by Jana Hunter
But she had me worried. Why was she looking more like a spotted monster than ever? Had I really done something awful to her?
For the first time ever I didn’t enjoy the sleeping part of the Sleepover. I tossed and turned all night in my sleeping bag and dreamed of red-hot monsters chasing me through a blazing fire screaming, “It’s the curse of the dreaded lurgy!”
It was well nasty.
Next morning was Sunday and I couldn’t wait to leave Kenny’s house. Luckily, I had to get home early for church, and this was one time I was not going to be late, Sleepover or no Sleepover. It made me feel better to be doing something good.
But I wish the vicar hadn’t gone on so much about sin. Molly’s blistered face kept popping into my head until all I could see were spots before my eyes and the vicar’s face turning bright red.
Yuck.
It wasn’t till Sunday dinner, when I was trying to act normal by sitting down to a nice plate of roast beef and Yorkshire pud, that the phone rang.
I leapt up and ran to answer it before my mum could learn the dreadful truth. “H – hello?” I said warily.
“Molly’s spots are worse,” Kenny hissed down the phone. “They’ve spread on to her body.”
“Oh, no!”
“Oh, yeah,” Kenny giggled. “She’s a right sight. My mum’s had to call the doctor.”
THE DOCTOR! Omigod.
What had I done? They’d put me in prison. They’d name me as a witch. Mum always said how important it was not to practise beauty treatments without a licence. What would she say when she heard her daughter had committed the Skincare Crime of the Century?
I hated being in trouble and I never was if I could help it. But this time it was all my fault and I felt awful. This big icy stone of worry kept plop, plopping into my tummy and churning away in the emptiness.
It was horrible.
Every ordinary, silly thing that happened seemed to have major significance, somehow… My mum serving out the apple crumble. Andy feeding the twins with custard and Hannah and Joe getting it everywhere…
It was as if any minute everything sweet and ordinary was about to change and I would look back on these innocent moments with a terrible longing for my life to be normal again. Now the Little Angels would really win as the goody-goodies of the school, because Felicity Proudlove was bad, bad bad.
Finally, in an effort to feel good again, I helped to clean up the twins. And the funny thing was, I was so worried about my future, I even thought how sweet their sticky little fists were. (I’d never get to see those gooey little fingers again when I was banged up in prison!) My head was beginning to feel hot and bothered and sweaty-cold at the same time. I even felt itchy as if in sympathy with Molly.
Guilt can play funny tricks on the mind, my gran says. Finally, I went upstairs and threw myself on to my bed, in an agony of itchy despair.
Then the dreaded phone rang again, and I knew it was the ghastly news of my doom.
“Oh, dear,” I heard my mum say and my heart dropped, plop! right down to my size five trainers. “Oh, dear no. What did the doctor say? REALLY! Yes, I see. Oh, yes, I certainly will.”
I held my breath and then my mum called upstairs. “Fliss! Come down here.”
It felt like I was going to my execution. My feet were like lead weights as I dragged them one after the other down the steep, steep staircase…
“Let me look at you, Fliss,” said Mum.
“Wh – what…?” I wobbled on to the bottom stair and just stared and stared at her until her face was fuzzy round the edges and she started shrinking further and further away…
Then everything when black.
It was official. The entire Sleepover Gang, and Molly to boot, had contracted chicken pox. Molly’s spotty face wasn’t my fault after all (whew!) but somehow it still felt like I was being punished. I had a raging temperature and sickening nightmares, only to wake to hateful itching spots on every (and I mean every) part of me. (Horrible blistery things that watered when you scratched their nasty little heads off.) I even had one on my tongue. Yuck!
I didn’t see anyone except my mum for four whole days. Every day seemed like a whole week, and every hour went on forever. It got so lonely I even started missing the twins. I could hear them chuckling and playing downstairs and I just wanted to be with them.
