Are We Having Fun Yet (Hmmm?)

  For Cecily

  (though she'll have to grow up a little

  before she can read this dedication!)

  —K. McC.

  I was VERY glad to see my step-brother Dylan.

  OK. I was quite pleased to see Dylan, and VERY pleased to see he had some kind of big cake in his hand.

  “We have to eat this,” he said.

  Yeah, like we were just going to look at it, I don't think…

  “Better come in, then,” I said, holding the door open for him.

  Oh, boy – my friends Soph and Fee were going to be

  soooooo

  glad they decided to come back to mine after school today.

  “Indie!” I heard my step-mum Fiona call out from her car. “Can you two try my new recipe and tell me what you think?”

  “Sure!!” I nodded, thinking that I was

  soooooo

  glad to have a step-mum who cooks for a living.

  “Where's she going?” I asked Dylan, as Fiona zoomed off in her car.

  “Can't remember.”

  “When's she picking you up?”

  “Don't know.”

  Those two answers might've made Dylan sound like he's pretty dumb, but really, he's a nine-year-old brainbox when it comes to school stuff. He's just lousy at normal everyday things, like chatting and making sense.

  “Go on through to the kitchen,” I told him, though he was already heading that way, holding the plate with the cake up high above his head.

  He was holding it so high 'cause my dogs had gone into a sniffing frenzy. The way George, Kenneth and Dibbles were acting, you'd think Dylan was carrying a dog food pie, instead of a cake.

  “It is a kind of cake, isn't it?” I checked with Dylan, as I walked behind him on my tiptoes and peeked at the suspiciously dark, gloopy filling.

  “My mum called it a Shoe Fly Pie,” mumbled Dylan, walking into the kitchen and handing the plate to Soph without bothering to say hello.

  A Shoe Fly Pie? I fretted to myself. I think I'd rather eat one made of dog food…

  “What's a Shoe Fly Pie?!” asked Soph, quickly shoving the plate towards Fee, as if she was playing a game of Pass the Smelly Parcel.

  Fee wrinkled and crinkled her freckly nose in disgust, holding the plate out as far as her arms could stretch, and then a little bit more.

  Dylan didn't answer Soph's question – he was too busy checking out the newest foster pets in our house. They were a tank of sickly fish that Mum had brought home from the Paws For Thought Animal Rescue Centre where she works.

  “Hey, wait a minute – I know what this is!” Fee said suddenly, uncrinkling her nose and sounding strangely excited at the idea of eating the strange pie. “I had it when I was on holiday in America!”

  “What is it, then?” I asked.

  I knew Fee had been to Florida. And I knew they had alligators in Florida. Maybe the brown gloop was some kind of alligator stew.

  Bleurghhhhh…

  “It's pastry, with a filling that's made of sugar, molasses, and, um, more sugar!”

  I frowned at Fee for a second, worried that molasses was a type of alligator.

  “Molasses is like treacle,” Fee explained, spotting the worried look on my face.

  The worried look on my face instantly changed to a very happy look, I was sure. A kind of cake made out of sugar, treacle, and more sugar sounded very alright to me.

  “But why's it called a Shoe Fly Pie?” asked Soph, looking for stray sprinklings of bluebottles or garnishes of shoelaces round the edge.

  “It's ‘shoo', as in ‘go away',” explained Fee. “A Shoofly Pie is supposed to be so sugary and yum, all the bees and bugs and flies swarm to it, and you have to shoo them away!”

  “I'll get a knife,” I said, while shooing my dogs away from the plate.

  “What kind are these?” asked Dylan, still staring into the fish tank.

  Weird. He was more interested in fish than food.

  “Goldfish,” I told him.

  “Can we not talk about goldfish, please, and just have some pie?” pleaded Fee.

  Fish were a touchy subject for Fee. Her FIERCE cat Garfield had eaten all the fish in her neighbour's garden pond yesterday.

  He'd eaten all their frogs too. He must've been very hungry, or bored (in a bad way).

