Oops, I Lost My Best(est) Friends Read online

  My Very Important Project was looking VHA, which stands for Very Hard, Actually…

  What NOT to wear

  How to make Dylan more friend-friendly – well, the first thing we had to sort out was clothes. Those cool boys in the park weren't going to think his Tshirt with the teddy-bear logo on it was cool, that was for sure…

  “So, what do you fancy doing this afternoon?” Dad asked me and Dylan, as he and Fiona tidied up and filled the dishwasher.

  It was Sunday. I always spent the day at my dad's house on Sunday. Being meganeat and pet-free, Dad's place wasn't as much fun as Mum's. Then again, my dad and Fiona did have an ace collection of DVDs, and if we didn't end up going out together somewhere on Sunday afternoon, then we'd stay in and watch one of those. (I did once suggest taking all the cushions off the sofa and chairs like Fee does on Saturday mornings, but Fiona looked a bit ill

  and so I shut up about it.)

  “Me and Dylan have got stuff to do,” I answered Dad's question, sticking my thumb over in Dylan's direction.

  Dad and Fiona looked chuffed and confused at the same time. I guess they were confused because for years, me and Dylan got on OK-ish, but weren't exactly big buddies. And I guess they were chuffed because it finally looked like we were getting along pretty well.

  Actually, we'd been getting along pretty good since Dylan helped me try to find a home for Dibbles. Dibbles had been bypassed by new owners at the Paws For Thought Animal Rescue Centre due to the fact that he wasn't very cute and had a special blankie that smelt like a swamp. Me and Dylan worked very hard at giving Dibbles a new image, and that's exactly what I was going to do for Dylan now.

  “What stuff have you two got to do, then?” Dad asked, as he put the last fork in the dishwasher.

  “Computer stuff,” I shrugged.

  I didn't want to say out loud that I was checking out Dylan's wardrobe for anything with teddies and sailboats on it, in case I offended Fiona, since I was pretty sure she was the one who bought that kind of thing.

  “What computer stuff?” Dylan asked, wondering what I was on about.

  “Just the stuff!” I said vaguely, widening my eyes at my step-brother to show that we were talking in secret code.

  Dylan might be very good at tests and exams, but he obviously wasn't very good at talking in secret code – probably because he'd never had a proper best friend to talk in secret code with.

  I could tell from his puzzled expression that he was just about to say,“What stuff?”, so I bundled Dylan towards his bedroom before he got any further than, “Wha—?”.

  “Look,” I said, as I sat down on his whirly desk chair, “I made the excuse about the computer because we're going to figure out what clothes you've got that look kind of cool, and which are pants. And I didn't want to hurt your mum's feelings, since she buys your clothes for you.”

  “Oh, OK,” nodded Dylan, now that he understood.

  Almost.

  “Er, Indie…”

  “What?” I said, as I started to rummage through a random drawer.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” I asked him right back.

  “Why are we figuring out which clothes are cool and which are pants?”

  “Because if you want to be friends with those boys in the park, then you have to dress like them, and not like their kid brother,” I explained, holding up a baseball cap with a toy digger on it as an example.

  Dylan was an excellent pupil. He sat patiently on the end of his bed and listened very, very hard while I went through his wardrobe and drawers and pointed out what was fine and what was horrible.

  In the end, I'd rearranged his stuff around so it would be easy for him to figure out what not to wear – I'd made an ‘urgh’ drawer.

  The ‘urgh’ drawer contained:

  anything with teddies on it,

  some shorts in pastel stripes,

  a jumper with a cuddly bunny sewn on the front,

  a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Mummy's Little Rascal!’ and

  a pair of musical socks that played

  “So, what must you never do from now on?” I asked Dylan, in my most teacherly voice.

  “Wear anything from the ‘urgh’ drawer,” Dylan recited, like the good pupil he was.

  “And?”

  “And when I go out shopping with my mum, I mustn't let her buy me anything that looks like anything from the ‘urgh’ drawer.”

