Karen's Sleepover

  “No,” replied Leslie. “Have you?”

  “Only about eighty-seven times. We own the movie.”

  “Well, so do we, but it still scares me,” I said. I felt like sticking up for Leslie.

  Boy, did I wish Nancy were at my party. If you think I have a big mouth, you should hear Nancy. She says whatever she wants. She told me once that this is because she plans to be an actress one day. She says it is good practice.

  I turned off the VCR. “Who wants to make cookies?” I asked.

  “What kind?” Hannie wanted to know.

  “Slice ‘n’ Bake with chocolate chips.”

  “Oh, yum! That is the best kind!” cried Leslie. “You can slice them up — which is really easy. Or you can make them into shapes!”

  We carried the empty pizza boxes and all our trash downstairs. We threw everything away. Then I called, “Kristy! Can you come help us bake cookies?”

  “Sure!” she called back.

  (I am not allowed to touch the stove or the oven. A grown-up has to do that for me.)

  “How come your sister is baby-sitting you?” Pamela asked me.

  “She is not baby-sitting. She’s just helping,” I told her.

  Then I decided to ignore Pamela. I joined Hannie and Natalie, who were slicing cookies, but eating about every other slice.

  There is just nothing like raw cookie dough.

  Before we had even put a tray of slices in the oven, Leslie rolled some dough into a ball and threw it at Jannie. Jannie giggled and threw it back. Soon we were having a dough-ball fight. Even Kristy joined it. We were giggling and shrieking and running around. (Pamela sat at the kitchen table. Her chin rested in her hand. She looked bored out of her skull. She did not even move when a piece of dough hit her head.)

  The next thing I knew, the fight was over. And Natalie was holding up something she had made. “Who does this look like?” she asked.

  “Ricky Torres!” I said.

  It was Ricky. We baked him with the other cookies. When the timer rang, we watched Kristy take the cookies out of the oven.

  “Who wants to eat Ricky?” she asked.

  At first, no one could bear to eat the Ricky Torres Dough Boy. Finally Hannie said, “I’ll eat him.” She bit his head off.

  “Aughh!” cried Kristy from behind her. “That hurt!”

  Everyone laughed. Pamela looked bored. So I began to feel bad.

  Kristy pulled me aside. “Are you having fun?” she asked me.

  I shook my head. “No. Pamela Harding is ruining everything…. I wish Nancy were here.”

  “Please Come to My Sleepover!”

  “Karen?” said Kristy. She had taken me into the den. My party guests were in the kitchen. They were eating the Slice ‘n’ Bake cookies and drinking milk.

  “Yes?” I answered.

  “Where is Nancy? Did she get sick or something?”

  I sighed. “No. We had a fight.”

  “About what?”

  “Nancy didn’t get her invitation in the mail when everyone else did. She thought I had not invited her to my party. So she was mad and she tattled on me and got me in trouble with Ms. Colman. Then Nancy got her invitation. She called and said she wasn’t mad anymore. But I was. So I uninvited her. We have not spoken to each other for a whole week.”

  “Wow,” said Kristy. “That was a big fight. I bet you wish it were over now, don’t you?”

  “Do I ever! I really need Nancy here. She would know what to do about Pamela. But what I really want is to make up with Nancy. I don’t know how to do that, though. And I feel funny inviting her to my party now.”

  “I think you should call her,” said Kristy. “Apologize to her. She already apologized to you. And say you forgive her for getting you in trouble. She was just angry then, Karen. People do all sorts of things when they are angry. And I bet Nancy would rather come to your party late than not at all.”

  I thought about that. “I don’t know. Maybe….”

  “Call her,” said Kristy. “It is the mature thing to do.”

  Well. I am a very mature person for a seven-year-old. So I said, “Okay. I will call her.”

  Kristy left the den so I could have some privacy. She said she would help my friends make more cookies.

  My heart pounded as I dialed the phone. Mrs. Dawes answered.

  “Hi,” I said in a small voice. “This is Karen. Is Nancy there?”

  “Sure. Hold on a sec.”

