Viva Alice! (7 page)

Chapter Fourteen

B
efore long, it started to get cold. We folded up the towels, and straightened up the sunloungers and went inside to have our showers.

Grace and Alice had gone downstairs and I was sitting on my bed brushing my hair when Mum rang my mobile.

She did her usual routine of checking to see if I’d broken any of her rules about healthy eating and being careful in the sun and staying away from all kinds of imaginary dangers that only she could dream up. I couldn’t concentrate properly on my answers though.

My mum has this secret radar that goes into overdrive when there’s a problem.

What would she say if she knew what was really going on?

What would she say if she discovered that Alice, Grace and I were home alone?

Her last question was the worst one of all.

‘It’s been lovely talking to you, darling,’ she said. ‘Now, will you put me on to Grace’s mum for a minute?’

‘What do you want to talk to her for?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I just wanted to thank her for giving you such a wonderful time,’ said Mum.

‘Mum!’ I said, trying to sound grown up. ‘You’ll only embarrass her. You’ve thanked her twenty times already, and I think that’s probably enough. If you talk to her again she’ll think you’re stalking her and she’ll want to call the police.’

And amazingly, Mum listened to me. ‘Oh, very well,’ she said. ‘You’re probably right. You
just make sure she knows how grateful we are, OK?’

‘Sure I will,’ I said. ‘Leave it to me. I’ll thank her a hundred times before I go to bed. Now I’d better go, I think someone is calling me for dinner. Love you, Mum, bye.’

‘I love you too,’ she said. ‘And so do Dad and Rosie and Domino. We’re all looking forward to seeing you the day after tomorrow.’ And then she hung up.

I listened to the beeping of the phone, and felt tears come to my eyes. Grace and Alice were downstairs planning all kinds of treats, but I couldn’t help feeling nervous and afraid.

Then I shook my head, and sat up straight.

Megan Sheehan
I said to myself.
You’re not a baby any more. You’re thirteen years old. It’s time to grow up and stop being such a scaredy cat. It’s time to have fun.

Then I stood up and marched downstairs, trying very hard to look confident and happy.

I made a really nice pasta dish with cheese and cream and tomatoes. I even let Alice help – after she promised to do
exactly
what I told her.

While Alice and I were cooking, Grace took out all the best dishes and cutlery, and decorated the table with flowers. She filled a jug with lemonade and ice and fruit, and put on some really cool music.

The meal was fun. We pretended we were college students, having a dinner-party in our flat.

‘Let’s all live together when we’re older,’ said Alice. ‘And every single night can be like this one. Every single night can be amazing.’

That did sound kind of cool, so I smiled as I served up the last of the pasta, and Grace poured us all more lemonade, and Alice turned the music up louder, and everything was perfect.

Gavin rang just as we finished eating, and Grace told him the story we’d agreed on.

‘Oh, Dad’s fine,’ she said, rushing the words a bit. ‘He’ll be as good as new in a few days. He has to stay in hospital for the night though. No, you don’t need to come back – Mum said it’s not a big deal. The doctors are just being super-cautious. No, sorry, you can’t talk to her. She’s gone to bed and she said not to disturb her. She’s kind of tired after sitting around the hospital for half the day. Yeah, I told her you’re spending the evening in Robyn’s cousin’s place, and she’s fine with that. She said it was kind of you to help her out. We’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll tell Mum you rang. Yeah, OK, bye.’

A second after she hung up, the phone rang again. ‘Oh hi, Mum,’ she said, a bit breathlessly. ‘How is Dad feeling now? Oh, good. Tell him I love him. Yeah, we’re all fine here. Alice made an … interesting lunch and Megan made us a
lovely pasta dinner.’

Then she hesitated and I knew she’d got to the hard bit. ‘Oh, sorry, Mum, Gavin’s asleep. He went for an extra-long run this afternoon, and he was wrecked after it, so he went to bed as soon as he’d eaten. He said to say goodnight to you. Yeah, we’ll all be fine, don’t worry about us. Yes, I’ll lock all the doors and I’ll put out all the lights when we’re going to bed. We’ll see you tomorrow, OK? Yes, love you too. Kiss Dad goodnight for me. Bye.’

When she hung up, Alice hugged her. ‘Well done,’ she said. ‘That was perfect.’

‘I feel bad though,’ said Grace. ‘I don’t like telling lies – especially to my family.’

‘Don’t feel bad,’ said Alice. ‘Remember, we’re doing a good thing here. Your mum is getting to stay with your dad while he’s not well, and Gavin is making sure that Robyn doesn’t get a hard time from her mean cousins. And we three will be fine here.’

