Sleepover Girls Go Splash!

Now, if you know anything about me, you’ll know that I absolutely love animals with a mad, mad passion. Sometimes I think I get on better with animals than people! I go horse riding every weekend, which is just my favourite thing in the world. My brother Stuart works part-time at a farm down the road from us, and I sometimes help muck out the horses there. Horses are just gorgeous, don’t you think? They’re so beautiful and strong and clever.

My favourite horse at the riding school is called Alfie. He’s a gorgeous bay gelding with a white star in the middle of his forehead. I always take him some sugar lumps for a treat because they’re his absolute favourite. Whenever he sees me, he nuzzles at my pockets with a hopeful whinny!

As well as Buster the dog, we’ve got three cats at home – Toffee, Truffle and Fudge. Truffle is my top cat because she’s lovely and snuggly and sometimes sleeps in my bed with me. The three of them pick on Buster though, if they catch him eating their cat food. They all gang up on him and chase him round the garden together. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen!

So what animal am I like, then? Well, the others gave me the nickname of Squirrel for a while, as Frankie reckoned I always had some sweets squirrelled away in my desk or in my bag. But I think that makes me sound more like a PIG!

If I could choose what animal I was, I’d be a horse, as I think they’re just the best animals in the world. In fact, I think I’d choose to be Alfie, as he’s so completely beautiful. Anyway, as I’m the one telling you all this, I think it’s only fair that I should be allowed to pick what I’d be.

There you are then, that’s us five. The Sleepover Club, yay! It’s great being in a club with your four best mates. We try and have a sleepover every Friday night unless someone’s on holiday or poorly, and we always do loads of cool stuff together at the weekends and in the school holidays. Best of all, someone’s always coming up with an awesome idea of what the club can do next.

And that was where I’d got up to, wasn’t it? Kenny’s awesome idea. Let me start another chapter and I’ll tell you more about it!

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If you can remember that far back, before I so rudely interrupted the story, Kenny had just suggested that we all went in for this sponsored swim at Cuddington Baths.

“I’m going to go for my personal best – one hundred lengths!” she said, eyes gleaming with excitement. Kenny’s a brilliant swimmer, of course. She’s got her gold lifesavers’ medal already, which is pretty spectacular for someone her age, apparently.

“A hundred lengths?” echoed Fliss, looking a bit faint at the thought. “We don’t all have to swim that far, do we?”

“No, of course not, silly,” Kenny said. “You just do as much as you can, and people sponsor you per length. Or, if you don’t think you’re going to manage many lengths, you can get them to give you a lump sum, like two pounds or something, just for taking part.”

“I could probably only do about ten lengths – if that!” I said doubtfully. “I mean, I like the idea, but I can still only do doggy paddle. I haven’t really got the hang of any other strokes yet.”

“Ten lengths would be excellent!” Kenny said warmly. “We can all practise together at weekends. And I could teach you breaststroke if you want – it’s dead easy. If you can do doggy paddle, you can easily do that.”

“All right, thanks!” I said.

“I reckon I can do fifteen lengths – or maybe even twenty,” Fliss said thoughtfully. She had a load of private swimming lessons last summer and is quite good now – even if she does hate getting her hair wet!

“I’m going to go for half a mile – thirty-two lengths,” Frankie said excitedly. She goes swimming quite a lot with her dad, and often with Kenny, too, so she’s pretty fit. “Half a mile – it sounds a long way, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, you can do that, no problem,” Kenny said confidently. “How about you, Rosie?”

“Ooh yes, of course, because you’re a water sign, aren’t you, Rosie?” Fliss said at once. We called her ‘mystic Flisstic’ for a while last summer, because she got really into horoscopes and fortune-telling. “You should be the best swimmer of the lot, then!”

Rosie went a bit pink. “I don’t think so!” she said. She was trying to laugh but she looked a bit awkward about it. “Anyway, I don’t think I’ll be able to do the swimathon with you guys. Sorry, but…”

“But what?” Frankie said. “One for all, and all for one, remember, Rosie?”

Rosie bit her lip. She was looking dead shifty, which is unusual when she’s normally such a down-to-earth person. “Well, the fact that my cozzie is so ancient and small that it’s practically unwearable for starters,” she said, with this embarrassed sort of laugh. “I don’t think Cuddington is ready to see my bare bum hanging out!”

“Oh, I’ve got loads of swimming costumes,” Fliss said at once. “You can borrow one of mine! Not my new one, obviously, as I’ll be wearing that, but I’ll dig out another one for you, if you like!”

“Nice one, Fliss!” I said. Fliss isn’t often very generous with her things. She’d never lend me or Kenny any of her clothes, I’m sure, simply because she would worry that we’d rip them or stretch them! Mind you, I suppose a swimming costume is pretty hard to break, isn’t it?

