by Jana Hunter

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Have you been Invited to all these Sleepovers?

Sleepover Kit List

Copyright

About the Publisher

Hi, how are you doing? Have you come to see the play? I’ve saved you a front-row seat. Excuse me, I must get on. I’ve got a ton of little black noses to paint before curtain time…

We’ve got a conveyor belt going. Lots of little squirrels and weasels and bunnies, to say nothing of baby hedgehogs. Frankie is doing the spiky faces and Kenny is doing the furry ones. Rosie is doing the eyes and Lyndz is doing the whiskers. Our practice in Musical Make-up is a big help. (I’ll tell you about Musical Makeovers, when I’ve got a second to spare. Right now this is a madhouse.)

The music starts and the beautiful, the wonderful, new school curtains swish open.

Phew! Maybe this is a good moment to tell you all about it. You know, why the Sleepover Club is helping with the make-up and costumes for the Cuddington Players’ production of The Wind in the Willows and all that.

What? You don’t know what the Sleepover Club is? Where have you been living, Planet Nowhere? No, sorry. I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but everyone knows about the most coo-el gang of girls ever to hit Cuddington! We are: Frankie, Kenny, Lyndz, Rosie and me, Fliss (Felicity Proudlove in case you didn’t know). Our gang is famous for its ace sleepovers where we have fun with a capital F. We’re also famous for getting into trouble with a capital T, but it’s not our fault. We just can’t stop ourselves when we get going. Anyway, before all the big trouble with the clingfilm and the spots and the horror of being hauled off to prison for causing permanent damage to Molly the Monster’s face, we have to go back to the beginning…

It all started a few weeks ago in Assembly. Mrs Poole, our headmistress, was making an announcement about the Cuddington Players.

“This year,” she said, “the Cuddington Players will be using our very own school stage to put on their production of The Wind in the Willows. And I think they’re going to want some of you little ones to be animals…”

There was the usual Cuddington Juniors’ excitement as the infants bounced about and squealed. And in the hullabaloo, Lyndz leant over and hissed, “Yeah, and my dad’s the producer of the play!”

Lindsey’s dad, Keith, is Head of the Art Department at the Comprehensive we’re going to after Year Six. But as if that wasn’t enough, he produces plays with the Cuddington Players in his spare time!

“The only trouble is,” Mrs Poole was going on, “we still don’t have any curtains for our stage…”

Right on cue the whole school went, “Ohhhh…” just like the Teletubbies when they don’t want to wave bye-bye.

Mrs Poole nodded. “Yes, ‘Ohhhh’. We can’t have a play without curtains now, can we?”

“Noooo, Mrs Poole…” went all the little infants in the front row, as if they remembered last year’s school play when everyone had to line up on stage for the final bow in complete darkness (so the audience wouldn’t see us) and we all landed in one gigantic heap on the floor. You should’ve seen us, it was well funny. Ooops, sorry. I was telling you about Mrs Poole’s announcement, wasn’t I? Honestly, I am such a fluff-brain, sometimes…

“So what are we going to do about it, boys and girls?” Mrs Poole continued. “Any ideas? Hands up!”

There was silence while everyone thought hard. Then, suddenly, hands started going up all over the hall.

“Miss, we could paint pretend curtains!” said a little kid.

“Or borrow the curtains from the windows in the hall,” suggested the gruesome Emily Berryman in her gruff goblin voice.

“Yes, Miss,” simpered her goody-goody mate, Emma Hughes. “We could take them down and…blah blah blah…” (That girl loves the sound of her own voice.)

But luckily Mrs Poole said “no” to the totally stoo-pid hall curtain idea. If she hadn’t, we’d never have heard the last of it from our sworn enemies the M&Ms (that’s the Sleepover Club’s nickname for the Gruesome Twosome, by the way).

The whole school went on suggesting things and some of the ideas were truly sad, like lining up the dustbins on stage, or having a row of kids to shield the performers, or even dear old Kenny’s lame-brain idea of draping swimming towels over ladders! (I ask you!)

