5.15pm?’ What’s wrong with that?”
“Well what if one of us is late? Or it takes us longer to get our stuff sorted out?” asked Lyndz.
“Yes and where are we going to put the presents so the others can’t see them?” asked Fliss.
“Oh no!” gasped Rosie. “I’ve got to do some more planning. But you can’t be late. You just can’t be. It’ll mess everything up if you are!” She looked as though she was going to cry.
“Don’t you think you’re taking this a bit seriously?” asked Frankie gently.
“I just want it all to be perfect, what’s wrong with that?” snapped Rosie. “It’s not just any old sleepover. It’s our tenth birthday sleepover and I want to make sure we’ll all remember it.”
She was certainly right about that. I don’t think any of us will ever forget it!
“Is there anything you want us to bring?” I asked. “Stopwatches, so we don’t run over time? Running shoes so we can sprint from one thing to another?”
“Party clothes? Balloons? Cuddly
toy?” asked Frankie.
“What about the cake?” asked Fliss. “We’ve got to have a cake.”
Rosie began to search frantically through all her sheets of paper.
“The cake!” she shrieked. “How could I forget about the cake?”
It was a bit sad really, seeing her get so upset.
“Don’t worry. We could buy one,” I suggested.
“We’ve no money,” Lyndz reminded me.
“Well let’s make one then!” Frankie said.
Now the Sleepover Club are not exactly the greatest bakers in the world. In fact, we are a total disaster in the kitchen.
“Is that a good idea?” asked Fliss. Her mum never lets her loose in their gleaming white kitchen. Not after we nearly burnt the place down anyway.
“Sure it is!” said Lyndz very confidently. “My mum’s a mean cook. She’ll give us a hand. She likes getting the chance to do stuff like that. She’s always complaining that my brothers aren’t interested in anything domestic. And neither am I, usually.”
“We’ll have to do it before next Saturday,” Rosie reminded her. “Is that OK?”
“No probs,” said Lyndz. “I’ll ask mum when I get back this afternoon and give you a ring. You can all come over to my place and we’ll have a girlie afternoon in the kitchen!”
Now I don’t know about you, but cooking isn’t really my thing. Eating, yes. Cooking, no way. But what could I do? I couldn’t let my friends down now, could I? So when Lyndz rang that evening to say that we could all go there on the Friday before the sleepover to bake the cake, well how could I refuse?
Anyway, before that I had other things on my mind – like what to give Fliss for her stupid sleepover birthday present!
I know that this sounds really mean, but I really resented having to spend my pocket money on something which Fliss would like for five minutes and then throw away. She’s like that is Fliss. She has to have all the latest fashions she sees in magazines, then when the next thing comes along, she forgets how desperate she was for this skirt, or that pair of trainers, and she wants something else. Frankie reckons that I’m jealous, but it’s not that. I’ll be quite happy wearing my Leicester City football shirt until I die. I don’t like frills and sequins like Fliss. And I don’t really care how I look.
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