  As soon as Nancy got on the phone I started talking. I wanted to get things over with quickly. Like ripping a Band-Aid off fast instead of peeling it back slowly.

  “Nancy, I’m really sorry I un-invited you to my party,” I said. “But you made me feel bad when you got me in trouble. I know you feel bad now, though. So I think our fight should be over. And I want you to come to my party right away.”

  “You do? Thanks! And Karen, I am sorry I got you in trouble. That was a mean thing to do. Do you forgive me?”

  “Oh, yes!” I said, remembering what Kristy had told me. “I forgive you. Do you forgive me?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Good. Then come over right away. You won’t believe Pamela. She is making us all feel like babies.”

  “She is? How?”

  “She thought The Wizard of Oz was not a scary movie, when everyone knows it is. I mean, duh. And she will not sleep in a sleeping bag. And she would not eat pizza with us. She said it gives her bad breath. Now she is just sitting while everyone else makes cookies. She looks like she thinks we are jerks. Maybe even dweebs. She is ruining everything. Please come to my sleepover. I really need you!”

  So of course Nancy got permission from her parents. Her father said he would drive her right over.

  Blackout

  Flash! Flash! BLAM! BLAM!

  Lightning lit up our yard. Thunder thundered. The storm was on its way — but there was no rain yet.

  The rain did not start until Nancy arrived. She ran to our door and rang the bell three times fast. Just as she had climbed out of her daddy’s car, the rain had begun to fall in huge, gusty sheets.

  When I opened the door, though, Nancy was only a little wet. But she wanted to get inside fast.

  “ ‘Bye!” she called to her father.

  Mr. Dawes waved. Then he drove away.

  I closed the door behind Nancy. We hugged tightly. Hannie smiled at us. She was glad our fight was over.

  “Here,” I said to Nancy. “Let me take your stuff. Hey, how come you brought two sleeping bags?” Nancy was wearing a knapsack and had been carrying a sleeping bag in each hand.

  (Flash! BLAM!)

  “Yeah,” said Jannie. “How come?” Everybody had rushed into the front hall to greet Nancy.

  “I heard that Pamela doesn’t have a sleeping bag, so I brought one for her.”

  I tried not to giggle. So did Hannie and Natalie.

  “I sleep in beds,” was all Pamela would say.

  “How boring,” replied Nancy. Without waiting for Pamela to reply, she went on, “Boy, what a storm! It is so, so scary out there. My father said we’re really in for it.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” asked Pamela.

  “It means we are in great danger,” said Nancy in a low voice.

  Even Pamela looked scared at that.

  Then I said, “Maybe this is a good time for Charlie to tell us a ghost story. He promised he would.”

  “Ooh,” said Leslie. “I don’t know….”

  “Oh, it will only be fun scary,” I told her. “Honest.”

  So I found Charlie, and we sat on the sleeping bags in the playroom again. Pamela started out on a chair. But as Charlie told the story, she began edging off of it.

  Charlie’s story was about a ghost that haunts a huge mansion. The people in the house only see him when it rains. The ghost wears a bucket on his head, so the family calls him Buckethead. This makes the ghost angry.

  “I will get you! I will get revenge!” wails the ghost.

/>   Pamela slid all the way off of her chair. Now she was sitting on the floor.

  I looked at Nancy. She was looking at me. Her eyes were shining. Very quietly, she reached over and turned off a lamp.

  “Aughh!” shrieked everyone except Charlie and Nancy and me.

  Pamela moved onto Jannie’s sleeping bag.

  “The people in the house,” Charlie was saying, “heard clanking sounds … like chains being rattled. A girl saw a white figure standing at the end of her bed one night. The figure said, ‘I will taaaake my reveeeenge soooooon.’”

  “Ooh,” whispered Hannie.

  Outside, the wind howled. The rain beat on the windows. Just as Buckethead was taking his revenge, a bolt of lightning lit up the playroom.

  Then the lights went out.

  “Where Am I?”

  “Help! Oh, help!” Was that Pamela’s voice? I couldn’t be sure.

  “Where am I? I can’t see a thing!” cried someone else.

  It was true. I held my hand in front of my face. I could not see it.

