Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Sneak peek at St Grizzle’s School for Girls, Goats and Runaway Grannies!
About Karen McCombie
About Becka Moor
Copyright
I’ve been staring at penguins’ bums for quite a long time now.
On the TV, I mean – we don’t have any real, live, fishy-breathed ones flip-flapping about in the living room or anything.
I know staring at penguins’ bums might sound kind of fun, but fun things turn into boring things when you do them too often. And we stare at penguins’ bums A LOT in our house.
It’s cos my mum’s a zoologist. You’d THINK that’d mean exciting stuff, like she’d take me to hang out with pygmy hippos or stroke jaguars or stingrays or ocelots or something.
But no. It’s all about endless film clips of penguins, penguins, penguins and their bums, bums, bums, just cos Mum’s doing this important project thingammee about how they waddle or something.
“…so, Dani, that’s when my boss told me…” Mum is saying as she kneels in front of the TV, her eyes glued to the widdle-waddling birds, “…I mean, it’s always so difficult to get funding…”
I know this sounds bad, but I sort of switch off when Mum’s talking about her work. Especially right now, since my best friend Arch will be here any minute and I’ve been daydreaming about what we’ve got planned for the afternoon.
“…such an amazing opportunity…” Mum carries on, though I think I might have missed a bit. OK, a lot. “…it’ll mean big changes, of course, but…”
I sit fidgeting on the sofa, twisting the head of my Tyrannosaurus rex (plastic one, not real – duh!). The thing is, I’m not that interested in any big changes happening at Mum’s work. I don’t mean to sound rude – I bet Mum wouldn’t exactly find it fascinating if I told her they’re laying new floor-tiles in the smelly boys’ toilets at school.
And it’s not just me – my dog Downboy is fidgety, too. Normally he loves “ARF! ARF! ARF!”ing at any random animals that pop up on telly, but today he’s had enough of penguins and is entertaining himself by licking my knees through the holes in my skinny jeans instead.
I wonder how much longer Arch’ll be, I think to myself, as I stop nibbling the end of one of my messy plaits long enough to shove Downboy away. (He comes straight back and starts eating the laces on my beat-up trainers.)
Then all of a sudden – right in the middle of a waddle – Mum finally presses pause on the remote control.
The penguins on screen freeze like they’re playing a game of big-bummed Statues.
“So?” says Mum, turning and looking at me expectantly.
“So … that was great,” I reply, flashing Mum my best pretend ooh-that-was-interesting! smile as I scramble up off the sofa.
“Er, glad you enjoyed it,” says Mum, sounding a bit confused. “But more importantly, what do you reckon, Dani?”
“Huh?” I mumble vaguely, hovering halfway to standing.
What is Mum on about? Whatever it is, she’d better tell me quick, cos Arch is arriving any minute to make our latest mini-movie. It’s our thing. We got into doing mini-movies after we found these totally funny clips on YouTube. Some little kid’s parents got hold of his toy dinosaur collection and made films with them when he was asleep. They had the dinos doing stuff like watching Toy Story with teeny bowls of popcorn or all piling on his blue plastic scooter and zooming across the dining-room floor.
The clips were so cool, we decided to make our OWN films with a bunch of random ex-toys we didn’t play with any more, plus some extras from the local charity shop. Between us we have forty-six. They are:
• 9 Beanie Boos
• 8 dinosaurs (all kinds, but my favourite is the T rex)
• 8 teddies (various sizes)
• 7 LEGO figures
• 5 Barbies
• 4 Star Wars characters (Chewbacca, Yoda, R2-D2 and a one-armed Stormtrooper)
• 2 Furbys (broken/silent)
• 2 Elmers
• 1 unicorn (tiddly)
We used to have TWO unicorns, but Downboy ate the big one in the middle of a Doctor Who scene me and Arch were filming, which was pretty annoying, since it took AGES to tape the rounded bit of an egg box to the big unicorn’s head and turn it into Strax the Sontaran. We recast using a small teddy – moulding a Sontaran domed head out of Play-Doh since Downboy had eaten the rest of the egg box. We stuck it up on YouTube and it got the most views we’ve ever had – one hundred and three.