“Thanks, Fliss,” Rosie said, but she still wasn’t looking anyone in the eye. “But—”

“Anyway, you’ve GOT to take part,” Kenny said suddenly. “Because I haven’t told you the rest of it yet. All the money that we raise goes to Whizz-Kidz, I forgot to say! NOW tell me you won’t take part!”

“Whizz-Kidz?” asked Frankie. “Who are they?”

“Oh!” Rosie said. She looked delighted at the news. “Whizz-Kidz is that charity for disabled kids. They make all these amazing customised wheelchairs and trikes and stuff. You know that day centre that Adam goes to? They helped them out with a load of new wheelchairs, remember me telling you?”

“Yeah, and that’s not all,” Kenny said. “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you all about this! After the swimathon, there’s going to be this mega party at the pool for all the swimmers who take part, plus all their families. It should be really fab!”

Fliss’s eyes lit up. “Ooh, I hope the lifeguards are good-looking!”

“Yeah, one of them’s gorgeous, actually,” Kenny said, winking at the rest of us. “Nige, he’s called. I reckon you’ll like him, Fliss.”

“Oh, really?” Fliss said, smoothing her hair down. “What’s he like, then?”

“Well…” said Kenny, but just then Mrs Poole blew the whistle and we had to go inside for registration. But from the wink Kenny had just given, I had a fair idea that ‘Nige’ wasn’t going to be quite as hunky as Fliss was hoping!

Not even the morning maths test could dampen our spirits now we had the swimathon to get us excited! I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I could tell the others felt the same.

The only person who still didn’t seem that interested was Rosie. But I guessed it was because she didn’t have a swimming costume and felt embarrassed about it. Rosie’s dead proud like that. When we first started hanging out with her, she wouldn’t let us come round to her house for ages because she thought we’d turn our noses up at it, just because it’s in a bit of a state!

To be honest, I think our house is much scruffier than hers, because my dad’s one of these people who’s always starting things off and never finishing them. So we’ve got a half-built wall here, a half-painted room there, a frame out the back for a conservatory that he’s never managed to finish… It drives you mad sometimes!

Anyway, I don’t mind the others seeing our mad half-built house because that’s the way it’s always been, but I guess Rosie’s a bit different. I knew she’d hate having to wear one of Fliss’s swimming costumes because she hates not being able to “pay her own way”, as she says. But if something’s offered to you, you might as well take it, in my book.

I was just imagining myself doing the most graceful breaststroke ever up and down Cuddington Baths with crowds of people cheering me on, when Mrs Weaver called out, “OK, time’s up! Pens down!” and I realised with a jump that I’d barely started on the maths test. Uh-oh – I’d been daydreaming again.

“OK, swap tests with the person next to you,” Mrs Weaver said briskly. “Here are the answers. One – three nines are twenty-seven. Two – eighteen plus sixteen is thirty-four. Three – six fours are twenty-four…”

Luckily, I had Kenny marking mine, and being a complete star and fantastic friend, she scribbled a load of answers in for me so that I wouldn’t get too bad a score. Now that’s what I call a mate! I was marking Rosie’s paper and she’d done nearly as badly as me by the looks of things, so I tried to put a few answers in there, too. Rosie was obviously thinking about the swimathon as well, judging by all the empty spaces on her answer sheet!

Unfortunately, our little bout of “helping” was spotted by beady-eyed Emma Hughes, one of our sworn enemies, the M&Ms. BAAAD news…

“Mrs Weaver, Kenny and Lyndsey are cheating!” she said at once, sticking her hand in the air.

Kenny scowled at her and I gave her a dirty look. Interfering cow! Just because she was a mega-brain maths-head!

Mrs Weaver hates people telling tales, but she’s also pretty hot against cheats, too. “Kenny and Lyndsey, bring your answer sheets here,” she said crisply. “I think I’ll mark the rest of those, thank you very much.”

Emma gave us this whopping great smirk, like she’d just won a prize. In fact, if there was a prize going for smugness, she would have won the gold medal.

Mrs Weaver soon cut her down to size, though. “And Emma, we don’t like tell-tales in this class, so you can wipe that grin off your face,” she said. “Now then! Let’s see if we can get through the rest of this test without any more dramas!”

Kenny and I exchanged looks. Trust one of the M&Ms to stick a big fat nose into our business.

As you probably guessed, me and Rosie didn’t do very well on the maths test in the end, thanks to old supergrass Hughesy. Mrs Weaver handed our papers back, not looking very impressed.

“Tomorrow’s Friday, and it’ll be the last test of the week, as you all know,” she said, “so let’s see if we can get some better scores, please! I don’t know what’s up with you all this morning but some people obviously aren’t at their brightest. Let’s do some long division, to see if THAT will get your brains in gear.”

Ugh! She was in a bad mood now, if she was making us do MORE maths. We were all relieved when it was break time, and we could get outside for a breather. But by now, Rosie was grumpy and fed up, I was feeling completely thick as I’d got all the long-division sums wrong, and even Kenny was still a bit growly after being told off.