Dance-off! Page 5

  After that Fliss’s mum ordered Callum to bed and the five of us went up to Fliss’s bedroom.

  “You know what was great as well in that film?” said Lyndz, sitting down on the spare bed, which Fliss keeps covered with neat rows of about five hundred and one cuddly toys. “The dancing! That jive competition was cool! Couldn’t we put some of the moves in our routine?”

  “Great idea!” exclaimed Frankie. “Hey – we should have a go now while we remember!”

  Apprehensively I glanced at Fliss. Up until now, no one had mentioned the dance competition. I figured it was still a sore subject.

  But the next minute, Kenny said, “Fliss! You know the film really well. Can you show us some moves?” And straight away Fliss’s expression changed from about-to-turn-grumpy to really keen. Smart move, Kenny! I thought, feeling relieved.

  “Well, for a start there’s hand-jive,” Fliss said, “which means things like this.” And she waggled her hands in front of her, holding each elbow in turn, and then doing something which looked like she was playing ‘One potato, two potato’ with herself.

  We all had a go, and after a few false starts even I got some hand-jive moves going pretty well.

  Kenny said, “What about those amazing jumps, when the girl’s legs swing right up?”

  Some of the dancing in the film had been pretty acrobatic, with the boys flinging the girls around as if they were rag dolls.

  “Oh, it’s seriously tricky, that stuff,” said Fliss.

  “Let’s have a go!” said Kenny. “That’s exactly the sort of thing we should have in our routine. Gobsmackingly brilliant moves that’ll leave the M&Ms gasping!” Fliss was hesitating, so Kenny held out her hands. “Come on!” she coaxed. “Can’t be much harder than a piggyback, can it? I’m pretty strong, and you weigh about as much as one baked bean.”

  Which to Fliss – who worries about her weight because she’s dead slim and bananas – was a big compliment. “OK, then,” she said. She faced Kenny and put her hands on Kenny’s shoulders. “Hold me round the waist,” she said. “I’m going to do one little bounce, and then jump up with my legs either side of you, right? If you sort of bend forward into it, you can swing me back up into the air before I land.”

  Kenny nodded confidently, but I had a sneaking suspicion she didn’t have a clue what Fliss was talking about.

  “You sure about this?” Fliss asked. Kenny nodded again.

  So Fliss did one little bounce on the spot, then she flung herself towards Kenny as if she were trying to hug her with her legs. Holding Fliss round the waist, Kenny swung forward like she’d been told to, till Fliss’s feet were pointing to the ceiling.

  “Er, I’m stuck,” said Kenny in a strangulated voice.

  Fliss was giggling. Her head was nearly on the floor. “Just swing me up again!” she said.

  “Heeeeaaaaave!” groaned Kenny, putting all her strength into the swing.

  She so nearly made it. She pulled Fliss upright again, although she didn’t manage to swing her into the air, as Fliss had suggested. It would have been fine – if only Fliss’s left foot, heading back towards the floor, hadn’t got tangled in a loop of lace from her petticoats. As she landed, Fliss stumbled, and since her arms were still round Kenny’s neck, she pulled Kenny forward on top of her.

  “Aaarrrgghh!”

  They landed in a sprawled heap, and for a second Kenny just lay there, shaking with laughter.

  “Get up,” said Fliss.

  “Hold your horses, I’m not that heavy,” said Kenny.

  “Get up!” Fliss screamed. “Get up, get up, get up!!!”

  Quick as a flash, Kenny scrambled to her feet. “Fliss, are you OK?” she said.

  By this time Frankie, Lyndz and I were clustered round her.

  “No!” Fliss said, starting to sob. “It’s my ankle. It…” She gasped as she tried to move. “It really hurts.”

  Together, the four of us managed to pull Fliss up. Her left leg had twisted at a really odd angle under her as she fell. Now Frankie supported her as she hopped to her bed and then half sat, half lay on it, propped up on her pillows.

  “Does it still hurt?” asked Lyndz.

  Fliss nodded, biting her lip. “So much.”

  “We’d better call her mum,” I said to Frankie. But Fliss said, “No – no. It’ll be OK in a minute. I’ll just lie still for a bit.”

