anything seriously wrong. I haven’t heard from her this morning yet. I suppose she’s sleeping in, like I’d be if I didn’t have the loudest family on earth.
No mail from Paperboy, by the way. But, at the moment, I’m almost too tired to care.
LATER
Terrible news. It turns out Alice fractured her left wrist. She will be in a cast for weeks! She says it doesn’t hurt, but she is still feeling a bit wobbly. Poor Alice. Hurting her left wrist is particularly annoying – it means she can’t get out of school work because she can still write, but she can’t play the guitar because she can’t hold down the strings to make different chords (if it was her right wrist she’d still be able to strum the strings with her right hand).
And of course me and Cass are affected too. Because without Alice on guitar, there can be no more Hey Dollface until she gets better. No more band practices. No more venting my feelings by bashing the drums (I can use the sofa and cushions like I used to when I was just starting, but it’s not the same now I’m really used to playing the real things). I mean, I suppose I could go out to Alice’s house anyway and play them there, but it wouldn’t really be fair to Alice to play drums in her house (well, next to her house) while she can’t play anything. So no more drumming for weeks. No more of that brilliant feeling when a song works out. And just when I was determined to get everything back to normal between the three of us! How will I stick to my new rule about doing stuff and bonding now?
Nothing is going right this week.
There is one bright side, though. I texted Jane to tell her about Alice and she texted back to say that Mrs Finn came in to Jane’s mum today, and Jane heard her say she thinks Vanessa has gone too far and that maybe they have been spoiling her too much. At last! Maybe this means Vanessa will not spend her next birthday doing what she did last year, ie boasting loudly about how expensive her presents were and howher new bag cost more than she bets our parents earn in a week (she was probably right, but how obnoxious and silly). I hope the Finn parents’ reign of strictness has kicked in by tomorrow otherwise Vanessa will be even worse than ever now that she has been thwarted by the ‘Big Birthday Bash’ people.
MONDAY
I’m not sure whether the reign of strictness has begun or not. Vanessa doesn’t seem to have changed at all. She spent most of today boasting about how wonderful her party was, as if we all hadn’t been there and seen everything (including, of course, the pony running amok and knocking her into a pile of cupcakes).
‘In a way,’ said Cass, as we watched Vanessa holding forth to Caroline and Karen Rodgers and Alison on the other side of the classroom, ‘you’ve got to admire her. I mean, she doesn’t let things get to her, does she?’
‘But in another way,’ said Ellie, ‘that kind of shows she’s a psychopath.’
‘True,’ said Cass. ‘You wouldn’t know she’d been knocked into some cakes by a pink pony. While covered in glitter.’
‘And she’s even got some new fans out of the whole thing,’said Ellie. ‘Look, Karen and Alison seem to like her now.’
‘That’s because Karen snogged that fairytale prince,’ said Emma.
And we all screamed ‘What?!’ because none of us had heard about this on Saturday night, probably because we all more worried about Alice than Karen Rodgers’s love life. But Emma was talking to Alison at the lockers this morning (they are both going to the new computer classes that are starting next week) and apparently it was true. The fairytale princes were all boys from some local drama club and Karen had danced with the same boy all night and ended up kissing him among the bean bags. And he took her number and texted her yesterday and they’re meeting up at the weekend.
‘Maybe love will change Karen,’ said Cass. ‘Maybe it’ll make her nicer.’
‘Hmmm,’ I said. ‘The only
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