Party Time Read online

  “This is a proper dress from the 1950s.” Emily Berryman twirled round in front of the class. “It belongs to my Auntie Sally. She said she’d lend it to me if I promised to look after it.”

  Rosie made a being-sick face and Danny McCloud shouted out, “We can see your knickers when you do that!”

  The rest of the class collapsed into giggles and Emma Hughes told him to “grow up”.

  Fliss was getting more and more furious.

  “It should have been us in all those great clothes!” she spat. “No one’s going to remember our little bit of the play, are they? I mean, ‘medical developments since 1900’ isn’t the most exciting topic in the world, is it?”

  Kenny just sighed.

  The truth is that none of us were very thrilled when Kenny had suggested our topic for the play. I mean, she wants to be a doctor, so stuff about medical history is fascinating to her. But to the rest of us it was one big YAWWWN. We went round to Kenny’s house one night though, and her father told us some really interesting stuff. And he’s a doctor, so he knew what he was talking about.

  “When you’ve got a really bad virus, doctors prescribe tablets called antibiotics that fight infection,” he told us. “Do you know how their discovery came about?”

  Of course, none of us had a clue.

  “Well, a man called Alexander Fleming discovered that a particular mould could kill certain nasty germs …”

  “A mole? The animal?” asked Rosie.

  “No!” he laughed. “A mould, a fungus.”

  “YUK!” Fliss leapt about ten feet in the air. “Antibiotics aren’t made from mould, are they?”

  “No, Fliss, things have advanced a bit since then!” he grinned. “But back then, that mould led to the discovery of penicillin, which was really the first type of antibiotic. Now antibiotics save millions of lives.”

  Fliss was still looking a bit green.

  “There are lots of other developments that aren’t to do with illnesses,” Dr McKenzie went on. Fliss brightened up a bit.

  “I bet your mum’s had a lot of scans recently, hasn’t she Frankie?” Kenny’s dad smiled at me.

  I nodded. Since Mum’s been pregnant, she’s always going to hospital and being hooked up to some machine or other.

  “Things like ultrasound machines enable doctors to check out what’s going on in the body without doing it any harm,” said Dr McKenzie. “It means that we can monitor Frankie’s mum’s baby and make sure everything’s normal. That kind of thing would have been unheard of a hundred years ago. And now we’re much better equipped to look after babies if they’re born early too. Surely that’s a good thing?”

  Suddenly, medical developments seemed quite a cool thing to talk about. The others seemed to think so too. Apart from Fliss, who still seemed a bit grossed out about the mould thing.

  Anyway, after that we had lots of ideas for our play. The problem was that we were only going to be on stage for five minutes. Ryan Scott and his group were going to be on just before us, with the M&Ms straight after.

  “Great!” chortled Kenny when she found out. “It should be easy to put my plan into practice!”

  The rest of us looked at each other. The M&Ms certainly deserved what was coming to them, but the end-of-term play was a bit of a risky place to dish it out …

  For the next week or so we worked really hard on our performance. We painted loads of boxes so that part of our scenery would look like an old-fashioned laboratory and part of it would look like a high-tech hospital.

  Every time the M&Ms saw us rehearsing, they started yawning.

  “I bet you’ll send everyone to sleep with your bit,” they screeched. “But never mind – we’ll wake them up with our fashion presentation. Thanks for the idea, Fliss!”

  Poor Fliss, I thought she was going to strangle Emma Hughes with her plaits.

  “It won’t be your stupid fashion show that wakes them up!” muttered Kenny under her breath. The rest of us smirked.

  Of course, no one else knew what we had planned, and Mrs Weaver seemed really pleased with our part of the play. Fliss was our narrator, dressed in a white coat to look like a doctor, and Lyndz was going to be Alexander Fleming. We’d saved all this yukky mould from old cheese and fruit and stuff, because Kenny said she wanted it to look realistic. But it was so gross that we made Kenny look after it.

  Rosie was playing the part of a patient with a nasty virus. First she was going to die a horrible death to show what it would have been like before antibiotics were invented. Then she was going to pretend to be cured by the new drugs. She liked the dying bit best. It seemed to take longer every time we rehearsed it. If we didn’t watch out, our entire five minutes would be taken over by her death scene!