  Fee's family had kept him locked in the house since then, till the neighbour calmed down. But it hadn't made Garfield calm down – Fee said he'd growled and hissed all night and clawed a big hole in the bathroom mat.

  “But they don't exactly look like goldfish…” muttered Dylan.

  He was obviously thinking about One, Two, Three, Four and Five, who lived happily and healthily in the tank in my living room, along with Brian the Angelfish.

  “No, you're right – they don't look much like goldfish,” Soph joined in, leaning over to stare at the four fish flitting around the fake seaweed in the tank.

  “Their tails and fins are all pretty and lacy!”

  “Um, that's 'cause they've got fin-rot,” I told my friends.

  Mum said fin-rot happens when fish are stressed. I don't know what had happened to make these fish so stressed; it's not like they had to worry about homework or spots or anything.

  Mum had taken them home from the rescue centre 'cause she thought it was

  TOO NOISY

  with all the barking going on there, and didn't want them to get even more stressed. The problem was, Mum seemed to have forgotten that we had three barky dogs of our own. And we had a lodger (nineteen-year-old Caitlin, my childminder) who played the didgeridoo.

  “Yuck!” squeaked Fee, crinkling up her nose. “Can we not talk about rotting fins? I want to eat pie!”

  Fee was very squeamish about stuff like that. I think it was because of her FIERCE cat Garfield; his hobby was killing small things and hiding chewed bits of them around the house. (It made me very glad that my cat Smudge's hobby was pretending to be a furry sofa cushion.)

  “Hey, Indie…” Soph said now, pointing somewhere behind the seaweed at the back of the tank. “See that fish there? Is it doing a trick?”

  Soph was pointing at one particular upside-down fish.

  I wasn't an expert or anything, but from my experience, I didn't think goldfish did tricks – they left that to dolphins.

  And upside-down wasn't really the right way round for a goldfish to be.

  “Um, I'm pretty sure it's DEAD,” I said reluctantly. cried Soph and Dylan at the same time.

  “That's it!” announced Fee. “No more talking about fish, or fin-rot, or dead things—”

  Fee was probably about to tell us to shut up and eat pie, when Caitlin poked her head around the kitchen door.

  “Fee? Phone for you – it's your mum.”

  As Fee hurried out into the hall, Soph's eyes twinkled with tricksiness.

  “Hey, Indie – let's you, me and Dylan get a slice of pie, hide the rest, and pretend we've eaten it all when Fee comes back!” she giggled.

  “Er, I wouldn't fool around with Fee just now,” said Caitlin. “Her mum's got bad news – her cat died.”

  Gulp.

  Me and Soph and Dylan were so stunned and sorry for Fee that we all went quiet. Till Dylan came up with a sweet but stupid suggestion.

  “Y'know, I think we should give ALL the pie to Fee,” he declared.

  Like I said before, Dylan is smart at lots of things and dumb at others. He didn't get that Fee would be so sad that the last thing she'd want to do was eat a whole pie, however sugary

  and treacly

  and yum it was.

  But, uh-oh – how do you make someone who's super-sad feel better…?

  Soph is the colour of coffee.
I'm the colour of a cup of tea that's been made way too milky. Fee is the colour of milk, only paler.

  That's important to know, so you get an idea of how Fee looked after crying all the way to her house. Put it this way, if it was me or Soph, we'd be a bit pink-eyed and soggy. But 'cause she's so whitely white skinned, poor Fee's eyes and nose looked like three raspberries on a snow-man's face.

  “Can I see him, Mum? I want to give him one last cuddle…” Fee sniffled.

  Mrs Dean winced.

  Urgh – I got the feeling there wasn't that much of Garfield left to cuddle…

  “That's not such a good idea, honey.”

  “Please, Mum!” Fee sniffled some more.

  Soph and Dylan wriggled in their chairs, wondering if we'd done the right thing, hanging around after we'd walked Fee home from mine.

  “Fee,” I butted in, trying to help Mrs Dean out, “my mum says it's always better to remember pets when they were alive and happy.”

