The Sleepover Club Sleep Out

by Narinder Dhami

  “Look, we’ve got to decide what we’re going to do,” Frankie said, for about the zillionth time. “If we don’t get our own back, the M&Ms’ll never let us forget it.”

  We all nodded, but none of us said anything. We were too depressed. We were sitting in Frankie’s back garden, the sun had started shining and we were eating pizza, but we were still miserable. That was because we couldn’t believe the nerve of the M&Ms.

  “I still can’t believe they did it,” Lyndz said. “I mean, the M&Ms are so goody-goody and all that.”

  “Yeah, I would’ve thought they’d be scared of getting caught,” Rosie agreed.

  “Well, there wasn’t much chance of that, was there?” Frankie pointed out. “Mrs Weaver was in the book cupboard, and everyone else was watching Ryan and Danny fighting with the metre sticks.”

  “And Emma was so close to the computer, she wouldn’t even have had to get out of her chair,” I said. “You know what I was really worried about? I thought Mrs Weaver might say I couldn’t come to the museum sleepover.”

  “Yeah, you were lucky to get away with just a detention,” agreed Frankie.

  We all sat gloomily looking down at our pizzas. Not even the thought of the museum sleepover could cheer us up at the moment.

  “You should have told Mrs Weaver it wasn’t you, Kenny,” Fliss said, also for the zillionth time.

  “I did, and she didn’t believe me,” I said impatiently.

  “You could have told her it was the M&Ms,” Fliss persisted. That girl never knows when to give up. I glared at her.

  “I’m not a snitcher!”

  “Anyway, Mrs Weaver wouldn’t have believed you,” Frankie cut in quickly. Just in time to stop me throwing a half-eaten slice of pizza at Fliss.

  After what had happened, I wouldn’t have got through the rest of the day if it hadn’t been for the others. The M&Ms were real pigs. They kept staring at me and giggling, and looking really smug and pleased with themselves, and they made me so angry, I could have gone over there and knocked their heads together. I think Frankie and the others were a bit worried I might actually do it, because they’d stuck to my side like glue all day.

  “Come on, someone must have a really good idea for getting our revenge on the M&Ms,” Frankie said. “We’ve got to think of something.”

  “What have Emily and Emma done now?” Frankie’s mum asked, coming towards us with a jug of lemonade. No-one had even noticed her come out of the house, and I wondered how much she’d overheard.

  “Nothing!” we all said together. Well, all of us except Fliss.

  “They played this really horrible trick on Kenny,” she said breathlessly. “What they did was, they – OW!”

  Fliss was sitting between Frankie and Lyndz, so one of them must have kicked her leg. Quite hard, too, from the look on Fliss’s face. She turned pink, and shut up. I like Frankie’s mum a lot, but this wasn’t something we wanted to tell grown-ups about. This was private, Sleepover Club business.

  Frankie’s mum raised her eyebrows and waited, but we all just looked innocently at her. We’re good at that. Well, Fliss goes bright red after about ten seconds, but the rest of us are brilliant at it.

  I don’t think Mrs Thomas was fooled, though. But she didn’t say anything except, “Who wants some lemonade?” She filled our glasses, and then went back into the house.

  “Who kicked me?” Fliss demanded crossly.

  “Not me,” Frankie said innocently.

  “Nor me,” said Lyndz, just as innocently.

  Fliss looked from one to the other, and then gave it up as a bad job.

  “I don’t see why we couldn’t have told Frankie’s mum what happened,” she grumbled, rubbing her shin.

  “Because grown-ups just say things like ‘Oh, ignore them’,” said Frankie.

  “Yeah, and they’d try to stop us getting our own back,” I said. “This is our problem, and we’ll decide what we’re going to do about it.”

  “But we haven’t decided anything yet,” Rosie pointed out. We all sighed, and sat there in silence, sucking lemonade through our straws.

  It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about getting revenge on the M&Ms. In fact, I’d hardly thought about anything else all day. It would have been easy to ambush them in the girls’ loos, and chuck wet paper towels at them, or do something ordinary, like putting a fake tarantula on Emma’s chair. But that wouldn’t be good enough. They’d set me up and got me into big trouble – and I was going to get my own back in style. That meant some serious thinking.