I tried to read my teen magazines to get fashion inspiration, but everything seemed like a huge effort. In the end, I just buried my head in the pillow and cried till my face got more swollen and red than ever. I hated being ugly! I know it’s not supposed to matter, but I have always liked having blonde hair and being called a Barbie doll. Now the only kind of toy I looked like was one of the 101 Dalmations!
Worse still, we would lose the competition and probably not get to work on The Wind in the Willows. It wasn’t fair.
Then, just as I was about to give up, Auntie Jill came round. (She’d had chicken pox so she could visit without the worry of contracting the dreaded disease.)
“Hello, there!” she said, poking her head round my bedroom door. “Are you feeling any better?”
Now that she was here, I was! We chatted away for hours and I even showed her my drawings for makeover outfits.
Dear Auntie Jill. She loved them. “You could wear something like that for my wedding,” she said, pointing to a floaty sequin number in pink.
Trust Auntie Jill. She was a real rebel.
“Your mum is driving me mad,” she confided, “worrying about her outfit for the wedding. I told her she’d look good in an old sack. But she keeps moaning about how she’s put on weight since the twins.”
“She’s not fat,” I protested. “She’d look gorgeous in my chiffon trouser outfit.”
“Yeah,” laughed Auntie Jill. “Like something from a harem!”
And we both fell about laughing. It was such a relief. As my gran always says, “Laughter is the best tonic.”
The next day, even though I’d reached the delightful scabby stage (thank you very much!), Mum still said I couldn’t go out. Lazing around my room was dead boring. I wasn’t s’posed to spend forever on my mobile because it cost too much, but I was dying to talk to my friends. So in the end we texted one another:
Me: How r u?
Frankie: Bored. How r u?
Me:
Me: How many spots have u got?
Kenny: 30
Me: Where is your worst spot?
Lyndz: Up my nose
Rosie: Between my toes
Frankie: I’ve got one on my bottom!
After that we had a competition to see who had the most spots. They took a lot of counting and I was the winner with forty-two. Thanks a lot! This was one competition I’d rather have lost.
It was Frankie who got the idea for a Pick-a-thon. Gross, I admit, but the whole gang was so bored by this time, Frankie said she’d have eaten scabs on toast if it meant seeing each other again!
We weren’t contagious any more but our mums said we’d better stick to only seeing each other just in case.
Fine by me!
So, on the sixth day of our quarantine, Kenny’s mum brought the four of them over to my house.
We were so happy to see each other we just hugged and smiled as if we’d been parted for years. Then we trooped up to my room for our delightful Pick-a-thon…
(Not my favourite kind of thing, but it was so good to have a laugh with my friends again, that I joined in.)
“Ready, steady, GO!” said Frankie, and we got to work.
“Oooh! This one’s huge,” squeaked Lyndz, who was working on the one up her nose.
“Not as big as the one on my bum…”
I shook my head at them. “This one’s gruesome.”
“But if you don’t pick it, it’ll ‘grew some’ more!” giggled Frankie, who loved to play on words.
“Eeeuw, I just got a bleedy one,” shrieked Rosie and she grabbed a tissue to dab her knee.
“Only do the scabs that are ready t
o come off,” I warned. “I don’t want you bleeding over my pink carpet.”
“Hey, we could make a delicious scab pie!” chuckled Frankie.
“To go with my bogey stew,” laughed Lyndz.
That set the gang off on a major gross out. They tried to invent the most disgusting recipes. Truly sick-making, but it might make you laugh:
Parrot Dropping pie
Toe Jam tarts
Belly Fluff fondue
Snot Sauce
Fingernail Fancies
Dandruff Delight
“Yuck!”
“You look well blotchy!” Rosie said, still laughing at our disgusting recipes.
“Not half as blotchy as you!”
It was true. We looked like something the cat brought in – all spotty and scabby and pale.
“If we don’t leave them alone, we’ll get scars,” Kenny, who plans to be a doctor, pointed out.
“And our complexions will be ruined,” I added, thinking of my pretty pink and white skin.
“Who cares how we look?” said Frankie. “What’s more important is that the Little Angels will be winning the competition!”