At this rate the Cuddington Players would have what you might call a naked stage.

Then, Frankie the Wizz had one of her brilliant ideas. “Miss, why don’t we have a fundraiser to buy new curtains?”

We’ve had fundraisers before, and our gang are ace at them.

“That’s an excellent idea, Francesca,” beamed Mrs Poole and all the teachers nodded delightedly. “Don’t you think so, boys and girls?”

The whole school went, “Yes, Mrs Poole!” while Lyndz and I thumped Frankie on the back to congratulate her.

“Three cheers for Frankie!” shouted out Kenny. “Hip, hip, hooray!”

Well, you know how a bunch of school kids can get totally mad sometimes? This was one of those times. The cheering and clapping started big time, and I mean big time. (One little kid got so excited he wet himself!) When that happened Mrs Poole frowned and told us to go to our classrooms and work on our fundraiser ideas sensibly.

So that’s how our class competition came up. It was the cute, the completely dishy, Ryan Scott’s idea. He’s definitely the best-looking boy in our school and luckily he happens to be in my class! (My mum says I’m too young to go out with boys, but when I look at Ryan Scott I know she’s dead wrong.)

Anyway, our teacher, Mrs Weaver, thought Ryan was the bee’s knees too right then, because she thought his idea was just as brilliant as Frankie’s. “Yes, Ryan,” she gushed. “I think if we have a class competition to raise the most money, we’ll have the curtains in no time!”

“In Cuddington Playtime you mean, Miss!” joked Kenny and everyone, including Mrs Weaver, laughed. (Mrs Weaver might be strict sometimes, but you can always have a joke with her if you get her in the right mood.)

“YAY!” the whole class cheered.

A competition! Did I tell you Cuddington School was the best?

“I know what we could do!” Lyndz was mega excited at the thought of helping out her dad. “We could give pony rides!”

Lyndz is horse mad, and she’s always trying to get as many rides in as she can.

But practical Rosie knocked that one on the head. “I’m scared of horses,” she reminded Lyndz. “And anyway, what about the little kids?”

“They’d most likely wet the saddle,” giggled Kenny, and we all burst out laughing, remembering the kid in Assembly.

So pony rides were O-U-T out.

We were trying to come up with fundraiser ideas for our team. Mrs Weaver had split the class into groups and told us to give each team a name. Ours was the Sleepover Gang (natch!) and the goody-goody M&M’s were, can’t you guess…the Little Angels. (Puke!) They were so jealous that Frankie had come up with the fundraiser idea, they were determined to show the world what little darlings they were (NOT!) and win.

“What about a sponsored bike ride?” suggested Rosie. But everyone said that was no good because Ryan Scott’s team, Hot Wheels, was bound to do that.

“We could have a jumble sale,” said Frankie. (Personally I think she had used up all her good ideas in one shot with the fundraiser scheme.) “You know, collect rubbish and sell it.”

“Yeah, I could put my house in it,” muttered Rosie to herself. Rosie’s house was a bit of a tip since her dad, the builder, had left and sometimes it got her down.

“Or put the M&M’s rubbish team up for sale…”

“Yeah.”

“So what about a jumble sale, then?” persisted Frankie, and I could tell she had something up her sleeve. When the Wizz gets that “look” anything can happen!

“Bor-ing!” Kenny yawned. “A sponsored football match would be much more coo-el.”

“Yeah, and who’d be on the team?” I wanted to know. “Not me, that’s for sure.”

Kenny pretended to do a header right in my face. “Goal!” she cheered and Mrs Weaver looked over to quieten us down.

“Well, what about an animal show, then?” (Lyndz could never let go of her favourite subject.) “I could borrow a horse from the stables and parade it on stage.”

“Whoever heard of a horse on stage?” laughed Frankie, and she reared like a stallion, bashing into the book display and making it topple over.

“You’ve heard of a stage coach, haven’t you?” Lyndz grinned.

“D’you want to go on the stage?” chuckled Rosie. “There’s one leaving in two minutes!”

