have a Makeover!” I blurted out, and I could tell my cheeks had gone bright red with excitement. “You know, make up people and charge for it.”
“Coo-el!” said Lyndz.
“We could even give fashion advice and dress people up…” I was getting really excited.
Rosie interrupted me. “Where would we get the class gear for that?”
“We could borrow glamorous gear from my gran’s dress shop. And make stuff out of our own clothes…” I began, but football-mad Kenny couldn’t let that one go.
“Glamorous gear. How girlie-girlie!” Kenny (who lives in her Leicester City football strip) wrinkled her nose in disgust.
I could feel myself going red, and bit my lip.
“Using your own clothes is all right for you,” Frankie laughed, giving my long blonde hair a playful tug. “A Fashion Victim like you has got the best gear in the whole school.”
I blushed even harder. Can I help it if I love clothes and make-up? It’s a Proudlove family tradition.
“We could use my mum’s dressing-up clothes,” offered Lyndz, whose mum has the best dressing-up box ever.
I flashed Lyndz a grateful smile. (She’s the soft-hearted one in our gang and you can always rely on her to rescue you.)
“Anyway, we don’t need flash gear,” I explained, feeling a bit more confident. “We can use old stuff and make it totally fab.”
“How?” asked Rosie suspiciously.
“You know, decorate T-shirts and jeans with sequins and beads and stuff! We could do fabric paint designs, embroider flowers and sew on floaty bits…” I’m going to be a fashion designer when I grow up and I couldn’t wait to try out some of my own gorgeous designs.
“Hmmm…” mused Frankie and I could see she was getting into it. Frankie is also known as Spaceman because she loves jewellery, sequins and nail varnish – anything as long as it’s silver.
“We could sell jewellery,” I prompted her, dead innocent like.
“Yeah! We could make our own!” said Frankie excitedly. “I was thinking of selling some of mine at the jumble sale anyway.”
So that was it. Frankie was never one to let go a chance to thread beads and glue diamonds. That’s why she’d been so keen to have a boring old jumble sale.
I wasn’t complaining, though, ‘cos Frankie’s vote tipped the balance. And suddenly the gang saw that a Makeover was the neatest, sweetest little plan that yours truly had ever come up with!
Of course, Kenny had to be the fly in the ointment. “Oh, no, a Makeover!” she groaned, making out to stick her fingers down her throat. “Urrrgh!”
“It’ll be fun,” I retorted. “We can get ideas for outfits to wear to my Auntie Jill’s wedding.”
“The wedding, of course!” Lyndz squealed excitedly.
“Hey, that’d be great,” Frankie agreed.
My Auntie Jill, our very own Snowy Owl from Brownies, is a big favourite with our gang (especially now she’s marrying Mark, our old tennis instructor). And Auntie Jill had promised that her wedding would be “different” (which could mean anything with my crazy auntie) so I reckoned a Makeover was a golden opportunity to make fab gear for it. Trouble is, I’d forgotten how Kenny hates weddings and romance almost as much as she hates frilly clothes, girlie-girlie colours and make-up.
“Pass me the vomit bag!” she heaved.
I could see Kenny was going to take a lot of convincing, but funnily enough it was the ghastly M&Ms (earwigging as usual) who changed her mind.
“You lot doing Makeovers!” they sneered. “What do you know? You’re too ugly!”
“You lot as Little Angels!” I snapped right back. “You’re too nasty!”
“Just wait till we do all our good turns,” sniffed Emma huffily.
“We’ll have the whole of Cuddington eating out of our hands,” agreed the Goblin in her horrible gruff voice.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah…”
They went on winding us up about how they were going to win the prize, by running errands and doing odd jobs. Totally sick-making. Mind you, we gave back as good as we got. We pointed out that scrubbing floors and babysitting bratty kids wasn’t half so much fun as doing makeovers, and they knew it.
Huh! One-nil to the Sleepover Gang! But before Total War could break out, Mrs Weaver was clapping her hands for everyone to be quiet.
“Year Six, I’ve made this graph,” she announced, holding up a huge sheet of coloured card, “to show the progress of your fundraising competition. (So the graph wasn’t for Maths! Phew!) “It has the name of every team in the class, and Mrs Poole informs me that the Cuddington Players will award a prize to the winning team.”
A prize for the winning team!
The Sleepover Gang had to get it.
There was only one thing to do. Have a Sleepover to work on our make-up skills. Luckily, we were having one at my house that night!
Look out, Little Angels!
If my mum could have seen the state of our living room she’d have had a blue fit. I’d tipped my make-up drawer on to the sofa and there was lip gloss, nail varnish, body glitter, transfers and tiny pots of eye gel strewn all over it. It was even spilling on to Mum’s prized white carpet.
Well, it was her fault for making us have our Sleepover in the living room. (Since the last Sleepover we’ve had to use the living room so we wouldn’t wake up the twins. Cheek!)
So we were trying to make the best of it. Frankie was threading beads and Lyndz was stretched out on the floor, surrounded by all her art stuff. (She was working on the poster advertising our Makeover.)
“What about this?” she said, holding up a drawing of a girl covered in make-up.
“Aaagh! The curse of the pink lippy!” Kenny screamed, and before I could rescue my make-up, she’d done a pretend faint backwards right on to it.
“Kenny!” I tried to rescue my multi-coloured eye shimmer palette from under Kenny’s bum.
Kenny lifted one thigh unhelpfully. “Ooops.” Then, seeing I wasn’t laughing, she got all businesslike to prove she wasn’t just being a nuisance. (Huh!)
“I
