by Narinder Dhami
Contents
Have you been Invited to all these Sleepovers?
Salut tout le monde! Je m’appelle Rosie, et j’ai une super histoire à vous raconter sur les vacances du Sleepover Club à Paris!
No, don’t get your knickers in a twist – you haven’t picked up the wrong book! The Sleepover Club have kind of gone all French, because last half-term we went on a school trip to Paris. We had a really cool time, but as you can probably guess by now, things didn’t go all that smoothly. In fact, just about everything that could go wrong did! But I’d better start right at the beginning…
The beginning was at school a few months ago in Cuddington, the village where we all live. The bell had just rung for hometime, and the Sleepover Club were all desperate to get out of school as fast as we could, as usual. You remember the Sleepover Club, don’t you? There’s Frankie, Kenny, Fliss, Lyndz and me (Rosie), and we sleep over at each other’s houses at the weekends.
“What’s up with Weaver?” Kenny said crossly as Mrs Weaver started rooting around in her desk instead of letting us go. “I want to go home!”
Everyone in the class started muttering and moaning, until Mrs Weaver glanced up and fixed everyone with a beady glare. Then we all shut up.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said, picking up a pile of papers. “But I have some letters for your parents here.”
“Boring!” Frankie whispered with a huge yawn.
“The school is organising a trip to Paris next half-term for this year group,” Mrs Weaver went on. “And we need to know how many of you would be interested in going.”
Well, that wasn’t boring! We all looked at each other in delight. Our last school trip abroad, to Spain, had been cool – and we were all up for some more!
“Excellent!” Kenny said. “I’m definitely going!”
“Me too!” I put in.
“I’m going to ask my mum and dad if I can go,” Lyndz added.
“I wonder if we get to go to Disneyland Paris?” Frankie asked, looking excited.
“Oh, I’ve been there,” said Fliss. “It’s fab!”
As you can probably guess by now, we were all determined to go! And there was one other special reason why we were looking forward to it. We’ve kind of started having sleepovers in different places whenever we can. We’ve had one in a museum, one when we were camping and one when we went on the last school trip to Spain. Now we had the chance to have a sleepover in France – and none of us was going to miss that!
“When are we going to have our French sleepover then?”
Kenny said that in a really loud voice while we were waiting in the school minibus to go through the Channel Tunnel to Paris. Immediately we all started shushing her, and looking round to check where Mrs Weaver was.
“Shut up, Kenny!” hissed Frankie.
“Yeah, shut up, Bigmouth!” Lyndz added.
“If Mrs Weaver hears that, she’ll go ballistic,” Fliss said nervously. “After the school trip to Spain, I bet she watches us all the time.”
“Do you remember when Mrs Weaver caught us right in the middle of the Spanish sleepover?” Kenny grinned. “She looked pretty spooky in her nightie!”
“Ssh!” said Fliss, even though she was giggling as hard as the rest of us. Luckily Mrs Weaver was down at the front of the minibus with Mrs Jackson and Mr Tate, who were the other teachers coming with us. We were near the back of the minibus, although we hadn’t managed to bag the back seat. Kenny was sitting next to Frankie, Fliss and Lyndz were sitting behind them, and I was behind Fliss and Lyndz.
“We won’t get caught this time,” Frankie said confidently.
“Maybe we’ll all be in the same room,” Lyndz said hopefully. “That’d make it easier.”
“What are we going to do at a French sleepover anyway?” I asked.
“Eat snails!” Kenny suggested with an evil gleam in her eye.
“Urgh! No way!” Fliss turned pale.
“Do you know what ‘snail’ is in French?” Frankie asked, pulling a French phrasebook out of her bag. We all groaned loudly.
“Oh, you’re not going to bore us to death again, are you!” Kenny moaned. When we went to Spain, Frankie took a Spanish dictionary and kept on telling us loads of stupid words.
Frankie flipped through the book, ignoring the lot of us. “Escargot,” she said, “That’s French for snail.”
“Well, I’m not eating any escargots at our sleepover,” Fliss said firmly.
“We could have French bread and cheese,” Lyndz suggested.
“And onions,” I added.
“Hey, I’ve got a great idea!” Kenny announced. “We can dance the Can-Can!”
“Don’t you have to show your knickers when you do the Can-Can?” Fliss giggled.
“That depends on how high you can kick!” Kenny started humming the Can-Can tune, and kicking up her legs against the seat in front of her.