Friends Forever!

Table of Contents

 

As tears dribble down my face, my mind is racing. Claude, Fleur and I have hung out together since, like, Day 1 of Blackwell School. Ever since the gangly blonde chick and the little prim black girl with her hair in bunches sat down beside me in Year 7 French. We're like sisters. We're a team. We live our lives together! If they're sad, I'm sad. If I'm sad, well, they try to sort things out for me. And, sure, we've had bust-ups before, but that's just because sometimes we can all be extra-specially infuriatingly annoying! Like when Fleur falls in love with a different aftershave-drenched drongo every ten minutes. Or when Claude gets all swell-headed about her straight-A grades. Or when I forget birthdays or turn up late for stuff. Or, say, when Claude and Fleur post pictures of me all over the Internet, taken at a sleepover, asleep with my mouth open, wearing Blu-Tack devil horns. Oh, how I laughed.

But we always make friends in the end. Don't we?

SPEAK
Published by the Penguin Group
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Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published in Great Britain in 2006 by Puffin UK, London.
First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam's Sons,
a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2006
Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2007

Copyright © Grace Dent, 2006

All rights reserved
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Dent, Grace. LBD : friends forever / by Grace Dent. p. cm. Summary: Now sixteen years old,
Ronnie, Fleur, and Claude try to repair an unexpected rift in their friendship by getting summer
waitressing jobs together at a seaside resort. [1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. Waiters and waitresses—
Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction.
5. England—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.D4345Lam 2006 [Fic]—dc22 2005023963

eISBN : 978-1-440-68433-3

 

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Three abrupt knocks on my bedroom door, then I'm invaded by the sleep police.

“Ronnie?
Ronnnnnnie?
Are you under there?” my mother quacks, lifting up a corner of the duvet, letting cold air surge over my limbs.

“Ronnie! Helllllloooo?! Earth calling Veronica Ripperton? Wake up!”

“Gnnnngnn! Go away!” I groan, whipping the quilt back from her and wrapping myself up like a sausage roll.

“Ugh! What do you
do
in this room?” she says sniffily, flinging back the curtains so the morning sunlight scorches my face. “How can you make a room so messy!”

I lie very still, praying for her to leave.

“You'll have rats in here before long,” continues Mum, picking up a half-eaten chocolate chip muffin discarded on my desk. “Rats, I tell you! With big tails and sharp teeth! Well, not that rats would put up with this mess,” she mutters under her breath.

“Uggghhh,” I groan, hiding my face in the pillow.

“Ronnie! Can you hear me? What's this? What's going on here?” Mum says.

I sit up in bed, rubbing my eyes. Mum's peering at the front of my iMac like it's an extraterrestrial. “The front of this thing is flashing! Is it on? You'll start a fire in here! Why do you always leave things switched on?”

“Don't touch it,” I mumble, watching Mum jabbing the power button, probably crashing the computer and corrupting all the files. “It's in sleep mode.”

“Sleep mode! Pghhh!” she mutters. “You're in sleep mode, you lazy lump! Get up!”

“Gnngnn . . . ,” I grumble, catching sight of myself in the mirror with pointy morning hair and a pillow crease down my face. “What is wrong with you? Are you a complete freak?”

I look at my bedside clock. It's 7:58 A.M.

“Ha!” Mum snorts. “What's wrong with me? What's wrong with you, more like?! You lie in your pit all day, then gawp at TV and play bass guitar all night long. Your body clock's upside down! You hardly see the sun. It's like living with a bat!”

“Ugh!” I groan, hiding my face under the covers again. “Look, you insane old goat! My last GCSE exam was on Wednesday. Two days ago! And I studied really hard for them too! And I'm not back at school till September. I've nothing to get up for!”

“Oh, there's
plenty
to get up for, young lady!” Mum hoots, clearly elated that I'm rising to her bait. “When I was sixteen years old, I'd be up with the lark on a glorious June morning like this. I'd be making breakfast and doing housework, really helping my mother out!”

“Oh, pur-lease,” I groan.

“And you can start by minding Seth for me while I go to the wholesaler's. I'll be gone two hours,” Mum twitters, poking me a bit. “Oh, c'mon, Ronnie, please? He's dying for you to play with him. He's been so miserable since he caught that tummy bug.”

“Is he still projectile pooing?” I frown.

“Mmm . . . no, that seems to have cleared up,” Mum sniggers. “But, y'know, best wear something wipeable, just to be safe.”

“Euuuh!” I grimace, swinging my legs out of bed.

Mother has won again.
She always wins.

“Hey, and when I get home . . . ,” Mum says, “I'll help you fill out that waitressing application form for the Wacky Warehouse.”

“Er, pardon?” I splutter. “I'm not working at a Wac . . .”

“It'll teach you the value of money!” Mum snaps back. “You're not freeloading off me and your dad until September.”

“Huh! I
know
the value of money, thank you!” I say, beginning to raise my voice. “Listen, Mother, I am
not
working in a Wacky Warehouse! I'm not mopping up the ice cream and vomit at children's birthday parties! Cynthia Morris from Blackwell School had a Saturday job there, and they made her dress up in a squirrel costume and jump up and down on a mini trampoline playing the bongos for six hours a day. I'm not that wacky!”

Mum just rolls her eyes at me, then heads for the door. “Well, you better start feeling wacky soon, Lady Muck,” she snaps crossly. “Or you're working downstairs with me as the Fantastic Voyage's dishwasher. I'm not paying an extra body while you laze about up here!”

“What? Aaaagh!” I howl, imagining the prospect of nine weeks trapped in the basement of our family pub, unblocking hair from the waste disposal and gutting fish. “That is so unfair!”

“Veronica, life isn't fair,” clips my mother. “Now, I want you up, dressed and in the den, frolicking with an incontinent toddler in ten minutes. Or else! Oh, and if you're bored, I've left notes about other chores on the fridge.”

“I'm not going to be your slave for the summer!” I yell, getting angrier by the second. “And I won't work at the Wacky Warehouse either! I'd rather die! In fact, I'm going to fling myself out of my bedroom window . . . straight after breakfast.”

“Mmm . . . don't do that, sweetheart,” Mum says dryly, opening my bedroom door. “You'll make a terrible mess.”

Mum trots out, smashing the door shut behind her. I've been awake less than forty-five seconds and we've already had our first bust-up. This is impressive, even by our standards.

“But this was meant to be . . . ,” I yell as she clomps away down the landing, “my summer break!”

I strip off my nightgown, pulling on a hoodie and some baggy jeans, dragging my long auburn hair into a pink bobble, pausing to look at a photograph on my noticeboard. It's a picture of me, Fleur Swan and Claudette Cassiera, or Les Bambinos Dangereuses, as we're universally known, taken last summer when we had a fabulous adventure at the Astlebury Music Festival. Spike Saunders and tons of other bands played. The whole thing totally rocked. In the photo, I'm grinning like a demented hobbit, my arms wrapped around my two friends' shoulders. Fleur, as ever, looks fabulously, nauseatingly pretty. Blonde hair, perfect skin, big blue eyes, she's doing her typical “rabbit ears” trick behind my head. Next to her, Claude's goofing about, pulling one of her daftest faces. We look so happy.

I let out a long sigh. I really have got nothing to get up for today.