‘I guess you’re right,’ said Grace.

‘Of course I’m right,’ said Alice. ‘It’s all good. We’re three responsible kids and everything’s going to be fine.’

The three of us helped to tidy up after the dinner and then we threw ourselves on the couches in the living room and ate ice-cream and chatted and laughed. I felt all grown-up, like someone from a movie or a cool TV show.

‘I’ve got a great idea,’ said Alice after a while. ‘Let’s play the secrets game.’

I hate that game. (There’s a reason they’re called secrets.) I didn’t say this though. Once Alice has made up her mind about something, it’s pretty impossible to make her change it.

‘You start then, Alice,’ I said. ‘You tell the first secret.’

I was trying to buy time so I could think of a secret I didn’t mind sharing.

‘OK,’ said Alice. ‘Let me think … Oh, I know,
I have a great one. Years and years ago, I used to love playing with Mum’s make-up. One day I sneaked into her bedroom to play with her new lipstick. She’d only got it the day before, and I knew it was really, really expensive. I’d just wound it up as far as it would go when I heard her coming up the stairs.’

‘What did you do?’ I asked. I felt scared even thinking about it. Veronica totally hates when anyone messes with her stuff.

‘I didn’t have time to think,’ said Alice. ‘I put the lid back on really quickly, but I hadn’t wound the lipstick down, and it got all squished up and wrecked.’

‘OMG,’ I said.

‘What happened?’ asked Grace. ‘Did your mum go crazy?’

‘I haven’t told you the worst part yet,’ said Alice. ‘I’ve never told anyone this before. I shoved the squished-up lipstick into my pocket, and later I put it under Jamie’s bed. When Mum found it the next day, she blamed him.’

‘That’s awful,’ I said. ‘But didn’t Jamie tell her that it was nothing to do with him?’

Alice shook her head. ‘He was so small he couldn’t talk properly. He could only say words like duck, and teddy and stuff, so he wasn’t able to explain that he’d never touched the broken lipstick.’

‘The poor kid,’ said Grace. ‘How could you do that to him?’

‘Actually, it wasn’t as bad as it sounds,’ said Alice. ‘Jamie was so small and cute, Mum didn’t really get cross with him, even though she’d have
killed
me. Anyway, I survived, and that’s the end of my secret. What’s yours, Grace?’

Grace thought for a long time. ‘I don’t know,’ she said in the end. ‘I can’t think of anything. I’ve told you two all my secrets already.’

‘But you’ve got to think of something,’ said Alice. ‘That’s the game.’

‘OK’ said Grace in the end. ‘Since you insist – but you might be sorry, Alice, because my secret is to do with you.’

‘What is it?’ asked Alice leaning forward and looking excited. ‘Will I be happy when I hear it?’

‘Er … I don’t think so,’ said Grace. ‘My secret is that, at lunchtime, when you went inside to get the ketchup, I didn’t eat any of the sandwiches you put on my plate.’

‘So what did you do with them?’ asked Alice. ‘Were you saving them for later?’

‘No,’ said Grace quickly. ‘I threw them over the hedge.’

That wasn’t news to me, because I’d done exactly the same thing. I didn’t want to hurt Alice’s feelings, but there was no way I was going to eat those gross sandwiches.

‘That’s rotten,’ said Alice. ‘After all my trouble! Don’t you feel guilty about wasting the food I prepared for you?’

‘Not really,’ said Grace giggling. ‘My only worry is that maybe I poisoned the local wildlife. Sorry, Alice, but those sandwiches were just weird. I never would have told you, but you’re
the one who insisted on this stupid game.’

Alice turned to me, and I could see that she was really mad. ‘What about you, Meg?’ she asked. ‘Did you throw my sandwiches away too?’

‘If I tell you, does that count as my secret?’ I asked.

‘No!’ said Alice crossly.

‘Well then,’ I said, avoiding her question, ‘My secret is …’

My biggest secret was that I thought Gavin was kind of cool, but there was nooooo way I was telling Grace and Alice that. They’d tease me in front of him, and it would be totally, totally embarrassing.

‘Get on with it, Megan,’ said Grace. ‘What’s your big secret?’

‘OK,’ I said slowly. ‘My secret is – and I know it’s kind of stupid – I was really afraid about staying here tonight without your parents, Grace. I didn’t like the idea of being home alone.’

Alice leaned over to me. ‘I already figured that out,’ she whispered. ‘So it’s not exactly a secret.’

