Freaks Out!

“Cos I’d feel awful,” said Skye, “if I wrote something nasty and then it actually came true. Even though I’d know it was only coincidence.”

I saw Jem’s mouth open, and quickly shoved my elbow in her ribs. We didn’t have all day. We’d come back to my place after school and Skye and Jem would have to be getting home pretty soon.

“Just write,” I said.

These are my four that I did:

An exciting new opportunity will arise. It should be grasped with both hands.

Big changes are coming your way. They will take your life in a different direction.

A treasured possession will be lost, but do not despair. It will turn up.

Be on the lookout: trouble ahead!

“OK, I’ve finished,” I said.

“Me too,” said Skye.

Jem was still sitting hunched up like a little gnome, furiously scribbling. Now and again, a giggle would burst out of her.

“I hope you’re not being gross,” said Skye.

“What’s it to you if I am?” Jem threw down her pen. “Now what d’you want us to do?”

“Cut them into strips,” said Skye, “then fold them up and shuffle them about so you don’t know which is which.”

Jem rolled her eyes.

“Do it!”

“Yes, do it,” I said.

“All right,” said Jem. “I’m doing it!”

Skye said that now we would each take one for ourselves. “I’ll take one from Frankie, and Frankie can take one from Jem, and Jem can take one from me… go!”

“Can we look?” said Jem. “Well, I’m going to, anyway!”

We all opened our bits of paper. On mine, in Jem’s round squiggly handwriting, it said: Things will happen. Hm! It didn’t make much sense, but at least she hadn’t said bad things.

I asked Skye which one of mine she’d picked, but she wouldn’t tell me. She said, “It’s got to be secret. Like a secret ballot.”

“So what happens to all the rest?” Jem wanted to know.

“We randomly assign them,” said Skye.

Jem blinked. “You what?”

“We randomly assign them!”

There was a pause.

“I do wish, just occasionally, she would speak in normal English,” said Jem.

Skye made an impatient tutting sound. “It’s perfectly simple! What we’re left with is nine horoscopes and nine star signs.” She laid them out in two rows on the floor. “We’re going to staple one horoscope to each star sign.” She clicked her fingers. “Stapler!”

“Haven’t got one.”

“Paper clips!”

“Haven’t got any.”

Skye breathed heavily, like Mr Hargreaves when he’s about to blow up.

“Sellotape?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I’ve got some of that.”

Just as well! It doesn’t do to cross Skye when she’s in one of her schoolteacherly moods.

With brisk efficiency, she began picking up horoscopes and picking up star signs, folding them over and sticking them together. Jem immediately began bleating.

“If they’re all going to be secret, how are we supposed to know if any of them come true?”

Skye said we would wait till the end of term, and then we would open all the bits of paper and see.

“But we don’t know what people’s star signs are!”

“We know what our mums’ and dads’ are.”

“I’m talking about people at school. I thought we were supposed to be asking them?”

“You can ask, if you want,” said Skye. “No one’s stopping you. Honestly, I’ve never known anyone make such a fuss! It’s only a game.”

“So if it’s only a game, why can’t we look?”

“Cos even games have rules. There’s no point playing, if you don’t have rules. I’m going to go now, I promised Mum I’d be back by five. You coming?”

“In a minute,” said Jem.

“I’ve got to go now. I’ll take these with me.” Skye scooped up all the bits of paper, neatly stuck with Sellotape. “Cos I know what you two are like.”

“Are you saying we’d cheat?” said Jem.

“Well, you would, wouldn’t you?” Skye opened her schoolbag and stuffed the bits of paper into one of the inside pockets. “They’ll be safe there. I won’t look.”

To be fair to Skye, we knew that she wouldn’t. After she’d gone, Jem giggled and said, “D’you want to know what I picked?”

I struggled for a few seconds with my conscience. There wasn’t any reason I shouldn’t know. Just cos Skye had decided it had to be kept secret. Me and Jem hadn’t decided. But it was true that Skye was honourable, and we weren’t, so I very nobly said no.

“Better not tell me.”

“Don’t see why not,” said Jem. “What right’s she got to dictate?”

None at all, really, except that she was our friend and if she wanted to make up rules – well! That was just Skye. At least she’d joined in.

“Wouldn’t be fair to go behind her back,” I said.

Jem looked for a minute as if she might go off into a sulk again, but then she gave me this mischievous grin and said, “If I was doing your horoscope now, know what I’d say? I’d say, Keep an eye on Daisy Hooper.”

“Why?” I couldn’t resist asking.

“See if she gets a clonk on the head!”

“Is she likely to?”

