“It’s completely black out there!” Fliss muttered. “I’m going to get my torch.”
Kenny grabbed her arm. “No, it’s too risky. We’ll be safer in the dark.”
“But how’re we going to find our way?” Fliss wailed.
“We’ll all stay in a line behind Frankie, and keep close to the wall,” Kenny told her.
“Oh, great!” I grumbled. “Looks as though I’m in front again, as usual!”
We all got into a line – me at the front, followed by Kenny, Rosie, Lyndz and Fliss – and we linked hands. Then we shuffled out into the dark corridor.
Once we’d got past Mrs Weaver’s room, we began to breathe more easily, but it was still a long way to the Spanish girls’ room. I led everybody slowly down the corridor, feeling my way along the wall, until we came to the corner.
Suddenly, someone behind me hiccuped. Although it wasn’t very loud, it sounded loud in the dead silence. My heart beating fit to bust, I yanked on Kenny’s hand, and pulled everyone round the corner with me. We all flattened ourselves against the wall, and waited for the lights to go on. But nothing happened.
“Lyndz, you idiot!” I whispered. “Why didn’t you hold your breath?”
“It wasn’t me!” Lyndz whispered back indignantly. “Well, who was it then?” No one answered.
“Maybe this is going to be like a horror film,” Kenny said, “and the monster’ll join the end of the line and bump us off one by one.”
“I’m not standing at the end then!” Fliss said, alarmed, trying to push in between Rosie and Lyndz.
“Ssh, we’re here now anyway,” I said. Kenny flicked the torch on quickly to check that it was the right room, and then she crept across the corridor.
“Turn the torch off before you open the door!” I told her, but Kenny shook her head.
“I want to make sure I chuck the stinkbomb right into the middle of the room!” she said, taking the box out of her pyjama pocket.
We all watched breathlessly as Kenny opened the door, dimming the torch by putting her hand over the beam. Then we all nearly dropped down dead, as suddenly she flung the door wide open.
“What’re you doing?” I gasped, my heart in my mouth.
“They’re not here!” Kenny said crossly. “Look!”
She shone the torch round the room, and we all peered in. Every one of the beds was empty!
“Well, where are they then?” Rosie said, but we didn’t get a chance to discuss it. Someone was opening the door of a room further down the corridor…
“Quick!” I hustled everyone into the room. “Get into the beds!”
We each dived into one of the empty beds, and lay there silently, pretending to be asleep. We saw the corridor light go on, then, the very next second, the door opened, and Miss Moreno, the Spanish girls’ teacher, looked in. She said something in Spanish, which was probably “Are you asleep?” and then, when nobody answered, she went out.
We all sat up, breathing huge sighs of relief. But that didn’t last long because the next moment we heard Mrs Weaver’s voice outside the door. We nearly died.
“Yes, I’m sure I heard someone moving around too,” Mrs Weaver was saying. “Have you checked up on all your kids?”
“Not all of them,” Miss Moreno said. “I will go and look at the rest now.”
“Well, I’d better go and see if mine are all present and correct too,” Mrs Weaver said grimly, and we all gasped. Now we were really in for it.
“What’re we going to do?” Fliss moaned. “Mrs Weaver’ll see we’re not in our rooms!”
“She might not notice,” Lyndz said hopefully.
“Maybe we ought to try and make it back,” Rosie suggested.
“Oh yeah, and run slap-bang into Mrs Weaver as soon as we put one foot outside the door!” Kenny pointed out. “We’re better off waiting here.”
“We could pretend we’d just gone to the loo or something,” I said.
“What, all five of us?” Rosie raised her eyebrows. “She’d never swallow that!”
We couldn’t decide what to do, so we just stayed where we were, and waited. After a couple of minutes, Mrs Weaver and Miss Moreno came back down the corridor, and we strained our ears to hear what they were saying.
“Well, I can’t understand it.” Mrs Weaver spoke first. “I know I heard something. But all my pupils are safely tucked up in bed.”
