St Grizzle's School for Girls, Geeks and Tag-along Zombies Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Sneak Peek at St Grizzle's School for Girls,

  Gremlins and Pesky Guests!

  About Karen McCombie

  About Becka Moor

  Copyright

  WHACK!

  POP!

  Fffftttt…

  The WHACK! is the sound of the dorm door being shoved open and smacking against the wall.

  The POP! is my one and only dorm-mate Swan blowing and snapping a pink bubble of gum as she pads into the room, her fresh-from-the-shower hair leaving a trail of drips on the floor behind her.

  The Fffftttt… might sound like a deflating air bed but it’s actually Swan letting out a long, weary sigh, which comes with a matching eyeroll.

  “What?” I say, blinking over at her from the bottom bunk I’m sitting on.

  It’s Wednesday morning, it’s five minutes to breakfast and I was halfway through getting ready when I got distracted. Swan is probably sighing and rolling her eyes at the sight of me still in my PJs with one side of my hair neatly plaited and the other a mess of sticky-out brown frizz. Oh, and I’ve just remembered I’ve got my toothbrush tucked behind my left ear.

  “You’re not watching that film AGAIN, are you, Dani?” Swan asks, nodding at the mobile phone I’m holding in my lap.

  Right, so it’s got nothing to do with my effortless lack of style. She’s talking about the mini-movie my best friend Arch posted on our YouTube channel on Sunday night.

  “Well, yeah,” I answer with a shrug.

  “How many times have you viewed it now?” asks Swan as she starts slamming around in drawers, looking for some clothes.

  “Not that many,” I lie.

  Thirty-three times, actually, I realize, glancing down at the counter on the YouTube page.

  Since I arrived at St Grizzle’s, me and my back-at-home buddy Arch are usually in touch every day, sometimes several times a day, by messaging and texts and video chats. But most of all, we make and upload dumb-but-fun minimovies for each other to watch.

  I last uploaded one on Saturday – it was a James Bond action scene, from the movie Sceptre. I made a tiny tuxedo out of black tissue paper for my little plastic brontosaurus, then dangled the dinosaur from Swan’s twin brother Zed’s remote-controlled helicopter with a bit of gift-wrap ribbon I found in the art room. While I filmed, Zed expertly flew the helicopter, making Secret Agent Dino 007 swoop and zip around the back lawn of the school.

  It was excellent, even AFTER the helicopter crash-landed in a rhododendron bush and Swan had to rescue it and Secret Agent Dino 007 before Twinkle the school goat leaped in and ate them. (Actually, that was the BEST bit.)

  My James Bond tribute was in reply to a minimovie Arch had posted a couple of days earlier of himself having a conversation with a sock puppet. I only sussed that the sock was meant to be ME when I spotted the brown wool plaits he’d attached to either side with safety pins.

  It was so funny, especially when another sock puppet – made to look like my dog Downboy – boinged into the frame and chased sock-puppet Dani round the table.

  And it got even funnier when my old teacher, Miss Solomon, loomed into shot behind Arch saying, “Well, THIS doesn’t look much like converting fractions to decimals to ME, Archie Kaminski!” before yanking BOTH the socks off his hands in one swift move. (Guess filming in class was a pretty stupid idea...)

  So, yeah, fun mini-movies are our thing.

  Only this latest mini-movie of Arch’s is not funny, not a bit.

  “Are you still convinced there’s something up with him?” asks Swan, pulling a T-shirt down over her wet head.

  “Kind of,” I say, nibbling at the skin around my nail while I stare at the screen – and wonder if I’ll have time to play it for the thirty-fourth time before we have to go down to the dining room.

  Here’s the thing – Arch’s latest mini-movie stars zombies made out of loo-roll tubes.

  He’s drawn goggle-eyed zombie faces on the cardboard tubes and given them outstretched arms using wooden lolly sticks. But these living-dead creatures are not exactly cute and they don’t really do much.

  They just look glum and grey as they tag along after each other, inching towards the camera...

