by Ginny Deals

DEDICATION

For Granny

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Have you been Invited to all these Sleepovers?

Sleepover Kit List

Copyright

About the Publisher

Say “Cheese!”

Hiya, Frankie here. Wanna be a supermodel? We’re having a photo shoot in the garden, as you can see. OK, so the flowerbeds aren’t exactly a catwalk in Paris, but you can’t have everything. As my gran always says, life’s what you make it.

Welcome to the latest Sleepover Club adventure. This one got pretty messy, I have to admit. Stinky, too. But hey – it all turned out seriously cool in the end. Go the Sleepover Club!

What do you mean, you don’t know what the Sleepover Club is? You have got to be kidding! We are the top bonza babe gang in the whole of Cuddington, and probably the whole of the world too. The crazy sleepovers we have at each other’s houses! The games, the food, the jokes! Our best mate code, which means we always stand up for each other! Oh, except when Fliss is blathering about something stoopid, when we all sit on her. Literally.

Let’s give you a quick rundown on our models today, then. We have Flissy Slidebottom prancing in from the side, mincing about like she’s on hot sand. Don’t tell her I told you her nickname – her real surname’s Sidebotham, which isn’t much better, is it? She thinks she’s Claudia Schiffer, that one. But I don’t think very much of her modelling style, do you? Flinging your arms and legs around doesn’t work for the camera – you just come out in one big blur. FLISS!! Stand still a sec, will you?

You wouldn’t believe how many costume changes Fliss has gone through today. Her sleepover kit bag was stuffed so full of clothes this weekend that she couldn’t fit in any sensible stuff at all. Guess whose toothpaste she’s had to borrow? As you probably know by now, Flisspot has the biggest wardrobe in town. She and her mum are dead keen on clothes and the latest fashions. Can’t really see what the fuss is about myself. Who wants to dress like everyone else?

Kenny the Football Queen’s just as bad at this modelling business. How am I supposed to snap her when she’s flinging herself about like she’s scoring some mega-header for Leicester City, I’d like to know? She keeps charging out of the shrubbery with this really ferocious expression on her face. Do some action shots Frankie, she begs me. Well, I’m doing my best, but if she comes out all weird she’s only got herself to blame.

Rosie’s got the right idea. She knows how to stand still for more than half a second at a time. Give us a grin, Rosie-Posie! OK, so she’s not so good at grinning to order. No Rosie, a GRIN, not a death stare! You look like Emma Poos Hughes sucking up to Mrs Weaver with that fake smile all over your face. Hey, do us a favour and pull a gruesome face at Rosie to make her smile, will you? That’s better! Rosie is the original grumpy-chops. Getting her to laugh is sometimes like getting Kenny to sit still. Totally impossible.

And here comes Lyndz, galloping across the lens. Animal crackers, this girl. I suppose that’s an invisible horse she’s whacking. It’s going to look pretty dumb in a photo, but there’s no point telling her that. More action shots! I wish I was just taking photos of my cute baby sister, Izzy. She can’t move around much yet, and she’s beginning to smile in the most adorable way. Kenny, who wants to be a doctor like her dad, reckons she knows all about babies, and insists that Izzy’s just got wind. But I’m Izzy’s sister, so I know she’s trying to smile at me! I still can’t quite believe that I’ve got a kid sister. It’s totally the best thing ever.

What, you wanna know more about me? Well, I look like a beanpole and I wear some crazy stuff sometimes. You can’t miss me, actually. The others think I’m kind of the leader of the gang – but don’t tell them I said that, ’cos they’ll only think I sound big-headed. Oh, and the most interesting thing about me at the moment is that I’ve just got a kid sister! Oh, I already told you that, didn’t I. The others are always banging on about how much I talk about Izzy. Sorry!

Don’t you just lurve cameras? The snaps, the laughs, the bit when the film finally gets developed and you see what you really look like? I think I always look stupid because my legs are so long and stringy, and my hair just flops like a pancake on my head. But the others say I’m very photogenic. They’re probably just being nice because they’re my mates, but that stuff’s always cool to hear.