That floored us. We weren’t in bed – well, not in our own beds anyway – but Mrs Weaver didn’t seem to have noticed. Anyway, we didn’t much care – it looked like we’d got away with it!
We waited for about fifteen minutes to let the teachers get back to sleep again, then we made a break for it. There wasn’t much point in letting off the stinkbomb with no one there, so it had all been a waste of time really. And we were lucky we hadn’t got rumbled by Mrs W…
“Let’s get out of here!” Kenny said to our relief, flicking off the corridor light again.
“Can’t we keep the lights on?” Fliss wailed.
“No way!” Kenny retorted. “If Mrs Weaver busts us, at least we’ve got a fighting chance of getting away in the dark!”
We set off. We were so nervous about not making a sound, we were even trying not to breathe.
As we inched our way along the corridor wall, I put my hand out, feeling for the corner, which I knew was coming up soon.
And I nearly passed out with shock when my hand touched someone else’s fingers…
I don’t know how I stopped myself from screaming, but I did. And if you’ve ever bumped into someone in the dark unexpectedly and felt their flesh, you’ll know just how scary it is. I froze right there, but the others kept on coming and bumped into me.
“What’s going on?” Fliss squealed.
I groped around for the nearest light switch and turned it on. There in front of us were the Spanish girls – Pilar at the front, with Maria and Isabella behind her and the twins at the back.
“What are you doing here?” Pilar and I said furiously right at the same moment.
None of us knew what to say. We didn’t know whether to be relieved it wasn’t one of our teachers, or annoyed that it was them, so we all stood there looking stupidly at each other, and shuffling our feet.
“We’ve – er – just been to the bathroom,” Rosie said weakly.
“You go the wrong way then,” said Maria, jerking a thumb over her shoulder. “The bathroom is this way.”
“Well, where’ve you been?” Kenny shot back. “I bet you went to our rooms to play a trick on us!”
The Spanish girls looked embarrassed.
“What a shame we weren’t there then!” Fliss said triumphantly.
“So, where were you?” Maria asked suspiciously. “I think you also try to play a trick on us!”
This time it was our turn to look embarrassed.
“We must’ve passed each other in the corridor!” I said. “Did you hiccup?”
Elena turned pink. “I do that.”
“She hiccup all the time!” Maria explained.
“That sounds just like someone I know!” I glanced at Lyndz. “Anyway, we saved your necks when your teacher came in to check on you, ’cos we were in your beds, pretending to be you!”
“So?” said Pilar. “Your teacher come to check on you also – and we did same thing!”
“You mean, you were in our beds and we were in yours?” Fliss gasped.
“What about Alana Banana?” I asked. “Didn’t she notice?”
“You mean that girl who sound like a pig?” Maria grinned. “No, she not wake up!”
We all looked at each other. Then we started to giggle. The Spanish girls were just like us, after all. Suddenly our big war seemed really stupid and how we had all been creeping around each other’s rooms seemed really funny. We tried to stop laughing, but we couldn’t.
“You come to our room!” Maria mouthed at us, so we all hurried silently back down the corridor to their bedroom. Once we were inside, though, we
all collapsed onto the beds, shaking with laughter.
“I can’t believe Alana Banana didn’t notice what was going on!” Kenny was lying on Maria’s bed, stuffing a corner of the duvet into her mouth to muffle her giggles. “That girl’s so dozy, she’d forget her own name!”
“Is this her real name – Alana Banana?” Anna said in a serious voice.
That cracked the Sleepover Club up.
“Why do you laugh?” Anna said, looking a bit prickly like Rosie does sometimes.
So we quickly explained about the M&Ms, and about Alana. If I was a beanpole like Pilar, and Kenny and Maria were totally alike, and Lyndz and Elena both got the hiccups, then Anna was definitely a bit like Rosie!
“So, what trick you try to play on us?” Maria asked curiously.
Kenny pulled the box of stinkbombs out of the pocket of her pyjamas, and held it up.
“And us!” said Maria, and she did exactly the same thing.
