by Jana Hunter
I busied myself with putting the top back on a lip gloss.
“Well?”
There was a silence, where it felt like everyone was thinking what a selfish thing I was to demand my rights. But it wasn’t like that. This was the first time in ages I’d had a major idea and Kenny was acting like it was nothing. I was shoved out at home and now I was shoved out with my best friends. It wasn’t fair.
Then good old Rosie chimed in, changing the subject. “I’ll do style makeovers in school and charge for them,” she said. (Her favourite TV show’s where they take someone with really awful dress sense and change her image completely. Now Rosie-posie wanted to do the same on some fashion disaster.)
“OK, ‘Rosie – style makeovers’.” Kenny wrote it down in her Sleepover diary. “So who’s doing hair?”
Pointing our fingers at her, we all shouted out, “YOU!”
“Noooo!” groaned Kenny, but you could tell she was secretly pleased. Her mum does hairdressing at home so she must have learnt something. Actually, hair was one of the other things I was dying to do, but there was no way I could make a fuss now, was there?
Lyndz consoled Kenny as if doing hair was a punishment. “You can practise haircutting on us, Kenny.”
(Not on my hair, she won’t! I vowed.)
“You’ll all probably end up bald!” Kenny warned, but she wrote down her speciality just the same.
I was feeling well bad that everyone had latched on to Kenny’s ideas so quickly. Didn’t my ideas count for anything? But it meant so much for the Sleepover Gang to beat the Little Angels in the competition, so I had to give in! And I have to admit it was fun getting into it. In the end, this is what we came up with:
1. Fliss – beauty treatments and make-up
2. Rosie – style makeovers
3. Lyndz – advertising and manicures
4. Frankie – jewellery and face painting
5. Kenny – hairdressing
“We should do a ‘Swap the Head’ challenge,” giggled Lyndz, when it was all written down in Kenny’s diary.
“What’s that?”
“You know, you cut up pictures of people and swap their heads around. Then you charge for guessing whose body belongs where.”
Frankie gave a snort of laughter. “I can just see Emily Berryman’s body with the school hamster’s head!”
“And Mrs Pickernose with its bum!”
“Wicked!”
Mrs Pickernose is our name for our gruesome dinner lady, Mrs Pickett. (Mind you, Pickett is a good name for her too, because she’s always picking on us lot.)
“Imagine Dishy Dave with Mr Short’s knobbly knees!” laughed Rosie.
We’d seen Mr Short’s knees when he wore shorts at the school fête and they were well knobbly.
“Oh, Dave, Dave!” I sighed, pretending to swoon. “I never knew your knees were so knobbly!”
Everyone shrieked with laughter and Lyndz went into a major bout of hiccups (natch!). We had to bash her on the back, and scare her with horrible faces, to try and stop her.
Suddenly, there was a loud banging on the ceiling that made us all jump out of our skins. “Keep it down in there!” my mum called out. “I’m trying to get the twins to bed.”
As if we didn’t know. Already, the babies’ ear-splitting howls were interrupting our important Sleepover Gang business. Why couldn’t they be the ones to “keep it down”, I’d like to know? Those twins were taking over the whole house!
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Mum’s knocking had made the gang go embarrassingly quiet. I knew just what they were thinking…
My mum used to do all sorts of cool things for our sleepovers, making scrummy things to eat and treating us dead grown-up, but these days all she could think of was my baby brother and sister. Sleepovers were nothing but a nuisance to her since they came along and now she’d banished us to the living room it was even worse. It was really winding me up.
Didn’t I count for anything in this house any more?
“I know,” I said, trying to shrug it off, “let’s play Musical Make-up.” (Those twins were not going to ruin my Sleepover!)
“Musical Make-up. Brillo!” squealed Frankie, forgetting to be quiet. She leapt up, knocking her tray of beads all over the floor.
Who cares? I thought. We’ll clean up later.
Musical Make-up is the Sleepover Gang’s own version of musical chairs. Difference is, when the music stops, instead of just finding a chair, you plonk yourself opposite someone. Then the two of you make up one side of the other’s face (both working at the same time!). You have to work dead fast before the music starts up again, and the winner is the person with the finished face. You get some really weird faces, half one way and half another.
