by Angie Bates
Then of course Frankie had to go right over the top! “If it was the only way I could save our baby, I’d live up a tree forever,” she cried.
The thought of Frankie living up a tree sent us into hysterics!
“All the birds would build nests in your hair,” Rosie giggled (Frankie has masses of really wild tangly hair!).
At that exact moment, Kenny’s watch started making chirping birdy sounds. We totally cracked up.
Frankie dashed across the landing to hammer on the bathroom door.
About ten seconds later, Kenny marched out, all clean and shiny in blue stripy cotton pyjamas. She saluted. “Next!” she grinned.
It was a good thing we had Kenny’s stopwatch. As it was, it was almost quarter to ten by the time we’d all had baths and changed into our sleepover things!
Rosie was wearing the sweetest little sleepsuit, which her big sister Tiffany got her for Christmas. Shorts and a floppy vest top, with the cutest embroidery around the hem. I was dead jealous!
We tossed a coin to see who was sleeping in my spare bed. (Having two beds is dead handy for sleepovers!) Frankie won the toss that time. She was suddenly looking really worn out.
The others busily spread out their sleeping bags on my carpet.
“Hey everyone,” said Lyndz excitedly. “This is it! Sleepover 2000. Durn durn durn!”
“Yikes!” said Rosie. “I’ve got millennial butterflies, haven’t you?”
“I’ve had them for DAYS!” I said. “You have no idea.”
“Relax,” yawned Frankie. “You and your mum did a great job.”
I felt myself go red. “Oh, thanks,” I said.
“We should DO something,” said Kenny. “To celebrate.”
Frankie groaned. “Is this celebrating going on all year, or something? A snow picnic and an ecological protest in the same sleepover ought to be enough for anyone!”
“I wasn’t suggesting we, like, bungee-jump out of Fliss’s window,” Kenny said crossly. “I meant, do something people can, like, LOOK at in the future, so they’ll know we were actually HERE, tonight.”
“You mean, like a time capsule?” I said.
Lyndz sat bolt upright. “Fliss, that’s such a COOL idea!”
My mum came in with our toasties. “Everyone happy?” she said.
Suddenly Frankie took a big breath, like she was diving underwater.
“Sorry if I was rude earlier, Mrs Sidebotham,” she gabbled. “And I’m not trying to wriggle out of it, but none of us gets much sleep at our house. You know, since my little sister was born. And sometimes I – well, you know.”
Look, don’t tell the others, because it’s not something I’m exactly proud of. But sometimes I don’t know if I like Frankie very much. But just when I decide I really can’t STAND her, that girl does something which knocks my socks off.
I didn’t realise it, but apparently the whole time we were at Browses Piece, Frankie was feeling terrible about hurting Mum’s feelings. I think she was dead brave to apologise in front of everyone like that, don’t you?
Luckily Mum was really chilled about the whole thing.
“Rude?” she said, like the idea never even occurred to her. “Well, it’s very sweet of you to apologise, Frankie, but I honestly didn’t notice. So, I’ll see you all tomorrow, shall I? Unless you need anything?” There was a hopeful gleam in her eye.
I shook my head. “Uh-uh,” I said firmly. “Good night, Mum.”
After we’d polished off our toasties, we had a mega argument about what to put in our time capsule.
Kenny said we all had to donate something especially precious.
Rosie pointed out that no-one in their right mind would want to stick their most precious possession in the ground for, like, decades.
“I mean, you wouldn’t bury your Leicester City scarf, Kenz, would you?” she said.
“No WAY,” said Kenny. She sounded shocked!
“Well, there you go,” said Rosie sensibly.
Everyone looked depressed.
“So what are we going to do now?” Frankie asked. “Put in things we totally hate, or something? That makes sense. NOT!”
“I know,” I said. “Suppose we don’t write our normal sleepover diaries tonight. Suppose we write special millennium letters for our time capsule instead.”
Frankie groaned. “If I have to hear that M-word one more time,” she threatened.
“A letter?” said Lyndz. “Who to?”
“Whoever finds it in the future,” I said. “You know, a future person.”