But she squeezed my hand, and I knew she wasn’t going to give me a hard time.

‘OK,’ she said then. ‘It’s my turn again. Last year, when I was staying at my dad’s place––’

I soooo didn’t want any more of this game. I picked up a cushion, and whacked Alice on the head with it, and as soon as she had recovered she did the same to me. A second later, Grace joined in and we had a long cushion fight, that only ended when Alice collapsed on the couch and begged for mercy.

It was totally cool.

Chapter Fifteen

A
fter the cushion fight we watched a DVD, and chatted some more. I was really tired, but it seemed a bit weird to go to bed when there wasn’t an adult around to tell me I had to. So I rubbed my eyes, and tried to keep up with what Grace and Alice were saying.

In the end, when I thought I’d have to find some matchsticks to hold my eyes open, Alice gave a huge yawn.

‘Bedtime?’ she suggested, and no one argued.

We checked that all the doors and windows were securely locked. (And when the others weren’t looking, I checked a second time, just
to be sure to be sure.) Then we went upstairs and got ready for bed.

I was just pulling back my bedcovers, and getting ready to dive in, when Alice opened the balcony door.

‘The sea is beautiful tonight,’ she said as she looked out. ‘Come and look, you two.’

Grace and I went and stood beside her. Alice was right. The navy-blue sky was full of twinkly stars, and the moon was shining on the distant sea, lighting up a silvery pathway, like something out of a fairytale.

‘The three of us are so coming back here on our own when we’re older,’ said Grace. ‘We’d have an amazing holiday.’

‘That would be so cool,’ said Alice. ‘We should make a pact, and promise that we’re going to do it, no matter what.’

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we take a photograph of the three of us here on the balcony? Our grown-up selves can look back, and see how totally cute we were when we were teenagers?’

‘We should take a picture in the same place every time we visit,’ said Alice. ‘We can watch ourselves growing up.’

‘That’s a brilliant idea,’ said Grace. ‘I’ll go get my camera.’

So Grace got her camera from the bedroom, and she spent ages figuring out how to work the self-timer, and then she had to balance the camera on the patio table, and it kept falling over, so Alice brought out the blanket from her bed to support it, and then the three of us lined up at the edge of the balcony, and put our arms around each other and said ‘LANZAROTE!’ all together really loud and the camera flashed and we all laughed and then there was a sudden gust of wind and the door into the bedroom slammed shut and Grace stopped laughing and said in a very quiet voice. ‘Oh.’

‘What?’ I asked, noticing how worried she looked. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Now we are in very, very big trouble,’ she
said. ‘That’s what’s wrong.’

Alice ran over to the door. ‘This is stupid,’ she said. ‘There’s no handle on the outside. How are we supposed to open the door? How are we supposed to get back inside?’

‘We can’t,’ said Grace. ‘That door can only be opened from the inside. Gavin and his friend got stuck out here last year. They shouted for ages and it was nearly an hour before we heard them and set them free.’

‘But there’s no one to hear us shout,’ I said in a quiet voice. ‘We’re all alone.’

‘We can phone for help,’ said Alice in a bright voice. ‘Who’s got their phone?’

Grace and I both shook our heads. ‘Not me,’ we said together.

‘We’re teenagers,’ sighed Alice. ‘Isn’t there a rule saying that we should never be more than a few metres away from our phones?’

I looked through the glass to where our three phones were lined up on the lockers next to our beds.

‘We
are
only a few metres away from our phones,’ said Grace. ‘Only trouble is, there’s a locked door between them and us. They might as well be a million miles away.’

Alice leaned over the balcony and looked down. ‘Maybe I could climb …’

‘No way,’ I said, pulling her back. ‘Don’t even think about it. We’re on the second floor remember? Things are bad enough, but I think they might be a bit worse if Grace and I were stuck up here, looking at you lying on the patio with a broken leg. Have you forgotten what happened when you climbed up that tree to rescue Domino?’

‘You’re right, Meg,’ said Alice. ‘That was a stupid idea. Maybe we could try shouting for help instead.’

‘We’d be wasting our voices,’ said Grace. ‘Mum and Dad especially chose this villa because it was so private. We never hear a single sound from the other villas, and that means they won’t be able to hear us either. Everyone’s
too far away.’

‘But that means …’ began Alice.

‘… that we have to wait until either Gavin or my parents come back to rescue us …’ said Grace.

‘… that also means we’re going to be on this balcony for the whole night,’ I said, and I started to cry.