“Well…” Jem cackled. “Someone’s going to. Hope it’s not you! You didn’t pick that one, did you?”

Before I could stop myself I said, “No.”

“That’s good,” said Jem. “Means it could be her!”

Me and Jem watched eagerly the next couple of days, waiting to see if Daisy Hooper would get clonked on the head. See if anyone got clonked on the head. Just cos Jem had written it for one of her horoscopes, didn’t necessarily mean it was going to happen.

“Skye could be right,” I said. And Mum, and Tom. And Dad. “Could all just be coincidence.”

It wasn’t what I wanted to believe, cos I like to think there’s stuff going on that’s a bit mysterious. But if you’re conducting a scientific experiment it’s important to keep an open mind. Jem already seemed to have made hers up.

“If it’s all just coincidence,” she said, “why would anyone bother? There’s got to be something in it. I mean, look at my auntie! You’re not telling me that was just coincidence?”

I didn’t wish to talk about Jem’s auntie. Rather sternly I said, “We are conducting an experiment. We must wait for proof.”

“But that is proof!”

“More proof.”

Jem giggled. “Want to know another one I wrote? Beware the hairy monsters… I thought I might as well use it. Wonder who got that one? Wasn’t you, was it?”

“We’re not supposed to be telling,” I said.

“Oh, pooh!” Jem tossed her head. “What’s it matter?” She danced round me, waggling her fingers. “Big hairy monsters! It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Not saying.”

“It was, it was! You’re going to get a bunch of huge enormous spiders marching across the ceiling!”

“Yeah, or I might get mugged by a load of huge hairy muggers. Might end up in hospital. Then what’d you have to say?”

Jem’s face fell. She looked at me, suddenly uncertain. “It wasn’t really you, was it?”

“Well, if it wasn’t,” I said, “it’s someone else, and then you’ll be responsible if it comes true.”

Quick as a flash, Jem said, “I’m not saying everything does! Just some things.”

In the meantime, we kept our eyes fixed firmly on Daisy Hooper. I guess I wouldn’t have minded if she’d got clonked on the head, but all that happened was she got whacked by a hockey stick. On the ankle, not the head.

Jem tried claiming that was just as good. She said you had to know how to interpret these things – they were never straightforward. Clonk on the head didn’t have to mean clonk on the actual head, it could just as easily mean clonk on the top part of something, such as for instance the top part of the foot, which was, of course, the ankle. Well, if you looked at it one way it was. The ankle was on top of the foot. In other words, it was the head of the foot. And Daisy had been clonked on it and was now all bandaged up and hobbling.

We wouldn’t normally wish ill upon someone, but Daisy Hooper is such a disagreeable person. Really loud and overbearing. And mean. She is so mean! Plus she hates us and we hate her.

Jem was eager to open up all our bits of paper and check whether clonk on the head had been matched to Daisy’s star sign or someone else’s. She said, “I know which sign she is, I asked her, she’s Libra! So please can we just look? Please, Skye? Please?”

But Skye said no. She was very firm about it. The end of term was when we were going to look. Not before.

Jem grumbled to me later that “Skye can be such a bore at times!”

I had to admit she was being a bit more bossy than usual.

“Why do we put up with it?” wondered Jem. “It was our game – we invented it. Then she comes barging in and takes over. I think we should tell her.”

“Tell her what?”

“That we’ve had enough! We want all our bits of paper back, and we’ll play the game without her.”

“Thing is…” I hesitated.

“What?”

“I wouldn’t want to upset her.”

“But she’s upsetting us!”

“Yes, but she’s been really funny just lately. Like there’s something on her mind.”

“Mm.” Jem thought about it. “She has been a bit odd.”

“It’s no use asking her, you know what she’s like.”

“Secretive.”

She is a very controlled sort of person, is Skye. Unlike me and Jem, who tend to splurge, Skye prefers to keep things to herself. She wouldn’t dream of splurging.

“What we’ve not got to do,” I said, “we’ve not got to nag, cos that’ll only make things worse.”

“Make her all ratty.”

“We’ll just have to be patient.” Mum is always urging me to be patient. She says patience is a virtue. I don’t get it, myself, I don’t think it’s natural; I mean you want something to happen, you want it to happen now. But as I said to Jem, sometimes you just have to wait.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” Jem waved a hand. “Wait till she gets over it.”

“Or till she feels like telling us.”

“Whatever.”

“In the meantime,” I said, “we can still go on watching, see if anyone gets clonked.”