  “Still not made contact?” asks Swan as she fastens the shoulder straps on her cut-off dungarees.

  “Nope. It’s been days now,” I reply. “It’s so unlike him. I’ve left comments on this film, I’ve texted him, I’ve tried to video chat, I’ve called his mobile…”

  I pause, thinking how strange it was to hear Arch’s usual, cheerful, “Sorry, I can’t take your call right now cos I’ve been abducted by aliens!” message. Because of the gloomy zombies and the silence, I’m starting to think he might be feeling not-very-cheerful-at-all in REAL life.

  “…so I’ve basically tried every way I can to get in touch with him,” I continue, since Swan’s staring at me in that unsettlingly stern way of hers. “Every way except…”

  This time I’ve stopped cos I’m thinking about what I might have to do as a last resort.

  “Except what?” asks Swan, staring harder.

  “Except for calling him on his home phone,” I tell her, my voice all rumbly-grumbly with dread.

  The trouble is, one of Arch’s parents is BOUND to pick up, and they have been SO weird towards me since I left, a whole not-quite-a-month ago.

  Mr Kaminski – Arch’s normally joke-a-minute dad – sounds all sad and forlorn whenever he answers the phone to me now, like I am a condemned prisoner who’s been given a life sentence, instead of an eleven-year-old girl who’s having to spend a term at St Grizelda’s School for Girls while her mum’s on an exciting expedition to the Antarctic.

  Mrs Kaminski is even WORSE. I swear she sounds all choked and teary whenever she talks to me. She totally doesn’t approve of Mum sending her beloved only child away to boarding school. (To be honest, when I first heard Mum’s plan to send me here, I didn’t approve of it either – but that was before I fell for its random kooky charms.)

  And even though I’ve tried to explain what it’s ACTUALLY like here, Mrs Kaminski doesn’t seem to believe that St Grizzle’s really isn’t a strict ’n’ stern, no-fun, no-magic version of Hogwarts.

  I mean, if only she could see the stone statue of St Grizelda out in the driveway at the front of the school… This morning she has an orange Christmas-cracker paper hat taped to her head and a slightly frayed, lime-green skipping rope dangling from her hands.

  If only Mrs Kaminski could meet Lulu the head teacher, in her uniform of cut-off denim shorts, an old faded T-shirt and flip-flops with giant plastic daisies on them.

  If only she could see the goblin flying past the dorm window on a trapeze right now, screaming its head off (in other words, eight-year-old Blossom from Newts Class getting ready for our upcoming lesson in circus skills).

  But of course Mr and Mrs Kaminski’s opinions of my new school don’t matter as much as discovering what’s going on with my friend Arch.

  Is he really, truly as gloomy as his loo-roll zombies?

  Like James (Brontosaurus) Bond, it’s my mission to find out…

  “Oi, Dani – are you trying to start a new
trend?” mutters Swan.

  I glance up from the list I’m making to see what Swan’s on about.

  She’s sitting next to me, slouching across the desk and pointing at my forehead.

  “What is it?” whispers Zed, leaning over from his wheelchair on the other side of me.

  “She’s got a blob of toothpaste on her eyebrow,” says Swan, keeping her voice JUST low enough so Miss Amethyst doesn’t hear.

  I quickly rub away the dried white gloop with the sleeve of my cardie. This morning – after spending WAY too long staring at loo-roll zombies – I’d got dressed and ready for breakfast at lightning speed. Only I was hurrying so much that when I yanked on my T-shirt I forgot to take the toothbrush out from behind my ear and got in a bit of a tangle.

  “So that’s been there all through breakfast and assembly?” I hiss. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Cos it was funny?” Swan suggests with a shrug.

  “AAAARRRRGGHHH!”

  Me, Swan, Zed – and even Miss Amethyst – pay absolutely NO attention to the bloodcurdling yelp coming from another part of the school.