  “Let’s think,” said Kenny, a determined look on her face. “In football matches, when someone twists their ankle, they put an ice pack on it. D’you have an ice pack, Fliss?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Fliss in a small voice. Her ankle obviously hurt – a lot.

  “Won’t a bag of frozen peas do?” said Frankie.

  “Good thinking!” exclaimed Kenny. “I’ll see if I can get to the freezer without anyone seeing me.”

  “The freezer’s in the laundry room,” said Fliss with a sob through gritted teeth. “Last door on the right before the kitchen.”

  “OK.” Kenny opened Fliss’s bedroom door a crack and looked both ways along the landing. “Coast clear,” she mouthed, and tiptoed out.

  By the time Kenny got back, holding the bag of peas with her sleeves pulled down over her hands, Fliss was sniffing and pointing at her ankle in alarm. “It’s gone all puffy!”

  “Here, this’ll stop the swelling,” said Kenny, applying the peas.

  Fliss winced at the cold. After a moment she wailed, “But I don’t want a fat ankle!” For the first time since the accident, Kenny laughed.

  It’s strange, but sometimes when you’ve had a shock it can make you go giggly afterwards. Soon Kenny was re-enacting what had happened, with lots of exaggerated grimacing, and the rest of us were in hysterics. Even Fliss.

  “How does it – hic – feel now?” hiccupped Lyndz.

  “Oh, miles better,” said Fliss breezily. She swung her legs off the bed. But the second she tried to stand on her left foot, she fell back again, her face twisted with pain.

  “Aaaaaaah!”

  “That’s it,” said Frankie. “Fliss. I’m telling your mum right now.”

  “OK,” said Fliss in a trembly voice.

  It was pandemonium. Fliss’s mum thundered up the stairs and burst into the room like one of those doctors on ER racing into the operating theatre.

  “My baby! Are you all right?” she screeched.

  “Oh, Mummy!” wailed Fliss, suddenly far more upset than she’d been before.

  “Tell me exactly what happened,” said Mrs Sidebotham, taking Fliss’s hand and smoothing her hair back, over and over.

  While Fliss went through it all in minute detail, Andy shouted up the stairs, “Is everything OK?” about every three seconds. Not surprisingly, the hubbub woke Callum, who came out on to the landing, trailing his blanket and making small grizzling noises. His grizzling got louder when he realised no one was taking the least bit of notice.

  “Are you sure you can’t stand on it?” Fliss’s mum asked her. Fliss tried again, and yelped with pain.

  “OK,” said Mrs Sidebotham, “we’ll have to get you to the hospital.”

  “Oh, please,” said Kenny, “may I come too? I want to be a doctor, you see—”

  “No, Laura, I think it’s best not,” said Fliss’s mum firmly. She already looked totally stressed. Having Kenny for company would probably have pushed her over the edge.

  She looked round at the rest of us, and for one awful moment I thought she was going to burst into tears. But instead she said, “Rosie, Lyndsey – would you go and ask Andy to come up here? Felicity will need carrying down to the car.”

  “Yes, Mrs Sidebotham,” said Lyndz and I together, and we raced downstairs.

  We told Andy what had happened to Fliss and he dashed up the stairs. A minute later he came down again, much slower this time, carrying Fliss like she was some injured heroine in a film. Mrs Sidebotham opened the front door for them and then we heard the car doors slamming and the engine starting up.

  When An
dy came back he gave us a wobbly smile and said, “Don’t worry about Fliss, girls. You go back up to your friends.”

  So Lyndz and I slunk back upstairs to Fliss’s bedroom. There we found Kenny and Frankie sitting on Fliss’s bed, and looking as cheerful as two wet weekends.

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  Frankie shrugged. “We wait, I guess. Fliss’s mum said it was too late to ring any of our parents. So the sleepover’s still on.” She smiled weakly.

  “How long d’you think Fliss’ll be at the hospital?” asked Lyndz.

  “It could take a while,” said Kenny. “Sometimes there are loads of people in Casualty, and you just have to wait your turn.”

  If it hadn’t been so awful it would have been funny, imagining Fliss and her mum waiting in Casualty in matching Fifties outfits, with matching ankle socks and matching blonde ponytails.