Our best total before that (sixty-nine views) was for our One Direction music vid, which starred Chewbacca as Harry Styles.
“Dani…?” Mum says, with a little uncertain frown on her forehead.
“Uh-huh?” I mutter, suddenly sure I just heard a car door shut. Fingers crossed it’s Arch getting dropped off by his dad. I can’t wait to get started on today’s mini-movie – we’re studying the Anglo-Saxons in class so we’ve decided to film a battle. It’s going to star the Beanie Boos as Viking invaders and the teddies as Saxons.
“Dani!” barks Mum, like she’s trying to get my attention. “I said, what do you reckon to my news?”
Mum is smiling hopefully at me.
Hopefully I will give her an answer that makes sense, since I wasn’t really listening.
I mean, there was stuff about ‘in the wild’ and ‘big changes’ at work or whatever.
And before that, I heard something that sounded like, “Blah, blah, RESEARCH, blah, PENGUINS, blah, blah, OPPORTUNITY, blah, blah, EXPEDITION, blah, blah, THREE, blah, MONTHS, blah, blah.”
“I reckon,” I say warily, “that it’s … good?”
Mum breaks into a huge grin.
Yesss! By total fluke, I said the right thing.
“Dani Dexter – come HERE!” she calls out to me, her arms wide.
Uh-oh.
She said something important, and I MISSED it.
Panicking a little bit, I let myself be squished by an enormous hug and pat Mum worriedly on the back with the dinosaur I’m still clutching.
“You are the BEST, most FANTASTIC, most UNDERSTANDING daughter a mother could ever have. You know that, don’t you?” Mum murmurs into the side of my head.
BING-BOINNNNGGGG! goes the doorbell, before I get a chance to figure out what she’s on about.
“ARF! ARF! ARF!” barks Downboy, hurtling into the hall and launching himself at the front door with a dull thud and a scrapetty racket of claws.
Downboy jumps up at stuff all the time. And he chews EVERYTHING, especially things he’s definitely not meant to, like shampoo bottles, passports and wasps.
When he was a puppy we took him to dog training classes, but he kept jumping up at all the other owners and chewing the trainer’s notes, and Mum was too embarrassed to take him any more.
Mum also gets embarrassed when people ask what kind of dog Downboy is and I say a Box-a-Poo. Or a Poo-Box. But that’s what he is – his curly fur is cos he’s part poodle and his big smiley mouth is the boxer in him.
“Downboy! Get DOWN!” Mum yells, her lovely, mother-daughter-Tyrannosaurus cuddle moment spoiled.
Phew.
“I’ll go – it’ll be Arch,” I tell her, wriggling free and racing off.
I shake my T rex in front of Downboy’s nose and, as soon as he’s distracted, I squish around him and tug the door open.
“Hey!” says Arch, tossing his floppy fringe out of his eyes.
He’s holding a small blue backpack, stuffed with his random ex-toys. I have the same one in red for mine.
“Hey!” I say back to Arch, whipping the dinosaur out of Downboy’s reach and waving it in the air to keep him entertained.
Then something peculiar happens. As Downboy leaps and jumps at me, I don’t even try to push him away. That’s cos I’ve JUST remembered another chunk of Mum’s one-sided conversation. She said something about me being ‘bored in school’. Why would she say that, I wonder…? What exactly did I miss back there?
“You OK, Dani?” asks Arch, grabbing Downboy by the collar.
“Er… I’ve just got to check something,” I reply, then turn and pad back towards the living room, with Arch and my overexcited dog following behind.
I have a question that needs answering. Urgently.
“Mum – can you say all that stuff again?” I ask.
Mum is crouched down in front of the TV, ejecting the penguin DVD. She frowns up at me and I realize it’s cos I still have my hand – and T rex – in the air. (Oops.)
I lower them both quickly, and accidentally thunk Downboy on the head with the dinosaur. (Oops again.)