  We’re not being uncaring, it’s just that we know for sure that nothing is actually wrong with the yelper. It’s Blossom, and she’s just in a really grumpy mood and has been “AAAARRRRGGHHH!”ing at regular intervals ever since assembly, all because Lulu announced that today’s schedule would have to be tweaked as she had a Very Important Meeting at 10 a.m.

  So rather than having a whole-school circus skills session this morning, we were all splitting off to do other stuff. My Year 6 class (Fungi) would have an extra science lesson with Miss Amethyst, the Year 5 Conkers Class and Year 4 Otters were being taken into the woods by art teacher Mademoiselle Fabienne to draw woodlice, while Granny Viv – the newest employee at St Grizzle’s and my ACTUAL granny – was going to give the Year 3 Newts a cookery lesson.

  That’s when Blossom let rip with her first, ear-splitting “AAAARRRRGGHHH!”

  At first I’d thought Blossom might’ve had her toe run over by Zed’s wheelchair (it happens sometimes) or that she’d been headbutted by Twinkle (it happens a lot) or she’d heard wrong and thought that they were cooking with woodlice or something (on second thoughts, Blossom would probably think that was pretty cool).

  But when I looked round I saw…

  a) Zed parked – quite innocently – right beside me

  b) Twinkle at the back of the school hall chewing on something that looked suspiciously like one of the shiny new school brochures Lulu had just ordered, and

  c) Blossom wearing her brand-new ‘Super-Grrrl’ PJs and sprinkles of glitter on her face, all ready for circus skills class.

  So Blossom was obviously just “AAAARRRRGGHHH!”ing cos she was gutted that her excellent outfit and sparkles were going to go to waste…

  “Now, stop your nonsense and just behave yourself!” the three of us hear Miss Amethyst suddenly snap and all sit bolt upright.

  Luckily we see that our teacher’s not talking to me, Swan or Zed – she’s frowning at the class computer, which is refusing to play the film she wants to show us. I think she said it was about plant cells or sound waves or the earth’s crustiness or something.

  I wasn’t really listening, to be honest – I was too busy thinking about zombie loo rolls and worrying about Arch. Apart from finding out about my toothpasted eyebrow, I’ve spent the last few minutes scribbling a To Do list for my mission but it’s a bit rubbish...

  MISSION PLAN

  Text Arch loads done that already

  Leave messages done that too

  Email him done that heaps of times

  Stick comments on YouTube done that as well

  Call his home number urgh, don’t want to…

  While Miss Amethyst is busy with misbehaving software, I scrunch up my useless plan.

  “So what ARE you going to do about getting in touch with Arch, Dani?” asks Zed.

  “She’s going to phone his house, THAT’S what she’s going to do,” Swan says, reaching out to grab my mobile, which is sitting on the desk.

  “No! Don’t you dare!” I whisper, grabbing the phone back.

  “Hey, I know! Why don’t you make a really great mini-movie that Arch can’t RESIST commenting on?” Zed suggests.

  “Maybe…” I mumble as I start scrolling through photos of my best friend, missing him madly.

  The trouble is, my brain is slightly frazzled with worry. If I can’t even come up with a solid bullet-pointed plan for my mission, how am I going to get inspiration for a new film?

  “Hey, who’s that?” Zed whispers now, leaning closer. Swan leans in to look, too.

  “It’s Arch, of course,” I whisper back. I’ve paused at a picture of my best buddy at the lido back home, where we went swimming in the summer holidays last year.

  “No way! He looks totally different!” says Swan, almost forgetting to whisper, she’s so surprised.

  Swan and Zed have seen Arch ALMOST for real plenty of times now, either on the films he sends me or sometimes during our video chats.

  But they have never seen him like this.

  “Hey, Arch isn’t wearing his baseball cap!” says Zed, suddenly realizing what’s changed. “He looks so different. He always wears his baseball cap, doesn’t he?”

  I gaze at the image, at Arch’s stunned expression and his short fair hair with the flop of long fringe covering his forehead. “He even tried to wear it in the pool,” I say, memories flooding back. “But it came off every time he jumped in…”

  “Arch looks totally WRONG without his hat. It’s like seeing Yas without her uniform or Miss Amethyst wearing a colour that’s not purple,” says Swan.

