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  We were on our best behaviour for the rest of the morning.

  “You really should have asked permission,” said Mum, putting the jelly back in the fridge.

  “I know, but we completely forgot about them and we wanted them to be set for the picnic,” I explained.

  “I’m not sure that they will be, love,” said Mum. “You might have to forget about them.”

  “We can take them anyway. It’s cool to drink jelly at the moment,” said Rosie quickly.

  “Not much good for throwing though,” grumbled Kenny. I shot her one of my looks. She was getting as bad as Fliss.

  “I hope you’re not going to do anything silly,” warned Dad sternly. “I don’t want to have to bail you all out from the police station for causing trouble in the park.” The five of us exchanged looks.

  “As if!” I exclaimed, looking very hurt. “We’re going to have a nice civilised picnic.” I hate lying to Mum and Dad.

  “Well I’m very pleased to hear it!” laughed Mum. “Now Fliss, where is this concert that Callum’s in? I thought we might go along to watch and catch up with your Mum and Andy.”

  “Is Callum any good?” asked Rosie.

  “No, he’s useless!” laughed Fliss. “He keeps tripping up! Flora’s supposed to be good, though. Mum says her teacher thinks she could be famous one day!”

  “Is Flora Callum’s girlfriend?” I asked. “The one we saw him with at the fair?”

  “Yep. Apparently she’s so good, some of the older girls are jealous of her. I think they can be quite mean, too. Anyway, she’s got Callum to protect her now! He’s like a limpet – he’s always right by her side.”

  “Even when she goes to the toilet? Yuk!” exclaimed Kenny, and we all laughed.

  We spent the rest of the morning getting ready for our picnic. Kenny kept on her grubby Leicester City football shirt; the rest of us put on shorts and cropped tops. We fluffed our hair up a bit and put Body Shop fruity lip balm on our lips. As I was rummaging about in my drawer for a sparkly bangle, I found some Silly String which was left over from Christmas.

  “Coo-el!” said Kenny when she saw it. “That’s just what we need for spraying at the M&Ms.”

  “Yeah, it’ll get stuck in their hair, and they’ll hate that!” laughed Rosie.

  “Right, you lot!” Mum called upstairs. “If you get your picnic food ready quickly, we’ll give you a lift to the park. I know that it’s near enough to walk there, but we’ll be passing it anyway. We’re going round to your house, Fliss to find out from your mum where this concert is.”

  Poor Dad! I knew this wasn’t exactly his idea of fun.

  As we piled into the car, we were all pretty hyped up. Mum and Dad exchanged glances. They know how silly we can get.

  When we got to the park, Dad pulled over.

  “Right, you lot,” he said very seriously. “I’ll pick you up by the park gates at four. Don’t be late. Have a good time and don’t get too silly.”

  “Chill out, Dad!” I said. “We’ll be as good as gold!” Kenny started to giggle.

  “Yes, fool’s gold!” said Dad and drove off.

  We all skipped into the park, singing Wannabe at the tops of our voices.

  The park was kind of busy. Busier than we had expected. We panicked a bit that we wouldn’t be able to find a good spot for the food fight. The secluded place that Kenny knew was already taken. We had just assumed that it would be free. A young couple was already there, having a romantic picnic.

  “What are we going to do now?” hissed Rosie. “We can’t have a food fight if they’re here.”

  “Maybe we should just go somewhere else and forget about the M&Ms,” whispered Fliss nervously.

  “No, we’re staying,” said Kenny firmly. “Let’s unpack the picnic.”

  We spread out a rug and began to unpack all our boxes of food. Kenny suddenly began to behave like a chimpanzee. She started grunting and bent over so that her knuckles were scraping the ground. Then she began to screech and pretended to pick fleas off her arms. I know that she can be strange sometimes but I’d never seen her doing anything like that before. The rest of us stared at her, and so did the young couple. After a few minutes of tutting and sighing, they packed up their things and moved away.

  “I knew that would work!” laughed Kenny triumphantly.

  I felt a bit guilty, but I was relieved that we were by ourselves. When anybody else poked their head around the corner, Kenny did her chimpanzee act and they soon cleared off again.

  I don’t know about you, but I always plan everything very clearly in my head. I always know exactly what I’m going to do in certain situations. Then, when it becomes reality, I just freeze up. I guess I’m always braver in my thoughts. That’s exactly what happened that day with our food fight. I was so brave talking about it beforehand, but when we were actually in the park I started to get butterflies. I didn’t want to be there at all.

  I don’t think that I was the only one who felt like that either, because none of us spoke to each other. Fliss, Lyndz, Rosie and I just stared at all the food we had brought for the picnic. We couldn’t face eating anything. Kenny could. She’s much braver than the rest of us. I just sat there with a sick feeling in my stomach. Fliss had been right. We should have gone somewhere else and left the M&Ms alone.

  We took it in turns to keep watch on the gates through a small hole in the hedge. Half an hour passed and there was still no sign of Emma Hughes and Emily Berryman.

  “Maybe we got the wrong end of the stick,” said Rosie. “Maybe the M&Ms aren’t coming to the park at all.”