That started us off on one of our horsey joke fests. The jokes were well daft. Read them and you’ll see what I mean:

Q. Heard the one about the pantomime horse who tripped over his own tail?

A. He didn’t know which end was up!

Q. How d’you hire a horse?

A. You put two bricks under him!

Book Titles:

Twenty Years in the Saddle by Major

Bumsore

Desert Cactus Cowboy by Evan Sorer

Rodeo Rider by I. Hangon

We were killing ourselves so much by then it made Kenny do her horse whinny imitation and soon we were mucking about, in true sleepover style, snorting and neighing away. Any moment now, Lyndz would start hiccuping.

“Er, Sleepover Gang, if you can’t do this sensibly…” began Mrs Weaver and the M&Ms smirked gleefully at the prospect of us getting into trouble.

“Sorry, Miss,” said Frankie innocently. “We were only trying out ideas.”

“Well, try them out quietly,” warned Mrs Weaver. She was busy drawing up a huge graph (probably planning on a major Maths project) and she looked like she meant business.

“Yes, Mrs Weaver.”

We seriously got back down to it, then. This was a better skive than slogging away in our Maths workbooks, and we didn’t want to ruin the chance for a laugh. So for a while the Sleepover Gang acted more angelic than the goody-goody M&Ms themselves.

Mind you, all the time the rest of the gang were talking and thinking I was fizzing away inside, like a firework ready to explode. See, I had this brilliant idea. The coolest, most wonderful brainwave I’d ever had in my entire life. Oh, you’re wondering why I didn’t come right out with it, are you? Well, it’s weird. When something matters to me, you know like, really matters, I can sometimes go all shy about it, even round my best friends. D’you ever get like that?

Suddenly, though, I couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Let’s have a Makeover!” I blurted out, and I could tell my cheeks had gone bright red with excitement. “You know, make up people and charge for it.”

“Coo-el!” said Lyndz.

“We could even give fashion advice and dress people up…” I was getting really excited.

Rosie interrupted me. “Where would we get the class gear for that?”

“We could borrow glamorous gear from my gran’s dress shop. And make stuff out of our own clothes…” I began, but football-mad Kenny couldn’t let that one go.

“Glamorous gear. How girlie-girlie!” Kenny (who lives in her Leicester City football strip) wrinkled her nose in disgust.

I could feel myself going red, and bit my lip.

“Using your own clothes is all right for you,” Frankie laughed, giving my long blonde hair a playful tug. “A Fashion Victim like you has got the best gear in the whole school.”

I blushed even harder. Can I help it if I love clothes and make-up? It’s a Proudlove family tradition.

“We could use my mum’s dressing-up clothes,” offered Lyndz, whose mum has the best dressing-up box ever.

I flashed Lyndz a grateful smile. (She’s the soft-hearted one in our gang and you can always rely on her to rescue you.)

“Anyway, we don’t need flash gear,” I explained, feeling a bit more confident. “We can use old stuff and make it totally fab.”

“How?” asked Rosie suspiciously.

“You know, decorate T-shirts and jeans with sequins and beads and stuff! We could do fabric paint designs, embroider flowers and sew on floaty bits…” I’m going to be a fashion designer when I grow up and I couldn’t wait to try out some of my own gorgeous designs.

“Hmmm…” mused Frankie and I could see she was getting into it. Frankie is also known as Spaceman because she loves jewellery, sequins and nail varnish – anything as long as it’s silver.

“We could sell jewellery,” I prompted her, dead innocent like.

“Yeah! We could make our own!” said Frankie excitedly. “I was thinking of selling some of mine at the jumble sale anyway.”

So that was it. Frankie was never one to let go a chance to thread beads and glue diamonds. That’s why she’d been so keen to have a boring old jumble sale.

I wasn’t complaining, though, ‘cos Frankie’s vote tipped the balance. And suddenly the gang saw that a Makeover was the neatest, sweetest little plan that yours truly had ever come up with!

Of course, Kenny had to be the fly in the ointment. “Oh, no, a Makeover!” she groaned, making out to stick her fingers down her throat. “Urrrgh!”