“Probably won already,” I said ruefully. And the gang had to agree I was right.
You know how when you feel ugly and bad-tempered (the irritable convalescent stage, my mum calls it) you can’t help making yourself feel worse? Well, that’s how we were. We sort of couldn’t help punishing ourselves, gloomily imagining what the rest of the teams were up to at school.
“I can just see Mrs Weaver’s graph,” sighed Rosie, scratching her leg.
“Yeah, Little Angels, Sweetcakes and Hot Wheels all racing ahead!” agreed Frankie. “And us way behind.”
“The Sleepover Gang is doomed,” I moaned.
We worked our way further and further down into the pit of despair until my mum told us she had to go to the supermarket. Then we all perked up at the prospect of having the house to ourselves.
“Let’s have some fun!” said Kenny.
“Yeah!”
“What shall we do?” Rosie wanted to know.
We thought for a minute. It seemed so long ago since we were well, we felt out of practice at getting up to mischief.
Then Frankie got that gleam in her eye. “Why don’t we have a go on your mum’s exercise bike?”
“And treadmill!” Kenny said. “We need to get back our strength.”
“Er…” My mum’s treatment room was out of bounds. But we had been ill and we badly needed to recuperate. “Well, OK… if we leave it tidy…”
“Yippee!” Lyndz whooped. And we raced down the hall, feeling better already.
Frankie leapt on the exercise bike and Kenny got the treadmill.
Whirr, whirr, whirrrrr.
Lyndz eyed my mum’s sunbed. “The best thing for healing scars is a sun tan,” she hinted, talking loud over the noise of the bike and the treadmill.
But I drew the line at my mum’s sunbed. “It’s too dangerous,” I told her. “You’d end up even more blistered.”
So the Slushbucket had a go on the mini trampoline instead.
Bounce whirr, thud thud. Did that floor ever shake!
“What’s this for?” asked Rosie, making my mum’s huge roll of clingfilm spin round. “Wrapping giant sandwiches?”
I laughed. “No. It’s for body wrapping,” I explained. “For ladies who want to lose weight.”
“How?”
And that was how the Mummies’ Curse (as we called it) happened. It wasn’t meant to get out of hand. It’s just that when you’ve been cooped up for days and days, you can go mad with a bit of fun. And twisting round and round, wrapping yourself in clingfilm, is good fun when everyone is cheering and egging you on. Especially when you are killing yourself laughing as the see-through film gets tighter and tighter…
But my mum didn’t see it that way. All she could see were five hysterical girls encased like mummies, rolling about her treatment room, and banging into her expensive equipment.
Ooops!
Mum did not shout, or go mad, or even give us the tiniest earwigging. (It would’ve been better if she had.) She simply got a big pair of scissors and very, very carefully, without saying a single word, snipped through every one of our clingfilm bandages.
It was so embarrassing lying there on the floor waiting to be freed, that we went dead silent. All except Lyndz, that is. She couldn’t stop giggling and hiccuping. Trust Lyndz!
When she’d finished clearing away the piles of clingfilm, my mum phoned Mrs Thomas to take my friends home.
After I’d waved them goodbye, I threw myself on to my bed with a huge sigh. All my fun ends up in disaster these days! I must have been born under an unlucky star or something. I lay there feeling sorry for myself until I dozed off (there was nothing else to do!).
Somewhere far away a doorbell rang… Still sleepy, I listened to the voices – one high-pitched, the other low and husky. Who on earth…? I rubbed my eyes and heaved myself up at the window to have a look.
And you’ll never guess who I saw! (No, not Ryan Giggs.) But there, walking down the street, were two girls, pushing two identical buggies. Nothing strange about that except these were blue and white buggies and they belonged to Joe and Hannah! What’s worse, who was pushing them, but our dreaded enemies – the M&Ms!
I felt myself go faint.
The M&Ms were kidnapping my brother and sister! I flung open the window and screeched, “HEY! Bring back those babies! They’re mine, not yours!”
The Queen and the Goblin turned and stared up at me, their faces pale ovals of surprise.