“OK,” I said, turning up the music recklessly. “Line up the chairs.”
There was lots of giggling as we squashed four dining-room chairs between the two sofas. “Now. Ready, steady, GO!”
There wasn’t room to move, so my friends kept banging into things and falling over one another. They got well daft. But when I stopped the music they went totally haywire. Rosie and Lyndz got going on each other, while Frankie and Kenny partnered up. They worked fast and furious, making up one side of each other’s face.
“I can’t see to do your lips!” screeched Rosie, as Lyndz plastered eye gel over her closed eyelid. Rosie blindly tried to do Lyndz’s lips, but the lip gloss went all over her chin.
“You’ve got a pink beard!” shrieked Frankie.
Lyndz groaned. “Oh, noooo.”
“Look at Kenny!” chortled Frankie as she finished pencilling in one surprised eyebrow.
Before she had a chance to do any more, I turned the music back on. The four of them shrieked, and looking like clowns with split personalities, they leapt up for the second round.
“ONE STEP CLOSER TO HEAVEN, BABEEEEE!” pounded the music and we all joined in, singing loud and proud.
Suddenly, the living-room door flew open and my mum burst in, clutching a furiously squalling baby on either arm. “Turn that down, this minute!” she demanded. (I suppose she had to shout, what with the music and the twins screaming their heads off, but she didn’t need to sound so cross.)
I punched the control button and everyone (except the twins) froze.
My mum glared at me over one squalling baby head. “This is the last Sleepover in this house, Felicity Proudlove,” she informed me angrily. “The absolute last.”
“But, Mum…”
“And as for the rest of you, I shall speak to your parents in the morning!”
“Mum, you can’t…” I burst into tears. “You just can’t!”
“Waaa! Waaa! Waaa!” (Yes, she can! Yes, she can!) yelled the stoopid twins in unison.
Back at school, things only got worse. (It was that stupid graph’s fault. It told the whole class the terrible truth.)
The Sleepover Gang was losing to Hot Wheels.
“Can’t beat speed!” Ryan Scott teased, and just catching his eye made my cheeks go pink. “Hot Wheels rule!” he grinned.
“Don’t!” I begged, dropping my bag of lip gloss, blushers and glitter gels all over the classroom floor.
“Don’t what?” Ryan asked, dead innocent.
“Er…Ryan, let me put it this way…” Frankie began, as she helped retrieve the jars rolling about the floor. “Shut up!”
Ryan looked at me and grinned his gorgeous grin, but the dreaded Emma Hughes had to go and spoil my wonderful moment (natch!). “Don’t know why you bother,” she sneered. “The Little Angels will beat you both!” And she flounced out the classroom as if she’d already won.
That girl is a sad case.
Mind you, the Sleepover Gang had to work fast to beat the opposition, so it was dead lucky we had a super coo-el plan…
Welcome to the Cuddington Juniors MAKEOVER with me on make-up, Kenny on hair, Rosie on fashion, Frankie on jewellery and Lyndz on manicures.
Yep, this break time the S
leepover Gang was ready to beautify anyone who wanted to be beautiful. I’d brought enough make-up to do the whole school and with a team like us, we could even make Mrs Pickernose look good. (Well, not exactly good, but you know what I mean.) Beauty has its price, of course, and ours was £1 a go. (Mind you, seeing how much the Hot Wheels had already made, maybe a price increase was on the cards!)
“See you, losers!” teased Ryan, revving up his imaginary hot wheels, right into me.
“Ry-YAN!” I squealed, as he screeched by me and zoomed off into the playground. Who needs blusher when Ryan Scott’s around?
Outside in the playground, girls swarmed around us like bees to a honey pot.
“Do me first!”
“No, me.”
“Me,” went Alana Palmer, who was so keen to look good she forgot whose side she was on.
“Me!” begged Gemma Hitchins.
We had them lining up!
Only trouble was, some of our clients hadn’t brought any money, so in the end we let them pay with sweets or packets of crisps.
“The idea is to sell those sweets at lunch time, not eat them!” I protested as Lyndz stuffed her face with a Penguin bar.
“Just this one,” Lyndz pleaded, through a mouthful of chocolate crumbs. “I’m starved!”
