“Oh, it’s been horrible, hasn’t it?” she sobbed. “You’ve all hated it. You’ll never come again. You won’t be my friends any more. I don’t blame you; nobody likes me!”
This was far worse than anything that had happened so far. Kenny and I didn’t know what to do. But good old Lyndz went and sat beside Fliss and put her arm round her.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s been… lovely. We don’t know each other very well yet; it’s bound to be a bit awkward the first time.”
Kenny and I tried not to look like we were thinking: you can say that again.
And then Lyndz’s next suggestion had us both ready to bolt.
“I know a little game we could play,” she said.
“What kind of game?” Kenny asked suspiciously.
“We’ll need a pen and a sheet of paper each. We fold the paper into a fan and we put our name on it,” Lyndz told us.
“Then what?” I asked, equally suspiciously.
“We pass the fan round and everyone has to write something nice on it, something they like about us. They’re called friendship fans…” Lyndz trailed off. She was looking at me, sort of appealingly.
In the end I just shrugged and said, “OK, why not?”
I didn’t look at Kenny. I knew she’d have plenty of reasons why not if I gave her half a chance. But afterwards even Kenny had to admit it was actually a fun thing to do, because everyone had something nice or funny or surprising written about them.
Everyone told Lyndz what a good laugh and a great person she was and how we even loved her smiley knees, which she has a thing about – and her hiccups, which she gets all the time!
I’m not being bigheaded, but I got lots of comments about being a good leader and having all the best ideas and being the person everyone would want with them if they were ever stranded on a desert island – you know the kind of stuff.
But most surprising were the things Fliss and Kenny wrote about each other.
Kenny said she thought Fliss was a bit of a genius when it came to colours and clothes and things. And while she didn’t give a stuff about them most of the time herself it would probably be good to have Fliss’s talent – in case you ever needed it.
And Fliss wrote how Kenny was her all-time hero. She said she thought Kenny was the bravest, most fearless person she’d ever met and she really wanted to be more like her, instead of being scared of everything. She said she couldn’t believe someone like Kenny would want to be friends with someone like her.
When Kenny heard that she went very…pink and did what she always does when she’s embarrassed: started pulling ridiculous faces and behaving like an idiot until she had us all rolling around on the floor in hysterics.
That completely broke the ice. Then things just got better and better and the sleepover really got going.
Can you remember your first sleepover? It’s always special, isn’t it? Sort of the best. Well, this one started off the worst – but then it was the best. A lot of the things that we do now whenever we have our sleepovers, we thought up that first night.
International Gladiators was Kenny’s idea and, because it was Kenny’s idea, Fliss was determined to give it a go. She wanted to prove she wasn’t a wimp and could be pretty fearless too.
The first event Kenny came up with was called Barging Contests. We have to get into pairs, one on the other’s back, like we’re horse riding. The two riders have to try to knock each other off using only their elbows, or sometimes a squishy pooh. A squishy pooh can be a sleeping bag, or a pillow case filled with clothes or cushions, that you swing at your opponent trying to knock her off. It can be pretty wild, especially when Kenny’s on the other end of the squishy pooh.
Having seen Fliss’s bedroom, I never thought she’d go for it in a gazillion years. She has enough ornaments and toys around to open a shop. But in minutes she’d cleared everything breakable out of the way and was on Lyndz’s back ready to do battle.
“Let’s go, go, go!” she squealed, hanging on to Lyndz for dear life and whirling her squishy pooh around her head.
“Prepare to meet the floor!” Kenny warned her.
“You wish,” Fliss replied.
I’ve probably made Fliss sound a bit of a fuss-pot (which she can be) and a bit of a cry baby (which she used to be), but Fliss is lots of other things too. She can be fierce when it’s a competition; she loves to win as much as Kenny does, and she really gave her a run for her money.
“Bulls eye!” Fliss shrieked every time she caught Kenny off guard. If Kenny wasn’t so tough Fliss would have had her off loads of times. I knew how hard Kenny was trying by the way she was digging her heels into me. Kenny’s such a brilliant aim, she hardly ever misses, but Fliss was brilliant too – at ducking. Several times Kenny missed her completely and nearly fell off herself.
In fact Fliss was doing so well she started getting cocky. Big mistake.
“So who’s got a date with the floor?” Fliss asked grinning, and forgetting to duck.
Wham! Kenny caught her full in the face. She fell backwards on to the bed carrying her horse with her. The pair of them landed so heavily the whole house seemed to shake.
In moments Nicky burst into the room expecting to find one of us fatally injured. Instead she found Fliss and Lyndz lying on the bed with their legs in the air, screaming with laughter.
“It’s OK, Mum, don’t get your knickers in a twist,” Fliss told her. “Nobody broke anything.”
“I think you won,” Fliss told Kenny afterwards.
But Kenny admitted, “It was a close thing.”
After our mad half hour we thought we’d perhaps better quieten down a bit and at least start getting ready for bed. Then we all suddenly got a bit shy around each other again, so Fliss said we could get undressed in the bathroom. But Lyndz said, “No need,” and she taught us all this brilliant technique she called Sleeping Bag Striptease.
“This is what you do,” she said, wriggling down inside her sleeping bag until only her head was poking out, and started flinging her clothes out around the room and finally pulling on her PJs. Then she sat up looking a bit hot and bothered, but grinning from ear to ear.
When we timed ourselves, Kenny was the fastest, even though it was the first time she’d ever done it. But Fliss was almost as fast.
That twenty seconds record that Kenny set has been beaten lots of times since. Not by me, I might add, because I’m too tall. There’s never as much room in my sleeping bag and I often end up with both legs down the same trouser leg. It’s not easy being a beanpole, you know.
Once we were all ready for bed came the best part: the midnight feast. We’d all brought secret supplies and, after we were quite sure Nicky wasn’t coming back in, we turned off all the lights and sat round in a circle with our torches on. Kenny said we should put all the food together in a bowl that we’d made Fliss sneak down to the kitchen to borrow.
“You can’t possibly mix smoky bacon crisps with Skittles and fruit jellies,” Fliss said, horrified.
“Watch me,” Kenny said, busy tearing packets open.
Then we passed the bowl round and all tucked in. It was a bit like a lucky dip, not knowing what you’d