“Maybe that would have woken Alana Banana up!” Rosie suggested, and set us all off laughing again.
When we’d finally stopped giggling, we sat there looking at each other in silence. It felt a bit weird. I mean, we’d been enemies for the last three days, and now here we were, getting on like great mates.
“I very sorry I say English football teams are not good,” Maria said suddenly.
“And I’m sorry I thought you’d taken my bag!” Kenny added immediately.
“I’m sorry I tipped you off your surfboard,” Lyndz said to Elena.
“And I am sorry we throw your clothes in the tree,” Pilar told us.
“Right, so we’re all sorry about everything,” I said. “Let’s talk about something else now!”
“You want some Coca-Cola?” Pilar took some cans out of her bedside locker. “We have crisps also.”
“Hey, this is just like being at a sleepover!”
Rosie said.
“Sleepover? What is this?” Anna asked, looking interested.
“You know. Dormir sobre,” I said. “At least I think that’s what they’re called in Spanish.”
“Ah, you mean like a pyjama party,” laughed Pilar. “We have them sometimes too.”
I nodded. “Yeah, kind of, but we have special ones. We’re the Sleepover Club!”
“I do not understand. What is that?” Maria asked.
“It’s a secret, but we could tell you a bit about it, if you really wanted to know…” I glanced at Rosie, Kenny, Fliss and Lyndz, and they all nodded.
So I told them about how the Sleepover Club had started, and they were really into all that. Then I told them about our sleepover song and our membership cards and the midnight feasts. We don’t usually go round telling everyone our secrets, but they promised they wouldn’t breathe a word about it to anyone. So then we started telling them about some of the adventures we’d had during our sleepovers, and soon we were all crying with laughter.
“What do you say? Will we have one of these Sleepover Clubs?” Pilar said, looking at Maria, Elena, Anna and Isabella.
“Yeah, why don’t you?” Kenny said eagerly. “We’ll help you to organise it!”
“Hey, why don’t we have one of our sleepovers right now?” I suggested. “Then we can show you exactly what we do!”
Everyone thought that was a great idea, so we all got into the beds, the Spanish girls at the tops, and the Sleepover Club at the bottoms. We finished off the crisps and the Coca-Cola, and then Maria gave everyone some chocolate. We started off by telling jokes, and then they taught us some Spanish. After that, we told horror stories. Maria was just as good at that as Kenny was, and between them they nearly frightened Fliss and Isabella to death.
Then we showed them some of the dance routines we’d worked out, and they showed us how to flamenco. We had a brilliant time, and it was nearly three o’clock in the morning before we all started yawning.
“I think Sleepover Club is fantastic idea!” Isabella said sleepily.
“So do you think you’ll start one yourselves?” I asked.
The Spanish girls nodded.
“Tomorrow you are going to the beach, yes?” Pilar asked. “If you like, we play volleyball together?”
“You bet!” Kenny said eagerly. “See you in the morning!”
So everything turned out fine in the end. We spent the rest of the week going round with Pilar, Maria, Elena and the others, and guess what? We had a sleepover every night – yeah, every night! That was a bit of a record even for us!
On the last night we had a really special sleepover. The teachers were having a party themselves and they’d agreed that just this once we could go into each other’s rooms.
So, because we could make as much noise as we liked, we showed the Spanish girls how to play all our International Gladiators games.
We’d had such a good time in Spain, I didn’t really want to go home. But in another way, I did. You know what it’s like – all your mum and dad do is nag nag nag when you’re at home, then when you go away, you can’t wait to see them again! And I was really missing Pepsi.
“Back home to boring old Cuddington!” Kenny sighed, as we climbed onto the minibus. “I wish we could’ve stayed for another week!”
“Me too,” Fliss said, waving at Pilar and the others who’d come to see us off.
“It’s a shame we didn’t have long to get to know them,” Rosie said gloomily, waving too. “D’you realise we’ll probably never see them again in the whole of our lives?”
That made us all feel pretty gruesome.
“Everyone here?” Mrs Weaver hurried down the bus with her clipboard, checking us off one by one. “Right, I think we’re just about ready to leave.”
