Sleepover Girls in the Ring

by Fiona Cummings

  We both grimaced and nodded.

  “And remember, Kenny, that you’re already on a warning after that incident at Fliss’s,” Mum reminded me grimly.

  Molly went, “Ha ha!” behind Mum’s back.

  “I heard that!” Mum retorted. “There’s a mound of potatoes need peeling in the kitchen, Molly, and I suggest you go and do that right now.”

  She shuffled off sulkily and I went upstairs. There was no way that I was going to let Molly get the better of me. And there was no way that I was going to let her upstage me in the circus performance. OK, so she was good at juggling. But if the rest of us practised hard enough, we could be pretty impressive, I felt sure. The question was, how were we ever going to practise without her seeing what we were doing?

  We needed a plan. A big fat hairy plan. And I knew that it was in my head somewhere. I lay on my bed and started drifting off to sleep. And that’s how it came to me. What we needed was a sleepover. And we needed to arrange one fast.

  Now you’d think the others would be mega-excited at the thought of a sleepover, wouldn’t you? Well, their reaction when I suggested it to them the next morning was lukewarm, to say the least.

  “What’s wrong with you guys?” I yelled at them. “We used to live for sleepovers, remember? We’re the Sleepover Club!”

  “We know that,” said Frankie slowly. “But look what happened the last time we were together. You know, the, er, Jam Doughnut Incident. I can’t exactly see our parents being overjoyed at the thought of us all getting together again.”

  “Well, there’s no way my mum would have you lot in my house,” mumbled Fliss. “And I doubt very much whether she’d let me go to a sleepover anywhere else, either.”

  “I reckon my mum wouldn’t mind,” admitted Lyndz. “But our house is still like a bomb site, so we couldn’t have one there. What about your place, Kenny?”

  “The whole point of us having a sleepover is to practise our routines without Molly finding out about them,” I reminded her. “So there wouldn’t be much point in you lot coming to my place and flaunting them under her nose, would there?”

  “Mum probably would let me have a sleepover if I talked her round a bit,” Frankie said. We all started grinning. I mean no-one can talk her parents round like Frankie. “Only Izzy’s still poorly, so it’ll have to wait,” she added.

  We all sighed despondently again.

  Rosie was being very quiet. We all turned to her.

  “Well, Rosie-Posie, it looks like you’re our last hope,” I put my arm round her. “What do you say?”

  “I..I..I don’t know,” she stammered. “I mean, Mum was cool about me coming here, but I don’t know whether she’d let me have a sleepover. Not when she’s just got the lounge nice and everything.”

  “But we won’t be going in the lounge,” I reassured her. “All we’ll be doing is rehearsing our stuff outside and sleeping in your room. Simple. She can lock the lounge door for all we care, can’t she girls?”

  The others nodded enthusiastically.

  “Right, that’s settled then,” I slapped her on the back. “You work on your mum this evening and tell her that we’ll be as good as gold. And tell her our reputation is at stake. Today we’ve got to start practising like crazy so we don’t look total lame-brains on Saturday. And remember to spy on my stupid sister whenever you get the chance. I’m not having her showing us up, OK?”

  We went into the Big Top to find the others all busy rehearsing. Molly started giggling with Edward Marsh as soon as she saw us.

  “Ignore them,” I hissed.

  But it wasn’t easy. Their juggling was just so darned good. So good, in fact, that some of the regular jugglers let them practise a few of their routines with them. Whilst Lyndz and I were struggling to keep two balls in the air, there were Molly and Edward tossing hoops about in complicated sequences and hardly making a mistake at all! Gutted!

  At least Frankie, Rosie and Fliss looked pretty impressive with their skills. Frankie could ride her unicycle at speed without tumbling off it, Rosie was quite a star on stilts, and Fliss could keep four plates spinning at once with only a teensy amount of dithering on her part.

  As we were leaving at the end of the day, Molly brushed past us.

  “We’re going to wipe the floor with you, suckers!” she smirked.

  “Not if we’ve got anything to do with it!” I shouted back.