  All around me, my friends were screaming. Some of them were even crying. I knew for sure that Natalie was crying, because she snorts when she cries.

  “Calm down, you guys!” I heard Charlie say. “We probably just blew a fuse or something. I’ll go check the fuse box.”

  “No!” shrieked Natalie. (Snort, snort.) “No! Don’t leave us!”

  “How about if I send Kristy up here to stay with you?”

  “That’s fine,” I replied, before Natalie could answer him.

  In a few minutes I could see a light bobbing down the hallway.

  “Eeeee! It’s Buckethead!” cried Natalie. (Snort, snort.)

  “Who’s Buckethead?” That was Kristy. She was making the bobbing light. She was running through the hallway with a flashlight.

  “That is my sister,” I announced to my party guests. “Don’t worry.”

  Kristy was carrying three more flashlights with her. She set them on the floor and turned them on. The room looked spooky and shadowy, but at least we could see again.

  Natalie was still crying. Actually, she was the only one crying. My other friends looked scared but okay. Pamela found her chair again.

  “I’m frightened,” wailed Natalie.

  “Wimp,” muttered Pamela.

  “Did Charlie look at the fuse box?” I asked Kristy.

  “He didn’t need to,” she replied. “And I’m afraid I have a little bit of bad news.”

  “Oh, no!” cried Natalie. (Snort.)

  “What kind of bad news?” I asked.

  “It’s not a problem with our fuse box. There’s a blackout. We looked outside. There are no lights on anywhere. That means nobody in our neighborhood has any power.”

  Natalie snorted and said she wanted to go home.

  Pamela called her a wimp again.

  Then Leslie said, “My big brother told me that thunder is really dead people bowling, and if a bowling ball rolls into the gutter, it will fall out of the sky. It could crash right through the roof of your house.”

  “My brother,” began Jannie, “says that lightning is caused by angry ghosts. And if they’re angry enough, they will send a lightning bolt right down to the ground.”

  Hannie began to cry then, too (at least she doesn’t snort), so Kristy said, “Haven’t you guys heard about cold fronts and warm fronts?”

  In the dim light I saw Pamela yawn.

  “Cold fronts and warm fronts?” Nancy repeated.

  “Yes,” said Kristy. “A thunderstorm is just weather. That’s all. When air is unstable — like if it rises up instead of staying still — and if the air is wet, too, then you get a thunderstorm. See, the big, dark thunderclouds are charged with electricity….”

  “Do you know what she’s talking about?” I heard Leslie whisper to Natalie.

  “No.” Natalie didn’t even snort.

  And at just that moment, the power returned. All the lights came on again.

  “Hurray!” cheered my friends.

  Bedtime

  With the lights on again, the playroom looked very cheerful. My friends and I did not feel scared at all anymore.

  “Do you guys know enough about thunderstorms now?” asked Kristy.

  “Yes!” we cried.

  “Because I could teach you some more things — ”

  “NO!” we shouted. We began to giggle.

  Kristy left then. Jannie turned on her musical puppy. I tried to turn a cartwheel over the sleeping bags (I fell down), and Nancy threw a stuffed toy at Hannie. Hannie shrieked and threw it back.

  “Ahem!”

  Uh-oh. That was Daddy. I could tell without even turning around.

  Everyone stopped what they were doing.

  “Girls?” said Daddy.

  “Yes?” I sat up and looked at him.

  “Bedtime now, okay? You’ve had plenty of excitement for one night.”

  I looked at my watch. It was only ten o’clock. My friends and I had planned to stay up until at least midnight. But all I said was, “All right. ‘Night, Daddy. We’ll get ready for bed now.”

  “Sleep tight, girls,” said Daddy. Then he left.

  My friends began groaning. They said things like, “Karen, we have to go to bed now?” And, “But, Karen, it’s too early!”

  Pamela said, “I go to bed at ten o’clock on school nights.”

  I smiled. “We’re not really going to bed now. We are just going to pretend. We will put on our pajamas and get in our sleeping bags — ”

  “Or beds,” interrupted Pamela.