  I suddenly felt very proud of Dylan, just like his (real) teacher at school must've done every time he scored mega-good marks for something.

  I felt even more proud half an hour later, when Dad shouted that it was time to give me a lift home, and me and the new, improved Dylan walked into the living room.

  “Hey, you're looking very trendy, young man!” Dad grinned at the sight of Dylan. “Is that my baseball cap?”

  Dylan was looking quite trendy (in a plain black T-shirt and jeans), and it was Dad's baseball cap (a nicely faded blue one, instead of the toy digger).

  Fiona wasn't so keen, even if she didn't say so. In the car over to my place, she kept turning around and checking Dylan out. She almost seemed sad that Dylan looked like a proper nine-year-old boy instead of a toddler.

  “What are you up to tomorrow, Indie? Seeing the girls?” asked Dad, as we turned into my road.

  “Mmm…” I nodded in reply, sneaking a sideways peek at Dylan and thinking he didn't look enough like the boys from his class yet. What was it that made him look different? I frowned, trying to put my finger on it…

  “Hey, Dylan, don't forget it's my day off tomorrow,” said Dad, pulling up outside my house. “So are we on for going to the barber's together?”

  An idea suddenly boinged into my head faster than Dylan could say yes.

  “Can I come?” I blurted out, now that I'd realized that the one thing that made Dylan different from the boys in his class was his haircut. I mean, it was fine, it was OK, but he didn't look as cool as those lads.

  “Yeah, can Indie come?” Dylan jumped in too.

  Dad and Fiona exchanged the smallest, weeniest surprised glance, but I saw it. They obviously thought it meant me and Dylan were getting to be really good friends.

  What they didn't realize was that it was just all part of my Very Important Project. We had one week before Dylan went back to school, and I wanted to make him a lot more friend-friendly by then.

  And tomorrow, I was going to make sure that his hair was friend-friendly too!

  I was feeling very pleased with myself as I stood on the pavement, ready to wave Dad, Fiona and Dylan off.

  That was till I noticed something very, very bad.

  In fact, it was something

  The coler than cool hedgehog haircut

  “Why is I MUM ‘urgh’?” said Dylan, without looking up from the magazine he was reading.

  It might have sounded like the beginning of a riddle, but Dylan was just asking why his I MUM socks had to go and live in the ‘urgh’ drawer for ever.

  I'd spotted the I MUM socks yesterday afternoon. Dylan had put his foot up

  on the back seat and pulled one of them up, just as Dad's car pulled away from the pavement.

  I hadn't been able to say anything about it yesterday (since cars go a lot faster than my legs do, and I wouldn't have been able to catch them up). But now that we were in the barber's – and Dad was just out of listening range – I'd explained to Dylan why the socks had to go.

  Or at least I thought I had.

  “Dylan, I MUM isn't ‘urgh’ I MUM is cute! But not on socks when you're a nine-year-old boy!”

  Especially not when you were a nineyear-old boy who wanted to hang out with the cool lads in your class. “But that's not fair!” Dylan mumphed, still not looking up from his magazine.

  “What's not fair?” (Why doesn't Dylan ever ask a proper, whole question that you can understand, instead of you having to ask another question first? That boy really makes my head go dizzy sometimes…)

  “Sop
h's got a T-shirt with I Kittens on it!”

  “Yes, but girls can always wear cute stuff, however old they are. Boys can only do cute stuff till they're five or six.”

  Dylan made a little noise that might have been a huffy sort of “huh!”, but I couldn't hear him properly. The barber shop was very noisy – nearly as noisy as the Paws For Thought Animal Rescue Centre when Mum's doing the rounds with the breakfast munchies.

  But instead of happy woofs, howls and miaows this was a different type of noisy.

  For a start, there was a TV in the corner babbling, then there was a fan on the ceiling whoosh-whooshing, plus lots of razors buzz-buzzing, AND plenty of men and boys chatting at the level of a YELL above all the babbling, whooshing and buzzing.