  But at the moment, with our faces as long as a wet week-end, we weren’t going to be able to decide on anything. It was time to get this sleepover going a bit. So I sucked some lemonade up through my straw, pointed it at Frankie and blew.

  “Kenny!” Frankie spluttered, as lemonade squirted out all over her face. “You – you –! I’ll get you for that!”

  She sucked up some lemonade furiously, and blew. I ducked, and it hit Lyndz instead.

  “Ow!” Lyndz squealed. “It’s gone in my eye! It stings!”

  To get her own back on Frankie, Lyndz began to suck some lemonade up her straw, too. But she sucked too hard, and began to choke. Rosie slapped her on the back, but a bit too much, and Lyndz pitched forward and got the straw stuck up her nose. The rest of us nearly died laughing.

  I bet you can guess what happened next, can’t you?

  “Now – hic – I’ve got hiccups!” Lyndz groaned, when she was finally able to speak. “Frankie – hic – help me!”

  “Try drinking from the other side of your glass,” Fliss suggested. “That’s supposed to work.”

  Lyndz picked up her glass, and turned it round.

  “Like – hic – this, you mean?”

  “No, dummy!” I said. “You hold the glass normally, but you try to drink from the opposite side.”

  Lyndz bent forward and tried to take a sip, but she tipped the glass up too much, and ended up pouring lemonade all down her T-shirt. The rest of us cried with laughter.

  “This is really stupid, Fliss!” Lyndz yelled, creasing up herself. “It’ll never work!”

  “It already has!” said Fliss smugly.

  “Come on,” I said, grabbing Frankie’s arm. “Let’s play one of our International Gladiators’ games on the lawn!”

  Nobody mentioned the M&Ms and what had happened again for a long while after that. We had a few rounds of International Gladiators, then it started to rain so we went inside and played tapes and had a disco. Frankie’s mum let us make popcorn after all, and we scoffed two huge bowls of it while we watched a video.

  We were all tucked up in bed before we got talking about getting revenge on the M&Ms again. Frankie was in her own bed, and me and Lyndz were in the bunks, me on top and Lyndz at the bottom. Fliss was in the camp bed, and Rosie was in her sleeping bag on the floor. Mrs Thomas said goodnight and turned the light off, then we waited a few minutes and switched our torches on.

  “Are we eating first?” Lyndz asked, opening her sleepover bag, and pulling out a packet of chocolate digestives. “I’m starving.”

  “No, wait a minute,” I said. “I’ve been thinking!”

  “You probably want to lie down and have a rest then,” said Frankie.

  “Ha, ha. No, I’ve been thinking about the M&Ms.”

  “I’ve had an idea about that,” said Rosie. “Why don’t we do the same to them when it’s their turn to use the computer?”

  “No, we’ve got to do something different,” Frankie insisted. “We don’t want to copy them.”

  “We could hide Emma’s violin,” Lyndz suggested. “Then we won’t have to listen to her playing it in Assembly.”

  “I think we ought to get them into trouble with Mrs Weaver somehow,” said Fliss. “After all, that’s what they did to Kenny.”

  “What do you think, Kenny?” Frankie looked at me.

  “I don’t think we should do anything,” I said.

  The others looked shocked.
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  “What?” said Frankie. “Nothing at all?”

  “No, I mean I don’t think we should do anything just yet.” I grinned at the others. “I think we should wait. Until the sleepover at the museum next week.”

  Everyone looked puzzled.

  “Why?” asked Lyndz.

  I shrugged. “Think about it. There’s lots of spooky things in the museum, loads of places to hide and we’ll be there all night. We’re sure to be able to think of some way of getting our own back on the M&Ms while we’re there. And best of all –!”

  “What?” said the others.

  “Well, we’re excellent at sleepovers!” I pointed out. “We’ve been to loads. The M&Ms haven’t.”

  “So we’ll be one up on them before we start,” said Frankie.

  “We sure will!” I looked round at everyone, and we were all smiling. “The M&Ms are in for the biggest shock of their whole lives!”

  So we didn’t do anything. We just waited. It nearly killed us, but we stuck it out. Of course, the M&Ms thought it was a big joke. They were so smug, it was unbearable. Every time we went anywhere near them, they kept making chicken noises and flapping their arms. It was really difficult not to have a go at them, I can tell you. Frankie and Fliss actually had to sit on me to stop me leaping on Emma Hughes when they were winding us up in the playground one afternoon.

