There, standing in the assembly room door, was a truly spectacular sight: it was Jessica! Ava wanted to jump up and hug her tall, grown-up, eleven-year-old friend with the messy fringe and twinkling blue eyes.
But wait. What was Jessica still doing at Crabtree School? In her Crabtree School uniform? Jessica didn’t go to Crabtree School any more. Jessica was in Year Seven. Crabtree School did not have a Year Seven.
At first Ava thought she must be daydreaming. But other people can’t see your daydreams and Mrs Peabody could definitely see Jessica. So could Isabel: her eyes looked like they were going to pop out of her head. In fact, everyone in the school was now staring at the back of the assembly room.
(Everyone except the new Reception class, that is. The new Reception class were staring at their shoes and trying not to cry.)
“What are they doing here?” whispered Zoe to Ava. “It’s all twenty-four of them!”
Ava had been so focused on Jessica that she hadn’t noticed that Jessica wasn’t alone. Next to Jessica was Elizabeth, another of last year’s leavers. She was whispering in Jessica’s ear. That didn’t surprise Ava because Elizabeth never stopped talking. And there was Lucy who wore sparkly headbands, and Diya who could do twelve cartwheels and … in fact there was the whole of the Year Six class from last year. They were spread out along the back wall of the assembly room.
“Um,” said Mrs Peabody, again. Then she called Mrs Swan, the Year Six teacher, over to the stage. They did some whispering. And some head-shaking. It was clear that Mrs Swan had no idea what last year’s leavers were doing in assembly. Mrs Peabody tried a few other teachers. No one knew anything.
“Um,” Mrs Peabody said again, looking round the room. “Charlotte Lewis? Lottie? Where are you, darling? Come to the stage, please.”
Mrs Peabody knew that if there was anyone in the whole school who might know what Jessica’s class was doing there, it was Lottie. But for once Lottie didn’t know anything either.
Mrs Peabody had no choice but to muddle through. “Good morning, um, Crabtree girls,” she said, again. “As I said, lovely to have you back. All of you. Um…” Ava noticed that Zoe was counting on her fingers the number of times the headmistress said “um”. She was running out of fingers, but Mrs Peabody kept going.
“Especially all of you from last year’s Year Six class, I’m so glad you came to visit. And in your old uniforms too. Um, how lovely. Just lovely. So lovely to see you. Really, really lovely.” Now Zoe was counting “lovely”s. Ava had never heard Mrs Peabody blabber on like this before. Luckily, Jessica put her hand up.
“Yes, Jessica?” Mrs Peabody looked relieved that someone else was going to talk for a minute.
“Mrs Peabody, we aren’t visiting,” said Jessica. “We’ve decided to come back to Crabtree. We want to stay here.”
“All day?” asked Mrs Peabody.
“No,” said Jessica. “For forever and ever.”
The assembly room went very, very quiet.
“I don’t understand,” said Mrs Peabody. “What about your new schools? What about Year Seven?”
“We aren’t going to our new schools,” said Jessica’s classmate Elizabeth. “Not now and not ever. Never, never, never.” Once Elizabeth started talking there was no stopping her. “We are staying in Year Six. For forever and ever and ever and ever. Like Jessica said. All of us. Me, Jessica, Lucy, Harriet, Olivia, Talia—”
She would have named the whole class but Mrs Peabody interrupted her. “Now girls,” said the headmistress, “you can’t possibly—”
“But you can’t be in Year Six,” screeched one of the new Year Six girls. “WE are Year Six now! We can’t have TWO Year Sixes!” She hadn’t raised her hand but Mrs Peabody didn’t seem to notice.
“Yes,” called out someone else. “And WE are Year Five!”
“Year Five, Year Five!” The new Year Fives began chanting.
Suddenly there was the sound of crying. A LOT of crying. The new Reception class were sobbing as loud as ten thousand babies without their dummies. All this screeching and shouting had scared them.
Ava didn’t blame them for crying. She had been waiting for YEARS to be in Year Three. Spending forever and ever in Year Two – without your own desk, without swimming, without a real life sleepover class trip with all of your friends – didn’t sound at all brilliant. It sounded horribly, terribly, awfully bad.