  For my bit, I was going to be a pregnant woman having an ultrasound scan. Kenny had this great idea of taping a big pink balloon to my tummy so that it looked just like Mum’s enormous stomach. Then she was going to be the doctor and smear jelly stuff on to it and pretend to do the scan, just like they do in hospital. It was well cool!

  On the evening of the performance, I was really nervous. All our parents were coming to watch, and that suddenly made it all serious. Fliss and Rosie were already at school by the time I arrived, both jiggling about and looking sicky green.

  “Come on, you guys!” I tried to jolly them up. “We’re only on stage for five minutes and we know what we’re doing, don’t we?”

  They nodded weakly, and I started to blow up the balloon that was going to be my tummy. I’d just got it nice and big and was trying to tie the knot when Lyndz came flying into me. THUD! I ended up on the floor and the balloon went shooting about in the air, making a really rude noise.

  “You’re disgusting, Felicity Sidebotham!” Emma Hughes sniffed as she walked past.

  The thing was – she wasn’t joking. She hadn’t seen the balloon, and she really thought that Fliss had made that noise!!! I was still on the floor, but I was laughing so much I couldn’t get up. The more Rosie and Lyndz tried to pull me up, the more we creased up. And what made it worse was that Fliss was just standing there like a goldfish, opening and closing her mouth!

  When I eventually got up, my sides ached.

  “Can you believe that?” I spluttered. “I’d better go and find my balloon.”

  “Hurry up!” Lyndz called out after me. “I’ve got something to tell you!”

  I hadn’t really seen where the balloon had ended up and no one else had seen it either, so I had to return empty-handed. Fortunately I’d brought a spare one.

  “What’s your news then, Lyndz?” I asked when I got back to the others. I found the other balloon and started to blow it up.

  “It’s great!” Lyndz was hopping from foot to foot. “But shouldn’t we wait until Kenny gets here before I tell you?”

  We all looked at each other, then said together, “Nah!”, which made us all laugh.

  “Well …”

  Lyndz was just about to tell us what this great news was when someone thumped me in the back and started shaking a tube of red liquid in front of my face. I nearly swallowed the balloon, which wasn’t very funny.

  “Don’t do that, Kenny!” I yelled, and had to start blowing the balloon up again.

  “Look, this is for the operation!” Kenny ignored me and shook the liquid again. “Cool, isn’t it?”

  “What operation?” I gasped.

  “Operation ‘Destroy the M&Ms’!” Kenny announced proudly.

  “What are you going to do?” shrieked Fliss. “You’re not really going to operate on them, are you?”

  “Grow up, Fliss!” shrieked Kenny. “It’s only for effect!”

  “B…but we can’t really do anything to them,” Fliss stammered. “Not in front of all these people—”

  “Don’t be such a wet blanket!” Kenny hissed.

  Fliss looked as though she was about to cry.

  I had finally blown up my balloon and was knotting its neck. “What was your news?” I ask
ed Lyndz guickly, trying to change the subject.

  “Crikey, I almost forgot!” Lyndz shrieked. “A sleepover! Mum says we can have one at my place between Christmas and New Year. Then you’ll all be able to come! She said, what about Tuesday 28th? We can pretend it’s New Year’s Eve if we want and do something special. Well, what do you think?”

  We all hugged her.

  “That’ll be great, Lyndz!”

  “Yeah, cool!”

  “Hey, mind my balloon!”

  “Places everyone!” Mrs Weaver clapped her hands and started getting everyone organised.

  “Don’t forget about the M&Ms,” Kenny whispered as we made our way to the side of the stage. “Remember the plan!”

  Well, if Kenny had a plan, we didn’t stick to it. But who cares as long as we made fools of the M&Ms? And we certainly did that. To the max!

  The first part of our class’s performance passed in a bit of a blur. We were so busy trying to calm ourselves down that we didn’t watch much of it. Kenny kept disappearing too, and we had no idea what she was up to. I had my own problems with my balloon – somehow it just wouldn’t stay taped to my stomach, and it almost floated away twice. The M&Ms of course thought that was hysterical.

