Free Girl, 16: Five-Star Fiasco by Sue Limb Page B

Jess a quick, worried glance. Mackenzie, being Ben’s best buddy, subsided slightly.
    ‘What sort of help do you need?’ asked Jodie.
    ‘Uh . . . quite a bit,’ admitted Jess, glancing at Fred. He was stroking the edge of the table, as if distancing himself from the mess, and avoiding looking at her. Great. Fantastic. She had become invisible, less interesting than furniture. One day soon Fred might announce his engagement to a chest of drawers. ‘We, er, haven’t managed to get a band, for a start,’ Jess went on. ‘Have we, Fred? Are you still negotiating with Goldilocks?’
    ‘Not really,’ Fred admitted shiftily. ‘They let me down, to be honest.’
    ‘So, still no band,’ said Jess grimly. ‘Fred’s dad is running the bar, because he did that heaps of times when he was in the army, but the food . . . well, I don’t know where to start.’
    ‘Pizza?’ suggested Jodie, whose greed was famous throughout the south of England.
    ‘You can’t have pizza at a dinner dance!’ objected Flora. ‘We’ve got to have a proper buffet with cold chicken and stuff.’
    ‘What’s the, uh, budget?’ asked Ben Jones.
    Jess’s heart gave a nervous leap. A budget! Of course! They should have had a budget. Her mouth went dry with panic.
    ‘I – I’m not sure . . .’ she faltered.
    ‘Oh, Jess, you idiot!’ sneered Jodie. ‘Don’t say you don’t even know what your budget is?’ She glanced swiftly at Ben Jones, as if she belonged to his club of people who were savvy enough to understand the concept of budgets.
    ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Ben. ‘The tickets were, uh, seventy-five pounds per couple, right?’
    ‘So that’s thirty-seven pounds fifty per person,’ added Flora, the Queen of Maths.
    ‘How much of that is going to pay for the food?’ asked Tiffany, biting her nails in a lazy yet charismatic manner. Jess was jealous of her for a moment. To Tiffany, this whole conversation was just something to pass the time on a gloomy Sunday. She didn’t have to organise it. Tiffany hadn’t organised a party since the awful occasion of the minestrone-soup bra inserts – Jess shuddered at the memory. But if there were embarrassing moments in Jess’s past, that was nothing compared to the terrible looming crisis: in less than a fortnight, Chaos would be breaking over her head like a thunderstorm.
    ‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ Jess was panicking now.
    ‘Thirty-seven quid?’ Mackenzie shook his head. ‘Get real! You guys have massively undercharged. This is a dinner dance, right? I saw tickets for a dinner dance in Monterey advertised on the internet for five hundred dollars!’
    ‘You’re right, the sky’s the limit,’ murmured Fred ironically. ‘Why stop at five hundred? Why not make it an even nine? We can always ask for an extra eight hundred pounds per person on the door.’
    All this jokey talk of money when they had lost thousands of pounds made Jess feel desperate and faint.
    ‘What other expenses are there apart from food?’ asked Ben Jones, rubbing his beautiful right hand across the gorgeous blond stubble of his head. ‘Sorry if I’m being stupid . . .’
    ‘Hire of the hall, for a start,’ said Jodie. ‘How much was that?’ She turned unexpectedly to Flora.
    ‘Me?’ Flora looked startled. ‘How should I know? How much was it, Jess?’ It seemed Flora wanted to distance herself, too. Well, that was only fair: ultimately it was Jess and Fred who had cooked up this almighty mess, all by themselves.
    ‘I don’t remember!’ Jess felt as if she was being tied up with sticky tape, like an insect struggling in a spider’s web. ‘Fred’s dad booked the hall for us at the same time as getting the bar licence. How much was it all, Fred?’
    Fred looked clueless and gormless and he gave a shrug.
    ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Jodie sighed in exasperation, as if Fred was somehow letting her down personally. ‘Ring him and ask, Fred!’ she urged.
    ‘He’s out,’ said