“It’ll be fun,” I retorted. “We can get ideas for outfits to wear to my Auntie Jill’s wedding.”

“The wedding, of course!” Lyndz squealed excitedly.

“Hey, that’d be great,” Frankie agreed.

My Auntie Jill, our very own Snowy Owl from Brownies, is a big favourite with our gang (especially now she’s marrying Mark, our old tennis instructor). And Auntie Jill had promised that her wedding would be “different” (which could mean anything with my crazy auntie) so I reckoned a Makeover was a golden opportunity to make fab gear for it. Trouble is, I’d forgotten how Kenny hates weddings and romance almost as much as she hates frilly clothes, girlie-girlie colours and make-up.

“Pass me the vomit bag!” she heaved.

I could see Kenny was going to take a lot of convincing, but funnily enough it was the ghastly M&Ms (earwigging as usual) who changed her mind.

“You lot doing Makeovers!” they sneered. “What do you know? You’re too ugly!”

“You lot as Little Angels!” I snapped right back. “You’re too nasty!”

“Just wait till we do all our good turns,” sniffed Emma huffily.

“We’ll have the whole of Cuddington eating out of our hands,” agreed the Goblin in her horrible gruff voice.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah…”

They went on winding us up about how they were going to win the prize, by running errands and doing odd jobs. Totally sick-making. Mind you, we gave back as good as we got. We pointed out that scrubbing floors and babysitting bratty kids wasn’t half so much fun as doing makeovers, and they knew it.

Huh! One-nil to the Sleepover Gang! But before Total War could break out, Mrs Weaver was clapping her hands for everyone to be quiet.

“Year Six, I’ve made this graph,” she announced, holding up a huge sheet of coloured card, “to show the progress of your fundraising competition. (So the graph wasn’t for Maths! Phew!) “It has the name of every team in the class, and Mrs Poole informs me that the Cuddington Players will award a prize to the winning team.”

A prize for the winning team!

The Sleepover Gang had to get it.

There was only one thing to do. Have a Sleepover to work on our make-up skills. Luckily, we were having one at my house that night!

Look out, Little Angels!

If my mum could have seen the state of our living room she’d have had a blue fit. I’d tipped my make-up drawer on to the sofa and there was lip gloss, nail varnish, body glitter, transfers and tiny pots of eye gel strewn all over it. It was even spilling on to Mum’s prized white carpet.

Well, it was her fault for making us have our Sleepover in the living room. (Since the last Sleepover we’ve had to use the living room so we wouldn’t wake up the twins. Cheek!)

So we were trying to make the best of it. Frankie was threading beads and Lyndz was stretched out on the floor, surrounded by all her art stuff. (She was working on the poster advertising our Makeover.)

“What about this?” she said, holding up a drawing of a girl covered in make-up.

“Aaagh! The curse of the pink lippy!” Kenny screamed, and before I could rescue my make-up, she’d done a pretend faint backwards right on to it.

“Kenny!” I tried to rescue my multi-coloured eye shimmer palette from under Kenny’s bum.

Kenny lifted one thigh unhelpfully. “Ooops.” Then, seeing I wasn’t laughing, she got all businesslike to prove she wasn’t just being a nuisance. (Huh!)

“I think it’s time we made some group decisions,” she said pointedly, flipping open her Sleepover diary. “So. Who’s doing what?”

Er, actually this was all my idea, but I let Kenny get on with running the show. You know Kenny. Bossing everyone around would get her into the mood for makeovers, pink lippy or no pink lippy.

“Jewellery by Frankie!” announced Frankie, looking up from the tray of beads balanced on her knees.

Kenny wrote that down. Then Frankie piped up again, “Oh, and I’ll do face painting.”

“Wh – what do you mean?” I spluttered. “You’re doing the jewellery.”

Frankie threw me a withering look. “And who has the face paints?”

My cheeks burned. “But I want to do make-up…” I finished lamely.

Kenny closed her eyes and sighed. “So, if you do regular make-up, Frankie can do face painting. OK?”

I busied myself with putting the top back on a lip gloss.