  “Dolls! Balloons! You’re a bigger baby than we thought!” Emma Hughes sneered nastily. She was done up like a dog’s dinner in a spangly dress with fringes round the bottom and a feather in her hair. She was practising a stupid dance – ‘The Charleston’ or something. She said they did it in the 1920s. It looked pretty silly to me, all knocking knees and kicking your legs up. I’d much rather bop along to the Sugababes.

  Emily Berryman was still wandering around in her jeans and T-shirt.

  “I’m going to wear my Auntie Sally’s dress,” she growled in her gruff voice. “But I’m not putting it on until the last minute, because I don’t want to spoil it. Amanda’s keeping an eye on it for me.”

  “Are you talking about Amanda Porter?” Kenny suddenly reappeared. “I think you’d better go and help her out – she seems to be stuck in her mini-skirt.”

  The M&Ms twittered off behind the stage.

  “Amanda Porter in a mini-skirt! Ugh, gross!” winced Fliss. It wasn’t really a pleasant thought.

  “I bet they’ve made her wear a mini-skirt so that everyone will think how great they look.” suggested Rosie.

  “Amanda’s not really stuck, is she?” asked Lyndz suspiciously.

  “Yeah!” laughed Kenny. “I accidentally got the zip stuck when I was helping her into her skirt. How else could I tear her away from Berryman’s precious dress?”

  “What have you done?” I squeaked.

  But before she could answer, Mrs Weaver appeared.

  “The play’s going very well!” She seemed very pleased. “Right, Francesca, can your group please get your scenery together? You’re on next.”

  “I feel sick!” Fliss wailed.

  “Don’t be such a wimp!” Kenny reprimanded her. “It’ll be cool, you’ll see!”

  Fliss looked as white as a sheet, but I was kind of red and flustered. My balloon was causing me real problems.

  We grabbed the boxes we’d painted for our scenery and prepared to go on stage. And getting on stage is where the nightmare really began.

  We heard the applause for Ryan Scott’s group, then a familiar sniggering from the side of the stage, then— TOTAL BLACKNESS. Someone had turned the lights off completely, and we couldn’t see anything at all. We were all crashing into each other and treading on each other’s toes.

  “Ouch, mind my foot!” squealed Fliss’s voice.

  “Sorry,” mumbled Danny McCloud.

  There was a crunching sound, then …

  “Watch it, you clown!” That was definitely Kenny.

  And all the time we were getting totally tangled up in our scenery. When the lights finally went back on – thanks to Mrs Weaver – the stage looked like a battlefield. Ryan Scott was lying dazed on the ground, and Fliss was slumped on top of one of our crushed boxes. People were limping, Rosie was clutching a gash in her shin and Kenny was looking furiously at the M&Ms, who’d collapsed in giggles at the side of the stage. Lyndz had unfortunately started to hiccup, but there was no time to do anything about that.

  Red in the face, Mrs Weaver stormed on to the stage and started organising everyone. But I think she was so angry that she didn’t really notice what she was doing. So instead of having our own scenery of the hospital, we were surrounded by the televisions and video recorders that the previous group had used for their performance.

  As soon as Fliss saw what had happened she started to panic. She turned to Mrs Weaver, but Mrs W just snapped:

  “Come on Felicity, I think we’ve wasted enough time already!”

  So Fliss stammered, “Th…there…erm, there have been a great many advances in medicine since 1900 …” and at that point Lyndz appeared.

  To start with, she was OK and pretended to ignore the fact that she looked like she was standing in a television shop rather than in a laboratory. But when it got to the point where she had to make her discovery about penicillin, she realised that she hadn’t got the dish of mould. She looked frantically round at the rest of us.

  “Fliss, Fliss …” Kenny hissed. She’d been looking after the mould, hadn’t she, and was trying to pass the dish to Fliss. Well, Fliss nearly had a fit when she saw it, and screamed. The yukky green stuff fell out of Kenny’s hands and right down Fliss’s clean white coat and on to the floor. Fliss started flapping about, trying to wipe the mess off her coat, and the more she flapped, the more the mould got trampled into the stage.