We’re seriously into photography at the moment. Apart from the fact that we’ve got a bunch of right little show-offs in the Sleepover Club who just lurve posing about for shots, it’s down to this camera that the M&Ms—You remember our total worst enemies the M&Ms, Emma Hughes and Emily Berryman, don’t you? Bet you wish you could forget them! Well, let’s just say this camera means that the M&Ms won’t be bothering us for a while. You could say they’ve got too much egg on their faces…

But let’s start at the very beginning, which, as my gran would tell you, is a very good place to start. The end of the Easter term was approaching and—

HEY, Rosie, look out! Lyndz is galloping straight towards…Oof, I bet that hurt. Where’s Kenny anyway? Uh-oh – I bet she wishes she hadn’t come running out of that bit of shrubbery just now. Now Lyndz the Hiccup Champ is off and hic-hiccing away…Well, since Fliss was already lying on the grass trying to look gorgeous, perhaps she broke their fall a bit? That poor flowerbed’s gonna take a while to recover. Rather like another flowerbed I could mention – but more of that mega-disaster later. Are you going to tell Fliss that she’s got a grass stain on her new white jeans, or am I?

“Psst, Frankie! Get down!” Kenny hissed at me in class one morning.

“Wha…?”

Kenny flicked a paper pellet with deadly accuracy across the classroom, and caught Emma Hughes bang on the back of her shirt. Result!

“Ouch!” whined Emma, whipping round and glaring at Kenny. “I know that was you, Laura McKenzie!”

Kenny reaalllly hates being called Laura. I thought she was going to jump up and clock Emma one, when—

“Behave yourselves, girls,” snapped Mrs Weaver, who’d suddenly appeared. I don’t know how she does that. She must have a teleporter by her desk, like in Star Trek. One whiff of trouble, and she beams up from nowhere.

“But Miss, it was Kenny,” butted in Emma’s crony, the Goblin girl herself, Emily Berryman.

“I don’t know what she’s talking about, Miss,” said Kenny innocently. “I was nowhere in the vicinity.”

Kenny watches too many police dramas, I reckon. It was true, though – she hadn’t been anywhere near Emma, exactly. Fliss’s mouth went all pinched like a dog’s bottom, and Lyndz got the giggles and had to stare very hard at her maths book like it was the most interesting thing she’d ever seen. Me and Rosie just kept very quiet.

“That’s quite enough. I don’t want to hear another squeak from anyone, do you hear?” said Mrs Weaver sternly.

Ryan Scott and Danny McCloud started squeaking like a pair of mice, and then howled with laughter like it was the funniest thing in the world. Aren’t boys totally pathetic?

“Well, really!” said Mrs Weaver, looking extremely unimpressed. “I don’t know what’s got into you all today. You’re behaving as if you were still in the Reception class. Get on with your work, or you can finish off this maths instead of doing your Easter displays this afternoon.”

As if by magic, the whole class went silent. Maths in the afternoon! Quel horreur! That’s French for ‘serious doom’, by the way. I learnt it in Paris at half-term – but that, as they say, is another story.

“And while we’re on the subject of the Easter displays,” continued Mrs Weaver, now she’d got our attention, “this year’s theme is Poetry. There’ll be prizes for the most original idea, as usual.”

Groans and death noises and mumblings immediately spread across the classroom.

“But Miss, that’s really BORING,” protested Ryan Scott. “Poetry is all love and stuff.”

The boys all yawned and looked completely fed up. I have to say, I agreed with them. Soppy stuff really does my head in. My parents have gone totally soppy since my baby sister Izzy was born, and I swear – I have to leave the room to be sick. Kenny was looking grumpy, and so were Rosie and Lyndz. Only Fliss went all pink and hopeful-looking. She really fancies Ryan, would you believe it? In fact, Ryan even sent her a Valentine’s card this year.

“Poetry isn’t always about ‘love and stuff’, as you put it, Ryan,” corrected Mrs Weaver. “Poetry can be about nature, and people, and war – everything under the sun.”

“What, even football?” piped up Kenny suddenly.