“Me too,” groaned Kenny. “Give us that Curly Whirly.”
“I’ll have a KitKat,” said Frankie.
“And me,” piped up Rosie.
Our profits were disappearing fast. One of us had to make some money round here, and it looked like it had to be me.
“Right,” I said, laying out tubes of gel and pots of face glitter on my pink Barbie towel. “Gemma Hitchins, I’ll do you first.”
Gemma squealed with delight and perched on the special Makeover stool (actually the playground’s concrete turtle we all used to climb on in Year One).
I gave a professional cough, like my mum, the beautician, always did with awkward clients. “Ahem. Now, let’s start with skin care…” You’d think making up girls would be easy, but Gemma Hitchins was a challenge because she wanted all her freckles to disappear! (And Gemma Hitchins had more freckles than a greater spotted toad with measles.)
“I’m a make-up artist, not a magician,” I sighed. “Can’t you go for a country girl look?”
“No,” said Gemma shaking her ginger head. “Get rid of them!” But even three layers of my mum’s thick cover stick couldn’t do that. Those orange blobs kept popping back up like some dreaded lurgy! The only way was to concentrate on Gemma’s green eyes (sort of to distract you from the freckles). So I applied masses of green glitter eye gel, while next to me, Kenny got going on Alana Palmer’s (otherwise known as drippy Alana Banana’s) hair.
“What does Madam want today?” Kenny said, picking out a bit of Curly Whirly from her teeth. “How about French plaits?”
Alana Banana shook her head. “Cut it!” she ordered, freeing a huge bunch of frizzy hair from its scrunchie.
“Oooh… kay,” Kenny said doubtfully. “If you’re sure that’s what you want.”
The dopey girl nodded from under her big bush of hair. “I want to look like a famous model.”
Kenny and I exchanged “looks” over Alana Banana’s head.
Kenny got out her scissors and started hacking away. And from the way she worked, you could tell it was not the same as cutting straight hair, ‘cos you couldn’t see if you were getting it even with all that frizz. And no matter how much water or hair wax Kenny slicked on, Alana’s hair still sprung out from her head like an electric Brillo pad.
“It’s got a mind of its own!” moaned Kenny, hopelessly trying to hold it down with a comb.
Alana Banana groaned. “I know. That’s why my mum makes me wear it long and pulled back.”
Shorter and shorter Kenny chopped, but the effect was more and more like Basil Brush on a bad day. “Maybe if I give you a skinhead at the sides it’ll look better,” Kenny sighed. “It can’t look any worse.”
Oh, couldn’t it? Snip, snip, snip. Alana’s buzzed-out hairdo gave new meaning to the phrase “bad hair day”.
“You’ve made me look like a clown!” shrieked Alana when Kenny finally admitted defeat and handed her the mirror.
“You could always wear a wig.”
“My mum’s gonna kill me…”
But there was no time for Kenny to worry about Alana Banana’s mum. Four girls were already lining up for spray-in hair colour while another hopeful wanted a fringe.
It made the job of improving my next customer, a goofy girl, seem easy. “Smile,” I ordered as I slicked lashings of Lip Fizzlin’ Lip Tint on to her mouth, and the girl obeyed with a dazzling grin. Trouble was, when she smiled her teeth were so big I got blackcurrant gel all over them.
Danny McCloud, who was watching the whole operation with Ryan, laughed his silly head off. “I’ve seen better teeth on a comb!” he sniggered as I wiped my client’s teeth with a tissue.
“Shut up!” I growled at him.
“Yeth, thut up!” lisped the goofy girl.
“Take no notice,” I said to her. “You look lovely.”
And the truth was, she did.
“Do me next,” Ryan said as Kenny finished her client’s fringe. “I want an orange mohawk.”
“Get lost.”
I knew what Danny and Ryan were up to. They wanted to put us off so Hot Wheels would keep on winning. So, on a silent signal, we just blanked them out. (Not easy when one of them is so dishy his eyes burn holes in your back.)
But ignore them or not, the tension was still rising, and Lyndz was having a terrible time slopping blobs of nail varnish everywhere but her client’s nails. It was like the curse of the blobs. But it was when Rosie was giving advice on colour that real disaster struck.