  She just looked so funny that the rest of us creased up. Lyndz was giggling and hiccuping at the same time and making this terrible noise, and that just made us worse. Fliss looked really mad at us. She hates being laughed at at the best of times, but in front of all those people too – it was like her worst nightmare. Especially as most of the audience were starting to splutter as well. I thought that she might run away, but she didn’t. She carried on with her narration.

  “Before the invention of antibiotics,” she went on bravely, “viruses, which are treatable today, could lead to death.”

  That was Rosie’s cue to do her dramatic dying act. She held her head, she gripped her throat, she started to sink to her knees and…WHOOSH! She skidded on the patch of mould and fell right off the stage.

  I was waiting at the side to come on and do my bit, but as soon as I saw what had happened, I rushed over to Rosie. We all did. The poor thing was all crumpled up on the floor. Fortunately Dr McKenzie had come to watch the play, and he came running over to make sure that she was all right. As he was checking that she hadn’t broken anything, Kenny hissed to me:

  “The M&Ms are responsible for this! I’m going to fix them once and for all …”

  “Wait, Kenny!” I yelled, but I forgot that I still had a balloon strapped to my tummy. As I spun round, I fell over – and there was the loudest BANG you’ve ever heard as the balloon exploded. Everyone went silent. And that’s when we heard all the commotion at the back of the stage.

  All the boxes, which had been our scenery, cascaded on to the ground. All apart from two. Kenny and Emma were bashing each other about the head with those. It seemed like everyone else saw what was happening as well, because suddenly they were surrounded by the rest of our class.

  “Go, Kenny!” shouted Ryan Scott.

  “Hit her, Emma!” squealed Emily.

  But Emma suddenly couldn’t hit anything, because her feather head-dress had fallen right over her eyes and she couldn’t see. She raised the box over her head and stumbled into Kenny. Kenny was caught off balance and fell over – right on top of Emily.

  “Just what is going on here?” demanded Mrs Weaver, wading through the crowd.

  “Kenny’s, hic, for it now!” muttered Lyndz, who was standing next to me.

  Mrs Weaver’s face was like thunder. I’d never seen her so mad.

  “I am
horrified! I have never …” she began – then Emily Berryman let out this ear-splitting scream.

  “I’m bleeding!” she shrieked. “Look!”

  Blood was dripping down her arms and falling in a pool on the floor. We looked at Kenny. She had a huge bloodstain spreading over her white coat.

  “Kenny, are you all right?” I rushed over to her.

  “Oh, that!” She couldn’t stop laughing. “It’s only red paint. We were going to use it in our play, Mrs Weaver, honestly. The tube must have got broken.”

  Mrs Weaver looked at her suspiciously.

  “I don’t remember there being any blood in your performance, Laura,” she sniffed. “Emily, do try to calm down, dear. Laura says it’s only paint. It will wash off.”

  But Emily Berryman was wailing harder than ever.

  “But look at this!” she cried. “My Auntie Sally’s dress is ruined!”

  We all turned to look. As well as splodges of red paint down the front of the dress, sticky brown blobs were encrusted round the neck and the sleeves.

  “More of Merlin’s droppings!” squealed Rosie, who had hobbled over to join us. “Kenny’s done a real job on her this time!”

  We thought that Mrs Weaver was going to rip us to shreds, but I guess she thought that wouldn’t look too great in front of our parents. Instead she left it for Mrs Poole, the head, to give one of her “I’m-shocked-and disappointed-by-your-behaviour” speeches and to send us all home. And that, of course, is when our parents ripped into us.

  “I don’t know what to say, Francesca, I really don’t.” Mum shook her head.

  “But it wasn’t my fault!” I told her indignantly. “It wasn’t me bashing people over the head with cardboard boxes, was it?”

  “You’re not telling us that you knew nothing about all that business, surely?” said Dad sternly.

  But I honestly didn’t know that was going to happen. All Kenny had planned was tripping up the M&Ms when they were going on stage and bringing the curtain down on them mid-performance, which did all seem pretty tame after that night’s display.