It was a well-known fact at Crabtree School that Mrs Peabody simply could not bear the sound of a child crying. The very idea of crying made the headmistress’s knees knock, her legs wobble, her arms shake and her hair stand on end. This fear of tears was one of the things that made Mrs Peabody a headmistress of such legendary kindness. That morning, it also made her completely useless. When she saw an entire Reception class of twenty-four four-year-olds weeping and wailing, Mrs Peabody panicked.
She ordered last year’s Year Six class back to the Year Six classroom like naughty children being sent to their bedrooms. But then she had nothing to do with the new Year Six class. So she told them to go to Year Five. Then she told the new Year Five class to go back to Year Four. And so on. There were so many unhappy Crabtree girls stomping around the assembly room that the crab apples on the trees outside began to shake.
“All of you, collect your things and go back to wherever you were last year!” Mrs Peabody cried. “Please! Just until we get this sorted!” She sent the new Reception class to the Rainbow Room with Mrs Crunch. Mrs Crunch was the school dinner lady. She was very kind and always smelled like apple crumble. If anyone could stop the Reception girls crying, it was Mrs Crunch.
“Jessica and Elizabeth,” Mrs Peabody shouted over the noise, “as soon as the room clears, I want you in my office!” It didn’t sound like biscuits and hot chocolate would be on offer.
As Year Three, which was now Year Two again, filed out of the assembly room, Lottie hovered in the hallway. “We’ve got to find out what’s going on,” she told Ava and Zoe. She pointed at the door to Mrs Peabody’s office. It was open just a little bit. “I’ve got to get in there, so I can hear what they say to Mrs Peabody!”
“No way!” said Isabel. “Sneaking into the headmistress’s office? That is the naughtiest thing you could ever possibly do!”
“Surely not,” said Ava, thinking out loud. “It would be much naughtier to take a big tray of Mrs Crunch’s apple crumble and tip it out all over Mrs Peabody’s car…”
The other girls looked at Ava. That did sound very naughty, but hiding in the headmistress’s office was sneaky. Grown-ups really don’t like sneaky, even when it is for their own good.
“We have no choice,” said Zoe. “If the Year Sixes don’t leave, they’ll clog up the whole school. We’ll be stuck in Year Two, and within five years Crabtree will have, let’s see…” Zoe did a bit of maths. “More than one hundred Reception girls!”
Everyone gasped.
“This could ruin Crabtree School,” said Lottie. Ava had to agree. There would be Crabtree girls all over the place; they’d be wedged in the building like crayons in a box. They’d be popping out of the windows and hanging from the ceilings.
“Every year,” said Zoe, “there is the perfect number of five-year-olds and the perfect number of eleven-year-olds and the perfect number of everyone in between. And it has to stay that way.”
Zoe was right again. Ava pictured a huge crowd of grandmothers, mothers, big sisters and children all turning up for assembly together in their Crabtree uniforms. It would be beyond silly. Crabtree School just wouldn’t be the same.
“I’m doing it!” Lottie decided. She slid her notebook into her dress pocket and pulled up her socks. Then in a flash she disappeared behind the heavy door that read: MRS PEABODY.
As her class headed upstairs to get their things, Ava thought that even Baron Biscuit looked shocked at what Lottie had done. Ava stroked his back for the second time that day. They needed all the luck they could get.
Miss Moody did not notice that Lottie was
missing as she led the class, who were now carrying their coats and pencil cases, back down to the Year Two classroom. It was horrible; Ava looked back at the stairs sadly and tried not to cry. She felt like a baby being led back to nursery.
Once they got to Year Two, Miss Cheeky, who had been their teacher last year and was now their teacher again, did notice that Lottie was missing. But Miss Cheeky had a whole year of experience with this class. She was used to Lottie disappearing all the time. She knew that Lottie would come back once her mission was over.
The girls sat down at the tables that now felt too small. They’d been fine last year, but their class had obviously done loads of growing over the summer.
Ava stared out into the car park. It was a terrible view for inspiring daydreams. She missed Year Three already.
The rest of the class stared at Miss Cheeky. Miss Cheeky stared back at them. Nobody knew what to do. “Welcome to Year Two,” she finally said. “Again!”
Lottie hadn’t come back. Maybe she had already been found out. Maybe at this very moment Mrs Peabody was on the phone to Lottie’s mum. Ava couldn’t stand it any longer.