  But as the day of the museum sleepover got nearer, a funny thing happened. The M&Ms started to look nervous. I don’t think they’d guessed we were going to get our own back on the trip; they were just worried that we hadn’t done anything to them so far, and they were beginning to wonder what we were planning. They kept on staring suspiciously at us, and I’d noticed that every time they had to open their lockers, they did it really carefully, as if they expected something nasty to fall out.

  Did they really think they were gonna get away with something as ordinary as that? No chance. I had something much more special in mind for them. The trouble was, I wasn’t quite sure what, yet. Not until we got to the museum.

  At last the Great Day arrived.

  “I’m really looking forward to this,” I said to Frankie, as we waited for the coach to turn up. We were sitting on our table in the classroom. We aren’t usually allowed to do that, of course, but I don’t think Mrs Weaver would have noticed if we’d stood up on the tables and had a disco, because she was rushing round like she had ants in her pants, trying to organise everything.

  Everyone was so excited, the noise was deafening. We all had our sleeping bags, torches, pyjamas and slippers, and big bags of food for tonight. There were some parents coming with us, as well as Mrs Weaver, so the classroom was packed.

  “Oh, this is going to be ace,” said Rosie happily. “I can’t wait to see the Egyptian mummies!”

  Fliss looked a bit sick again.

  “As long as we don’t have to sleep in the same room as them,” she said firmly.

  “We’ll see about that,” I said under my breath to Frankie, who grinned and winked at me.

  “I wonder who’ll be our group leader?” Lyndz said. “I hope we don’t get Mrs Weaver. She’s got eyes in the back of her head.”

  “Yeah, we don’t want anyone too smart, do we?” I lowered my voice. “Not if we’re going after the M&Ms.”

  “Maybe we’ll get one of the parents,” said Fliss.

  “Yeah, isn’t Alana Banana’s mum coming?” said Frankie. “Alana’s pretty dozy, so maybe her mum is, too.”

  We all looked over at Alana Banana. Banana isn’t really her surname. It’s Palmer. Alana Banana’s pretty harmless, but she does hang around with the M&Ms sometimes, which makes her sort of our enemy. Except that she’s too clueless to bother us much.

  “Mrs Banana isn’t here yet, is she?” said Lyndz, looking round.

  “No, and anyway, she’ll probably be looking after Alana’s group,” Frankie pointed out.

  Just then we realised that Mrs Weaver was trying to get everybody’s attention by yelling “QUIET!” and waving her clipboard around like a flag. We all shut up and looked at her.

  “Right, the coach will be here in about ten minutes,” Mrs Weaver said briskly. “Before we go, I’ll tell you the name of the adult who’s in charge of your group.” She looked over at the M&Ms. “Emma Hughes’ group, you’ll be with me.”

  Frankie glanced at me, and pulled a face. At least we weren’t in Mrs Weaver’s group – that would have been a mega disaster – but the M&Ms were. That might make our plans for revenge a little bit tricky. It depended who our group leader was.

  “Francesca Thomas’s group.” Mrs Weaver looked over at us. “You’ll be with Miss Hill.”

  We all cheered. If I tell you that Miss Hill’s a student teacher, you’ll know why. You can get away with murder with a student teacher. Miss Hill, who was standing next to Mrs Weaver, turned bright pink. She probably thought we were cheering because we liked her so much. We did like her. But we liked her even more because she wasn’t as clued up as Mrs W.

  “Excellent!” I whispered in Frankie’s ear. “Now we’re all set!”

  “Alana Palmer’s group,” Mrs Weaver went on. “You’ll be with Alana’s mum – where is your mum, by the way, Alana?”

  Alana Banana frowned.

  “She can’t come, Miss.”

  Mrs Weaver nearly dropped down dead with shock.

  “What do you mean, she can’t come? It was all arranged!”

  “I told you this morning that she couldn’t come,” said Alana.

  Mrs Weaver turned purple. “No, you did not tell me, Alana!”

  Alana Banana looked puzzled. “Oh, didn’t I? I thought I did!”