Frankie perked up. “Hey!” she said. “We can put in one of those Polaroid photos of us that your mum took in the snow.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” grinned Kenny. “Ask Fliss’s mum to take a new photo of us, in our night things. A serious Sleepover Club picture!”
Unfortunately, at the exact moment I stuck my head round the living-room door, my mum was just sitting down for the first time all day. But if she was fed up, it didn’t show. Well, not much!
I explained our time-capsule plan. “Have you got a tin we can bury our stuff in?” I asked.
Mum did better than that. She dug out this sweet painted box she used to keep all her pretty things in when she was a little kid.
“Are you sure?” I said. She nodded. “Wow! Thanks! Whoever finds it will think they’ve found real buried treasure,” I said.
Then we all faffed around in my room, trying out various poses, while Mum tried to stay awake.
Finally we got ourselves into position.
“OK, now on the count of three, everybody smile!” Mum commanded. “One, two, THREE!” And she snapped the button on Frankie’s funky camera.
Honestly, it was the coolest photo ever. We all agreed that any future person finding it would be blown away!
Then Mum left us to write our millennium letters in private.
Kenny insisted they should remain the writer’s deadly secret, until they were finallydug up. Until the letters were dug up, silly, not the writers!
“That way we can write what we want, without worrying what anyone else thinks,” Kenny explained.
So we all crossed our hearts and promised we wouldn’t peek.
Which is why I truly TRULY can’t tell you what the other girls wrote in their time-capsule letters, OK?
But if you cross YOUR heart and totally promise never to snitch to anyone, I’ll tell you what I put in mine. Here goes!
Dear future Person
My hame’s Felicity Sidebot. ham and I’m a member of the Sleepover Club. Perhaps you don’t have Sleepovers in your time? You should. They’re a real laugh. Oh, by the way, in the photo, I’m the girl with long, really white-blonde hair, and I’m wearing the short pink nightie with the little hearts on. Pink’s my absolutely favourite colour. How about you?
I don’t khow what else to tell you about myself I’m really just average. For instance, I’m nowhere hear as brave and caring as Jewel, who lives in a van and goes to protests all the time. But I love both my dads and my mum and my little brother, and I’d do anything to keep them safe, which I think is quite a good start, don’t you?
Hope you are happy living in the future, and that there isn’t too much concrete everywhere by the time you read this.
Yours faithfully,
Felicity Sidebotham
We folded our letters into tiny squares and put them into a plastic bag with our sleepover picture. That was Lyndz’s idea. Then I wrote a message on a sticky label to put on the outside, which said: PLEASE DON’T OPEN THIS TIME CAPSULE UNTIL THE YEAR 2020.
I mean, 2020 is far enough into the future for anyone, right?
Finally we put the bag inside Mum’s pretty treasure box and closed the lid.
“We’ll bury it before we go home,” said Kenny.
Frankie smothered a yawn. “Do you think we could have our feast quite soon? My baby sister woke us up about a zillion times last night.”
Kenny rubbed her hands. “No problemo,
” she said wickedly.
Want to know what the others brought for our Sleepover feast? OK, here goes:
Pringles, a packet of squidgy pink pigs plus a packet of fizzy fish (I think Kenny got them from Marks), a HUGE white chocolate Toblerone (the Sleepover Club is going through a big white chocolate phase!) and a bag of dee-licious Caramel Swirls.
Suddenly I realised everyone was waiting. “Duh!” I grinned. “I only left mine downstairs.”
I went downstairs to get my contribution. Mum helped me make it earlier in the week. It’s this cake you don’t actually have to cook. You make it out of biscuit crumbs mixed with other scrummy things, and it kind of firms up in the fridge. Lemon squeezy or what!The
I think the others were dead touched when they saw the trouble I’d gone to. Not so much the cake, but the special topping. Because right across the cake in wobbly icing was my personal message to everyone.
welcome to sleepover 2000
After everyone had admired the cake, we switched out the light so we could have our feast by torchlight. Usually this is our favourite part of the sleepover.