“Miss Cheeky, please may I go to the toilet?”
Zoe wasn’t about to miss out. “Me too, please, Miss Cheeky?”
Miss Cheeky couldn’t be bothered to make them go one at a time. Plus she guessed they were off to find Lottie, which wouldn’t be a bad thing.
“Be quick, girls!” she said. “And please don’t talk in the hallway. It’s noisy enough around here with all the new Reception girls crying.”
Zoe and Ava didn’t speak as they walked down the hall. Sometimes best friends don’t need words. They nodded and pointed their way into the kitchen, sneaked out of the side door and tiptoed down the pebble path that wound round the side of the school. They crouched beneath the window of Mrs Peabody’s office, hidden in the crab trees.
“If we get caught out here, we’ll be in bigger trouble than Lottie,” said Zoe. It was against the rules to be out in front of the school on your own during the day.
Together they peered into Mrs Peabody’s window. There was no sign of Lottie. Mrs Peabody sat in her big chair. The school cat, Lady Lovelypaws, was asleep in a tray on her desk. Jessica and Elizabeth were in smaller chairs opposite the headmistress. Everyone was looking very serious. Ava and Zoe couldn’t hear a word they were saying.
Luckily, Mrs Peabody couldn’t hear anything outside either, because just then a crab apple fell right on Ava’s head. She yelped. Lady Lovelypaws raised her head and looked towards the window.
“SSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” hissed Zoe.
“Where is Lottie?” whispered Ava, rubbing her head. “She must be in there somewhere.”
“She’s very good at hiding,” said Zoe. “Even if she’s still in there we might never spot her.”
Ava looked very, very carefully. The office was tidy and there weren’t that many hiding places. There was Mrs Peabody’s big desk, a coat stand, the two visitors’ chairs and a huge potted plant in the corner. They could see that Lottie wasn’t underneath any of the furniture, and even she couldn’t hide behind a coat stand.
“Look!” whispered Zoe. “Look at the plant! It has shoes!”
The plant did indeed have shoes, right where the stem met the pot. If you looked very closely, it also had legs and a stripy dress. Lottie was standing in the pot, hidden amongst the leaves. It was like she was in a very small jungle. Ava had to stare for a long time to see her, but once she had, she saw the plant rustle slightly, as if Lottie were moving around. Then her notebook appeared though the leaves. Written in big block letters were the words: HELP! NEED OUT! NEED A WEE!
“Attention, Miss Ahlberg. Attention, Miss Hughes!” a voice boomed from behind them. Ava and Zoe jumped like popcorn in the Rainbow Room popcorn-maker. They were not as good at spying as Lottie was. They had been caught by Colonel Crunch, the school groundskeeper. Colonel Crunch was married to Mrs Crunch. About a million years ago he had been a soldier in the army. Now he was in charge of all the building, gardening, fixing, planting, cleaning, organizing, mowing, weeding, light-bulb-changing and lost-scooter-finding at Crabtree School.
Colonel Crunch saluted Ava and Zoe. A thousand stories about why they were out there flashed through Ava’s mind. But Zoe wisely decided that it was better to tell the truth. In less than a minute, she told Colonel Crunch the whole terrible tale about how last year’s leavers wouldn’t leave, how she and her friends only wanted to help and how brave Lottie had been. By the time she had finished the Colonel was bent down peeking in the window too. Now Lottie needed the loo so badly that she was hopping up and down, and the whole plant was shaking. Lady Lovelypaws was ready to pounce on it.
“Hundreds of Reception girls would be a lot to clean up after,” Colonel Crunch said. “They would ruin my playground.” Colonel Crunch kept the Crabtree School playground very tidy. He loved nothing more than a shiny slide and a bright, freshly painted climbing frame.
“So you’ll help us?” asked Zoe. “We’ve got to get Lottie out.”
“At your service,” said Colonel Crunch. He marched off towards the school’s front door.
“We’ve got to get back to Miss Cheeky,” said Zoe to Ava. She looked at one of her watches. “We’ve been gone almost nine minutes.”