Mrs Weaver looked slightly flummoxed. “Well, yes, I expect so. No poems about football exactly leap to mind, Laura, but yes – I’m sure if you looked around, you could find poems about sport. Let your imaginations run! Why don’t you ask Miss Malone to show you the Poetry section in the library? You’ll be amazed at what you find.”

The boys looked much happier when she said that. It was kind of a relief all round, to tell you the truth.

At break time, we all gathered together in our usual spot. It was really gorgeous just then, because the bank beside the playground was covered with bright yellow and white and orange daffodils, waving in the wind.

The daffs were totally Mrs Poole’s pride and joy. We’d all helped plant them a while back. Someone had come up with the idea of spelling out ‘Cuddington Primary’ with the orange bulbs, but it had gone a bit wrong. Now the flowers were out, all you could really see were a couple of orange squiggles, then ‘ding’, then a couple more orange blobs ending with a big curly ‘y’. Mrs Poole had been a bit disappointed, I think. I quite liked it myself.

Anyway, Fliss immediately started banging on about Kenny’s little stunt.

“I can’t believe you cheeked Mrs Weaver like that,” she began. “If we’d had to do maths instead of our displays this afternoon, you’d be in big trouble, Kenny.”

“Calm down, Fliss,” said Rosie mildly. “It is nearly the end of term, after all.”

“Yeah!” squealed Lyndz, doing a weird little dance on the spot. “Nearly the holidays! Everyone messes around at the end of term. The teachers would be disappointed if we all behaved ourselves.”

“Well, I think it was stupid,” said Fliss primly.

I couldn’t resist it. “Like Ryan Scott wasn’t joining in,” I said with a giggle. “Your Valentine!”

Fliss went a deep shade of pink. Ever since Ryan Scott had danced with Fliss at the Valentine Disco a couple of months earlier, we’d really been taking the mickey.

“Oooh, Ryan, your mouse noises were like, totally real. I swear, I thought you had whiskers and a tail there for a minute!” cooed Rosie wickedly.

The rest of us fell about. Then Rosie squealed as Fliss started chasing her across the playground.

“So guys, what’s our Easter display going to be, then?” asked Lyndz when Fliss and Rosie came panting back again. “It’s got to be a good one!”

“Remember the M&Ms’ prize-winning one last year?” said Fliss.

We all groaned and made sick noises. Last year’s theme had been ‘The Countryside’, and the M&Ms had done this really cutesie-wootsie display of woolly sheep made of cotton wool and matchsticks. The way Mrs Weaver had gone on about it, you’d think it was a piece of really precious art. It had been displayed in the assembly hall with a big sign saying ‘First Prize’, and the M&Ms had crowed about winning for like, months.

“Well, I’m not doing anything as wet as those baa-lamb blobs of fluff,” said Kenny in disgust. “I think we should—”

We started making stupid noises, la-la-la-ing and covering our ears and all the usual stuff. Kenny’s ideas always involved football, or blood, or both – and whatever Mrs Weaver said, neither topic was exactly poetic.

“Give me a chance to finish,” protested Kenny. “It might be the best idea you’ve ever heard in your lives.”

“Your ideas are always stupid, Laura McKenzie.” Emma Hughes’ horrible weedy voice floated over to us. She was obviously still mad about the paper pellet thing. “I don’t know why you even bother thinking.”

“Yeah,” bleated Emily Berryman, hanging round her friend like a bad smell.

“What’s it to you, fart-breath?” snarled Kenny. “At least I’ve got a brain to think with.”

We all started giggling at this point. Kenny’s always dead quick with smart answers.

“Huh!” Emma tossed her stupid blonde hair. “Well, I don’t see you and your pathetic friends winning any Easter display prizes,” she came out with in the end. (I just knew she’d get that in somewhere. I mean, how unoriginal can you get?) “And we’re gonna win again this year too,” she continued with a slimy smirk. “Then we’ll see who’s got the brains round here.”

“Yeah,” said Emily again.

Enough was enough, I decided.

“That’s all you know, Emma,” I said, stepping up beside Kenny. Lyndz, Rosie and Fliss quickly did the same. “As a matter of fact, we’ve got a fantastic idea for the Easter display that’s gonna make anything you do look totally naff.”

