And Lyndsey Collins. Now she does. Lyndz is a great laugh.
So that’s how it used to be.
Now there’s Rosie as well, which, in case you can’t count, makes five.
Rosie’s only recently moved round here; she doesn’t know many people yet, so we thought we’d be friendly. OK, we were curious as well. She’d moved into that big house at the end of Welby Drive, the one with the massive garden with an orchard, so we were expecting someone really posh. But Rosie is not posh. Up to now we haven’t been inside, but we’re working on it.
It was Lyndsey who suggested we let Rosie sit with us in class and hang around with us at dinner, which was cool with us, but then, the next thing, she said, “I think we should let Rosie join the Sleepover Club.”
I said, “What for?” as if I needed to ask.
“Well, I feel sorry for her; she’s got no friends.” Lyndz is the sort of person that would rescue a fly if it fell in a puddle.
“That’s not our problem,” said Fliss. “Anyway it would make five and five’s an odd number and odd numbers never work.” Fliss likes everything to be tidy. She even lifts hairs off your cardigan while she’s talking to you.
But for once I agreed with her. “We don’t really know her, do we? She might be a drip. She might be a scaredy cat. She might be really boring.”
“She’s not,” said Lyndz. “She passed the test, didn’t she?”
I suppose she did. We wouldn’t even have let her hang around with us at school otherwise. We do these naughty things: you know, like screwing up paper pellets and stuffing them down the back of the art cupboard to feed Muriel, our pretend pet monster. Sometimes we tie one of us to a tree behind the mobile classroom, then knock on the door and run away. If you want to be in the gang you have to do a dare and get sent to Mrs Poole’s office. We dared Rosie to take a bite out of a biscuit in the teachers’ tin on the staff-room table and then put it back. She ate half the biscuit, so we had to let her join. But there’s something about her I’m still not sure about.
“Well, I don’t care who joins,” said Kenny, “as long as we have a laugh.”
“But she doesn’t laugh, that’s the trouble,” I said. “She’s a bit of a sad case, really.”
“That’s because her dad’s left,” said Lyndz.
“So’s mine,” said Fliss.
“Yes, but you’ve got another one,” Kenny pointed out.
“Andy is not my dad,” Fliss insisted.
We argued for ages until Fliss said, “Let’s stop bickering and have a vote and settle it once and for all.” She can be so bossy sometimes. “Those in favour.”
Lyndz and Kenny put up their hands.
“Those against.”
Me and Fliss put up ours.
“Oh, well, that really settles it,” I said. “Now what do we do?”
Well, we didn’t do anything, until the following week when we were all at Brownies. We were sitting on the wall outside, waiting for Kenny’s dad to pick us up. We were talking about our next sleepover, which was at my house the following weekend. Just then Rosie came over, because she’s started Brownies too.
“I’ve got these really cute Forever Friends jimjams,” Fliss was telling us. “You’ll see them at the sleepover on Saturday.”
“What’s that?” asked Rosie.
Suddenly everyone went quiet. Kenny started to whistle, which she always does when she’s nervous. I looked at my feet, which are pretty fascinating. No, really, they are, because they’re the biggest feet you’ve ever seen. I take size sixes already. Of course I’m tall for my age and, as my mum says, if I didn’t have big feet I’d be for ever falling over. Fliss sucked her cheeks in, which is a silly habit and makes her look like a gerbil. Then, out of the blue, we all heard Lyndz say, “Oh, it’s our Sleepover Club. It’s at Frankie’s house on Friday. Do you want to come?”
After Rosie had gone, Fliss turned on her and said, “Why did you say that?”
But she needn’t have asked. We all said together, “Because she felt sorry for her!”
So that was it. Thanks to big-hearted Lyndsey, with a mouth to match, we now had five in the Sleepover Club.
Of course that was only part of it. The other person I blame is Fliss. If she wasn’t so potty about weddings, we definitely wouldn’t be in this mess now. And I wouldn’t be sitting here, hiding in my bedroom from Brown Owl.
Fliss is so potty about weddings that she even marries her toys. Whenever you go round to her house, there’s a rabbit in a wedding dress or a teddy wearing a veil or a Barbie getting married to a My Little Pony. She reads a bit out of the Bible, plays a tune on the keyboard and then she says, “And now you may kiss the bride.” Then they get to sit together on a shelf in their wedding clothes living happily ever after.
That’s how she came up with her bright idea. “Why don’t we have a wedding at our next sleepover?” she said, dead excited.
“A wedding?” I said.
“Yeah. I could be the bride, and you could be the groom.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’ve got a boy’s name.”
“So’s Kenny.”
“You’re the tallest. Kenny can be bridesmaid. You’ll have to wear a dress, though,” she told Kenny, “you can’t wear your soccer strip.”
I said, “Dream on!”
Kenny grinned and sat there shaking her head. Kenny lives and dies in her football top. She’s devoted to Leicester City football team and just about everything she wears has got The Fox’s logo on it. Me and Kenny have been friends since playschool and I have never seen her in a frilly frock.
“Anyway,” I said, “you can forget it. I’m not marrying anybody.”
“I’ll marry you,” Lyndz said.
“Brillo,” said Fliss and gave Lyndz a hug.
So we worked it all out: Kenny would be best man and I’d be the vicar. I’d borrow a white cotton nightie of my mum’s and Fliss’s Bible and an old pair of Dad’s glasses. All my toys and Pepsi, our dog, would be the guests and we’d do it out in the garden. All we were short of was a bridesmaid, so, at the time, it seemed quite lucky that Rosie joined the Sleepover Club when she did.
Lyndz has an excellent set of dressing-up clothes that used to be her mum’s. She brought Fliss an old wedding dress and a net curtain for a veil; she found a soldier’s outfit for herself to wear, and painted on a moustache. There was a pink fairy dress that Rosie wore, and Kenny wore her soccer strip with a jacket over the top.
We all had to hum the “Here comes the bride” tune and then Lyndz and Fliss walked down my garden path through the arch where the roses used to grow, before Pepsi dug them up. Arm in arm.
I started off, “We are gathered here,” and then I rambled on till everyone started to look bored. I didn’t say the bit about “And now you may kiss the bride” because Lyndz had made me promise to leave it out. But we did the bit where they exchange rings. And then we took lots of photos. Pepsi got too excited and kept running off with the other guests in her mouth, so in the end we had to lock her