Читать книгу: «Mega Sleepover 2»

But hang on, before I tell you about that, let’s look for Pepsi in the park, there’s a few bushes she likes digging around. I can’t see her anywhere yet, can you?

Oh, blow. Not a sign. Now where can we try?

I know: the other place she likes is the canal. I’m not allowed to go there on my own, but Dad and I often walk her there. We could go as far as the bridge next to the pub, you can see a long way down on to the towpath from there.

Come on and I’ll tell you what happened next.

By the time we’d collected up all Gazza’s bits and pieces, we were a bit late leaving school. Rosie put Gazza into his carrying cage and then we helped her carry everything round to her house. We were already loaded down with PE kit, lunchboxes, and school bags. So we must have looked like a travelling circus when we came round the corner of Mostyn Avenue, which is a couple of roads away from Welby Drive, where Rosie lives. Walking towards us were the gruesome M&Ms and who do you think was with them? Only Ryan Scott and Danny McCloud, two horrible boys from our class. That was all we needed.

“Oh, look, it’s the Famous Five,” said Emma Hughes.

“Which one’s the dog?” said Ryan Scott. He thinks he’s so funny.

“Ruff, ruff. Here, girls,” shouted Danny McCloud, “fetch a stick.” And he broke a whole branch off a tree by the side of the road and threw it at us. Good job for him he missed.

“Oh, very clever,” I said. But they’d both started now, whistling and calling us good dogs and silly things like that. Fliss looked like a boiled beetroot with embarrassment. Fliss actually likes Ryan Scott; she says she wants to marry him! She is so weird.

We just kept on walking, pretending we couldn’t hear them, but they followed us.

“Dogs are supposed to be kept on a lead,” shouted Ryan Scott.

“I’ve got a good idea,” said Emma Hughes, “they could enter each other for the Pet Show. That way they might win.”

“Well, you’re not gonna win, that’s for sure,” said Kenny.

“That’s what you think,” said The Goblin.

“That’s what we know,” said Rosie.

“And how are you going to stop us?” said The Queen.

“Don’t you worry, we have our ways,” I said, mysteriously.

We all smiled at each other, as if we’d got this big secret that they knew nothing about. We walked off down the road.

“What ways?” Emma Hughes shouted after us.

“You’ll find out,” Kenny called back to her. Then we carried on down the road trying to ignore the fact that those two stupid dodos were still whistling us to come and the gruesome M&Ms were giggling at them as if they were the funniest things on legs.

Fliss turned to Kenny, “How are we going to stop them?”

Kenny shrugged. “Don’t ask me,” she said, “ask Frankie.”

I shrugged too. I had no idea either. But, we’d got them worried and that was almost as good.

When we reached Rosie’s, she was right, her mum didn’t mind about Gazza.

“What difference can a hamster make?” she said. “It’ll be enough of a madhouse with all you girls round.” But she smiled, so we knew she was only kidding.

We were all so excited to be sleeping over at a different house, we raced off home to get our things packed. “See you at seven,” Rosie called after us. “Don’t be late.”

When I got home I gave Pepsi an extra good brush and clean up and told Mum and Dad they’d better keep her like that.

“Don’t let her roll in anything on her walk tonight,” I warned them.

“Yes, boss,” said Dad. “Any more orders while you’re away?”

“Yes,” I said. “Kindly collect me at eleven in the morning. And don’t be late!”

When we arrived at Rosie’s we went straight upstairs and dumped our sleepover kits on her bedroom floor. She’s right, her room does look a bit funny with no wallpaper, just plaster on the walls, but her mum lets her put posters up, so it doesn’t look boring; it’s dead colourful in fact. She’s got Oasis, Blur and Leicester City football team, loads of pictures of dogs and people out of the soaps on her walls. Rosie’s soppy about soaps.

Her dad’s promised to come round soon and decorate, so her mum says she’s allowed to write on the walls, which none of the rest of us are allowed to do in our bedrooms.

Rosie said we could help her if we wanted to. It was so cool. We wrote loads of jokes, like What did the spaceman see in his frying pan? An unidentified frying object. And What do you do if you find a blue banana? Try to cheer it up.

Rosie said it would certainly cheer her up, when she was lying in bed at night, to read those jokes.

“Just think,” I said, “in about a zillion years…”

“When the aliens come,” said Lyndz.

“…they might take this wallpaper off and find these jokes.”

So then we got into writing messages to Martians and it all got a bit silly. One of them was a bit rude. We had to scribble it out before Rosie’s mum saw it. It’s a good job we did because just then she came in to tell us to come down for tea.

“Great,” said Kenny, “I’m ravishing.”

“Don’t you mean ravenous?” said Rosie’s mum

“I’m ravishing, too,” said Kenny, pulling one of her silly faces.

“You’re weird, you mean,” I said. Then she chased me downstairs to the kitchen. Rosie’s mum had laid out a great spread for us with paper cups and plates and fancy serviettes, just like a party. She’s dead nice. She’s going to college to learn to be a nursery nurse. Rosie has an older sister, Tiffany, but she’s always out with her boyfriend, Spud. Her brother Adam was there, though. We’re really getting used to Adam now. It was strange at first, talking to someone who can’t talk back to you, but Rosie’s mum can tell us what he wants to say because he sort of spells it out with his head and she can understand him. So can Rosie some of the time, if he does it slowly.

We had pizza and salad and oven chips, and ice cream for afters. The pizza was OK, but it wasn’t a patch on my dad’s. The ice cream was heavenly, though: pecan and toffee fudge. Mmm, mmm. Rosie’s mum sat and fed Adam, because he can’t feed himself, and then she sat him on her knee to give him a drink through one of those baby feeder cups. All the time we were eating he was watching us and listening to what we were saying.

“What are you grinning at?” Rosie said.

Adam stopped drinking because he was choking a bit.

“That’s what comes of trying to drink and grin at the same time,” said his mum. Then Adam started shaking his head. He was trying to spell something. It was a poem he’d made up, while he’d been watching us have tea. Rosie says he’s always making up poems…and jokes. Rosie’s mum started spelling it out.

“F-I-V…Five?” she said. Adam nodded then spelt out some more.

“Little…Piggies? Sitting…in…a…row? R-O-S…Rosie’s the F-A-T-T…” Rosie started to squeal, “Tell him to stop.”

Her mum grinned. “OK, young man, that’s enough. Remember your manners.”

“You’re the little piggy,” Rosie told Adam.

“That’s about right,” their mum said, wiping his chin.

After we’d eaten Rosie said we could explore her house. There are five bedrooms on the first floor, then a staircase which leads to two more rooms, right up in the roof. In places, I could only just stand up straight without banging my head on the ceiling. The rooms were full of packing cases, cardboard boxes and old bits of furniture. There were no light bulbs up there, so when it started to get dark we couldn’t turn on the lights and that made it really spooky.

We played Hide and Seek and Murder in the Dark all over the upstairs and in the attic rooms, squealing and rushing around. There were no light-bulbs up there so we had to use our torches and that made it really spooky. But in no time it was nine o’clock and Rosie’s mum came to tell us to get ready for bed. We didn’t argue. Actually, we were looking forward to going to bed. That’s the best bit.