  Dad was sitting on a seat up at the far end of the barber's, with his nose in a photography magazine, while one of the barber blokes buzzed around his head with a razor.

  One of the other barbers had led Dylan to a tall, black vinyl seat in front of a mirror, but hadn't started cutting yet – which was good, since I needed to show him the picture I had in my pocket first…

  “What are you reading anyway?” I asked Dylan, as I perched my bum on the empty black vinyl seat just along from him.

  Dylan answered my reflection in the mirror, instead of the real me.

  “A thing about the latest operating system for my computer,” he replied, holding up his magazine so I could see the cover.

  But because I was staring at it in the mirror, it was back-to-front and kind of hard to read.

  “SULP CP…”

  I muttered, narrowing my eyes.

  So … Dylan was reading about the latest operating systems in a magazine called SULP CP. For all that meant to me, he might as well have been speaking in a very complicated language like Russian or something.

  “PC PLUS,” he corrected me.

  “Oh,” I mumbled, wriggling in my chair and feeling dumb.

  I thought for a second about asking him what an ‘operating system’ was, but I knew I wouldn't understand the answer.

  “So what's it like?”

  Sigh. That was Dylan, saying something else I didn't understand.

  “What's what like?” I frowned at him.

  “My new haircut!”

  OK – now I got him. I hopped off the slithery black chair and fished the photo out of the pocket of my trousers. I'd torn it out of a pop magazine last night. I'd had to flick through lots of pages in lots of my old magazines to find what I was looking for.

  “He looks like a hedgehog,” mumbled Dylan, staring at the head of the grinning guy in the photo.

  “He does not look like a hedgehog! He looks cool!” I said, defending the boy in the boy band with the spiky hair. “He looks just like those lads you pointed out in the park! What are their names again?”

  “Matt and Zane and Rez.”

  “Well, if you want to fit in with Matt and Zane and Rez, you have to look like them and have a haircut like theirs.”

  “I guess…” said Dylan warily, obviously still thinking of spike-a-delic hedgehogs.

  And then I realized something; I didn't know why exactly Dylan wanted to be friends with those particular boys.

  “What's so great about Matt and Zane and Rez anyway? You said they didn't even talk to you!”

  “They don't,” Dylan replied, blinking his blue eyes at me. “But they're always talking to each other, and it always looks like they're having a laugh. Like you and Soph and Fee.”

  I felt a funny ping when he said their names. What did that ping mean? Never mind; I had more important things to figure out, like how to convince Dylan that he wouldn't end up looking like a hedgehog.

  And persuading the barber bloke to cut it like that. (“Are you sure? Maybe I'd better check with his father first…”)

  And persuading Dad that it would be absolutely and totally cruel not to let Dylan have that haircut. (“Dad, every boy in his class has one just like it! He'd be the odd one out!”)

  It was me against two men and a boy – and I won.

  Ten minutes and some buzzing and snipping later, Dylan had a very cool, very spiky hairdo.

  “WOW!” said Dylan, gazing at himself in the mirror.

  “Hmm,” muttered the barber with one eyebrow raised.

  “Well, it's very … interesting!” mumbled Dad, sounding like Miss Levy (lying).

  gasped someone from the barber shop doorway.

  And that someone happened to be Fiona, looking as shocked as if she'd been zapped by a stray bolt of lightning.

  But as lightning doesn't usually happen inside shops, I guessed that she wasn't very pleased to see Dylan's new friend-friendly look.

  Still, that was a good sign. If Fiona hated it, then Matt, Zane and Rez would probably think it was cooler than cool!

  And sooner rather than later, me and Dylan would need to test that out…

  Dylan gets the wobbles

  I was trying to stroke the babies but I think the mum gerbil thought I was going to hurt them, so she bit me. See?”

  I held up my finger to show Dylan my wound from this morning (OK, a couple of tiny teethmarks that were practically invisible to the human eye).

  It was Tuesday and we were in the park again. George, Kenneth and Dibbles were very happy that

  a) it was the school holidays, and

  b) I was doing a Very Important Project, mainly because it meant extra walkies for them.