“Look!” whispered Ava. Inside the office, Mrs Peabody, Jessica, Elizabeth and Lady Lovelypaws had all turned to look at the door. Colonel Crunch appeared with a huge trolley. He saluted Mrs Peabody and then he pointed to the plant. He picked it up, put it on the trolley and wheeled it out. He turned and saluted Mrs Peabody again, just as the bell for morning break time rang.
Ava and Zoe dashed back inside. Their class was already in the hallway, on their way out to the playground for break time. Ava and Zoe followed them, and when Colonel Crunch passed by the queue with his trolley, Lottie jumped out and joined her friends. She had leaves in her hair.
“Wow!” Ava told her. “You did it!”
“Mission accomplished!” said Lottie proudly, stopping outside the door to the toilets. “But the report is terrible: Year Six are here to stay.”
“For forever and ever?” asked Zoe.
“Maybe even longer,” Lottie replied.
The first disastrous day of school was over and Ava, Lottie and Zoe were at Isabel’s house for a very special back-to-school play date. (This was play date number ninety-five in Lottie’s notebook.) Their mums had come along too, and so had all the littlies: Lottie’s younger sister Lola, and Isabel’s little twin sisters, Scarlett and Ruby. Scarlett and Ruby (or the Reds, as Isabel called them) were three-and-a-half and naughtier than the naughtiest thing you can possibly think of. They drove Isabel bonkers.
There were two brothers at the play date as well: Zoe’s brother, Rafe, who was a baby really and just learning to walk, and of course Johnny. After a quick snack, the littlies went out to the garden and the big girls headed for Isabel’s room.
Even though Isabel’s sisters were annoying, Ava loved going to Isabel’s house. She especially loved Isabel’s room. Isabel was always doing crafts, and on any given day you might find a group of animals made out of socks having a tea party on Isabel’s bed, or some potatoes with drawing-pin eyes giving a concert on a stage made out of a cereal box.
Isabel also had a huge collection of conkers that she had turned into little conker people. (She’d tried this with the crab apples from school too, but they tended to rot and get stinky.) There were little girl conkers with wool glued on for bunches and slightly bigger conkers that were mummies and daddies. There was even a doctor conker, with a stethoscope made out of string and a button. Most of the conkers lived in a doll’s house in the corner; a few more lived in the Barbie caravan.
Ava sat down on the floor and began sorting through the conkers to see if there were any new ones since she’d last been to Isabel’s.
“What we need,” said Zoe, “is a plan. A proper one.” She was hanging upside down off the sid
e of Isabel’s bed. Being upside down helped her think.
For the third time that day, the girls made Lottie tell them about what she had heard in the headmistress’s office. The reason that the Year Sixes wouldn’t leave, Jessica had told Mrs Peabody, was because they loved Crabtree School so much. They had all got together over the summer and their whole class felt the same way: they loved the building, they loved the teachers, they loved the food, they loved Baron Biscuit and Lady Lovelypaws, and they loved Mrs Peabody. No other school could possibly have the same magic.
Lottie said the headmistress had had a difficult time arguing with them, especially when they said they loved her.
“Didn’t she tell them they HAD to leave?” asked Zoe. “That their new schools are waiting for them?”
“Yes,” said Lottie, who was having a snoop through Isabel’s drawers. “But then Jessica started crying because she loves Crabtree School so much. And you know what happens to Mrs Peabody when she sees crying.”
They all nodded.
“I don’t see why she can’t just shove them out the door,” said Zoe. “All of them, before they get the chance to cry.” Zoe was going quite red in the face from being upside down. Ava thought she was beginning to look like a tomato, hanging there like that.
“Headmistresses can’t go around shoving people,” said Isabel. “But why didn’t Mrs Peabody just call their mummies?”
“She did,” said Lottie. “But it sounded like the mums were happy for them to stay. Mrs Peabody kept saying, ‘Yes, Mrs Blah-Blah, they do grow up so very fast’.”
“Ugh,” said Zoe. “Mums never want you to grow up.” Ava knew that Zoe said this because Zoe really, really wanted pierced ears and her mum said not until she was twenty-five.
“Anyway, Mrs Peabody said that she would ring their new schools and tell the heads that they will be coming soon,” Lottie went on. “But then Jessica and Elizabeth said not to do that because they would never, ever be coming. They said if she even talked about them leaving again, they would cry for forever and ever.”
Year Two Forever and Ever Page 2