We watched like hawks all the rest of the week, but nobody got clonked. Nothing, as far as we could see, happened to anybody, though Jem did turn up for school one morning bubbling over with excitement and obviously bursting to tell me something. She made it clear she couldn’t do it while Skye was there, cos she kept pointing at Skye behind her back and pulling faces. If Skye hadn’t peeled off at the school gates to go and talk to one of the teachers, I really think Jem would have exploded. Her face had gone bright scarlet with the effort of not saying anything.

“Guess what?” she squeaked, before Skye was even properly out of earshot. “Guess what happened?”

I said, “Tell me, tell me!”

“Huge hairy monsters!” Jem announced it in a trumpet-blast of triumph. Heads swung round to look at us.

I said, “Where?”

“In the kitchen,” whispered Jem. “All across the floor!”

Wow! Our first bit of evidence. I stared at her in awe. Skye must have stuck the huge hairy monsters horoscope to the star sign that belonged to Jem’s mum. So predictions could come true!

“I reckon most people would have screamed,” said Jem. “I didn’t! Not even when it ran across Mum’s foot.”

I said, “It?”

Her eyes slid away.

“What d’you mean it?”

I might have known it was too good to be true. When I questioned her more closely I discovered that in fact it had only been one hairy monster and it hadn’t even been a proper monster, if it came to that, just one tiny little mouse. Jem tried arguing with me, like she always does. She is a very argumentative-type person. She said that as mice went it had been pretty huge, it seemed to her, plus everybody knew that mice didn’t come singly.

“They live in nests. With other mice.”

She said there was obviously a whole family of them hiding away somewhere, and that if you stayed and watched, you’d probably see hordes of them come out and run across the floor. I told her rather sharply that in that case she had better be prepared to sit in the kitchen all night, and maybe, if lots of mice appeared, and if they were really big mice, I might be prepared to put them on my list.

Jem immediately said, “What list?”

I said, “List I’m making of stuff that happens, ready for when Skye lets us open up and have a look.”

“So what’s happened so far?” said Jem.

I had to admit nothing, apart from Daisy Hooper getting whacked on the ankle, which I didn’t honestly think we could count. Jem said she reckoned I still ought to make a note of it.

“And Mum’s mouse. Cos these things aren’t ever straightforward.”

“Yes, but you can’t just twist them to mean anything,” I said. “They’ve got to have a bit of resemblance to what’s written down.”

Jem said, “Clonk – Daisy. Monster – Mum. That’s two of mine, and they do have some resemblance! It could be,” she said, “that I’m the one with psychic powers. Not everybody has them. How much of what you wrote has come true?”

Loftily I said, “Too early to tell. I’m waiting for proper scientific proof.”

I certainly wasn’t putting Daisy Hooper’s ankle on the list, and I wasn’t putting Jem’s mum. Jem could argue as much as she liked. An ankle is not the same as a head, and one small mouse isn’t the same as a horde of huge furry monsters. On the other hand, something very remarkable happened later that day. I got home to find that a leaflet had been pushed through the letterbox. It was there, lying face up on the mat.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS EXCITING OPPORTUNITY!

GET FIT, HAVE FUN!

SIGN UP NOW FOR ONE MONTH’S FREE TRIAL AT THE

GREENBANK LEISURE CENTRE.

Well. That was more like it! It was exactly what I’d written: An exciting new opportunity will arise. It should be grasped with both hands.

If I could just get someone to grasp it… I rushed into the kitchen to show Mum.

“Mum,” I cried, “look! You can have a month’s free trial at the Greenbank Leisure Centre!”

Mum said, “Oh, Frankie, I don’t have time for that. I’m far too busy.”

It’s true that Mum is quite busy, doing dressmaking and stuff for all her ladies, but I’d have thought a bit of fun and keeping fit would have brightened up her life.

“Not really,” said Mum. “I’d sooner put my feet up and have a cup of coffee.”

What can you do? I try to be helpful.

I showed the leaflet to Angel, suggesting she might like to grasp the opportunity, but she seemed to think I was insulting her.

“Why should I need it?” she shrieked. “Are you implying I’m fat?”

I said, “No, but it’s free.”

“So you do it,” said Angel.

Next I tried Tom, who just grunted, which is pretty much all he ever does.

“You mean, you don’t want to?” I said.

“Gotta be joking,” said Tom.

Dad was my last chance. I reminded him what the government had said about us all taking more exercise to stop from getting fat and flabby, but Dad laughed and said he got quite enough exercise watching sport on TV, thank you very much.

Honestly! What a family. An exciting new opportunity and not a single one of them would grasp it. Still, I put it on my list. It was the first real sign we had had. A proper sign. Not like Jem and her hairy monsters. After all, you can’t blame horoscopes if people are too stupid to follow their advice. I just wish I knew which one of the family it was!