“Which part?” says Mum, getting to her feet and waving hello at Arch. “The bit about Professor Green’s study into the physiology of penguins’ gait?”
I blink, my fuzzy brain trying to translate.
“You mean, how penguins waddle?” I check with her, thinking of Mum’s tall, round-tummed boss, who’s studied penguins for so long he’s starting to look an awful lot like one.
“Yes, ‘how penguins waddle’, Dani,” she answers, rolling her eyes. “Is that the bit? Or the part about Professor Green dropping out of the three-month expedition to Antarctica and me taking his place?”
“Wow!” I hear Arch say.
“What?” I squeak.
My stunned response is so weedy and weeny that Mum doesn’t hear above the sound of Downboy yapping and Arch wowing. Anyway, she’s just leaned over to click the space bar on the open laptop.
“Or are you talking about the boarding school you’re going to?”
Wait a minute – ‘bored in school’ = ‘boarding school’?
I stare at the website that has popped up on Mum’s laptop screen. Arch mooches over to stare, too.
“St Grizelda’s School for Girls,” he reads.
Jaunty, plinky-plonky music is playing and there is a big photo of lots of smiling girls in grey skirts (SKIRTS!) and straw hats (HATS?!), standing around a snooty grey stone statue of someone I suppose is St Grizelda.
But I can’t concentrate on that because a panicky voice in my head is shouting…
Three months?
Boarding school?
THREE MONTHS!
BOARDING SCHOOL!
My mum loves penguins’ bums more than me.
Otherwise she’d NEVER dump me in some stuffy old school forever. (OK, three months, which is practically forever, isn’t it?)
The school I go to now is not perfect. But at least…
a) it’s near home
b) it doesn’t have a stupid, stiff uniform, and
c) Arch sits at the table right next to me.
I don’t want to go to some super-smart, fancy-pants, dull-grey-skirt-and-silly-hat-wearing boarding school. I don’t want to go to a school with no Arch in it.
“Ah, you weren’t listening the first time, were you, Dani?” says Mum, spotting that I’m in shock.
I guess it’s a bit like the time she said, “Blah, blah, ROOM, blah, TIDY, blah, blah, DONATIONS, blah, OK?” and I said, “Mmm,” cos I was busy watching The LEGO Movie on DVD.
The next Saturday I felt totally sick when I saw my old rainbow-striped piggy bank, Star Wars lightsaber and Diary of a Wimpy Kid book collection on the Kids’ Toys table at the school jumble sale. I had to use all the pocket money I’d brought along to buy them back.
“Dani? Huh? I mean … wow!” Arch burbles uselessly, as he flops down on to the sofa next to Downboy.
Only now it’s a sad-sounding “wow”, since my best friend has just realized that BOARDING SCHOOL equals me being AWAY.
AWAY from him and from our random ex-toy film project.
AWAY from school and here and home.
AWAY from Mum and Downboy and Granny Viv, of course.
Wait a minute. Granny Viv!
Of course!
“Granny Viv could look after me,” I yelp, since THIS IS AN EMERGENCY.
“Er, no, she couldn’t,” says Mum with a little laugh, as if I’d suggested living with wolves.
I frown a serious “why not?” at her.
“Dani, I barely trust her to look after HIM,” says Mum, pointing at Downboy, who is crunching snackily on the remote control.
I feel my face go prawn pink and angry.
Mum has a thing about Granny Viv. It’s mostly to do with the way she dresses, I think. My neat-freak Mum is embarrassed that her own mother lives in baggy jumpers, leggings and trainers, refuses to own an iron and dyes her hair something called Manic Panic Pillarbox Red.
“For goodness’ sake, your grandmother is not a responsible person,” Mum says to me now with a weary sigh.
OK, so maybe this isn’t ONLY about the way Granny Viv dresses.
I bet right now Mum is thinking about the time when I was eight and Granny Viv looked after me one Saturday while Mum was at a conference. She gave Granny Viv a very strict schedule which included a visit to a library and helping me with my model rainforest project.