The others looked a bit surprised, but tried to act like they knew what I was talking about, nodding vigorously and nudging each other like we were all in on a great big secret.

“Oh, sure,” said Emma, seeming just the teensiest bit worried all of a sudden. “You reckon!”

“Yeah!” said Emily. Honestly, doesn’t that girl ever say anything else?

“Yeah, we reckon,” said Kenny defiantly. “So you and your talking parrot of a friend have got some serious worrying to do!”

And we all turned together and stalked off down the playground like cowboys at high noon.

After that little showdown, there were loads of high fives all round for the Sleepover Club.

“Way to go, Franks!” beamed Kenny, banging me so hard on the back I practically swallowed my tongue.

“You sure showed ’em!” squealed Rosie, doing a couple of imaginary punches in mid-air.

Even Fliss was grinning. “You really do pull off amazing stuff when the chips are down, Frankie,” she gushed.

“Chips?” said Lyndz, who perked up immediately.

“DOH!” we all groaned. Lyndz’s mind was on food, as usual!

“So, what’s this top idea, then?” continued Kenny in excitement. “Come on, spill the beans! You sounded way excited back there, so I guess it’s a Super Spaceman Special, huh?”

“Er…” I faltered.

“Go on!” prompted Lyndz, leaping on Rosie’s back and resting her elbows on Rosie-Posie’s shoulders. “Tell us!”

“Well,” I said carefully, aware of four excited pairs of eyes resting on me, “when I said idea, I didn’t exactly mean idea…”

“You haven’t got an idea at all, have you?” said Fliss, cottoning on suddenly.

“Well…No, not an idea as such,” I confessed.

Kenny clutched her hair. “But we just challenged the M&Ms!” she yelled. “Francesca Thomas, I could kill you!”

“Well, I had to say something, didn’t I? The M&Ms were flattening you!” I shot straight back, looking her firmly in the eye. Her gaze dropped first. “It’s not so bad!” I rallied them – they were looking like drooping flowers all of a sudden. “We’ll just look on it as a challenge, that’s all!”

“Great,” they all groaned.

A horrible silence fell as we racked our brains. How were we going to get out of this one?

“Doesn’t anyone know any poems?” said Lyndz at last. “Limericks? Nursery rhymes?”

“Mary had a little lamb, the midwife fainted,” said Kenny promptly. “Well, I thought it was funny!” she protested when we all punched her.

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” began Fliss, looking all dreamy.

“Yuck,” I declared. “How does the rest of it go?”

Fliss blushed. “I don’t know. Something about temperatures.”

“Temperatures are good,” said Kenny, getting interested.

“Look, this is getting us nowhere!” said Rosie in irritation. “Let’s just do what Mrs Weaver suggested, and go and ask Baloney at lunchtime.”

Baloney is our pet name for Miss Malone, the librarian. It’s a perfect name, as her skin’s a bit blotchy like a sausage and she talks rubbish half the time.

“Yeah!” we all agreed. “Baloney to the rescue!”

And we played Stuck In The Mud for the rest of the break.

“Poetry, gels?” said Baloney that lunchtime. She always calls girls “gels”, which sounds weird but kind of goes with the rest of her. She wears hairy tweed skirts, and those little glasses on a thin gold chain that just rest on the tip of your nose. “What kind of poetry?”

“We were hoping you’d be able to tell us, Miss Malone,” I said politely.

“Yeah, anything, Miss Malone,” the others all chorused.

“Well, poetry can never be ‘anything’, gels,” said Miss Malone, looking quite shocked. “There are so many poems and poets out there, you see. There’s…”

And she started wittering on about Keats and Yeats and loads of other poets who all seemed to end in – eets, as far as I could make out.

“But do any poems leap to mind when you think about Spring maybe, Miss Malone? You know – seasonal stuff, flowers and grass and that?” interrupted Rosie as soon as Baloney drew breath.

Baloney stopped in her tracks. “Ah, now Spring! Well, of course, there’s always Wordsworth,” she gushed, sounding quite misty-eyed. “I wander’d lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills, when all at once I saw a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils…”

“DAFFODILS!” I yelled, clutching the others. “Perfect! Think of all those daffodils out in the playground!”