  “Whatever. Anyway,” I went on, “then we will talk and tell stories until midnight. And then we are going to do something special. We will do it in the dark when Daddy and Elizabeth and everyone else in the house is asleep,” I said very mysteriously.

  “What is it?” whispered Hannie with wide eyes.

  “Secret,” I replied. “Now, come on. Let’s get ready for bed before Daddy comes back and has to tell us a second time. Sometimes he gets mad if he has to tell me things twice.”

  So my friends and I put on our pajamas. Everyone agreed that Leslie’s leopard-skin nightgown was the best. Pamela went into the bathroom. She washed her face. She brushed her teeth. The rest of us did not bother. We knew those things did not matter at a sleepover.

  When she was finished, she stood in the doorway to the playroom.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to borrow my extra sleeping bag?” asked Nancy sweetly. “I brought it just for you.”

  “I am very sure,” said Pamela.

  I tried not to laugh. Instead I said, “Come on, Pamela. I will show you where my room is. I hope you like my bed.”

  Pamela and I walked down the hall to my room. Pamela was just about to climb into my bed when she stopped. “What are those?” she asked, pointing to the end of my bed.

  “They are Tickly and Moosie,” I told her.

  “Baby things?” she asked, picking one up like it was a bug.

  “No!” I exclaimed. I grabbed Tickly and Moosie. They would probably get cooties from Pamela.

  “Do you still sleep with them?” asked Pamela.

  I did not answer her. Pamela got into my bed.

  “See you at midnight,” I told her.

  And since she was such a grown-up, I did not turn on my night-light or leave the door open a crack. I left her in pitch blackness. Then I returned to my friends. They would not make fun of my blanket or my stuffed cat.

  Midnight

  I had been afraid that staying awake until midnight might be hard. Last year, I tried to stay awake until midnight on New Year’s Eve, but I could not do it. I fell asleep. Luckily, Mommy and Seth woke me up just in time to yell, “Hurray! Happy New Year!”

  But at my sleepover, nobody had any trouble staying awake. Even with the lights out. The very first thing that happened after we were supposed to be asleep was that Nancy asked a question.

  She said, “Who here likes Pamela?”

/>   At first nobody said a word.

  Then a girl named Sara said, “I like her. She is cool. She is so grown-up.”

  And Leslie said, “I wish I looked like her. I wish my mother would let me wear clothes like Pamela’s.”

  Most of the girls wanted Pamela to like them. Or they wanted to be like her. But they didn’t say they liked Pamela.

  Finally Nancy said, “I think Pamela is a jerk.”

  Jannie gasped.

  It was time to change the subject. “What,” I began in a low voice, “is the scariest thing that has ever happened to anyone here?”

  “Getting lost at Disney World,” said Natalie right away.

  “That happened to me once, too!” I exclaimed.

  We told scary stories and funny stories and embarrassing stories for a long, long time. Finally I turned on one of the flashlights that Kristy had brought to the playroom. I looked at my watch.

  “Hey, you guys! It’s almost midnight!” I said in a loud whisper.

  “You better go get Pamela,” said Sara.

  “Oh,” I groaned, but I tiptoed to my room anyway. I opened the door. “Hey, Pamela,” I said. “It’s almost midnight. It is time for the secret surprise.”

  No answer. I shined the flashlight in Pamela’s face. She was sound asleep. I decided to leave her that way. She probably needed her beauty rest.

  I went back to the playroom and told my friends I could not wake up Pamela. Then I said, “Guess what. Now it is time to … raid the refrigerator!”

  “Yea!” yelled a couple of girls.

  “SHHH!” I hissed. “We have to be very quiet, and we cannot turn on any lamps.”

  I passed around the flashlights and we tiptoed downstairs. On the way, Jannie crashed into a table. We were all quiet for a few moments, but I did not hear Daddy or Elizabeth getting up. So we went toward the kitchen.

  When we got there, we had to leave the light off.

  “We do not want anyone to know we are awake,” I reminded my friends.

  Then we opened the refrigerator. There was leftover apple pie and bread and lots of stuff for making sandwiches. There was fruit and juice and soda and milk.

  “Help yourselves!” I said.