  I hoped that she was right. I don’t like being wrong usually, but I wouldn’t have minded being wrong about this.

  I took my turn at keeping watch. There seemed to be lots of young girls, about six years old, all dressed up in frilly dresses. I thought it must be someone’s birthday and they were going to have their party in the park. I wished that I was that age again. Life didn’t seem so complicated when I was six.

  Then I thought that I saw Fliss’s mum with her partner, Andy. And I was sure that I saw Callum with them. And Flora.

  “Hey Fliss, I thought Callum was supposed to be in a concert this afternoon,” I called.

  “He is. Why?” she asked.

  “Because I’ve just seen him with your mum and Andy.”

  “WHAT?” Fliss yelled. She pushed me out of the way so that she could get a clear look herself. “What on earth are they doing here?” she said in a kind of strangled voice. Then she screamed.

  “They’re not the only people either,” she yelled. “The M&Ms are here. And they’re coming this way!”

  We all crowded round Fliss and strained to peep through the hedge. The M&Ms were standing right in front of us on the other side.

  “That’s what I saw them wearing yesterday,” whispered Rosie. Emma Hughes and Emily Berryman were wearing frilly tutus of the palest pink. Tight blonde buns sat on the tops of their heads. Not a hair was out of place. Emily Berryman suddenly turned towards us. We all crouched down and held our breath. If she saw us now, we were dead. But she was only asking Emma Hughes to check that her bun was secure.

  “Get a life!” muttered Kenny.

  “Ssh!” I hissed.

  The M&Ms couldn’t have heard because they turned away from us and started doing little pirouettes across the grass.

  “What do they look like!” snorted Lyndz, trying to keep as quiet as possible.

  “Show-offs!” muttered Kenny. She grabbed a handful of jelly.

  “Wait!” I shouted. “Let’s get organised first.”

  “Maybe we should pack away the stuff we’re not going to use,” suggested Rosie. “You know, just in case we have to make a quick exit.”

  “Good thinking, Batman,” I said.

  We shoved uneaten sandwiches and biscuits back into plastic bags. Then we put the jelly, Silly String and a few squelchy sandwiches in front of the hedge. Rosie put five plastic spoons in the jelly so that w
e could use them as catapults.

  Whilst we were preparing ourselves, there seemed to be an increasing amount of noise on the other side of the hedge. The sound of chattering and giggling floated over to us. Rosie went to have a look to see where all the noise was coming from.

  “It’s only the little girls in their party dresses. Some of them look kind of familiar, I don’t know why,” she said, looking puzzled. “The M&Ms don’t look very happy anyway. I don’t know why they’re even standing so close to them. We all know that they don’t like being associated with babies, don’t we!” We all laughed.

  Just at that moment some screechy music began to play. It was horrible, but I was sure that I’d heard it somewhere before.

  Kenny pushed Rosie out of the way and had a look through a gap in the hedge.

  “All I can see is the M&Ms dancing and making prats of themselves,” she snorted. “The other girls are just gawping at them. Come on, let’s get the M & Ms!” We all bent down and picked up our ammunition.

  “Right,” shouted Kenny. “FIRE!”

  Rosie and Fliss grabbed the cans of Silly String and sprayed them through the gap in the hedge. The rest of us grabbed spoonfuls of jelly and tried to catapult them over to the other side. There was a bit of a knack to getting the spoon at just the right angle. At first, as much jelly slopped down over us as it did over the hedge. But soon we got into the swing of it and there was no stopping us.

  Jelly flew everywhere. It was impossible to look through the hedge and throw at the same time, so we just kept throwing. We knew that some of the jelly was hitting the target, because we heard the M&Ms shrieking. Well, we assumed it was the M&Ms. Lyndz and Kenny were giggling so much, it was hard to tell.

  I was covered in jelly. We all were. Fliss had emptied her can of Silly String and had now moved on to throwing jelly. Considering that she hadn’t wanted to have the food fight at all, she was enjoying herself as much as anybody.

  When Rosie had finished spraying her Silly String she crept to the edge of the hedge and peeped round the corner to see what was happening on the other side.

  It’s funny because from that moment, everything seemed to go into slow motion. When Rosie turned back towards us she was very red in the face. She started to wave her arms about as though she was a fly who’d just been zapped by fly spray. We all stopped firing our jelly. All except Fliss who was having the time of her life.

  Something inside my brain clicked, too. And I realised that the music, which was still going, was the music that the M&Ms had been dancing to in the studio at school. Not that we could hear much of the music any more because the air was suddenly filled with angry voices and children crying.

  We all crowded round the gap in the hedge and peeped through. The scene on the other side looked like a battlefield. Small girls were on the ground in tears. Their dresses were covered in jelly stains and Silly String festooned their hair. The grass glistened with a jelly cover, and skid marks cut across it. You could trace where the girls had fallen. Adults were clustering round them and lots of angry faces were turned towards the hedge.

  We knew that we had to get out of there as quickly as possible. But we couldn’t help taking a moment to savour the state of the M&Ms. They were slumped on the grass. Silly String clung to their clothes and their hair like cobwebs. Their tutus weren’t pale pink any more, but streaky purple and red, with grass and mud stains up the back.