“What about them?” said Fliss, looking confused.

Kenny and I rolled our eyes at each other. Fliss had absolutely no imagination.

“Well, we could…er…we could…” I began, waving my arms around in search of inspiration.

“We could copy the shape of a daffodil and maybe write the poem inside it?” offered Lyndz shyly.

“Lyndsey Collins, you’re a genius!” roared Kenny, flinging her arms round all of us and launching into a little jig which had us all creased up within seconds.

“Come, come, gels!” said Baloney reprovingly. “This is a library, not a…”

“…circus, yes, we know Miss Balo—” As Lyndz began to choke with helpless laughter, Kenny quickly corrected herself. “Er, Miss Maloney I mean. Could you tell us where we can find the poem, please?”

Lyndz’s desperate attempts not to giggle at Kenny’s mega gaffe had resulted in…you guessed it…HICCUPS. We all took it in turns to bash her on the back as we followed Baloney’s tall shape towards the Poetry section. She hiccuped the whole way through Baloney’s explanation about looking after library books and returning it by the end of the week, and – can you believe it? – was still hiccuping as we turned to leave.

“Lyndsey Collins, this is a library, not a circus,” I said solemnly, which only made Lyndz worse.

“Frankie, you’re not helping,” hissed Rosie. “Try holding your breath, Lyndz.”

“Hold your breath and think of the moon,” said Fliss suddenly, as we emerged into the playground.

“What?!” we all shrieked.

“Fliss, you nutcase, how’s that supposed to work?” scoffed Kenny.

Fliss shrugged her shoulders, all annoyed. “Don’t ask me. I just know that’s what Mum told Callum to do the other day, and his hiccups stopped.”

“Phew – hic – so long as ali – hic – aliens don’t come into it,” quavered Lyndz. “Might as well give it a go.”

She seized her wrist and closed her eyes. “Moon,” she began intoning. “Hic. Moon. Moon.”

“Come on,” said Kenny, grabbing my hand. “Let’s go and get ourselves a daffodil.” And she dragged me over to the school flowerbed, leaving Fliss and Rosie making encouraging moon noises at Lyndz.

“Hey, wait a sec,” I said, warning bells ringing. “What do you mean, get ourselves a daffodil? We aren’t allowed to pick any of these flowers, you know that. Anyway, what do you want an actual daffodil for?”

“So we can copy it, of course!” groaned Kenny. “You can be dead thick sometimes, Franks. How else are we going to draw a good daffodil shape to write the poem in? They won’t miss one itsy-bitsy flower. See, there’s thousands of them!”

“But…” I bleated anxiously. I had a really bad feeling about this.

“Come on, Frankie! Stop being so wet!” scorned Kenny. “Look, there’s a perfect one over there.”

She pointed at this gorgeous, velvety, trumpety yellow daffodil, sitting temptingly right in the middle of the flowerbed.

“Just keep watch, will you?” Kenny said, and started moving purposefully towards her goal.

“No Kenny, don’t…” I began.

“Hey, that stupid idea of Fliss’s actually worked!” Rosie said, panting over to me, with Fliss and Lyndz following behind her. “I couldn’t believe…Er, what’s Kenny doing?”

“Picking a daffodil,” I said wretchedly. “To copy.”

Fliss took in the situation in one second flat, and turned papery-white. She hates getting into trouble. And this could really get us into trouble. “Kenny!” she screeched. “Don’t you dare! Mrs Poole will go mental!”

Kenny was tiptoeing daintily across the flowerbed, her eyes firmly on the trophy daffodil in the middle. I stared around desperately, hoping that no members of staff would look over in this direction.

Wait a second. What was going on? There were two familiar figures crouching down at the other end of the flowerbed. And it looked very much like they were about to…

“Psst, Kenz!” I hissed. “M&M alert! Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Kenny turned. Her eyes narrowed into little Ninja slits when she saw Emma Hughes wrapping her grubby little fingers around the stem of a daffodil. “Why, the crawly creeps!” she breathed. “I’ll bet you my Leicester City scarf that they’re copying our idea!! I’ll bet they were hiding in the library when we were talking to Baloney – typical!”