  When she’d gone I turned to the others. “Now do you see why we’ve got to have this sleepover? I’ll never live it down if she shows me up! My whole life will be cursed. Please, Rosie – you’ve GOT to help me.”

  Rosie looked at me slowly and grinned.

  “Well if you put it like that,” she said, “I’d better get pleading with my mum. I don’t want you on my conscience for the rest of my life!”

  That night I couldn’t concentrate – mainly because I was wondering how Rosie was getting on, but also because Molly kept tormenting me by juggling with a load of fruit, right in front of my face.

  “Pack it in!” I yelled, taking a swipe at a banana.

  “Jealous, are you?” she sneered.

  I would have whacked her, but the phone rang. I flew to answer it, and all I heard was Rosie yelling:

  “It’s on! Friday night!”

  “Yippee!” I jigged about in the hall.

  “But we can’t pull any crazy stunts, Kenny, I mean it,” warned Rosie, getting serious. “Mum says if we mess up her new lounge, we’re done for. And believe me, when Mum gets mad, she gets MAD. We could even be talking about severed body parts here.”

  “Phew, heav-y!” I sighed. “But hey, we’re not going to mess up, are we? So there’s no problem.”

  Fortunately that’s what the others said too. And by some miracle, Fliss had actually persuaded her mum to let her go to the sleepover without too much of a fight. (I put that down to hormones myself, with her being pregnant and everything. She probably didn’t really know what she was saying!) We finally had a real live sleepover to look forward to! And as I said to the others, we’d be so busy perfecting our circus skills that we wouldn’t even have time to think about getting up to any mischief. Well, that was the theory anyway.

  By the time Friday night came, we were all pretty stressed out, to tell you the truth. It was obvious that Molly was MILES better than Lyndz and me at juggling. And the others weren’t very confident that their own skills would be enough to take the limelight away from her.

  But we still had a trump card up our sleeves. When it came to being a clown, I was the KING! Molly was about as funny as a cup of cold sick. And hopefully that would be what everyone remembered.

  “OK then, let’s dump our stuff and get practising!” I commanded as soon as we arrived back at Rosie’s.

  “But I’m hungry,” moaned Rosie. “Who’s for Coke and crisps first?”

  “Yes!”

  Anybody would think the others wanted Molly to make them look stupid at the circus. I was a bit disgusted that they were more bothered about their stomachs than our performance, to be honest. But I figured that I should join them, just to make sure that they didn’t eat too much. So when we’d all had a snack and put our stuff in Rosie’s room and got our circus equipment together to practise with, we all trooped downstairs. And who should meet us there but Tiff, Rosie’s boot-faced older sister.

  “Now you lot, if you set foot in the lounge, you’re dead. I mean it. No-one’s to go in there, understood? Spud’s just finished painting the other side of the door, so we’ve got to leave it open so it won’t stick. But just keep away from there, OK?”

  We all nodded and smiled sweetly, then stuck our tongues out at her behind her back. Spud, her boyfriend, appeared and nodded hello. He never really speaks, does Spud, just nods and grunts a bit. Very strange. Anyway, he went into the kitchen to wash out his paintbrushes and we got ourselves ready to start rehearsing.

  “Come on, let’s go outside!” I urged the others. But when I opened the front door, I saw
that it was already dropping dark and was starting to rain.

  “We’ll have to go to my room,” Rosie said.

  “But there’s not enough space there now, with all our sleepover things laid out,” Frankie reminded her.

  “What about practising here in the hall?” I suggested. “It’s big enough. We’ll have plenty of room.”

  Rosie looked a bit uncertain.

  “Come on, Rosie, we can’t really do any harm in here, can we?” said Fliss gently.

  The paint was peeling from the hall skirting boards, the wallpaper was tearing off in strips and there were only bare bulbs in the sockets, no light fittings or anything.

  “OK,” Rosie agreed at last.

  “Great!”

  Fliss set up her plate-spinning stands at the far end of the hall near the kitchen. She was using special plastic plates which looked like china, but they didn’t break if they fell. Frankie had plenty of space to ride up and down on her unicycle, as long as she avoided Rosie parading about on her stilts.