  Fliss was oblivious to the chaos and was happily continuing to fire jelly. She took aim and – SPLODGE! – the jelly landed right on one poor boy’s head. On closer inspection the boy turned out to be Callum in his ballet tights. Andy was with him and – no, it couldn’t be! Yes, it was – my mum! Not only that, but we could see Fliss’s mum marching towards us. It was time to leave. And fast!

  “Fliss. Come on! Your mum’s heading this way!” I yelled, throwing some carrier bags at her.

  That was enough to stop Fliss in her tracks.

  “How do you know?”

  “We’ve just seen her,” I tried to stay calm. “My mum’s here, too. Looking after your brother, who you’ve just hit with jelly!”

  “Oh no! His concert must have been here. And that’s why the M&Ms were here. I think they go to the same dancing school.”

  I wanted to smack Fliss and find out why she hadn’t given us that little nugget of information sooner, but Kenny shouted, “Don’t go out of the main gate! Everybody’ll see us. I know a way out through the fence. Come on. Hurry up!”

  We all started running. Legs and arms were everywhere as we tried to cope with all the carrier bags full of picnic things. They seemed to get heavier with every step.

  I looked round as I ran to see if we were being followed. I could see Fliss’s mum in the distance, and a few more angry parents. I could also hear the park’s security guard shouting that we were banned from the park for life! A hand suddenly grabbed me and yanked me into the bushes. I screamed but a voice said, “Shut up!”

  It was Kenny. She had found the way out of the park and she thought I was going to run past it. Boy was I glad to see the other side of the fence.

  We carried on running though, until we were well out of sight of the park. Then we dropped our bags on to the pavement and collapsed in a heap.

  When I had got my breath back, I asked Fliss what she had meant about the M&Ms being in the same concert as Callum and Flora.

  “I think they must be the girls who have been so horrid to Flora because she got better marks in her exam than they did,” admitted Fliss sheepishly.

  “And you couldn’t have told us this before?” I asked crossly.

  “Well, I did say there was something worrying me about this whole thing, didn’t I?” Fliss snapped back. “I just couldn’t remember what it was.”

  “You mean, the babies they were talking about weren’t us, but those other little girls in the concert?” asked Lyndz. “It must have been them who the M&Ms had seen with their parents at the fair.”

  “And it must have been Flora who they thought acted like a goddess, not Laura!” said Rosie.

  I thought that Kenny was going to be furious with Fliss about the whole mix-up, but she couldn’t stop smiling.

  “It was worth it just to see those stupid M&Ms in such a mess!” she kept saying.

  “Hey, what are we going to do about your dad?” Rosie suddenly asked me. “He’s supposed to be picking us up by the park gates at four.”

  “Rats! I hadn’t thought of that!” I said.

  “Oh, but I had!” said a man’s voice behind us.

  It was Dad.

  Well, that all happened about a month ago. We haven’t been allowed to have any sleepovers since, but that’s no surprise. We did see each other at school until we broke up for summer, and at Brownies.

  We were all grounded but things have relaxed a bit now and I’ve seen Kenny, Lyndz and Rosie a few times. We’ve been to each others’ houses to play records and stuff but we haven’t seen much of Fliss. She hasn’t been allowed to hang out with the rest of us at all. Her mum thinks that we are a bad influence on her precious daughter. When she picked Fliss up from Brownies, she wouldn’t even look at the rest of us. All I can say is that she obviously hadn’t seen her daughter throwing that jelly. Fliss was like a different person! It was weird!

  As far as the M&Ms are concerned, they know that it was us who ruined their concert, but they haven’t taken their revenge – yet! It was strange, because when they saw us at school the next day, they didn’t say anything. Nothing at all! It was the first time we could ever remember them not having a dig at us. Kenny reckons they were just too embarrassed. And of course she’s thrilled that we finally gained a victory over them. It’s the summer holidays now and there’s no more Brownies for a while so we haven’t really seen the M&Ms much. They’re bound to have something planned for us though, so we’re keeping our ears open.

  Here we are at Fliss’s. Let’s go and see if her mum will let her come out. And remember – not a wor
d about parks and flying jelly!

  Sleepover Kit List

  1. SLEEPING BAG

  2. PILLOW

  3. PYJAMAS

  4. SLIPPERS

  5. TOOTHBRUSH, TOOTHPASTE, SOAP ETC

  6. TOWEL

  7. TEDDY

  8. A CREEPY STORY

  9. YUMMY FOOD FOR A MIDNIGHT FEAST

  10. TORCH

  11. HAIRBRUSH

  12. HAIR THINGS, LIKE A BOBBLE OR HAIRBAND, IF YOU NEED THEM

  13. CLEAN KNICKERS AND SOCKS

  14. SLEEPOVER DIARY AND MEMBERSHIP CARD

  15. BEST CLOTHES FOR PICNIC

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain by Collins in 1997

  Collins is an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith,

  London, W6 8JB

  3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Text copyright © Fiona Cummings 1997

  Original series characters,

  plotlines and settings © Rose Impey 1997

  The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

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  EPub Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN 9780007401000

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