But tonight we couldn’t actually eat that much. I mean, if you think about it, we’d been stuffing our faces since we got back from school!! Also, we’d had a really long and exciting day, so by this time we were all having incredible trouble keeping awake.
Poor Frankie kept dozing off. But you know Frankie. She hates to miss a thing! Every now and then, she kind of peeled back her eyelids and mumbled, “What did you just say?” in a really cranky voice!
After a bit of an argument, we decided to cut the feast short. One by one we switched off our torches. Rosie’s went off last.
“Bliss!” sighed Lyndz. “I lurve Rosie. She finally switched on the dark.”
“You are so-o silly,” giggled Rosie from her sleeping bag.
“Night everyone,” said Kenny.
“Night, John Boy,” joked Lyndz.
There was complete silence, except for the sound of breathing.
Suddenly the phone rang downstairs. Andy answered it. “Sure, I’ll tell her,” I heard him say. He sounded tickled pink. “Is Frankie awake up there, girls?” he yelled.
“Mmn,” mumbled Frankie. “Worra worra. Mmmn.”
“Well, kind of!” I giggled.
“Her mum says to tell her they got her message. They drew the baby’s name out of the hat, and it’s Frankie’s choice, OK!”
You should have heard us scream! I wouldn’t be surprised if all Mrs Watson-Wade’s curlers fell out!!!
Naturally I had to put the light back on, so we could congratulate Frankie properly.
“OK, put us out of our misery,” said Kenny, after the noise had died down. “Tell us this mysterious name!”
We were all blinking at Frankie in the lamplight. The others looked like little squinty owls, so probably I did as well!
Frankie couldn’t even OPEN her eyes, but she had a big smile on her face. “Remember the name I gave that doll just before Christmas? Isobel,” she murmured dreamily. “Izzy for short.”
“Hey,” said Lyndz. “That is so-o cool! Frankie and Izzy!”
“Ace,” agreed Rosie.
“Wicked,” said Kenny.
“That’s such a sweet name,” I said. I meant it too.
Was that a result or what? But the Sleepover 2000 fun’s not nearly over yet. (Heh heh heh!) Wait till I tell you what happened NEXT!
Oops! I am a TOTAL butterfly-brain. I told you all about how we came to be lumbered with the Ecology Zone, but I completely forgot to mention one TINY complication.
Unlike the actual Millennium Dome at Greenwich, ours was strictly a one-day-only event. This meant that, assuming Mrs Weaver approved of our ideas, we only had FIVE days to get the whole thing organised!!!
For various reasons, no-one in the Sleepover Club had registered this important fact until the weekend was nearly over. I mean, before Friday, we knew diddley-dot about ecology, right? Up to then, our biggest worry was having to face Mrs Weaver on Monday and admit we’d let her down. AGAIN.
But now, thanks to Jewel’s excellent input, we had a Five Star Super-de-Luxe surefire winner of a plan.
Unfortunately, we had next to no time to carry it out!! Plus, just to make things that little bit harder, we’d got to keep the M&Ms completely in the dark about our activities!
Why? Perleaze! Here are just three of the many, many reasons:
1. The M&Ms never miss an opportunity to get even. If they guessed we were up to something, they’d do ANYTHING to sabotage us.
2. The M&Ms are already into themselves in a really big way. If they suspected we were deliberately trying to get one up on them, they’d see it as a HUGE compliment.
3. In other words, we wanted to totally FLATTEN the spiteful little toads, but look dead cool and casual at the same time!!
“It’s got to be an undercover operation, OK?” said Kenny.
This was on Sunday evening. It was the fifth time she’d phoned that day, to tell me what Frankie had just rung to tell her!
“We’ve got to lull the M&Ms into a false sense of security,” Kenny went on. “We want them to think we’re totally out of our depth. Whimpering into our pillows…”
“Dribbling into our stew,” I giggled.
“Then on the big day…” Kenny did her sinister chuckle. “We’ll BLOW their prissy socks off!”
The minute Kenny put the phone down, I called Lyndz, so she could pass Kenny’s message on to Rosie!