  Lyndz and I really didn’t need that much room for our juggling. Once we got into our routines, it felt pretty cool. Especially as Adam was clearly thrilled with it all. He’d wheeled himself out of the dining room so he could get a better look, and he was grinning like mad. Frankie rode over to him and started cycling backwards and forwards round him. He loved that.

  “Hey, do you want to see my clown act, Adam?” I shouted, and dashed upstairs to change into my costume.

  I’d been practising a routine at home, and it was about time I showed the others. I know that Ailsa’s dad had said that all we needed to do was run about in silly costumes, but I wasn’t going to do that. I wanted everybody to remember what a great clown I was! The others hadn’t planned anything special – they just said they were going to have a laugh.

  Anyway, I went into Rosie’s room, pulled on the zany clown costume Mum had made for me (without Molly knowing, I hasten to add), and sprayed some shaving foam on to two paper plates.

  “What are you doing with those?” squeaked Rosie as soon as I appeared downstairs again. “Please, Kenny – you promised we wouldn’t make a mess!”

  “Keep your knickers on!” I told her. “I’m just getting used to holding them, that’s all. I’m not going to throw them, you dill!”

  “Well, just make sure you don’t, OK?”

  Frankie was still careering about on her unicycle, picking up speed as she got used to turning in the hall.

  “I’m bored with this now,” Fliss moaned, removing the last plate from her pole. “Can I have a go on those moon shoes you got for your birthday, Rosie? They’ll make me feel like I’m flying the way I did on the trapeze!”

  We all groaned. She was still going on about her stunt on the trapeze, and it was driving us all crazy! Rosie told her where her moon shoes were, and carried on walking about on her stilts.

  Now I don’t know if you’ve ever seen moon shoes before. They’re like boots with trampolines on their soles. So when you walk on them, you bounce up and down like an astronaut on the moon or something. And the more you bounce, the higher you go.

  Well, Fliss was just in her element with those strapped to her feet.

  “Look, I’m flying!” she kept yelling as she bounded down the hall.

  “Just be careful in those,” Frankie warned her. “We don’t want any accidents, do we?”

  Famous last words or what?

  We were all happily doing our own thing one minute, and the next… It still gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. And I know that we usually blame Fliss when anything goes wrong, but what happened that day was absolutely one hundred percent her fault, no question.

  Frankie was steaming up and down the hall on her unicycle. Admittedly she was getting faster and faster, but she was always in control. That is until Miss Felicity Proudlove entered the scene. (Yup, she’s Proudlove these days, ever since her mum married Andy in July. Gross, huh? Though perhaps not as bad as her old name, Sidebotham.)

  “Watch me – I bet I can touch the ceiling!” she yelled.

  She gave a huge bounce, somehow leapt at an angle and came crashing down right on top of Frankie.

  “WAAAYHAAYY – I can’t see!” Frankie shrieked, and skidded the length of the hall, the unicycle obviously out of control beneath her. Unfortunately, Rosie, who was on her stilts, could see her coming but couldn’t do anything about it. One minute she was strutting about four feet in the air – the next, she’d had her stilts whipped from under her and had gone sprawling on to the ground. CRASH!

  And this is where the really unfortunate bit comes into it.

  You remember how Tiff had told us that the lounge door was open, don’t you? And how under no circumstances were we to go in there? Well, we didn’t have much choice. Lyndz and I were standing right by the lounge door when Rosie came hurtling towards us. Lyndz took the full force of her fall, and crashed through the door with Rosie sprawled on top of her.

  The momentum of those two falling hurled me through into the lounge, which would have been OK apart from two things – a) Lyndz’s juggling balls and b) my two foam pies. Somehow a ball got under my feet, and I felt like one of those clown toys trying to balance on top of it… I slithered and I staggered, and after what felt like about five whole minutes, I crashed to the floor.

  All I could think of was saving myself, so I let go of the plates so that I could break my fall. I could only look on in horror as one blob of shaving foam landed slap bang in the middle of Rosie’s mum’s new rug, and the other slithered horribly all down one of the throws.

