“One of Stuart’s favourite bands!” laughed Lyndz, pulling a face.
“Let’s try this one,” said her dad, putting on another cassette. This time Boyzone blared out.
“Cool!”
We all sang along and we were still singing when Lyndz’s dad pulled over and stopped the van.
“Are we here then? Is this it?” asked Fliss excitedly.
“No, I’ve just got to drop something in here,” explained Lyndz’s dad. “I’ll be two shakes of a cat’s tail.”
He took a small box from the passenger seat and got out.
“Now stay right here and don’t move a muscle!”
We all sort of froze in the position we were in. Then we cracked up laughing.
“I hope we do win the competition,” said Rosie. “That would be so mega. The M&Ms would be as jealous as anything.”
“Just imagine a new computer and all those CD-Roms!” said Lyndz.
“And our own Home Page, don’t forget that!” laughed Fliss.
“That would be the best thing!” I grinned. “I bet no-one else at school has their own Home Page. People from all over the world will be able to see it. Oh, I almost forgot…” I pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of my pocket. “This came for you last night, Lyndz. I printed it out for you.”
Lyndsey unfolded the paper and the others crowded round.
“It’s an email message from my grandparents,” she explained. “They know some girls our age in Holland who would like some English pen-friends. They’ve sent us their email addresses so we can get in touch with them.”
“Awesome!”
“What’s awesome?” asked Lyndz’s dad as he climbed into the van.
Lyndsey showed him the message.
“That’s great!” he said. “I might have to come round to your place myself, Frankie. At this rate you’ll be hearing from my parents more than I do! Right then, let’s hit the road for the Leicester Mercury. The address you want isn’t far from here.”
We set off again. It had got quieter on the road, so it didn’t seem two minutes before we could see the Leicester Mercury building in front of us.
“You’ve gone very quiet, girls,” Mr Collins said. “You’re not going to tell me that you’ve forgotten your competition entry, are you?”
Fliss tutted. She always thinks people are criticising her – even when they’re joking.
“It just seems a bit strange that after all our hard work we’re just going to post our envelope through the door and that’s it,” I explained. “We should perform a good luck ceremony or something.”
The others nodded.
“It feels like we’ve gone through so much to get our entry here,” said Rosie.
“It’s only fair that we win the competition now!” said Fliss.
The rest of us cracked up, and Fliss laughed too. “I said that on purpose because you’re always teasing me about being fair!” she giggled.
“Nice one Fliss!” we all said, slapping her on the back.
“Right guys, we’re here!” said Mr Collins as he stopped the van. “If you’re having a good luck ceremony, you’d better be quick because I’m on a double yellow line here. I don’t want to get a fine when I’m doing you a good turn, do I?”
“No, that wouldn’t be fair at all!” said Fliss, completely straight-faced.
“OK, let’s all hold the envelope,” I said.
Fliss held it out and we all grabbed hold of it.
“Gently!” I warned the others. “We don’t want to spoil it when we’ve come so far!”
“Now what?” asked Lyndz.
“We’ll all close our eyes and concentrate as hard as we can on winning the competition,” I said.
After about thirty seconds Fliss whispered, “Can we stop now? It’s giving me a headache.”
“Yep, I reckon that should do it,” said Lyndz’s dad. “You’d better go now. There are some security guards in there who are looking at us as though we’re mad.”
We piled out of the van and over to the office building. Although we looked everywhere for a letter box, we couldn’t see one.
“What do we do now?” whispered Fliss.
We were kind of conscious that the security guards inside were watching us.
“We’ll just have to go in and ask those men where to take this,” said Kenny firmly.
She grabbed the envelope and pushed open the huge glass doors.
“Well, what can we do for you?” asked one of the men. He was very fat and bald and looked a bit frightening at first, but he was very friendly. We explained about our competition entry and how we’d missed the post.
“You just leave it with us!” he said. “We’ll make sure that the right person gets it first thing tomorrow morning.”
“You won’t forget, will you?” said Rosie. “It is very important.”
“No, you can trust us!” he promised, and both men laughed. It was more a bellow than a laugh and it sort of echoed round the empty building.
“Thank you!”
We all hurried outside.
“I wouldn’t want to be a security guard in an empty building like that,” shuddered Rosie. “It would give me the creeps.”
“And me,” agreed Lyndz. “Let’s get out of here.”
We ran to where her dad had parked his van, but it wasn’t there. Neither was Mr Collins. The street was deserted and he was nowhere to be seen.
“Where’s Dad gone?” asked Lyndz anxiously.
Even I felt a bit panicky inside, but I knew that Mr Collins couldn’t have gone far.
“He might have been kidnapped or something!” squeaked Fliss.
“Don’t be stupid!” snorted Kenny. “Look, here he is!”