“I’ll call the police!” I yelled. “You’ll be put away for life! Life, do you understand? They’ll hang, draw and quarter you! Boil you in oil…and…”
But before I could think of another torture, my mum rushed into my room, and pulled me away from the window. “Felicity, whatever’s got into you?”
“Mum! Mum!” I was shaking and sobbing. “The M&Ms, the Queen and the Goblin. Th – they’ve taken our Joe and Hannah!”
The look on my mum’s face said it all. I’d finally gone completely off my rocker. “It’s the Little Angels from your class fundraiser. Remember?” Mum was talking to me like I was a two year old. “They asked if I wanted them to walk the twins, and I said ‘yes’.”
“Mum, how could you?” I wept. “How could you let those M&Ms take my brother and sister?”
“Why not?” sighed Mum. “I needed a break.”
“But don’t you see? You’re helping our enemies win the c – competition…”
Mum sat down on the bed next to me. “I wanted the twins out of the way, so I could have a talk with you,” she explained softly. But the sympathy in her voice only made me cry louder.
“Oh, Mum, Mum…”
“You’re in a right state, aren’t you, love?” my mum whispered, and she leant forward and stroked my hair like she used to when I was little.
“Ye – es…” I flung myself into my mum’s arms and held on to her tight. And suddenly it all came to me in a huge agonising rush, how much I’d missed Mum and our long talks.
“It’s all right, love. It’s all right…”
And I don’t know how, but it was suddenly. We talked and talked and I told her how I missed our times together. How I loved it when she treated me like a friend and baked cookies and shared the day with me.
And, you know what? My mum said she missed all of it too!
“I love you and I love the twins,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “But babies take up so much time.”
“You’re telling me!”
“You know, Fliss, I really need help with them.”
That stung. I s’pose I hadn’t been much help to my mum lately.
“Well, I’ve been busy too, with the Sleepover Club and the competition,” I reminded her. “Then I got chicken pox…”
“I know.”
We both sighed then Mum looked at me. “What are we going to do?”
she said, treating me like a grown-up at last.
“What if I babysit the twins, so you can shop for your wedding outfit?” I suggested.
Mum smiled back at me. “We-ell, you’re not contagious any more, are you?”
“No, I’m better!” I grinned. “I’m well again!”
And it was true. Suddenly, I felt well again all over.
“Rabbits, over here. Fieldmice, come and have your tails pinned on!”
“No, stop that!” I ordered.
Two little stoats were using their tails as lassos and they were about to catch a rabbit. My mum was right. Getting little kids to do what you want is exhausting.
But in the end the Sleepover Gang worked their magic, and we had a whole woodland of furry little creatures in costume. Squirrels and rabbits and weasels and stoats, to say nothing of two baby hedgehogs.
Then it was time to paint their faces. We had a conveyor belt going. It was the only way with this many kids. Frankie was doing the spiky faces and Kenny the furry ones. Rosie was doing the eyes and Lyndz the whiskers. As for me, I had a million black noses to paint before the curtain went up…
You’ve never seen anything so sweet as the little animals, all dressed up and painted. Though I say it myself, the Sleepover Gang had done wonders.
“Sssshh,” I warned the little animals. “You have to creep on to the stage and hide behind the curtains quietly until we tell you to go on.
Ahem, curtains. Did you notice I mentioned “curtains”?
Well, our class, Year Six, had done, as Mrs Poole told the school, “a magnificent job at fundraising”. She said we had contributed the most out of the whole school to the new stage curtains. Then she said that both the school and the Cuddington Players would be forever grateful for our weeks of hard work and caring.
Oh, sorry. I can’t tell you any more right now because Toad is about to make his final speech.
“And now for a banquet!” Toad was saying. “The great banquet of Toad Hall!”
“YAY!” cheered the little animals.
And the audience clapped and clapped as the curtains swished to a close on The Wind in the Willows.
“Now!” We lined the animals up in straggly rows across the stage for the final curtain call.
