Narinder Dhami - Mega Sleepover 2

“Hang on,” said Kenny, “You could keep him in a box, or something, until they do the judging. The M&Ms’ll be too busy with their own pets. They’ll probably be in different rooms. I doubt if they’ll put the cats and dogs together with the small pets.”

“Yeah. Good thinking, Batman,” I said.

You could see Fliss was tempted, but she was still worried about it. Fliss always gets her knickers in a twist if she does anything wrong in case she gets found out. But she really wanted to join in with the rest of us, so in the end she said, “OK, but you’ve all got to promise not to tell anyone, though.”

We all made the Brownie promise and just then Rosie’s mum came in and told us to turn off the lights and settle down. I was sure she hadn’t heard us but Fliss went bright pink, as if Rosie’s mum could read her mind. When she got up to put Gazza in his cage, she dropped him twice. Fortunately both times he landed on the bed. At last she put him in his cage, but she was so nervous she didn’t fasten the cage door properly. It was nearly an hour before we realised and by then Gazza had completely disappeared.

After Rosie’s mum went out we lay in bed and counted to twenty-five before we sat up. Sitting up in the dark, with our torches turned on, whispering, is the best thing about sleepovers, I think. Sometimes we tell stories or sing songs or tell jokes. Sometimes we pretend we can talk to ghosts but that can get a bit too scary. Later on, when it’s really quiet and we know the grown-ups aren’t coming back in, we get out our midnight feast. But it was too early so we decided to finish off our Sleepover Club membership cards.

We’d got some old ones we’d made right at the beginning, but now Rosie’s joined we decided we’d make some new ones with photos and everything.

Do you want to see mine? Isn’t it excellent? Not as good as Fliss’s, though. Hers looks dead posh. She got her mum to take her into Leicester to get a proper passport photo done. The rest of us had to cut up old photographs. I had to cut my face out of a picture at my Uncle Alan’s wedding when I was little. Everybody started laughing at it, so I told them what my gran always says, “Small things amuse small minds!”

On the back of the cards we wrote our names, ages, addresses and hobbies. When we’d finished them we signed them. Well, the rest of us did. Kenny did this weird squiggle that looked as if someone had nudged her elbow. Then we passed them round and read each others’.

“I didn’t know your hobby was stamp collecting,” I said to Fliss.

She went a bit red. “It isn’t but I didn’t know what else to put. I don’t really have a hobby.”

“Course you do,” said Lyndz. “You go to Brownies, don’t you? You go to dancing classes and gymnastics. You’re interested in fashion.” She reeled off a few more.

“Oh, I didn’t realise they were hobbies,” said Fliss, grabbing her card back. She’s so dozy. She scribbled away and soon ran out of space.

For my hobbies I wrote: Reading, Brownies, Pop Music, Collecting Teddies and Acting. I just lurv being in plays. It’s the best.

Kenny had written: Football, Swimming, Gymnastics, Snooker, Brownies.

Rosie had put: Netball, (I’d forgotten that), Soaps (she’s mad about them), Pop Music and Brownies.

Next I read Lyndz’s. She’d written: Horses, Painting, Horses, Brownies, Horses, Cooking Horses.

“Cooking horses?” I said.

“Let me see that.” She grabbed it back from me. She’d just missed out the comma. “Oh, very funny, I don’t think.”

I thought it was very funny, actually, and so did Kenny. We creased up.

Later on, when we were sure Rosie’s mum wasn’t coming back, we got out the food, put it in a big bowl and passed it round. I’ll tell you what there was: sherbet dabs, Black Jacks, Love Hearts, a Snickers bar, six marshmallows and a packet of Original Pringles. We all tucked in straight away.

“D’you think we should give Gazza something?” said Fliss.

“It doesn’t seem fair leaving him out,” Rosie agreed.

But really there was nothing apart from Pringles we thought a hamster might eat and we weren’t really sure about those. We decided we’d try him just with a couple of crumbs to see. Fliss got out of her sleeping bag and went to get him.

That’s when we realised he’d gone.

“He’s not here,” she wailed. “Oh, help, where is he?”

I jumped up as well, just to check, because Fliss is always losing things, even when they’re staring her in the face, but this time she was right: he wasn’t there. And when we turned on the lights he wasn’t anywhere else we could see either.

We stripped everything off the bed and searched all five sleeping bags. We looked under the bed. We emptied all our sleepover kits out in a pile in the middle of the floor. There were leggings and T-shirts and socks and knickers and slippers and toilet bags and torches and hairbrushes and teddies and sweet packets from the midnight feast. And we still couldn’t find him.

Fliss was nearly wetting herself. She kept saying over and over, “I’m going to be in such trouble with Mrs Weaver. I’m going to be in doom forever.”

And just then Rosie’s mum came back in. “My goodness, what’s all this noise?” she said. “Whatever’s going on?”

So then we had to tell her, Gazza was gone.

She helped us search the room all over again. But in the end she said, “Well, there’s nothing else we can do tonight. We’ll just have to hope he comes back when he’s hungry. The door’s been closed, so he must still be in the room somewhere. We’d just better make sure Jenny doesn’t get in here tonight.”

“Oh, no,” said Fliss horrified. “Would she eat him?”

“Probably not, but the poor hamster might die of fright if he saw her.”

“But where can he have gone?” said Fliss, nearly in tears.

“We’ve looked everywhere, Mum,” said Rosie.

“He could be under the floorboards, who knows. Come on, now, let’s have this light off and you girls settle down.”

“I don’t want to sleep on the floor any more,” said Fliss.

“I’ll swap with you,” said Rosie.

So Fliss dragged her sleeping bag onto the bed and Rosie and I got into our sleeping bags on the floor. We cuddled our teddies and Rosie’s mum turned out the light.

“It’s very late,” she said, “I think you should try to go to sleep, now. Goodnight.”

For quite a long time, we all lay in the dark and no one spoke. Rosie kept turning over, Lyndz sucked her thumb, Fliss was sniffing a bit. It sounded as if she was crying. Then I heard Lyndz whisper, “Don’t worry. He’ll turn up.”

“But what if he doesn’t?” Fliss sniffed. “I’ll be left out again.”

I felt sorry for Fliss too but I didn’t know what to do. I turned over and tried to get to sleep. I’m always the last to drop off. My brain won’t seem to go to sleep for ages after I go to bed, so I was lying there, thinking everyone else was asleep by now, when I heard this noise. It was quite close. In fact it sounded as if it was right underneath my pillow, right under my ear.

Rosie whispered, “Frankie, are you awake?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Can you hear that noise?”

I could and I knew exactly what it was: Gazza was on the move.

I sat up and turned on my torch. We crawled out of our sleeping bags and pulled back the carpet. Rosie doesn’t have a fitted carpet, like the one in my bedroom. She just has this big square rug in the middle of the floor. We rolled up one side of it and followed the sound and shone our torches down the crack between the floorboards.