Mr Collins was running towards us.
“I’m sorry about that, girls,” he said breathlessly. “A policeman asked me to move on and said there were parking spaces round the corner. They were a bit further away than I’d expected. Anyway, did you deliver your competition entry all right?”
We told him that we’d left it with the security guards.
“Well it’ll be in safe hands then, won’t it?” he laughed.
We got back to the van, and all the way home we talked about our Home Page. So much had happened since we’d finished it that we couldn’t really remember what we’d put. Then we thought of a million things that we should have written about. Isn’t that always the way – you think of all the good stuff when it’s too late!
“When will we hear if we’ve got first prize?” asked Fliss.
I pulled the newspaper cutting from my pocket. “It says, ‘All prize winners will be notified by 5pm on Monday 17th. The judges’ decision is final.’” I read out.
“That’s two whole weeks!” moaned Fliss. “I don’t think I can wait that long!”
“Me neither,” agreed Lyndz. “It’s too exciting. We’ll have to decide what we’re going to do with all the prizes when we win them.”
I shot her a look. I remembered how we’d fallen out about the prizes before and I certainly wasn’t going to go through that again.
“We’ll just have to wait and see whether we win first,” I said quickly.
Boy, did the next two weeks drag. But we talked about the Home Page competition every day, so when Monday 17th finally arrived we were really hyped up.
You remember that I’d put my address on the entry form, don’t you? Well on Monday morning I flew downstairs as soon as I opened my eyes. I wanted to see whether the post had come. It hadn’t.
“You’re up early!” said Dad, who was in the kitchen.
I was going to explain why when there was a rattle at the letter box followed by Pepsi’s frantic bark. I dashed to the front door. There were three letters on the mat: one boring brown envelope for Dad, a dentist’s reminder for all of us, and an advertisement for a new pizza take-away in Cuddington. My heart sank – there was nothing for me. I felt really numb. Dad came to get the post.
“Hey, what’s w
ith the long face?” he asked. “Oh I get it, you haven’t heard from the competition, have you?”
I shook my head.
“Well don’t look so miserable! There are other ways they can get in touch,” he said gently. “I know that they’re probably not an expert like you, but I’m sure that someone at the Mercury will be able to use a phone. They’ve got your number, haven’t they?”
“Yes!” I shouted. “They’ll probably ring up, won’t they? But what if I’m at school? Will Mum come and get me?”
“She most certainly will not!” laughed Mum, who was coming downstairs. “Your friends are all coming back here after school anyway, aren’t they? Well, I’m sure you can wait until then.”
“There is a possibility that you might not win you know Frankie,” said Dad seriously. “I don’t want you building up your hopes too much.”
“I know!” I tutted, rolling my eyes, and ran upstairs to get ready for school.
When I got into the playground the others were waiting for me.
“Well?” they asked anxiously.
I shook my head, and watched all their eager smiles turn to major frowns.
“But Dad thinks they might phone us,” I explained. “So we’ll have to get back to my place as quickly as we can after school this afternoon.”
“Yeah, ‘cos if the competition is for under-thirteens, they’ll probably ring after four o’clock when everybody’s finished school, won’t they?” said Rosie.
I don’t know how we got through that day at school, I really don’t. I felt as though I had butterflies in my tummy all day. And it was a Monday too. Mondays are always a little bit harder than the rest of the week, aren’t they? It was such a relief to hear the bell at home time.
“Come on, you guys!” I yelled to the others. “Let’s get home!”
We gathered all our stuff together and ran home with our bags banging our legs as we went.
“I’m glad you don’t live any further away from school,” gasped Fliss as we panted up to my front door. “I need a sit down now.”
We piled inside and into the kitchen, where Mum was waiting for us.
“Have any letters come for me?” I asked excitedly. “Have there been any phone calls?”
“No and no,” Mum replied. “I’m sorry love, maybe you haven’t been successful this time. There’ll be other competitions.”
The others all looked as miserable as I felt.
“They said they’d notify winners before five o’clock,” said Fliss, looking at her watch. “It’s only ten past four. There’s still time for them to ring.”
She was right, but none of us felt confident any more.
We were just in the kitchen consoling ourselves with big glasses of Coke and bags of crisps when the phone rang. I threw myself at it and said “Hello” in my poshest voice.
“Hello pumpkin!” said the voice at the other end. It was Dad ringing to say that he would be late home. I mean, what a terrible time to choose to ring up. Didn’t he know that we were waiting for an important call?
For the last two weeks time had dragged, but those fifty minutes before five o’clock flashed past.
“Well, I guess that’s it!” said Rosie sadly. “It’s five o’clock. We’d have heard by now if we’d won. I was so sure that we’d win too.”