  But none of us felt much like giggling any more. “Come on,” I said, “we may as well get ready for bed.” So we brushed our teeth and changed into our pyjamas, then wriggled inside our sleeping bags. Kenny put out the main light and we all switched on our torches.

  “I bet Fliss’ll come back and it’ll turn out she’s fine,” said Lyndz. “Remember that time at Mrs McAllister’s stables, when Fliss was riding Alfie and he suddenly shot off at a million miles an hour?”

  “That was scary!” said Frankie. “If she’d fallen off she could have been so badly injured!”

  “Exactly,” said Lyndz. “But it turned out she was OK. It’ll be the same tonight, you’ll see.”

  “She might just be badly bruised,” I said, nodding. But I was only pretending to share Lyndz’s optimism. In my tummy I had a cold, sick feeling of dread.

  “Rosie! Wake up!”

  I heard Lyndz’s voice and felt her nudging me in the ribs.

  “Wha…?” I mumbled sleepily. “What time is it?”

  “Half past one,” said Frankie. “Fliss is back.”

  In a second I was awake. I scrambled out of my sleeping bag and shot to the window, where the others were craning their necks to see the car in the drive below.

  “Is she all right? Can you see?” I said anxiously.

  “She’s getting out…” said Kenny. “She’s OK. She’s – Ohmigosh!”

  “What?” There was a pause. “Kenny?”

  “She’s on crutches,” said Kenny flatly. “Her leg’s in plaster.”

  Lyndz had been wrong. Totally wrong. Fliss wasn’t fine. She had broken her ankle.

  “Well, two of the little bones in it, anyway,” Fliss explained when she joined us in the bedroom.

  Now she was sitting on the bed, still in her Grease outfit, her crutches propped against the wall. Her left leg was stuck out in front of her with what looked like a big red boot on it, except that her bare toes were poking out of the end.

  “Can I touch it?” I asked, stretching my fingers gingerly towards the cast.

  “Go ahead,” said Fliss. “It’s totally set.”

  “How come the plaster’s red?” asked Frankie.

  “You can choose different colours,” said Fliss. “It’s a new thing. I wanted pink, really, but they said they didn’t have it.”

  Fliss didn’t look half as miserable as you might expect. It sounded like she’d quite enjoyed being made a fuss of at the hospital. “The doctor was lovely,” she said, smiling dreamily.

  To be honest, it was Kenny I felt most sorry for right then. She was trying to put a brave face on it, but I could tell she felt just awful.

  “It was an accident,” I said to her quietly, when she passed me on her way to the bathroom. “Don’t blame yourself.”

  “Thanks, Rosie,” she said. “I know you want to be nice, but don’t pretend. It was my fault, and I know it.”

  The next morning, on the way home in the car, I told Mum what had happened.

  “Poor Felicity,” said Mum, shaking her head. “And poor Nikki, too.” (Nikki is Fliss’s mum.) “I can just imagine how stressed she must have been. If this had happened when you were all at our house…” Mum shuddered.

  After a minute, we stopped at some traffic lights and she turned to me with a serious look. “Rosie,” she said. “I hope you girls will realise now just how dangerous your messing about can be.”

  “Yes, Mum,” I said.

  “You have to try and see the consequences of things,” she went on as the lights changed. “Try to think. I know you’d like me to treat you more as a grown-up sometimes, but this is exactly what being a grown-up is about…”

  Blah, blah, blah. I expect you can imagine the rest, so I won’t bore you with it. Mum’s lovely, but she doesn’t half go on sometimes, especially when something worries her. We got all the way home before the lecture finished, and by then I’d said “Yes, Mum” about ninety times. Yawn!

  That afternoon, I had a phone call from Frankie. “I’ve had an ace idea,” she said, “for cheering Fliss up.”

  “Spill,” I said.

  “Tomorrow, we all take to school loads of stickers and glitter and coloured pens and stuff, and at break we can decorate her cast, and make it look really cool.”

  “Excellent!” I said. “I’m not sure whether I’ve got any stickers, though. It’s a shame it’s Sunday or I could go and buy some.”

  “Just bring whatever you’ve got,” said Frankie.

