Mega Sleepover 5. Louis Catt

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СКАЧАТЬ to look as if I didn’t really want anything. Mum was tidying up, so I thought it might be a good idea to hang up a few mugs. After all, it wasn’t that long since I’d been blasted for being messy, untidy, and a few other things that I couldn’t remember.

      Mum looked at me suspiciously. “Hmm,” she said. “Let me guess… you want to have a sleepover here on Friday night.” Then she nodded. “I don’t see why not. It’ll be much easier for you with Molly away – but I want your room spotless by the time she comes back again!”

      I gave her a huge hug. “I promise!” I said, and I meant it. Cross my heart and hope to die. Then I helped put away all the rest of the crockery.

      I had to wait until school the next day to tell the others. Mum said the phone bill was already staggering under the weight of all my calls, and I’d only said goodbye to my friends half an hour before. When I burst into the cloakroom and told them that the sleepover was all fixed and Molly was going to be away Frankie whooped, Lyndz cheered and Rosie grinned all over her face. Only Fliss shuffled a bit.

      “What’s the matter?” I asked. “You’re not chickening out after all, are you?”

      Frankie banged Fliss on the back. “You said you’d come!”

      Lyndz nodded. “It wouldn’t be the same without you,” she said.

      Fliss started to look really pleased. For a moment I felt bad, and I wondered if we were a bit hard on Fliss sometimes.

      Then she shuffled her feet again. “It’s the burglar,” she said. “My mum isn’t sure if I should spend the night away from home.”

      We all stared at her. “Burglar?” Rosie said. “What burglar?”

      “It was in The Mercury,” Fliss said. “Three houses were broken into last week, and another one this week. One of the houses was just round the corner from where I live!”

      Frankie gave a loud snort. “You’ll be just as safe at Kenny’s house as you are at home,” she said. “After all, it’s only a burglar – it’s not a murderer.”

      Fliss went even pinker. “My mum says it might not be safe. She says burglars often murder people if they get in their way.”

      Frankie made another snorting noise, but Lyndz patted Fliss’s arm. “We could come and collect you,” she said. “I could ask my mum to drive us both to Kenny’s house.”

      Fliss looked a lot happier. “That would be great,” she said.

      I wasn’t really taking much notice. I was thinking that things were getting better by the minute. Friday 13th – no Molly – a spooky sleepover – and now a burglar on the loose! What more could we ask for?

      “Hey!” I said. “Maybe we could hunt down the burglar and catch him! Is there a reward, Fliss?”

      Lyndz gave me a push. “Shut up!” she hissed, because Fliss was staring at me in her rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights kind of way. Catching burglars was about the last thing she would think of as fun.

      “Just kidding,” I said, but I didn’t look at Frankie. I was pretty sure that she was thinking the same as me. But we didn’t have time to discuss the sleepover any more, because the bell for registration rang.

      At lunchtime we got into a huddle to talk about the food, and Fliss was a lot more cheerful. She said she’d make a green cake, and when Rosie said she hoped it would be green inside, as well as having green icing, Fliss giggled and said, “Of course it will.”

      I wondered if Fliss would have green hair ribbons to match.

      “Bags I make the green spaghetti,” Rosie said. “I’ll put currants in it, and they’ll look like dead flies.”

      “Or spiders without legs!” said Fliss, and we all laughed.

      Lyndz said she’d already had an idea for a scary pizza. “What?” Frankie asked, but Lyndz shook her head and wouldn’t say. She’s completely brilliant at cooking so we didn’t make her tell us. If she had a good idea it was worth waiting for!

      “I don’t mind doing the green slime and the jelly spiders and worms,” I said. “But what are you going to do, Frankie?”

      Frankie rolled her eyes. “Wait and see!” she said. “Slugs and snails and puppy dog’s tails!”

      “Yuck!” said Fliss, but she didn’t look totally grossed out.

      You know I said how my jaw kept falling open so I looked like a gasping goldfish? Well, it happened again. As I staggered in through our front door that afternoon, I met Emma coming out with some girl I didn’t know.

      “Hi,” I said, although I didn’t expect a reply. Sometimes Emma pretends I’m invisible when she’s with someone. Either that, or she talks to me as if I’m about six and she’s my ageing aunt. Today I was lucky, this time it was the ageing aunt.

      “Hi,” she said, and ruffled my hair. She knows I hate it, but she still goes on doing it. “Look, Jade – this is my kid sister, Laura.”

      Jade gave me the sort of look you’d give a passing beetle. “Oh,” she said.

      “She’s got loads of funny little friends,” Emma said. “They have a club, and they all sleep over at each other’s houses. Cute, isn’t it?”

      Jade didn’t look as if she agreed, but she nodded anyway. “Yeah. Cute.”

      Emma ruffled my hair again. “You can really have fun on Friday, little sister,” she said. “I’m going to stay with Jade for the weekend. And she and the strange girl walked off.

      I stood and stared after them, my jaw doing its thunking thing. Emma was going away for the whole weekend. Wow! And an idea crept into my head, and once it was there it grew and grew and grew: if I put all Molly’s things in Emma’s room, I could clear my room right out! For the first time ever we could have loads and loads of space!

      I could just imagine it. No Molly hanging around telling us not to touch her things. No squeezing three extra sleeping bags onto the tiny bit of floor between my bed and Molly’s. I could push Molly’s bed right against the wall, push the dressing table back… or we could move the beds the other way… I dashed to the phone to tell Frankie, and to ask her to come round as early as she could on Friday to help.

      Frankie was just as pleased as I was. Then she said something that I’d been thinking. I’d been thinking it, but not saying it on purpose. I suppose I was being superstitious – you can’t be too careful around Friday 13th, can you? But then Frankie came right out and said it.

      “It all seems too good to be true,” she said. “Isn’t Friday 13th meant to be an unlucky day?”

      So I’m blaming all the things that happened after that on Frankie.

      I woke up really early on Friday 13th. СКАЧАТЬ