I couldn’t make up my mind whether to tell Jem or not. I knew if I did she would only start arguing again about ankles being the same as heads and tiny little mice being huge furry monsters, but, anyway, as it happened, I didn’t get the chance. Skye was with us, as usual, as we walked into school, and we were together all the rest of the day.

Skye was in a really glumpish sort of mood. Even in maths, when Mr Hargreaves wanted to know if anyone had the answer to some weird mess he’d scrawled all over the board, she didn’t put her hand up. I could tell Mr Hargreaves was surprised, cos Skye always has the answer to everything. Me and Jem exchanged glances over her head. Something was definitely not right.

We discussed it in whispers in the cloakroom at break. Should we ask what the problem was, or should we just go on pretending not to have noticed? We still hadn’t reached any decision when Skye came out of a cubicle and wanted to know what we were gossiping about.

“Not gossiping,” said Jem.

“So why are you being all furtive?”

I couldn’t think of any answer to that. Jem, her brain whizzing into overdrive, said, “Oh! You know,” and waved a hand rather vaguely about the empty cloakroom, but Skye didn’t pursue the matter. She obviously wasn’t that interested.

Last class of the day was drama with Miss Hamilton. Me and Jem adore drama! Whenever we’re told to choose partners, we always choose each other. Never Skye! Not if we can avoid it. Drama is one of the few classes Skye is useless at. She can’t act to save her life. It’s because she can’t show her feelings. Me and Jem like nothing better. We are full of feelings! Sometimes, Miss Hamilton says, we overflow. Skye says we swamp. But I think we are just naturally expressive.

Today, Miss Hamilton said, we were going to do improvisation, making up our own short scenes with a partner. Hooray! I love improvisation. Seems to me it’s far more fun making up your own words than having to stick to other people’s.

“So,” said Miss Hamilton, “find yourselves a partner.” Me and Jem immediately bagged each other. We didn’t even think of Skye. “I want one of you to be unhappy, and the other one has to find out why, and try to comfort her. OK?”

Jem begged me to let her be the unhappy one.

“Please, Frankie, please!”

I didn’t mind. I’m good at comforting. I’m a people person!

We waited impatiently for our turn. I hate having to sit and watch while everyone else gets up and does things. Specially when they’re not very good at it. Some of them were OK, like Brittany Fern, crying cos her pet goldfish had died. I think that losing your goldfish would be quite upsetting. I know you can’t take a goldfish to bed with you or cuddle it, like I can Rags, but I daresay they have their own little fishy ways that you get fond of.

Daisy Hooper was pathetic, as usual. She’s another one that can’t act; she just thinks she can. She lumped herself into the middle of the floor and started bellowing about how she’d been promised a trip to Disneyland and then at the last minute it had been cancelled, sob sob, boo hoo. Like anyone cared. Hardly in the same class, I would have thought, as losing your goldfish.

Skye did her scene with a girl called Lucy Westwood that hardly ever speaks above a whisper. It was a bit embarrassing, really, what with Skye all wooden and saying how she’d failed this really important exam – oh, disaster! – and Lucy whispering how sorry she was. Well, I think that was what she was whispering; it was hard to tell.

Me and Jem were left till last. Top of the bill! Stars are always on last. Not meaning to boast, but I do think we are more talented than most people in our class. What I couldn’t quite understand, as we took the stage – well, the centre of the room, actually – was why a series of tiny little squeaks were coming from Jem, like she’d got the giggles and was fighting to suppress them. This was serious stuff! Jem was supposed to be unhappy and I was going to comfort her. What was there to giggle at?

I was soon to discover. Miss Hamilton said, “All right, you two, off you go!” I felt that she was expecting something really special from me and Jem. I’d already put my face into sympathetic mode, letting my mouth droop and my eyes go all big and swimmy. It’s something I’ve practised in the mirror. I’ve practised lots of faces in the mirror. Evil ones, soppy ones, scaredy ones. All kinds! You never know when they might come in useful, like if you’re going to have a career as an actor. Not that I am, probably, but I like to think that I could. If I wanted.

I turned to Jem, who was still making little squeaks, and said, “Oh dear, Jem, you are not looking very happy! Is something the matter?” Instantly, Jem stopped squeaking and burst into loud, heart-rending sobs. Real sobs. I don’t know how she does that! It’s a gift that she has.

I was immediately sympathetic. “What’s wrong?” I said. “Tell me what’s wrong!”

“It’s my great-great-grandmother!” sobbed Jem.

Pardon me? Her great-great-grandmother? Great-great-grandmother?

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