At that exact moment, Emma Hughes saw us. She jumped like she’d been stung (I wish), and came stomping over to us. We just stood and gawped as Kenny and Emma thrust their faces right up close to each other.

“Hey, you copycat worm!” Emma stormed at Kenny. “Don’t you dare tell me you’re going to do that poem, I wander’d lonely as a—”

“I might say the same of you, Queen Quasimodo!” hissed Kenny. “Can’t you ever think for yourself? We had the idea first!”

“This was our idea first!” Emma spluttered, her hands balling up into fists. “So get out of it!”

Emily Berryman and dozy old Alana ‘Banana’ Palmer came running up just then.

“You tell her, Ems!” squealed Emily.

“I’ll bet you anything Sausage Brain Baloney told the M&Ms exactly the same as she told us,” groaned Lyndz, chewing her fingernails anxiously and looking round the playground for any marauding teachers.

“Duh! I didn’t know she was that stupid!” muttered Rosie.

“Well…no one said anything to Baloney about it being a secret,” Fliss pointed out.

“Well, now look! We’ve got a serious situation on our hands here, guys,” I moaned, twisting great handfuls of hair up in my hands.

Then, if you can believe it, things got worse. Kenny reached down and grabbed her trophy daffodil, pulling it right up by the roots and waving it in Emma’s face.

“Well, I’m the first to pick a daffodil, so I think you could say we’re the winners on this one, Emma!” she said triumphantly.

“Oh yeah?” shouted Emma, enraged. And bent down and grabbed TWO!

Three, four, seven, ten daffodils…Kenny and Emma just kept picking the flowers likethey were mad or something. It all became a blur of yellow, white and orange – and earth showered down from the flower roots as they got madder and madder, grabbing flowers left, right and centre.

“I’VE…GOT…MORE…THAN…YOU!” panted Kenny.

“NO…WAY…JOSE!!!” Emma roared in reply.

I saw what Kenny was about to do before anyone else did.

“No, Kenny!” I yelled, launching myself at her just as she rugby-tackled Emma. Fliss grabbed me. Rosie grabbed Fliss. And Lyndz grabbed Rosie. And in one massive jumble, we fell. Right across the middle of Mrs Poole’s prize flowerbed.

“Stop, stop, stop!” I panted, wrestling with Kenny’s flailing arms. Mud and petals were squashed into the grass, and everyone was shrieking fit to wake the dead.

A very tall, menacing shadow fell across the tangle of arms and legs and flowers.

“Just What Exactly,” said a terrifyingly familiar voice, “Is Going On Here?”

Holy moley. Nuclear war had nothing on Mrs Poole. You could see this huge thundercloud over her head, complete with forked lightning zigzagging out of it. We all leapt up in one terrified huddle, and followed her in silence as she stormed across the playground, virtually pushing over all the small kids who were standing in the way and staring.

She marched us straight down the corridor, where we trailed earthy muck all over the clean floor-tiles, and straight into her office. Once there, she went and stood behind her desk, breathing deeply, her knuckles resting on the desktop. She looked like a crazed bull, facing a row of petal-strewn mud monsters. It would have been quite funny if it hadn’t been so totally awful.

When she had calmed down a bit – which took a good minute or two and felt like forever – she began to speak.

“Explain.”

Everyone started talking at once.

“Miss, it was Kenny…”

“It was Emma who started it, Miss…”

“We were just trying to stop them…”

“We only wanted one daffodil…”

“One – at – a – time,” she said, pegging each word out like clothes on a washing line. “Francesca Thomas. Speak.”

I stared helplessly at Kenny, not wanting to land her in it.

“Please, Mrs Poole,” said Kenny, “it wasn’t Frankie’s fault. She was trying to stop the fight between Emma and me.”

I looked at her in mute thanks.

“Fliss, Rosie and Lyndz were trying to stop the fight too,” continued Kenny bravely. She’s got serious guts, that girl. “But I wouldn’t listen. Don’t blame them, Miss.”