  So I spent the rest of the afternoon turning my bedroom upside down, looking for anything sparkly or spangly that might help jazz up Fliss’s plaster cast. I did find some stickers – some really beautiful cat ones that I’d been given for my last birthday. I hesitated over them, because I’d been saving them up for something really special. To be honest with you, I didn’t want to part with them. Who would know, after all, if I just told the others I hadn’t got any stickers? But then I felt mean, and I put them in my school bag along with my glitter-glue pens and some sequins I’d found in my sewing box.

  On Monday morning Fliss caused a big stir, hobbling into school on crutches. As she made her way through the playground half our class trailed after her, most of them wanting to have a go on her crutches.

  “She’s loving it!” Frankie whispered to me. And it was true. Fliss was basking in the attention, a big smile on her face.

  “I know why, too,” I said, nudging Frankie and pointing to one of the people clustered round Fliss. “Suddenly Ryan Scott’s interested!”

  At break time, Frankie, Kenny, Lyndz and I persuaded Fliss to park herself on a bench while we went to work on her cast with all our decorations.

  “It’s so sweet of you guys!” she giggled.

  “It’s the least we could do, Fliss,” said Kenny earnestly. “Here, look – I’ve brought you something to keep your toes warm.” She held up a large sock with a picture of a birthday cake on it. “When you press like this…” she said, jabbing at the cherry on top of the cake, “… it plays ‘Happy Birthday’!”

  The buzzy little sound, coming from something as ridiculous as a sock, made us all crack up. “It’s awful!” said Fliss. “Brilliantly awful! Where did you get it?”

  “It’s my dad’s,” said Kenny. “But don’t worry,” she added, when she saw Fliss’s nose wrinkling, “he’s never worn it.”

  What with the sock, the stickers, the glitter, and all the swirls Kenny drew with her silver and gold pens, Fliss’s cast ended up looking like a mad miniature Christmas tree.

  “Is your mum cross about the accident?” Kenny asked, when at last we sat back to admire our handiwork.

  “Not cross,” said Fliss. “More disappointed, I think, because we’ve had to cancel the skiing holiday.”

  “What – no one’s going?” asked Lyndz.

  “Well, they were hardly going to leave me behind, were they?” said Fliss indignantly. “And they couldn’t take me. I would have died of boredom sitting in the hotel all day while Mum and Andy were off skiing.”

  I saw Kenny’s shoulders slump. At that moment I think we all felt bad, realising that we’d
ruined a holiday for Fliss’s entire family.

  “Hey!” said Frankie suddenly. “Now you can come to the party on the last day of term!”

  Fliss smiled ruefully. “Mmm. But I can’t dance with the rest of you, can I?”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Lyndz said, “Why don’t you take charge of the costumes, Fliss? We so need your advice.”

  Fliss nodded. “OK,” she said. “I guess I shouldn’t let all my talents go to waste.”

  There was less than two weeks to go now, before the party. We began spending every break time rehearsing in the only private spot we could think of – that’s right, by those pongy bins – with Fliss acting as look-out in case the M&Ms or any other spies from our class came along.

  It was weird having a whole section missing from the routine – the bit when Fliss had come to the front to do her solo. We filled the gap by repeating the chorus steps, but they didn’t go quite as well with that bit of the music.

  “It’s not the same without you, Fliss,” said Kenny.

  “Of course it isn’t,” said Fliss briskly. “But you’ll just have to manage somehow, won’t you?”

  On Thursday each of us brought in a selection of clothes that we thought might be suitable. Fliss laid them out on one of the benches in the girls’ changing room, so that she could see them all together.

  “You should be in toning colours,” she said strictly, hobbling up and down, and removing items she disapproved of. “I’m thinking pinks and purples, with quite a bit of silver.” (Which is Frankie’s favourite colour – all the silver things were hers.)

  Kenny – who is definitely not a pinks and purples kind of person – was chewing her lip in a desperate attempt to stop herself saying “Yeuch!” She only just succeeded.

  Fliss handed garments to each of us, and told us to stand in a line, holding them up. I had a purple T-shirt (my own) and a short pink skirt (Fliss’s). I wasn’t at all sure the skirt would fit me.