Trixie and the Dream Pony of Doom

Dinah and Chloe and me looked at each other. Griselda’s lot so rarely say anything honest that somehow it sounds different when they do. “What do you mean, prove it?” I asked, doubtfully.

“Look at her hand, sucker,” Sniffling Sophie said.

Griselda held up her right hand. There was a huge plaster binding up her first two fingers. “Got bitten,” she said triumphantly. “I was trying to tie a Halloween mask on Sally Campbell’s cat to frighten her, and it bit me. Poisoned and all. I can’t even write at the moment, let alone draw.”

Big Barbara and Sniffling Sophie started to close in on us. We’d blown it. There was nothing for it but to beat a retreat.

Disaster! Granny Clump abandoned to her fate! I knew I just had to get to that TV studio, even if I was expelled.

“I’ll have to break out of school, there’s no other way,” I said. “Just tell Warty-Beak I fell in a cement mixer or something.”

I headed for the gates, but just as the bell rang Warty-Beak loomed from nowhere to shoo us all inside. I thought for a second of diving through his legs, but I could see Ms Dove was already locking the gates.

I doubled back, desperate, to a dismayed Chloe and a mischievously grinning Dinah.

“I know a way,” she whispered, grabbing my hand.

“Where are you going? Is it a new game? Can I join in?” said Martha Marchant, who appeared from nowhere like the Ghost of Gloom.

“Distract her, Chloe,” Dinah hissed in Chloe’s ear.

Chloe can be a bit slow at this sort of thing, but she did her best. She started off by standing up like a lamppost, putting both arms straight up above her head and sticking her hands up in a point.

“What am I being?” she asked Martha Marchant, who just shook her head and then looked at us for a clue. Phew. Some distraction this was turning out to be.

“A carrot,” Chloe said in the end, looking disappointed.

But Martha clapped her hands and giggled. “Be another one,” she said.