  Speaking of walkies, Dylan stopped strolling and stared closely at my finger. From here I got a close-up of his very cool spiky hair. He'd had it for 24 hours now, and it still looked good. It hadn't gone freaky and weird while he was sleeping (like mine always did) and Fiona hadn't dragged him back to the barber's to trade the spikes for something more sensible (which I was scared she'd do).

  Dylan blinked his blue eyes at my “wound”.

  “It bit really hard and wouldn't let go,” I chattered on. “I had to wander round the house with it dangling from my finger.”

  “So how did you get it off in the end?”

  “Mum knew where to tickle it, and it just opened its mouth to giggle or something and dropped into her hand!”

  Knowing how to tickle a grumpy gerbil … it's things like that that make my mum so ace with animals. (Caitlin had just screamed and suggested hitting it with a rolled-up newspaper.)

  “I've got a new mouse,” Dylan suddenly announced, as he stood up straight and carried on walking.

  OK, so I could forgive Dylan for changing the subject – as usual. But if Fiona had suddenly gone and let him have a pet, how could he have bought a mouse, when he knew that the Paws For Thought Animal Rescue Centre (and our kitchen) was bursting at the seams with gerbils in need of a good home?

  “Where did you get it?” I asked him, ready to thump him if he said a pet shop and not a rescue centre like Mum's.

  “The electrical shop in the high street.”

  “What?!” I said, completely confused. “But that sells stuff like phones and cameras and everything!”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So when did they start selling mice?”

  “They'vealways sold computer stuff.”

  Duh… Dylan was talking about a plastic computer mouse, and not a sweet'n'squeaky live mouse. He really was the most annoying boy to have a conversation with.

  Luckily, I wasn't going to be having a conversation with him for too much longer – Matt, Zane and Rez were.

  “Look, Dyl! Your mates are playing football over there again!”

  “Well, they're not my mates—”

  “Yet!” I jumped in, trying to be extra-positive. “So why don't you walk over and say hi?!”

  Dylan suddenly looked very sheepish, which is fine if you're a sheep but not so good if you're a boy.

  “It would look weird if I just walked over…”

  Dylan wasn't getting out of it now. He was dressed right and had the right hair to fit in with those boys. Now was the perfect time to practis
e his friend-friendliness.

  “It won't look weird if you've got a dog with you!” I told him, quickly clipping a lead on George and handing it to him.

  I'd chosen George because he was the coolest-looking of my three dogs. Let's face it, a small Scottish Highland terrier that thought it was a cat wasn't too cool (specially when he sometimes broke into howls that sound like miaows). And Dibbles … well, Dibbles was adorable but did look like a stuffed bin bag on legs (and if an ice-cream van started playing a tune anywhere near the park, he'd probably end up dragging Dylan under a bench to hide).

  Yep, George the tall, sporty-looking greyhound was definitely the best choice.

  “Do I have to?” Dylan asked me, eyes pleading.

  I knew he was getting the wobbles (and butterflies seemed to be trampolining in my tummy too), but he had to start somewhere. And he was starting with a hi, which wasn't too hard.

  “Go on – I'll watch you from behind this tree!”

  Dylan turned and started heading towards the boys playing football.

  “Come on, Dylan!” I whispered, as I peeked out from the side of the big oak tree.

  humphed Dibbles, as he settled himself on one of my feet and lifted his back leg to scratch his ear (not as easy as it sounds, as Dibbles is very round and blobby and his leg is short and doesn't quite reach).

  Well, Dibbles didn't seem to mind waiting while Dylan and George walked in slow motion towards the lads, but Kenneth was pretty annoyed.

  he howled up at me grumpily, wondering why we weren't getting on with our walk.

  “Shush, Kenneth!” I told him, hoping none of Dylan's maybe new friends were looking over. It would seem pretty strange to see a girl peeking out from a behind a tree, with one loudly miaowing dog and another one that was sitting cross-eyed, frantically scratching at thin air with its back leg.