“Well?”

There was a silence, where it felt like everyone was thinking what a selfish thing I was to demand my rights. But it wasn’t like that. This was the first time in ages I’d had a major idea and Kenny was acting like it was nothing. I was shoved out at home and now I was shoved out with my best friends. It wasn’t fair.

Then good old Rosie chimed in, changing the subject. “I’ll do style makeovers in school and charge for them,” she said. (Her favourite TV show’s where they take someone with really awful dress sense and change her image completely. Now Rosie-posie wanted to do the same on some fashion disaster.)

“OK, ‘Rosie – style makeovers’.” Kenny wrote it down in her Sleepover diary. “So who’s doing hair?”

Pointing our fingers at her, we all shouted out, “YOU!”

“Noooo!” groaned Kenny, but you could tell she was secretly pleased. Her mum does hairdressing at home so she must have learnt something. Actually, hair was one of the other things I was dying to do, but there was no way I could make a fuss now, was there?

Lyndz consoled Kenny as if doing hair was a punishment. “You can practise haircutting on us, Kenny.”

(Not on my hair, she won’t! I vowed.)

“You’ll all probably end up bald!” Kenny warned, but she wrote down her speciality just the same.

I was feeling well bad that everyone had latched on to Kenny’s ideas so quickly. Didn’t my ideas count for anything? But it meant so much for the Sleepover Gang to beat the Little Angels in the competition, so I had to give in! And I have to admit it was fun getting into it. In the end, this is what we came up with:

1. Fliss – beauty treatments and make-up

2. Rosie – style makeovers

3. Lyndz – advertising and manicures

4. Frankie – jewellery and face painting

5. Kenny – hairdressing

“We should do a ‘Swap the Head’ challenge,” giggled Lyndz, when it was all written down in Kenny’s diary.

“What’s that?”

“You know, you cut up pictures of people and swap their heads around. Then you charge for guessing whose body belongs where.”

Frankie gave a snort of laughter. “I can just see Emily Berryman’s body with the school hamster’s head!”

“And Mrs Pickernose with its bum!”

“Wicked!”

Mrs Pickernose is our name for our gruesome dinner lady, Mrs Pickett. (Mind you, Pickett is a good name for her too, because she’s always picking on us lot.)

“Imagine Dishy Dave with Mr Short’s knobbly knees!” laughed Rosie.

We’d seen Mr Short’s knees when he wore shorts at the school fête and they were well knobbly.

“Oh, Dave, Dave!” I sighed, pretending to swoon. “I never knew your knees were so knobbly!”

Everyone shrieked with laughter and Lyndz went into a major bout of hiccups (natch!). We had to bash her on the back, and scare her with horrible faces, to try and stop her.

Suddenly, there was a loud banging on the ceiling that made us all jump out of our skins. “Keep it down in there!” my mum called out. “I’m trying to get the twins to bed.”

As if we didn’t know. Already, the babies’ ear-splitting howls were interrupting our important Sleepover Gang business. Why couldn’t they be the ones to “keep it down”, I’d like to know? Those twins were taking over the whole house!

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Mum’s knocking had made the gang go embarrassingly quiet. I knew just what they were thinking…

My mum used to do all sorts of cool things for our sleepovers, making scrummy things to eat and treating us dead grown-up, but these days all she could think of was my baby brother and sister. Sleepovers were nothing but a nuisance to her since they came along and now she’d banished us to the living room it was even worse. It was really winding me up.

Didn’t I count for anything in this house any more?

“I know,” I said, trying to shrug it off, “let’s play Musical Make-up.” (Those twins were not going to ruin my Sleepover!)

“Musical Make-up. Brillo!” squealed Frankie, forgetting to be quiet. She leapt up, knocking her tray of beads all over the floor.

Who cares? I thought. We’ll clean up later.

Musical Make-up is the Sleepover Gang’s own version of musical chairs. Difference is, when the music stops, instead of just finding a chair, you plonk yourself opposite someone. Then the two of you make up one side of the other’s face (both working at the same time

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