You’d think Mum would be pleased we were saving her money, instead of selfishly running up astronomically huge bills, like some other children we could mention. (Rosie’s big sister Tiffany for one.) Instead Mum actually yelled at me for hogging the phone, when I was only making one FIFTH of the calls I could have made!
My final chat of the day with Kenny went something like this:
KENNY:
Fliss, promise you’ll get to school by eight at the latest.
ME:
Kenz, you ARE kidding.
KENNY:
I ‘ve been racking my brains and this is our only chance. (Whisper whisper whisper!!!)
ME:
(incredibly impressed) You little minx!
Now here’s MY last call to Lyndz:
ME:
Kenny says we’ve got to be at school by eight tomorrow.
LYNDZ:
Hic. Sorry, Fliss.I totally missed that because of my hiccups! I thought, hic, you said—
ME:
I did. Be in the playground at eight sharp. Kenny’s got a totally outrageous plan. (Whisper whisper whisper.)
LYNDZ:
(stunned) That girl is so smart she’s, hic, scary!
Mum:
Fliss, will you get off that phone! Jilly’s promised to call from the States, to say if she can make our wedding.
Me:
Uh-oh. Mum’s in a real razz. Gotta go. See ya!
As I was trying to get to sleep, I thought of a new worry. What if it snowed really heavily and Cuddington Primary School didn’t even open for business?
But when I woke up, there had actually been a slight thaw. Normally I hate it when the snow gets that gruesome Slush Puppy look, don’t you? But this morning I could have stood on a chair and sung a happy little Slush Puppy song!
I was so nervous about letting the others down, that I arrived in the playground at 7.99am precisely. And guess what? The others didn’t turn up. I had to stand around in the slush by myself for AGES, like a totally sad person. Kenny didn’t show till ten past, and it was her idea!
The others rolled up, like, seconds before our headmistress drove through the gate.
We all went madly slipping and slithering across the playground, frantic to catch Mrs Poole before Mrs Weaver arrived.
Look, I’m going to fast forward this bit, OK? The actual conversation in the head’s office took AGES. All you need to know is that by the end of it:
1. We convinced Mrs Poole to let us dedicate our Ecol
ogy Zone to Browses Piece. (Yippee!)
2. Mrs Poole said we could miss lessons ALL week (not counting maths), to help us get our zone finished by Saturday!
3. She agreed with us that our zone would have more impact if we kept its contents deadly secret till the last minute!! “I’ll have a word with Mrs Weaver,” she said. (Yess!)
4. Mrs Poole was so impressed to hear we’d visited the protest camp in our free time, she practically kissed us. “I had no idea you girls were so concerned about the environment,” she gushed.
You did remember about us parking next to Mrs Poole’s car at Browses Piece, didn’t you? So did Kenny. Heh heh heh! That’s what gave her the awesome idea of persuading Mrs Poole to work on Mrs Weaver for us. (Frankie thinks Kenny should be a politician when she grows up.)
Anyway, when we finally got out of our headmistress’s office, Kenny collapsed in complete hysterics.
“Spaceman, you went totally too far then,” she gasped, wiping her eyes. “When you spouted that stuff about ‘think globally, act locally’, I thought I was going to wet myself.”
“It worked, didn’t it?” grinned Frankie. “Mrs Poole loved it.”
“She ADORES us,” said Rosie.
“She was putty in our hands,” sang Lyndz.
“Of course,” I giggled. “We’re the coolest girls in the school!”
Kenny checked her watch. “We’ve got exactly ten minutes. I reckon that gives us just enough time to track down Dishy Dave.”
Our caretaker’s real name is Mr Coleman, but all us lot call him Dishy Dave. Apart from being unusually young and good-looking for a school caretaker, he’s a brilliant person to have on your side! Honestly, that man can do just about ANYTHING!
After our useful chat with Dave, we had to go and face Mrs Weaver. Our teacher has a really suspicious mind. Do you know what she said when we told her our plans? She said, “Hmmn. This is all a bit sudden. Ten minutes in a protest camp and you’re all born-again eco-warriors!”