“I’d like to see the winning entry,” said Kenny crossly. “I bet it’s a fix and the computer’s gone to someone the judges knew.”
“They can’t do that, can they?” asked Fliss.
“I doubt it,” I tried to laugh.
The phone began to ring. My heart jumped but I said, “Let Mum get it, it won’t be for us.”
“Frankie!” Mum called. “It’s for you!”
I ran to take the phone from her and the others crowded round.
“Yes…that’s right…really? That’s great! I certainly will! Byee!”
I very carefully put the phone down and turned to face the gang.
“Come on Frankie! What’s happened?”
The others were so close I couldn’t breathe.
“Well…” I began. Suddenly I was so excited I couldn’t speak.
“Come on for goodness sake!” Kenny was getting really agitated.
I tried again. “We haven’t won first prize…”
“Awww!”
“…but we did get one of the runners-up prizes! The man on the phone said that the judges were very impressed because our club was so original. They’ll be sending the CD-Roms to me in the next few days and our Home Page should be on the Net in a week’s time! Cool or WHAT!!!”
The others went beserk, whooping and cheering. Mum came in with this huge smile on her face.
“I’m so proud of you!” she cried, pulling us all together in a big hug. “Even if you did have to stay up half the night finishing off your entry!”
“You knew!” I gasped.
“Francesca, my darling,” she said, “I know everything. You should know that by now!”
So you see, all our efforts were worth it in the end. The CD-Roms arrived a few days later and they were ace. Everybody came round to my house and helped to unpack the parcel. But as only Rosie and I have computers at the moment, sharing them out was a problem. And Fliss for one was not very happy about that.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” she moaned. “You two will be able to use them whenever you want and the rest of us won’t get a look in.”
“What if we promise only to use them when we’re all together?” I suggested. “There are six of them so there’s one each and one left over.”
One of the CD-Roms was called ‘Encarta’, and it was really great because it was like an encyclopaedia but a lot more exciting.
“This would be really useful at school, you know,” Rosie said when we were trying it out.
“Maybe we should donate it to school then,” I suggested. “It would solve the problem of who’s going to look after the extra CD-Rom.”
“It might even get us back in Mrs Weaver’s good books,” laughed Kenny. “And it would be one in the eye for the M&Ms!”
When we told Mrs Weaver the next day what we wanted to do, she said that we were really kind and that it was a lovely gesture. And you’ll never guess – we ended up doing another assembly! We had to tell the rest of the school about the competition, and then we presented the ‘Encarta’ CD-Rom to Mrs Poole, our headmistress. It was fantastic. Nothing went wrong and, best of all, the M&Ms were furious about us getting so much attention.
But the most brilliant thing about the whole competition really is our Home Page. Look, I’ll show you. Isn’t it amazing that we’re actually on the Net? I still don’t believe it. Look, here are our photographs – don’t I look silly in mine? And look at these really cool graphics for our ‘Midnight Feast’ section. And what about these wicked symbols for our ‘Sleepover Games’ and ‘Spooky Sleepover Stories’? What’s totally fab is that there’s a section where people who’ve visited our Home Page can send us messages. We pick up a few every week. I print them out and let the others see them, then we reply to them all. It’s great. We’ve heard from girls as far away as Canada and Norway, which is mind-boggling really. And you remember those email addresses that Lyndz’s grandparents sent us? Well, we got in touch with those girls, and now we send messages to them all the time. So thanks to the Internet, we’ve got loads of new pen-friends.
Oh-oh, can you hear what I hear? Yep, here comes trouble! The others will be knocking down the door if I don’t go and let them in. You stay here and make the most of the peace and quiet while you can. It sounds to me as though the others are in the mood for some serious mischief. But hey, that’s nothing new, is it!?
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 t
he 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 at Camp
Sleepover Girls go Detective
Sleepover Girls go Designer
Sleepover Kit List
Sleeping bag
Pillow
Pyjamas or a nightdress
Slippers
Toothbrush, toothpaste, soap etc
Towel
Teddy
A creepy story
Food for a midnight feast: chocolate, crisps, sweets, biscuits. In fact anything you like to eat.
Torch
Hairbrush
Hair things like a bobble or hairband, if you need them
Clean knickers and socks
Change of clothes for the next day
Sleepover diary and membership card
Copyright
The Sleepover Club ® is a Registered Trademark
of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
First published in Great Britain by Collins in 1999
Collins is an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith,
London W6 8JB
The HarperCollins website address is
www.harpercollins.co.uk
3 5 7 9 11 13 12 10 8 6
Text copyright © Fiona Cummings 1999
Original series characters, plotlines
and settings © Rose Impey 1997
The author asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of the work.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
The Sleepover Club Surfs the Net Page 6