  The words BIG and TROUBLE flashed over my eyes in neon lights.

  For a few moments, as I lay there, there was deathly silence. Then the whole world went crazy.

  “What’s happened, Kenny?” shrieked Rosie, as she flew into the room. She took one look at the mess and started to wail. “Mum’s going to ki-i-ill me!”

  “It’s not that bad!” I tried to sound confident as I got up and dusted myself off. “We’ll soon get it cleared up. It’s only shaving foam, it can’t have done so much damage.”

  The others looked at me in disbelief.

  “It’s not my fault!” I told them huffily. “If Fliss here hadn’t wanted to do her moon-walking bit, none of this would have happened!”

  Fliss started to protest, but was stopped by the sound of Adam’s wheelchair approaching down the hall. And the sound of him laughing like a maniac.

  “It is not funny, Adam!” Rosie yelled through her sobs.

  “No it most certainly is NOT!” said a furious voice behind him.

  Our hearts stopped. It was Tiff.

  “What on EARTH is going on?” she demanded. Then she surveyed the lounge. “I knew something like this would happen,” she raged. “I told Mum she was mad, trusting you lot here. You wreck everything you touch! Mum’s going to kill you this time, Rosie, she really is!”

  Rosie had somehow recovered herself, and was now staring at Tiff defiantly. “Well, she’ll kill you too then, won’t she? You were supposed to be supervising us, not messing about with Spud.”

  They stared each other down like it was the OK Corral or something. Then Tiff spoke.

  “All right then, I’ll help you clean it up. But if you put a foot wrong again, I’ll tell Mum everything, OK?”

  Rosie nodded. Then, to our total relief, Tiff went into clean-up overdrive. She gave us all instructions of where we should find various cloths and buckets of water to get the stains off the rug and the throw. She even dispatched Rosie to fetch a hairdryer so we could dry off the marks.

  We were all on our hands and knees rubbing at them furiously when the front door closed.

  “Mum!” screeched Tiff and Rosie together.

  “Right! Everyone sit down where you are so she won’t notice anything,” Tiff commanded. “And act normal. That’s our normal, Kenny, not yours!”

  Charming! It wasn’t my fault I was still dressed as a clown, was it?

  We al
l flopped down. Frankie and I lay on the rug, the others sprawled over the sofa. Just at the last minute Rosie noticed the bucket of water and managed to hide it behind the door before her mum appeared.

  “I thought we had a deal about no-one coming in here,” she said crossly. Oh-oh, someone wasn’t having a good day.

  “We wanted to see your new room,” Frankie smiled sweetly. “Rosie’s been raving about it so much.”

  “And I said it would be OK if I came in with them,” Tiff continued brightly. “They’re hardly likely to get into any trouble if I’m here, are they?”

  “I suppose not,” Mrs Cartwright agreed with reluctance.

  “Hey, you look tired, Mum,” Tiff coaxed. “I’ll make you a cup of tea if you like.”

  “That’d be nice, love!” Mrs Cartwright smiled. “So, how do you like the room then, girls? It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

  “Fabulous!” we all agreed.

  “Well, make sure you don’t mess it up, won’t you?”

  Tiff ushered her mum out of the door and mouthed to us, “Start drying the stains, I’ll keep Mum in the kitchen.”

  Once we were sure they’d gone, we all stood up.

  “Yuck! I’ve got a wet patch on my bum!” I announced.

  “Well, at least you’ll have dried it off a bit,” Frankie grinned. “It means we won’t have to use the hairdryer so much.”

  “Won’t your mum think it’s a bit suss if she hears that whirring away?” Fliss asked.

  “I’ve thought of that,” Rosie smirked, and turned on the radio really loudly.

  We took it in turns to dry the stains, and when we weren’t drying we were dancing! It was great. But because we had the radio on so loud we didn’t hear footsteps in the hall. We nearly jumped out of our skins when Rosie’s mum suddenly reappeared.

  “Just what do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

  I was holding the hairdryer, and fortunately had a brainwave. I held it like a microphone and started singing at the top of my voice.