  It was just a shame that Garfield was at his happiest when he was killing things. But saying what I said seemed to work – Fee shrugged an OK and stopped asking to see him.

  Mrs Dean mouthed “thank you” at me. But, really, I was just glad to help my friend. After all, with Mum working at the rescue centre, I knew that a lot of the very old or very sick animals weren't going to make it. I mean, when they died, it still made me sadder than sad, but I guess I didn't get as madly, badly, raspberry-eyed sad as Fee was feeling right now.

  “I bet Mr Petropoulos is really pleased,” Fee mumbled darkly.

  “Now that's not fair, Fee – I'm sure Mr Petropoulos was very upset.”

  I don't think what Mrs Dean said was true. Yes, so Fee's neighbour had gone to the trouble of picking Garfield up and letting Mrs Dean know what had happened. But since Garfield had eaten everything that lived in and around his pond, Mr Petropoulos probably wasn't going to cry himself to sleep tonight.

  So how had BIG, growly, scary old Garfield died?

  It had to be something very dramatic.

  Nope.

  Garfield the FIERCE had been squished by a delivery van.

  If he had to get run over, being squished by a huge juggernaut or a Formula One racing car might've been a cool way to go.

  Instead, he'd snuck out of the open loo window in Fee's house, hurtled across the garden, and zoomed straight into the path of a delivery van that was tootling along at the speed of a snail with a walking stick.

  So not cool.

  (I bet Mr Petropoulos was writing a Thank You letter to the van driver right now, on behalf of his ex-frogs and fish.)

  “LISTEN,” said Fee's mum, giving Fee's shoulders a comforting squeeze, “I know it feels bad right now, but it won't feel so awful in time…”

  Fee instantly dropped her gaze to the floor and started sobbing. From this angle, all you could see was a tumbling swirl of red curls bouncing up and down.

  I saw Soph grab a tissue out of a nearby box and pass it through the wavy curtain of hair, in the vague direction of Fee's nose.

  Dylan, I noticed, was frowning.

  I knew that frown – it meant his clever-clogs brain was whirring madly, thinking hard. I guessed what was up: I'd said something helpful to Fee, Soph had just done something helpful for Fee, and now he was trying to figure out how he could be helpful to our friend too.

  The frown vanished and Dylan's eyebrows shot up. He'd thought of something!

  “What's furry and dizzy?” he asked.

  No one answered him …

  “A cat on a roundabout!” Dylan burst out. “What's furry and wobbles?”

  Huh?! What was Dylan up to?

  “A cat on top of a washing machine!

  What's furry and loud?”

  Dylan didn't seem a bit put-off that no one was answering him, or that me, Soph and Mrs Dean were all staring at him like he'd gone bananas.

  “A cat doing karaoke! What's furry and goes WHEE! SPLAT! OOPS!?”

  And then I got it! Not the jokes so much, but the fact that Dylan was doing his best to cheer Fee up by making her laugh. What a brilliant idea! Why didn't I think of that?

  “A cat falling off of its skateboard. What's furry and giggles?”

  I was just about to jump in with an answer when Fee lifted her head, sending curls spiralling.

  She stared at Dylan with her watery, raspberry eyes and snapped, “How CAN you tell jokes at a time like this?” before PARPING her raspberry nose on the tissue that Soph had handed to her.

  Er, what was I saying about the joke thing being an EXCELLENT idea?

  I wanted to cheer Fee up, but it didn't look like making her laugh was going to work.

  What could me, Dylan and Soph try next?

  I'd have to have a good think about that, and come up with a better Cheer Up Fee Plan.

  (And I'd have to wait till we were safely outside to ask Dylan if the answer to “What's furry and giggles?” was “A cat that's just heard a really good joke…”)

  The next morning was Saturday, and for our next try at cheering up Fee, I'd made cookies.

  Well, not just me;

  I had a little help to make them extra-specially good cookies.

  In case you're wondering, the help didn't come from Caitlin (who can burn soup), or my mum (who was busy working at the rescue centre).