  I’ve never heard a teacher say a rude word, but I think Mrs Weaver came pretty close.

  “I’ll have to go and see who I can round up,” she said to Miss Hill. “We’ve got to have one adult for each group of five children. Just keep an eye on them, will you?”

  Mrs Weaver raced out of the room faster than Linford Christie, and headed off down the corridor.

  “Now don’t make too much noise,” said Miss Hill, but nobody could hear her because we were all chattering.

  “That Alana Banana’s a real nerd,” said Frankie. “It’d serve her right if Mrs Weaver left her group behind.”

  Mrs Weaver didn’t come back for ages. We were all beginning to get a bit fed up, when we saw the coach pull into the playground.

  “Here’s the coach!” yelled Rosie. “Time to go!”

  Everyone cheered, grabbed their bags and headed for the door.

  “I think we ought to wait for Mrs Weaver,” said Miss Hill timidly, but no-one listened to her. It was a good job she wasn’t standing in front of the door either, or she’d probably have been trampled on. The whole class piled out of the classroom, and charged for the coach. The driver saw us coming, looked a bit nervous and shut the doors, so we had to queue up instead. Luckily the Sleepover Club managed to get to the front.

  “I want to sit at the back,” I said.

  Fliss groaned. “I get sick on the back seat. Anyway, there’s only room for four.”

  “Oh, we can all sit together if we squash up,” said Lyndz.

  “My group wants to sit at the back,” said Ryan Scott, who was standing behind us, trying to push in.

  Fliss giggled, but the rest of us glared at him.

  “No chance,” I said. Then, right at that moment, I noticed Frankie’s mum coming across the playground towards us.

  “Hey, Frankie,” I said, elbowing her in the ribs. “What have you forgotten?”

  “What?” Frankie looked puzzled.

  “You must have forgotten something,” I teased her. “Here’s your mum.”

  Frankie frowned. “What’s she doing here?”

  “Will you please queue up properly without pushing, or I’ll send you back into class!” yelled Mrs Weaver, who’d just come out into the playground. “Sort yourselves out, please. Oh, Mrs Thomas, there you are. Thank you for filling in at such sho
rt notice.”

  We almost dropped down dead with shock. Frankie’s mum was coming with us? That was seriously bad news. Mrs Thomas is a just bit too sharp to have around when you’re planning something naughty.

  “Hello, girls,” said Frankie’s mum. “You don’t have to look quite so pleased to see me.

  “Don’t panic,” I whispered to the others, as Mrs Weaver began telling Mrs Thomas the arrangements for the trip. “At least we’re not in her group.”

  “Oh, Frankie,” said Mrs Weaver, “I thought you’d want to be in your mum’s group, so I’ve asked Miss Hill to take over Alana’s group instead. Right, I think we’re just about ready to get on the coach now.”

  We were all so stunned, we let Ryan Scott and his group push past us to grab the back seat. The M&Ms with Mrs Weaver, and us with Frankie’s mum – were we ever going to get a chance to put our plan of revenge into action?

  “Come on, girls, let’s get on the coach,” said Mrs Thomas. “This is going to be fun. Isn’t it?”

  So there we were, stuck with Frankie’s mum, and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. We couldn’t even talk amongst ourselves, because Mrs Thomas got on the coach right behind us. Luckily, she sat right at the front next to Mrs Weaver, while we scuttled off down towards the back.

  “Better luck next time, girls,” said Ryan Scott smugly from the back row. We ignored him, and slid into some empty seats, me next to Fliss, and Lyndz, Rosie and Frankie squashed in together.

  “I can’t believe my mum’s coming with us,” Frankie groaned. “Why did she have to have a day off work today?”

  “What are we going to do now then?” asked Fliss urgently.

  “Maybe we ought to forget the whole thing,” Rosie muttered.

  “Rosie’s right,” Lyndz agreed. “This is getting more and more dodgy.”

  “No way!” I said. “Don’t be a bunch of wimps.”

  The others looked at me. They weren’t convinced.

  “It’s too risky,” Frankie said at last. “The museum’s going to be crawling with grown-ups. And one of them will be my mum.”

  “So?” I shrugged. “There are always grown-ups around when we have our sleepovers. Have we ever let that stop us doing exactly what we want?”