Mega Sleepover 4. Narinder Dhami

this stuff from your desk. This tray is heavy you know.” Lyndz is nearly as untidy as I am. There was so much stuff piled on her desk that when she tried to move it, it fell on to the floor.

      “Hey what’s this?” asked Rosie, picking something up.

      “Oh that’s just a card I’m working on for my Artist’s Badge at Brownies,” said Lyndz taking it from her.

      “Oh no! I’d forgotten!” gasped Rosie. “I’ll have to start planning it tonight. What else do we have to make? Is it a bookmark?”

      “Or a poster,” said Fliss.

      I hadn’t even thought about what I was going to make, and the Badge Tester was coming to Brownies the following Thursday.

      “That’s it!” shrieked Frankie, grabbing me by the shoulders. “I’ve done it again! I am a genius!”

      “Oi! Let go of me Big Head!” I gasped. “What cunning plan have you thought of now?”

      “Well,” spluttered Frankie. “We’re all doing the Artist’s Badge right? If we all design a birthday card for the Sleepover Club, then get the Tester to decide which one is the best, whoever designed the best card gets to hold the tenth birthday sleepover party. I told you I was clever didn’t I?”

      Frankie was talking so fast that all her words had fallen over each other. So it took the rest of us a little while to work out what she had said. But when we did, we had to admit that the girl’s got brains.

      Of course, we still had the problem of deciding exactly what we were going to do at this party. But first we were all determined to win the competition.

      

      After Frankie had had her brainwave we were all eager to get home to design our creative masterpieces. The trouble is that I’m about as good at drawing as an elephant is at roller-skating. If we’d been competing for something like the Athlete’s Badge, then I would have started putting up the party streamers. As it was, I knew that I would be going somewhere else for the tenth birthday sleepover party. The question was, where?

      My money was on Lyndz winning the competition. She’s brilliant at making things. I can sort of see things in my head, but when I try to put my ideas down on paper, they come out all wrong. Lyndz seems to have good ideas, and be able to carry them out. Fliss is very prissy and fussy about things. They never quite turn out as she expected them to, but they are always very neat and tidy. And adults always like that don’t they?

      Frankie is a bit hit-and-miss. Once in art at school, she made this really great dinosaur out of papier-mâché. It was wicked. It stood outside Mrs Poole’s office for weeks. Parents would come into school and stand for ages admiring it, like it was by some famous sculptor or something. Then the next time Frankie made a model it was worse than one of those piles of junk you bring home when you’re in nursery class. She can be weird like that. You never know what to expect.

      I’d never really seen much that Rosie had made. Her last sleepover invitation was pretty neat. But Adam had helped her design it on the computer, so that didn’t really count. All I knew for sure was that although I had tried my best with my birthday card, it wasn’t going to be good enough to win our competition.

      We all met up at Frankie’s house a couple of days before Brownies. All the others seemed very confident that their card was going to be the best. But everybody acted like their design was the biggest secret in the universe. Frankie had even asked her father to lock hers away in his filing cabinet. I ask you, how ridiculous can you get?

      “If it’s a birthday sleepover, are we going to buy presents?” asked Lyndz.

      “Oh, we’ve got to, I love presents!” said Fliss. “This is great. It means we’ll all have two birthdays. Like the Queen.”

      “Hang on one second!” I said, putting on a cheesy American accent. “I mean I love you guys and everything, but I have a serious shortage of dosh. You know what I’m saying?”

      “Me too,” admitted Rosie. “I never seem to have any money.”

      Frankie and Lyndz agreed.

      A brainwave suddenly hit me:

      “Why don’t we just give one present each? We don’t need to buy it either, we could make it,” I said. “I’m sure I could knock something up out of a washing-up bottle and a bit of string. I’ve seen ‘Blue Peter’ often enough!”

      Who says Frankie should have all the bright ideas?

      “I know it’s the thought that counts,” laughed Lyndz. “But would we really want something you’d made, Kenny?”

      The cheek of it! I couldn’t let her get away with that. I wrestled her to the ground until she was hiccuping and begging for mercy.

      “I’d, hic, love anything you made, hie, Kenny! Really I would!” she spluttered.

      “But how would we decide who we were getting the present for?” asked Rosie whilst Frankie dealt with Lyndz’s hiccups. She tried a cold marble down her T-shirt for a change. And it worked!

      “We could have a lucky dip,” said Frankie. “We’ll all write our names on a piece of paper, put them in a hat and pull one out. As long as no one picks their own name, it’ll be cool.”

      “And we could keep it a secret. Whose name we’ve got I mean,” said Lyndz. “Then when we get the presents at the party, we’ll all have to guess who bought them.”

      “That means we’ll all have to wrap them in the same paper and put them in a special place at the sleepover when nobody else’s looking,” said Frankie. She always thinks of things like that.

      We were all pretty excited about our presents. We each wrote our names on scraps of paper, which Frankie tore out of a notebook. Then she got out her favourite purple velvet hat, and we put all the pieces of paper in it. We each took it in turns to pull out a name. I was the last to pick, so there was only one left. It said:

      I looked round to try to figure out who had picked my name, but everyone was shoving the papers in their pockets, and had sort of secret smiles on their faces.

      “I’ve seen some great earrings in that shop in the village,” said Fliss. “I just thought it might help to give someone a few ideas!”

      Oh great! Now we’d have to listen to Fliss dropping hints about her present right up until the sleepover. And we didn’t even know when that would be.

      “Call me picky…” I said

      “Hello Picky!” said the others together.

      “Ha! Ha!” I said. “What I was going to say was, call me picky but it would be nice to know when we’re going to have this sleepover. Some of us have lives to plan you know!

      “Right! You mean your hectic social life of showbiz premieres and parties I take it!” laughed Frankie.

      “I wish!” I said. “I just want to know, that’s all.”

      “Well, I say we should wait until after Brownies on Thursday,” said Frankie. “At least then we’ll know whose house the sleepover’s going to be at. Everything else should be easy to decide after that.”

      “Right as usual Batman!” I said.

      We never usually take this long to plan our sleepovers. I was beginning to think that this one would never happen.

      When we saw each other at Brownies on Thursday, we finally showed each other the cards we had been working on for the Artist’s Badge. Mine was