  Actually, even if she'd been at home, Mum wouldn't have been able to help much. My dad once said that her cooking was as good as my driving. I was five at the time, so I guess that was his way of saying she was rubbish near a cooker.

  He's right; I don't think Mum knows what an oven's for. She's got some packets of dried rabbit food and a stack of unused, weird-shaped jelly moulds stored in ours just now.

  I'm not being mean about my mum when I say that. Mum is very helpful at other things, like showing you how to bottle-feed baby mice and give antibiotics to sick goldfish. But she's not much use when you want to make chocolate chip cookies.

  Which is where Fiona came in. Maybe one of the reasons why Dad is happy to be married to Fiona is that she spends all day, every day trying out new recipes for her cookery column in the local paper.

  And, yes, Fiona was the someone who'd been very helpful to me – in a cooking cookies way – this morning.

  Yep, I know I'd pooh-poohed Dylan's foodie idea, the one about giving Fee the entire Shoofly Pie to eat the second we heard about Garfield. But it had now been nineteen and three quarter hours since the bad news, so I thought Fee might be up for a bit of comfort eating.

  Or at least comfort nibbling.

  “Mmm … they smell great. Can I have one?” asked Soph, lifting the corner of the plastic box and drooling.

  Me, Soph, and the cookies were sitting on a picnic blanket in the park. Dylan and my three dogs were lolloping around somewhere close by.

  “ABSOLUTELY NOT!”

  I scolded Soph. “They're a present for Fee, to cheer her up!”

  “But she can't eat all of them!” Soph practically whimpered.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, “but we have to wait for her to offer us one.”

  I didn't dare tell Soph that me and Dylan had already eaten two each as soon as they came out of the oven (all hot and melty – mmm!), or that we'd taken turns eating chocolate chip cookie gloop straight from the bowl (drool).

  If I told Soph that, she'd moan, moan, moan that it wasn't fair, and pester, pester, pester me till she got one. Or more likely two, to catch up with us.

  Then I'd HAVE to have another one. Why? Because it's the law, when it comes to cookies.

  And Dylan would have another one. (Of course.)

  And the dogs would all want a bit of one.

  And all that would be left in the box would be one and a half cookies and some chocolate crumbs. Which would still taste good, but wouldn't look like much of a present.

  “Fee was pretty miserable yesterday – maybe she isn't going to come,” Soph suggested.

  She had a sympathetic look on her face, but I cou
ldn't help wondering if Soph sort of slightly hoped Fee wasn't going to show up, from a cookie point of view…

  “Hey!

  Here comes Fee now!”

  Dylan panted, thundering up to us with three barking dogs in hot pursuit.

  Uh-oh…

  It might have been nineteen and three quarter hours since our friend had heard the bad news about her cat, but she still looked gutted.

  In fact, I'd never seen anyone ride a bike so sadly.

  If she cycled any more slowly the bike would fall over.

  “Mmmmm…” Fee mumbled, flopping off, flinging her bike on its side on the grass, and flooping herself miserably onto the blanket beside us. Fee must've smelled too sad for Kenneth and George; after a quick, wary sniff, they both scuttled off to investigate a nearby tree trunk.

  But Dibbles, my dog of very little brain, was more sensitive, and thunked his big, cannonball head down on Fee's lap.

  “How are you feeling today?” I asked her.

  “Hnufffinummm…”

  Fee mumbled some more and shrugged vaguely.

  She didn't look so much like a raspberry-eyed snowman today, but you could tell by the puffiness of her face that she'd been doing plenty more crying in the last nineteen and three quarter hours.

  “What's wrong with your arms?” Dylan suddenly asked.

  “And what's happened to your chest?!” Soph added.

  Huh?

  For a second, I thought that something like “Are you OK?” would have been a better question for Dylan and Soph to have come out with.

  And then I spotted the, er, spots.

  “What is that?” I joined in, bending over for a closer look at the tiny pink bumps dotted across her white skin.