Mega Sleepover 2. Narinder Dhami

      “What a cheek!” said Lyndz. “We don’t stink.”

      “Right,” I said, “after the spelling test we’ll ask to go on the computer.”

      While Mrs Weaver was busy hearing readers, we wrote back to them:

      Dear Ugly Mugs,

      We hope you both slip down a drain or

      fall in a bowl of sick. There’s no way

      you will win tomorrow. We’ll make sure

      of that. Have a horrible day, Poshfaces.

      It’s funny really, because that is what happened. Not the bit about them falling down the drain or in a bowl of sick, but about them not winning. When we wrote it we didn’t have a plan or anything. It was just one of those things you say. And then, when we met them on the way home from school, we said it again. Afterwards we wished we hadn’t, because it all turned out to be true.

      

      But hang on, before I tell you about that, let’s look for Pepsi in the park, there’s a few bushes she likes digging around. I can’t see her anywhere yet, can you?

      Oh, blow. Not a sign. Now where can we try?

      I know: the other place she likes is the canal. I’m not allowed to go there on my own, but Dad and I often walk her there. We could go as far as the bridge next to the pub, you can see a long way down on to the towpath from there.

      Come on and I’ll tell you what happened next.

      By the time we’d collected up all Gazza’s bits and pieces, we were a bit late leaving school. Rosie put Gazza into his carrying cage and then we helped her carry everything round to her house. We were already loaded down with PE kit, lunchboxes, and school bags. So we must have looked like a travelling circus when we came round the corner of Mostyn Avenue, which is a couple of roads away from Welby Drive, where Rosie lives. Walking towards us were the gruesome M&Ms and who do you think was with them? Only Ryan Scott and Danny McCloud, two horrible boys from our class. That was all we needed.

      “Oh, look, it’s the Famous Five,” said Emma Hughes.

      “Which one’s the dog?” said Ryan Scott. He thinks he’s so funny.

      “Ruff, ruff. Here, girls,” shouted Danny McCloud, “fetch a stick.” And he broke a whole branch off a tree by the side of the road and threw it at us. Good job for him he missed.

      “Oh, very clever,” I said. But they’d both started now, whistling and calling us good dogs and silly things like that. Fliss looked like a boiled beetroot with embarrassment. Fliss actually likes Ryan Scott; she says she wants to marry him! She is so weird.

      We just kept on walking, pretending we couldn’t hear them, but they followed us.

      “Dogs are supposed to be kept on a lead,” shouted Ryan Scott.

      “I’ve got a good idea,” said Emma Hughes, “they could enter each other for the Pet Show. That way they might win.”

      “Well, you’re not gonna win, that’s for sure,” said Kenny.

      “That’s what you think,” said The Goblin.

      “That’s what we know,” said Rosie.

      “And how are you going to stop us?” said The Queen.

      “Don’t you worry, we have our ways,” I said, mysteriously.

      We all smiled at each other, as if we’d got this big secret that they knew nothing about. We walked off down the road.

      “What ways?” Emma Hughes shouted after us.

      “You’ll find out,” Kenny called back to her. Then we carried on down the road trying to ignore the fact that those two stupid dodos were still whistling us to come and the gruesome M&Ms were giggling at them as if they were the funniest things on legs.

      Fliss turned to Kenny, “How are we going to stop them?”

      Kenny shrugged. “Don’t ask me,” she said, “ask Frankie.”

      I shrugged too. I had no idea either. But, we’d got them worried and that was almost as good.

      When we reached Rosie’s, she was right, her mum didn’t mind about Gazza.

      “What difference can a hamster make?” she said. “It’ll be enough of a madhouse with all you girls round.” But she smiled, so we knew she was only kidding.

      We were all so excited to be sleeping over at a different house, we raced off home to get our things packed. “See you at seven,” Rosie called after us. “Don’t be late.”

      When I got home I gave Pepsi an extra good brush and clean up and told Mum and Dad they’d better keep her like that.

      “Don’t let her roll in anything on her walk tonight,” I warned them.

      “Yes, boss,” said Dad. “Any more orders while you’re away?”

      “Yes,” I said. “Kindly collect me at eleven in the morning. And don’t be late!”

      When we arrived at Rosie’s we went straight upstairs and dumped our sleepover kits on her bedroom floor. She’s right, her room does look a bit funny with no wallpaper, just plaster on the walls, but her mum lets her put posters up, so it doesn’t look boring; it’s dead colourful in fact. She’s got Oasis, Blur and Leicester City football team, loads of pictures of dogs and people out of the soaps on her walls. Rosie’s soppy about soaps.

      Her dad’s promised to come round soon and decorate, so her mum says she’s allowed to write on the walls, which none of the rest of us are allowed to do in our bedrooms.

      Rosie said we could help her if we wanted to. It was so cool. We wrote loads of jokes, like What did the spaceman see in his frying pan? An unidentified frying object. And What do you do if you find a blue banana? Try to cheer it up.

      Rosie said it would certainly cheer her up, when she was lying in bed at night, to read those jokes.

      “Just think,” I said, “in about a zillion years…”

      “When the aliens come,” said Lyndz.

      “…they might take this wallpaper off and find these jokes.”

      So then we got into writing messages to Martians and it all got a bit silly. One of them was a bit rude. We had to scribble it out before Rosie’s mum saw it. It’s a good job we did because just then she came in to tell us to come down for tea.

      “Great,” said Kenny, “I’m ravishing.”

      “Don’t you mean ravenous?” said Rosie’s mum

      “I’m ravishing, too,” said Kenny, pulling one of her silly faces.

      “You’re weird, you mean,” I said. Then she chased me downstairs to the kitchen. Rosie’s mum had laid out a great spread for us with paper cups and plates and fancy serviettes, just like a party. She’s dead nice. She’s going to college to learn to be a nursery nurse. Rosie has an older sister, Tiffany, but she’s always out with her boyfriend, Spud. Her brother Adam was there, though. We’re really getting used to Adam now. It was strange at first, talking to someone who can’t talk back to you, but Rosie’s mum can tell us what he wants to say because he sort of spells it out with his head and she can understand him. So can Rosie some of the time, if he does it slowly.

      We had pizza and salad and oven chips, and ice cream for afters. The pizza was OK, but it wasn’t a patch on my dad’s. The ice cream was heavenly, though: pecan and toffee fudge. Mmm, mmm. Rosie’s mum sat and fed Adam,