“Hey, wait a sec,” I said, warning bells ringing. “What do you mean, get ourselves a daffodil? We aren’t allowed to pick any of these flowers, you know that. Anyway, what do you want an actual daffodil for?”
“So we can copy it, of course!” groaned Kenny. “You can be dead thick sometimes, Franks. How else are we going to draw a good daffodil shape to write the poem in? They won’t miss one itsy-bitsy flower. See, there’s thousands of them!”
“But…” I bleated anxiously. I had a really bad feeling about this.
“Come on, Frankie! Stop being so wet!” scorned Kenny. “Look, there’s a perfect one over there.”
She pointed at this gorgeous, velvety, trumpety yellow daffodil, sitting temptingly right in the middle of the flowerbed.
“Just keep watch, will you?” Kenny said, and started moving purposefully towards her goal.
“No Kenny, don’t…” I began.
“Hey, that stupid idea of Fliss’s actually worked!” Rosie said, panting over to me, with Fliss and Lyndz following behind her. “I couldn’t believe…Er, what’s Kenny doing?”
“Picking a daffodil,” I said wretchedly. “To copy.”
Fliss took in the situation in one second flat, and turned papery-white. She hates getting into trouble. And this could really get us into trouble. “Kenny!” she screeched. “Don’t you dare! Mrs Poole will go mental!”
Kenny was tiptoeing daintily across the flowerbed, her eyes firmly on the trophy daffodil in the middle. I stared around desperately, hoping that no members of staff would look over in this direction.
Wait a second. What was going on? There were two familiar figures crouching down at the other end of the flowerbed. And it looked very much like they were about to…
“Psst, Kenz!” I hissed. “M&M alert! Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Kenny turned. Her eyes narrowed into little Ninja slits when she saw Emma Hughes wrapping her grubby little fingers around the stem of a daffodil. “Why, the crawly creeps!” she breathed. “I’ll bet you my Leicester City scarf that they’re copying our idea!! I’ll bet they were hiding in the library when we were talking to Baloney – typical!”
At that exact moment, Emma Hughes saw us. She jumped like she’d been stung (I wish), and came stomping over to us. We just stood and gawped as Kenny and Emma thrust their faces right up close to each other.
“Hey, you copycat worm!” Emma stormed at Kenny. “Don’t you dare tell me you’re going to do that poem, I wander’d lonely as a—”
“I might say the same of you, Queen Quasimodo!” hissed Kenny. “Can’t you ever think for yourself? We had the idea first!”
“This was our idea first!” Emma spluttered, her hands balling up into fists. “So get out of it!”
Emily Berryman and dozy old Alana ‘Banana’ Palmer came running up just then.
“You tell her, Ems!” squealed Emily.
“I’ll bet you anything Sausage Brain Baloney told the M&Ms exactly the same as she told us,” groaned Lyndz, chewing her fingernails anxiously and looking round the playground for any marauding teachers.
“Duh! I didn’t know she was that stupid!” muttered Rosie.
“Well…no one said anything to Baloney about it being a secret,” Fliss pointed out.
“Well, now look! We’ve got a serious situation on our hands here, guys,” I moaned, twisting great handfuls of hair up in my hands.
Then, if you can believe it, things got worse. Kenny reached down and grabbed her trophy daffodil, pulling it right up by the roots and waving it in Emma’s face.
“Well, I’m the first to pick a daffodil, so I think you could say we’re the winners on this one, Emma!” she said triumphantly.
“Oh yeah?” shouted Emma, enraged. And bent down and grabbed TWO!
Three, four, seven, ten daffodils…Kenny and Emma just kept picking the flowers likethey were mad or something. It all became a blur of yellow, white and orange – and earth showered down from the flower roots as they got madder and madder, grabbing flowers left, right and centre.
“I’VE…GOT…MORE…THAN…YOU!” panted Kenny.
“NO…WAY…JOSE!!!” Emma roared in reply.
I saw what Kenny was about to do before anyone else did.
“No, Kenny!” I yelled, launching myself at her just as she rugby-tackled Emma. Fliss grabbed me. Rosie grabbed Fliss. And Lyndz grabbed Rosie. And in one massive jumble, we fell. Right across the middle of Mrs Poole’s prize flowerbed.
“Stop, stop, stop!” I panted, wrestling with Kenny’s flailing arms. Mud and petals were squashed into the grass, and everyone was shrieking fit to wake the dead.
A very tall, menacing shadow fell across the tangle of arms and legs and flowers.
“Just What Exactly,” said a terrifyingly familiar voice, “Is Going On Here?”
Holy moley. Nuclear war had nothing on Mrs Poole. You could see this huge thundercloud over her head, complete with forked lightning zigzagging out of it. We all leapt up in one terrified huddle, and followed her in silence as she stormed across the playground, virtually pushing over all the small kids who were standing in the way and staring.
She marched us straight down the corridor, where we trailed earthy muck all over the clean floor-tiles, and straight into her office. Once there, she went and stood behind her desk, breathing deeply, her knuckles resting on the desktop. She looked like a crazed bull, facing a row of petal-strewn mud monsters. It would have been quite funny if it hadn’t been so totally awful.
When she had calmed down a bit – which took a good minute or two and felt like forever – she began to speak.
“Explain.”
Everyone started talking at once.
“Miss, it was Kenny…”
“It was Emma who started it, Miss…”
“We were just trying to stop them…”
“We only wanted one daffodil…”
“One – at – a – time,” she said, pegging each word out like clothes on a washing line. “Francesca Thomas. Speak.”
I stared helplessly at Kenny, not wanting to land her in it.
“Please, Mrs Poole,” said Kenny, “it wasn’t Frankie’s fault. She was trying to stop the fight between Emma and me.”
I looked at her in mute thanks.
“Fliss, Rosie and Lyndz were trying to stop the fight too,” continued Kenny bravely. She’s got serious guts, that girl. “But I wouldn’t listen. Don’t blame them, Miss.”
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