Free Strawberry Sisters by Candy Harper

to Dad’s house. Lucy was sprawled on the stairs, arranging My Little Ponies in a battle scene with various
home-made weapons and sucking a lollipop.
    ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked.
    ‘I made it out of a Smarties tube.’
    ‘Not the pony bazooka. The lollipop.’ Suvi never usually allows anything that sugary in the house.
    ‘Emily gave it to me.’
    ‘Evil Emily?’
    ‘Yep. Evil Emily’s got a grandma who buys her lots of sweets because she knows that it annoys her mum.’
    ‘I suppose that’s the best kind of Evil Emily.’
    Lucy slurped happily. ‘And I’ve got a packet of Maltesers from Rose.’
    ‘Why are your friends being so generous all of a sudden?’
    Lucy shrugged and squished a blob of Blu-Tack on to a tiny plastic hand grenade so she could stick it to a pony hoof. ‘Cos I’m nice.’
    I stepped over the battlefield to go upstairs. ‘It can’t possibly be that.’
    Before we went to bed, Dad told me and Chloe to put all the recycling out on the kerb.
    I wasn’t in the best of moods. ‘Why do we have to do it?’ I asked.
    ‘It’s important for you to learn life skills,’ Dad said. ‘Next week, I’m going to teach you how to change a tyre.’
    ‘I can already do that,’ Chloe said. ‘Thunder’s uncle showed us.’
    ‘What about you, Amelia?’ Dad asked. ‘What are you going to do when you find yourself with a flat tyre by the side of the motorway?’
    ‘I’ll ring Chloe.’ I folded my arms. ‘Anyway, what has this got to do with recycling?’
    Dad sat back and opened his paper. ‘I told you: life skills.’
    ‘I’m pretty sure I can carry some cardboard boxes without any practice, but I can see that even a short walk might crumble your elderly bones so just this once I’ll do
it.’ I followed Chloe to the garage before he could say anything. I didn’t really mind that much about moving some recycling; I just felt so fed up about Lauren.
    The recycling is supposed to go in a little green bin in the garage, but that quickly gets full up. Some people, like Suvi and Ella, neatly stack the extra stuff round the bin, but other people,
i.e. everybody else, just open the door from the kitchen and toss it into the garage. Which means, when it’s collection time, you have to crawl about in the cold garage, fishing yoghurt pots
out from whatever they’ve rolled under.
    I tried to pick up an armful of plastic bottles, but they escaped my grasp and clattered all over the concrete floor. I huffed.
    ‘Why don’t you make up with Lauren?’ Chloe asked.
    ‘Who says I need to make up with Lauren?’
    ‘Well, it’s obvious you’ve fallen out with someone. And, since you haven’t been spending hours and hours on the phone to her, I’m pretty sure it’s
Lauren.’
    My skin prickled. Infuriating. I’d put so much effort into not taking my bad mood out on my family, but obviously I hadn’t done a very good job. I bit my lip.
    ‘If you make up with her then you could stop being super grumpy all the time and just go back to being your normal level of grumpy.’
    I couldn’t help giving Chloe a black look. ‘If Lauren wants to make up, she knows where I am.’
    ‘Yeah, but you said she’s poorly. Why don’t you go round? You could do it tomorrow after rehearsal.’
    ‘I’m not going back there; it’s bad enough that her mum makes me feel unwelcome, but if Lauren doesn’t want to see me then I won’t set foot in that place
again!’
    Chloe stomped on a juice carton to make it pop. ‘Yeah you will.’
    ‘I won’t. I’m furious.’
    ‘I know you are. But you get furious about things all the time; you were furious this morning when I used your toothbrush.’
    I stared at her. ‘Was that you? You said it was Lucy.’
    Chloe went on gathering up packaging. ‘I said Lucy had used it, which was true, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t use it too. It’s the only one that’s ever in the
proper place. I don’t have time to remember what I’ve done with my