Instead, Granny Viv took me to see her friend Eric play a lunchtime set of punk songs in a pub by the canal. (I liked it. I mean, the songs were a bit shouty, but Granny Viv bought me a packet of crisps and two Cokes while I worked on my project, which was nice.)
Mum was hyper-cross when she found out. And I thought her head might EXPLODE when Granny Viv told her we’d somehow, sort of, maybe managed to leave the project – a cardboard box with papier mâché toucans and sloths – on the number twenty-three bus on the way home…
“Anyway, your gran’s studio flat is tiny, so you couldn’t move in with her, even if she WAS reliable…” Mum carries on with her unfair reasoning.
“Yeah, but Granny Viv could move in here while you’re away,” I reason right back at her, ignoring the stuff about Granny Viv being non-reliable.
“Look, NO ONE can be here while I’m away, Dani,” Mum says matter-of-factly. “The local builder’s had a cancellation and can come and fit a new kitchen and bathroom for us while the place is empty and—”
“Yoo hoo!” a familiar voice calls out from the direction of the front door.
Yay! It’s Granny Viv – she’s come to my rescue! (Even if she doesn’t know it yet.)
“ARF! ARF! ARF!” barks Downboy, leaping off the sofa to go and meet her. I feel like doing the same.
“Ha! What a welcome!” I hear Granny Viv say, just before she appears in the living-room doorway with a red-lipped smile as bright as her hair.
But the smile slips and Granny Viv’s eyes narrow as she sniffs out trouble.
“What’s up?” she asks, folding her arms across her chest, jangling all the colourful Indian bangles on her wrists.
“Mrs Dexter’s sending Dani to BOARDING SCHOOL!” Arch bursts out before I can.
“She’s what? Over my dead body!” growls Granny Viv, stepping forwards and wrapping her slightly wrinkly arms around me.
For the second time in five minutes, I’m squashed in a hug.
This time I end up with fluffy purple wool all tickly in my nostrils, as well as a wet hand (Downboy has joined in by nuzzling my fingers and drooling on them).
“Calm down and let me explain!” Mum says. “Today at work I was offered the chance to step in last minute on this amazing expedition to A
ntarctica. I couldn’t say no and, since I leave in two weeks, I’ve had to arrange everything super quickly.”
“Arranging to send Dani to boarding school, you mean? Staying with me isn’t good enough?” growls Granny Viv.
But you know something strange?
Even though Mum and Granny Viv are launching into a proper grumbly, grumpy argument, I decide everything will be all right.
Cos there is no way Granny Viv will let me go to stupid St Grizelda’s School for Girls.
Will she?
I try to cross my fingers, but that’s quite hard to do when you’re…
a) still locked in a tight Gran Hug, and
b) holding a T rex with one hand and trying to push your dog’s jaws away from your T rex with the other.
It’s Monday morning. The gloomiest Monday morning ever.
A week ago, I thought the hardest thing I had to do was make seventeen weeny swords out of lolly sticks and tinfoil for the Vikings versus Saxons mini-movie.
I had no idea that today I’d be doing something MUCH harder.
Harder than realizing – aged four – that flushing my pet goldfish down the toilet so he could have an adventure meant he was never coming back.
Harder than seeing my mum’s face after I cycled into a wall last summer and chipped my front tooth. (Arch says it looks cool, though.)
And that MUCH harder thing was saying goodbye to Granny Viv…
Granny Viv hugged me SO tight as I was leaving that I still have the imprint of her chunky necklace in my cheek, even though me and Mum are now in the car and miles from home, almost at my stupid new school.
And you know, I can still hear Downboy’s whimpers … but that’s probably cos he’s lying asleep and dreaming in the boot, using my backpack as a pillow.
By the way, it wasn’t hard to say goodbye to Arch this morning because he didn’t come and see me off like he was SUPPOSED to. Instead his dad rang Mum and told her we should look on the doorstep.
St Grizzle's School for Girls, Goats and Random Boys Page 1