We all stood up and opened the windows.
“’BYE!” we yelled. “Adiós! Write and tell us about your sleepovers!”
“We will!” they called back, and we all waved until we couldn’t see each other any more.
“Have you had a good time?” Mrs Weaver asked us as the minibus headed towards the airport. “I noticed you were getting very friendly with some of the Spanish girls.” She smiled. “Well, towards the end of the week, anyway!”
We all turned a bit pink.
“I thought you might like to know that Miss Moreno and I have been talking about making exchange visits between our schools,” Mrs Weaver went on. “We’d go to visit their school in Madrid, and they’d come to ours in Cuddington. What do you think?”
We all sat up.
“That sounds excellent, Miss!” Kenny said eagerly.
“So we’ll see them again after all!” Rosie squealed, as Mrs Weaver went back to her seat. “That’s brilliant!”
“We’d better start learning Spanish then!” I pulled the dictionary out of my pocket and started flicking through it. “What does…”
The others groaned, and Kenny threw her baseball cap at me.
So that was our trip to Spain! Pretty good, huh? Well, it turned out better than it started, anyway. I guess you’re probably thinking “Hey, they didn’t get into that much trouble either!” – which makes a change. OK, so we had one sticky episode with Mrs Weaver, but we didn’t do too badly, did we?
Wrong!
I told Kenny not to put that box of stinkbombs in the bottom of her bag, but she didn’t take any notice. I told her to be careful when she dropped her bag on the floor in the airport lounge, and dashed off to buy a burger.
Ever smelt a whole box of stinkbombs going off at the same time?
They practically had to evacuate the airport! And Mrs Weaver took her life in her hands, and went sniffing round all the bags, trying to find out who was to blame. She wasn’t at all surprised when she found out it was Kenny, but it wouldn’t be a sleepover adventure without at least one disaster, would it?
See ya!
Have you been invited to all these Sleepovers?
The Sleepover Club at Frankie’s
The Sleepover Club at Lyndsey’s
The Sleepover Club at Felicity’
s
The Sleepover Club at Rosie’s
The Sleepover Club at Kenny’s
Starring the Sleepover Club
The Sleepover Girls go Spice
The 24-Hour Sleepover Club
The Sleepover Club Sleeps Out
Happy Birthday, Sleepover Club
Sleepover Girls on Horseback
Sleepover in Spain
Sleepover on Friday 13th
Sleepover Girls go Camping
Sleepover Girls go Detective
Sleepover Girls Go Designer
The Sleepover Club Surfs the Net
Sleepover Girls on Screen
Sleepover Girls and Friends
Sleepover Girls on the Catwalk
The Sleepover Club Goes for Goal!
Sleepover Girls go Babysitting
Sleepover Girls go Snowboarding
Happy New Year, Sleepover Club!
Sleepover Club 2000
We Love You Sleepover Club
Vive le Sleepover Club!
Sleepover Eggstravaganza
Emergency Sleepover
Sleepover Girls on the Range
The Sleepover Club Bridesmaids
Sleepover Girls see Stars
Sleepover Club Blitz
Sleepover Girls in the Ring
Sari Sleepover
Merry Christmas Sleepover Club!
The Sleepover Club Down Under
Sleepover Girls go Splash!
Sleepover Girls go Karting
Sleepover Girls go Wild!
The Sleepover Club at the Carnival
The Sleepover Club on the Beach
Sleepover Club Vampires
sleepoverclub.com
Sleepover Girls go Dancing
The Sleepover Club on the Farm
Sleepover Girls go Gymtastic!
Sleepover Girls on the Ball
Sleepover Club Witches
Sleepover Club Ponies
Sleepover Girls on Safari
Sleepover Club Makeover
Sleepover Girls go Surfing
Sleepover Girls go Treasure Hunting
Sleepover kit List
1. Sleeping bag
2. Pillow
3. Pyjamas or a nightdress
4. Slippers
Mega Sleepover 4 Page 15