“Green is definitely your colour,” Rosie was saying sweetly to a girl in Year Five, Mandy Owen.
“Yeah, matches the bogeys up your nose!” snickered Danny.
Rosie gritted her teeth and ploughed on. “You know, you’d look great in really tight hipsters…”
“Yeah, her bum would look like two boiled eggs in a handkerchief!” persisted Danny.
Rosie ignored him, but Mandy flushed an angry red colour.
“In fact,” Rosie finished desperately, “you’d look good in anything!”
“Yeah, anything except a mirror!” and Danny and Ryan broke up laughing. “You…”
But before Danny could say another word, Mandy had leapt up, grabbed Lyndz’s manicure tray and bashed him over the head with it.
“OW!”
Bottles of ruby, blue and purple nail varnish slid down Danny’s face and shattered on to the playground in millions of sticky pools of colour. They ran across the tarmac in a rainbow swirl.
“My nail varnish!” screamed Lyndz. “I’ll get you for this, Danny McCloud!”
“Try it!” dared Danny, and he and Ryan legged it across the playground with Lyndz haring after them screaming for blood.
Some hope! The only blood spilt was mine when I cut myself on a broken nail varnish bottle. (Mrs Weaver was not best pleased.)
“What have you been up to?” she demanded, dabbing my finger with stingy antiseptic.
“Ouch! Er… it was an accident,” I began but Emma Hughes, ‘The Queen’, couldn’t resist the chance to get us in trouble.
“Miss, the Sleepover Gang were putting make-up and stuff on everyone!” went the squealer.
“And cutting hair!” barked the Goblin.
Those two are right telltales. And didn’t they just love it when Mrs Weaver called the gang up to her desk for what she calls “a little talking to”!
“But, Miss, we were only trying to raise money,” protested Frankie. “Mrs Poole said we should use our initiative.”
“That’s all very well, Francesca,” said Mrs Weaver severely, “but you should’ve got permission first.”
“Yes, Miss.”
“You could have caused a real accident bringing scissors i
nto school,” she went on, as if we were babies.
Blah, blah, blah…
It was well humiliating. And it wasn’t helped by Alana Banana who kept clutching tufts of her cropped hair and wailing, “My mum’s gonna go mad!”
The M&Ms were in fits of gleeful giggles at that. And for the rest of the afternoon, whenever Mrs Weaver noticed another girl with purple spiked hair, nail transfers or body glitter, her look of horror set them off again. They were in heaven. (Which I suppose is the best place for Little Angels, though, personally, I could think of a much hotter place.)
Anyway, their sniggering backfired this time because by the end of the afternoon the whole class, even the Sleepover Gang, was laughing. See, Mrs Weaver kept on going, “Oh no!” and “Shock, horror!” as she discovered another amazing hairdo or manicure. It was hilarious. Mrs Weaver was really playing up to it in the end, acting mega alarmed as she went round the class – even checking the boys’ fingernails for polish and their eyelashes for mascara. And when Ryan fluttered his eyelashes like a girl, she even broke out laughing herself.
“Thank you, Ryan! You should audition for a part in the play,” she chuckled as he preened and posed.
“Ohhh, thank you, thank you, Miss,” Ryan gushed like a Hollywood film starlet.
It was well funny.
Of course, the M&M’s laughter wasn’t friendly. They couldn’t bear everyone laughing with us and their sarcastic smirks were enough to make you sick.
Next day we wiped the smiles off their faces, though, when the Sleepover Gang overtook the Hot Wheels on the graph.
“YES!” Frankie and Kenny punched the air, while Lyndz, Rosie and I hugged each other. The Sleepover Gang was winning!
It was ace. We danced about and cheered like mad.
Too bad it didn’t last. Because when the Sweetcakes gave in the money they’d collected from their bake sales, our victory bubble burst. The Sweetcakes were beating everyone!
Urrgh!
“Very good,” beamed Mrs Weaver, when all the money was in. “Year Six, you are all doing really well.”
“I wonder if the Sweetcakes baked all their own cakes,” Emma Hughes hissed, accidentally-on-purpose getting Mrs Weaver to overhear.