Sleepover Club Makeover

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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!

(#ulink_ff6d31eb-58c9-5e71-ab1c-d79f55ed5ac8)

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 think it’s time we made some group decisions,” she said pointedly, flipping open her Sleepover diary. “So. Who’s doing what?”

Er, actually this was all my idea, but I let Kenny get on with running the show. You know Kenny. Bossing everyone around would get her into the mood for makeovers, pink lippy or no pink lippy.

“Jewellery by Frankie!” announced Frankie, looking up from the tray of beads balanced on her knees.

Kenny wrote that down. Then Frankie piped up again, “Oh, and I’ll do face painting.”

“Wh – what do you mean?” I spluttered. “You’re doing the jewellery.”

Frankie threw me a withering look. “And who has the face paints?”

My cheeks burned. “But I want to do make-up…” I finished lamely.

Kenny closed her eyes and sighed. “So, if you do regular make-up, Frankie can do face painting. OK?”

I busied myself with putting the top back on a lip gloss.

“Well?”

There was a silence, where it felt like everyone was thinking what a selfish thing I was to demand my rights. But it wasn’t like that. This was the first time in ages I’d had a major idea and Kenny was acting like it was nothing. I was shoved out at home and now I was shoved out with my best friends. It wasn’t fair.

Then good old Rosie chimed in, changing the subject. “I’ll do style makeovers in school and charge for them,” she said. (Her favourite TV show’s where they take someone with really awful dress sense and change her image completely. Now Rosie-posie wanted to do the same on some fashion disaster.)

“OK, ‘Rosie – style makeovers’.” Kenny wrote it down in her Sleepover diary. “So who’s doing hair?”

Pointing our fingers at her, we all shouted out, “YOU!”

“Noooo!” groaned Kenny, but you could tell she was secretly pleased. Her mum does hairdressing at home so she must have learnt something. Actually, hair was one of the other things I was dying to do, but there was no way I could make a fuss now, was there?

Lyndz consoled Kenny as if doing hair was a punishment. “You can practise haircutting on us, Kenny.”

(Not on my hair, she won’t! I vowed.)

“You’ll all probably end up bald!” Kenny warned, but she wrote down her speciality just the same.

I was feeling well bad that everyone had latched on to Kenny’s ideas so quickly. Didn’t my ideas count for anything? But it meant so much for the Sleepover Gang to beat the LittleAngels in the competition, so I had to give in! And I have to admit it was fun getting into it. In the end, this is what we came up with:

1. Fliss – beauty treatments and make-up

2. Rosie – style makeovers

3. Lyndz – advertising and manicures

4. Frankie – jewellery and face painting

5. Kenny – hairdressing

“We should do a ‘Swap the Head’ challenge,” giggled Lyndz, when it was all written down in Kenny’s diary.

“What’s that?”

“You know, you cut up pictures of people and swap their heads around. Then you charge for guessing whose body belongs where.”

Frankie gave a snort of laughter. “I can just see Emily Berryman’s body with the school hamster’s head!”

“And Mrs Pickernose with its bum!”

“Wicked!”

Mrs Pickernose is our name for our gruesome dinner lady, Mrs Pickett. (Mind you, Pickett is a good name for her too, because she’s always picking on us lot.)

“Imagine Dishy Dave with Mr Short’s knobbly knees!” laughed Rosie.

We’d seen Mr Short’s knees when he wore shorts at the school fête and they were well knobbly.

“Oh, Dave, Dave!” I sighed, pretending to swoon. “I never knew your knees were so knobbly!”

Everyone shrieked with laughter and Lyndz went into a major bout of hiccups (natch!). We had to bash her on the back, and scare her with horrible faces, to try and stop her.

Suddenly, there was a loud banging on the ceiling that made us all jump out of our skins. “Keep it down in there!” my mum called out. “I’m trying to get the twins to bed.”

As if we didn’t know. Already, the babies’ ear-splitting howls were interrupting our important Sleepover Gang business. Why couldn’t they be the ones to “keep it down”, I’d like to know? Those twins were taking over the whole house!

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Mum’s knocking had made the gang go embarrassingly quiet. I knew just what they were thinking…

My mum used to do all sorts of cool things for our sleepovers, making scrummy things to eat and treating us dead grown-up, but these days all she could think of was my baby brother and sister. Sleepovers were nothing but a nuisance to her since they came along and now she’d banished us to the living room it was even worse. It was really winding me up.

Didn’t I count for anything in this house any more?

“I know,” I said, trying to shrug it off, “let’s play Musical Make-up.” (Those twins were not going to ruin my Sleepover!)

“Musical Make-up. Brillo!” squealed Frankie, forgetting to be quiet. She leapt up, knocking her tray of beads all over the floor.

Who cares? I thought. We’ll clean up later.

Musical Make-up is the Sleepover Gang’s own version of musical chairs. Difference is, when the music stops, instead of just finding a chair, you plonk yourself opposite someone. Then the two of you make up one side of the other’s face (both working at the same time