“Huh? You want MY permission?” I repeat, confused. “Why?”
“Well, in the words of our founding head teacher, the fabulous Miss Wilberbuttle, a St Grizelda girl is valued. Your opinion is valuable, Dani, as is the opinion of every other girl—”
“—and boy, Mum,” adds Zed, who is sitting next to me.
“Sorry, you’re quite right, Zed,” Lulu replies, happy to be corrected. “Everyone’s opinions are valuable at our school and that’s why I’d like your permission before I do something.”
“All right,” I say shyly but with a ripple of a thrill at being treated like an adult.
“I’d like to ask your grandmother if she’d consider staying on at St Grizzle’s for the rest of this term while you’re here, Dani. She’s been SUCH a help the last couple of days and I don’t just mean with the cooking and the housework. She has such a wonderful energy about her that I think will make her a perfect fit for us all at St—”
“YES!” I blurt out before Lulu can finish.
Granny Viv might be a bit of a loud, over-the-top, sometimes irritatingly huge character but she’s MY loud, over-the-top, sometimes irritatingly huge character and I love her.
And if she gets too much, I’m grown-up and confident enough now to tell her.
Or I can ask Swan to.
“Lovely! I’ll go and put it to her. Wish me luck!” says Lulu, pushing herself upright again and wobbling back down the aisle to the front of the coach.
I’m pretty sure what Granny Viv’s answer will be.
I’m pretty sure she’s been pretty lonely back home, with Mum and me gone and only Downboy to tell her jokes to.
Still, I lean out over Zed with my camera so I can film her reaction to what Lulu is saying.
Only I can’t zoom in on it properly, because a wibbly-wobbly Mexican wave has started and all I can make out are girls’ arms wafting wildly.
But that doesn’t matter, because a moment later a loud “YEEEE–HAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” bursts from the front of the coach.
Hmm, seems like me and Lulu have our answer.
And I’ll be sending Mum yet another mini-film today, showing her that right this cowboy-whooping moment, Granny Viv is the newest recruit at St Grizzle’s School for Girls, Ghosts, and Runaway Grannies…
I knew something was wrong with my best friend Arch when he posted zombies made out of loo-roll tubes on our YouTube channel.
He’d drawn goggle-eyed zombie faces on the cardboard tubes (he’s a really good artist) and added wooden lolly-stick arms on them, but his living-dead monsters didn’t really do much.
They just looked glum and grey as they inched towards the camera...
“What’s this, Dani? Something new from Arch?” asks my classmate Swan, flopping down on the dorm bed beside me while I watch the film again and try to figure out why it’s bothering me. “Hmm … looks a bit gloomy, doesn’t it? Not like his normal funny stuff.”
Swan is right.
Since I got sent away to boarding school, me and Arch have kept in touch in all the usual ways, like messaging and texts and video chats. But most of all, we make and post dumb-but-fun mini-movies for each other to see.
The last one I posted was an action scene from James Bond. I made a tiny tuxedo out of black tissue paper for my little plastic Brontosaurus, then dangled it from Swan’s twin brother’s remote-controlled helicopter with a bit of leftover gift-wrap ribbon I found in the art room. While I filmed, Zed expertly worked the console and made my Secret Agent Dinosaur 007 swoop and zip around the back lawn of the school.
It was excellent, even after the helicopter crash-landed in a rhododendron bush and Swan had to rescue it before Twinkle the school goat leaped in and ate it. (Actually, that was the best bit.)
My James Bond epic was in reply to a mini-movie Arch had posted of himself having a conversation with a sock puppet. I only realized it was meant to be ME when I spotted the brown wool plaits he’d pinned to either side.
It was so cute, especially when another sock puppet – made to look like my fuzzly furred dog Downboy – boinged into the frame and chased sock-puppet Dani around the table. And it got even funnier when my old teacher, Miss Solomon, loomed into shot behind Arch saying, “Well, THIS doesn’t look much like converting fractions to decimals to ME, Archie Kaminski!” before yanking both the socks off his hands in one swift move.
“Y’know, I definitely think something’s up with Arch,” I mumble, pressing my cursor and watching the teeny-weeny zombies lurch moodily towards me again.
“Still not talked to him in a while?” asks Swan.
“Nope. It’s been two whole days now,” I reply, as Swan lazily blows and POPs! one of her perfect pink bubbles of gum. “I guess I’ll have to try the last resort…”
“Which is?” asks Swan, twirling elasticy strings of gum around her finger.
“Calling him on his home phone later,” I tell her, dreading it already.
What if one of Arch’s parents pick up? They have been SO weird since I left, a whole not-quite-a-month ago.
Mr Kaminski – Arch’s normally joke-a-minute dad – sounds all sad and forlorn whenever he answers the phone to me now, like I am a condemned prisoner who’s been given a life sentence, instead of a ten-year-old girl who’s having to spend a term at St Grizelda’s School for Girls while her mum’s on an expedition to the Antarctic.
Mrs Kaminski is even worse… I swear she sounds all choked and teary when she talks to me. She really doesn’t approve of Mum sending her beloved only child away to boarding school.
To be honest, when I first heard Mum’s plan to send me here, I didn’t approve of it either. But even though I’ve tried to explain what it’s actually like here, Mrs Kaminski doesn’t seem to believe that St Grizzle’s isn’t a strict ’n’ stern, no-fun, no-magictastic version of Hogwarts.
I mean, if only she could see the posh, stone statue of St Grizelda out in the driveway at the front of the school … this morning she has an orange Christmas cracker paper hat taped to her head and a plastic shopping bag dangling from each of her outstretched hands.
If only Mrs Kaminski could meet Lulu the head teacher, whose uniform today is a faded “Hello Kitty” T-shirt, frayed-edge denim shorts and flip-flops with giant plastic daisies on them.
If only she could see the goblin flying past the dorm window on a trapeze right now, screaming its head off (in other words, eight-year-old Blossom from Newts Class getting ready for our whole-school lesson in circus skills).
But of course Mr and Mrs Kaminski’s opinions of my new school don’t matter as much as discovering what’s going on with my friend Arch.
Just why do I get the feeling he’s as gloomy as his loo-roll zombies?
Like James (Brontosaurus) Bond, it’s my mission to find out…
STRIPES PUBLISHING
An imprint of Little Tiger Press
1 Coda Studios, 189 Munster Road,
London SW6 6AW
First published as an ebook by Stripes Publishing in 2017.
Text copyright © Karen McCombie, 2017
Illustrations copyright © Becka Moor, 2017
eISBN: 978-1-84715-867-3
The right of Karen McCombie and Becka Moor to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work respectively has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any forms, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
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