  Yas in Conkers Class is the only pupil who still wears the old-style uniform that all the girls were expected to wear back when St Grizelda’s was a properly posh and serious school. Even when Lulu gently tells her she doesn’t have to and waves super-comfy jogging bottoms at her.

  And Miss Amethyst? Well, I risk a quick glance up and see her wearing her typical wafty layers of mauve, lilac and violet. Only her face breaks the colour code – it’s bright pink with annoyance.

  Oh, and speaking of faces, there’s Toshio’s peering at us through the glass panel in the classroom door, his ever-present headphones circling his neck. Toshio is a Japanese student who Lulu is supposed to be teaching English to in exchange for him being the temporary school receptionist… Except she never seems to have the time, which leaves Toshio free to amuse himself by listening to shouty music and playing computer games in the school office. Still, blissfully happy as he is, Toshio’s lack of language skills makes things very confusing for anyone expecting a useful response when they contact the school.

  Last week a man in a van had turned up to deliver the new school brochures. Only Toshio had never heard the word “brochure” before and every time he tried to repeat it – “brushirrrrr!” – it got funnier and funnier. In the end he was giggling too much to sign the delivery form and one of the nine-year-old triplets from Otters Class had to do it for him.

  “Hello,” says Toshio now, opening the door and bowing apologetically to Miss Amethyst. “Lulu says Fungi must come, please.”

  “Oh, well, fine – off you go, dears,” says Miss Amethyst, running a hand wearily through her lavender-coloured hair and glowering at the computer as if she’d quite like to tap it with a brick.

  And so the three of us who make up Fungi Class set off after Toshio down the corridor. On the cool stone tiles, Swan’s flip-flops flap, Zed’s wheels squeak like a rapping mouse and my bare feet don’t make a sound.

  “So, what does our mum need us for?” Zed asks Toshio.

  When Zed says “our mum”, he is not including ME, of course, since MY mother is currently studying penguins’ bottoms in Antartica (for SCIENCE not fun reasons). Lulu is not only the head teacher, she’s also Swan and Zed’s mum, which is why Zed is St Grizzle’s School for Girls one random boy – a fact he is very proud of.

>   But in answer to Zed’s question, Toshio turns to us and just says a single word:

  “BOO!”

  Huh…?

  “BOO!” he repeats a bit louder.

  Me, Swan and Zed swap puzzled frowns.

  But there’s no time to ask Toshio the original question again in a way that Toshio might understand as we’re now in the big grand entrance hall of the school and there is an AWFUL din coming from somewhere.

  “AAAARRRRGGHHH!”

  I quickly glance at the elegant staircase wending up to the first floor – it’s empty of children, goats and screamers.

  Glancing the other way, I see light spilling in through the open double doors of the front entrance. Lulu is standing there with her back to us talking to a smartly dressed couple. None of them appear to be screaming.

  “AAAARRRRGGHHH!”

  OK, so it’s coming from a doorway along the corridor directly ahead of us.

  “AAAARRRRGGHHH!”

  Is someone being murdered in the dining room?

  “Stay still, dear!” I hear Granny Viv’s voice say. “It’s only FLOUR, Blossom. Look, a damp cloth is taking it all off. See?”

  “Sorry about that!” we now hear Lulu say perkily to the smart couple. “One of the other girls from Newts Class mentioned that our very own superhero got half the cupcake ingredients over her costume and is a bit upset about it!”

  Me, Swan and Zed turn our heads like meerkats so that we can have a nosy at whoever Lulu is talking to. Toshio isn’t very curious – he just puts his headphones on and wanders back towards the reception. I suppose he’s already met the couple hovering out there and just fancies getting back to his music and computer games work.

  I pad a little closer to the front entrance, and see that the man Lulu is talking to has a fizzy cloud of black hair arranged around a big, shiny bald spot and the woman has the sort of expression someone might have if you were waving a week-old dead fish under their nose.