The 24 Hour Sleepover Club

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Sleepover Kit List

Copyright

About the Publisher

I hope I haven’t kept you waiting. It’s a miracle that I’m here at all. With the strop that my parents are in, I never thought I’d see daylight again! Well, I suppose we did go a bit far this time. Quick! Keep your head down and we’ll just hurry past the park gates. Phew! Right let’s sit down and catch our breath and I’ll tell you all about it.

Thanks to our 24-hour sleepover, I’m banned from that park. We all are. All the members of the Sleepover Club that is. The Fearless Five my dad calls us, or at least he used to. Now it’s the Flipping Stupid Five! OK, what we did was a bit OTT. But we were only trying to get even with our deadly rivals Emma Hughes and Emily Berryman, or as we call them, the M&Ms. How were we to know that flinging a few jellies and spraying a bit of Silly String would cause so much chaos? Still, it was worth it to see the look on their faces. Wicked!

It all started with us planning our 24-hour sleepover. That is probably the most important date on our calendar because it’s kind of where the whole Sleepover Club began.

You remember Kenny, don’t you? You know, the crazy one. Well, we’ve been best friends for ever. When we were both about five or six and the funfair came to Abbey Park in Leicester, I went to it with her family. Then I stayed the night at her house. I hadn’t really slept away from home before and I thought it was pretty cool. The next year we went to the fair with my parents and Kenny stayed at my house. Well, then we started hanging around with Lyndz at school. She’s such a scream, although she’s kind with it. And Fliss kind of tagged along. You couldn’t possibly forget Fliss, she’s so tidy and organised. She’s probably the only person in the world who matches the colour of her knickers to the rest of her clothes!

The first sleepover we all had together was after we’d been to the funfair. It was class! That’s when we decided we ought to form the Sleepover Club. We have heaps of sleepovers now, but this one is our anniversary. That’s why we have a 24-hour sleepover, to make it special. We go to the funfair in Leicester on Saturday night, then on Sunday we have a picnic by ourselves in the local park.

This will be Rosie’s first 24-hour sleepover. Of course you remember Rosie. She’s new and she seemed like a bit of a wet weekend at first. She’s actually pretty smart. And sensible too, which makes a change from the others!

“Francesca, you’re straying from the point!” my teacher, Mrs Weaver, would say. People only ever call me Francesca when they’re cross with me. You can call me Frankie.

Anyway, you want to know why we’re banned from the park, don’t you? And the funfair as well, actually. You might as well make yourself comfortable because we’ll be here for a while.

We always know roughly when we’re going to have our 24-hour sleepover because the fair comes around the same week every year. But as soon as we find out the exact dates we get a bit wild. The thing is, we’re a bit hyper anyway because it’s towards the end of the summer term and we know we’ve got the summer holidays to look forward to. Bliss!

This year, Kenny rushed up to us in the playground before school all red in the face and grinning from ear to ear. She shoved a crumpled poster of the fair at me. She said it just happened to have fallen off a fence as she walked past.

“The sleepover’s on for Saturday the 6th,” she shrieked, jumping up and down on the spot. Lyndz, Fliss and me screamed and did high fives.

“I don’t see what’s so special,” said Rosie, looking at the rest of us as though we’d just escaped from a zoo. “We’re always having sleepovers.”

“Yeah, but this one isn’t just a case of come in, stay the night, go home again,” said Kenny. “We’ve got a whole day together doing exactly what we want to do.”

“Oh right, so you get to be a doctor and Fliss gets married to Ryan Scott, does she?” asked Rosie innocently.

“But I’m not old enough to get married,” said Fliss.

“Derr!” said the rest of us together, tapping our heads. Fliss, as you probably remember, had her sense of humour removed at birth.

“No, it’s just cool hanging out together. Like Friends,” I said.

“With no boys,” added Lyndz. She has four brothers and, as far as she is concerned, boys are a serious waste of space.

“Just Molly The Monster instead,” said Fliss.

We all groaned. Molly is Kenny’s sister from hell. She’s only a year or so older than Kenny but they’re about as different as Oasis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The worst thing is that they share a bedroom so she always has to be part of our sleepovers there. It’s like having a huge tub of Cookie Dough ice-cream and finding a maggot in the middle of it.