Free Strawberry Sisters by Candy Harper Page A

toothbrush the night before when I’m trying to get ready for school.’
    I made a growling noise in my throat.
    ‘Anyway, the thing is that you were angry then, but you’ve completely forgiven me now, haven’t you? Especially since I’m offering you such good advice about
Lauren.’
    ‘Who I am still furious with.’
    ‘But what I’m saying is that you get cross with people about ten times a day. You like it. You’ll have forgotten about it by tomorrow.’
    ‘Maybe. But I’m pretty fed up of her not being a very good friend.’
    ‘She is ill though, isn’t she? She keeps being ill. She had all that time off before half-term.’
    ‘That wasn’t all being ill,’ I said. ‘She had to go to a wedding and some days she had to go to the orthodontist.’
    ‘I didn’t know they let you have a whole day off for that. Anyway, she seems pretty sicky. She always looks dead pale when I see her. What exactly is wrong with her?’
    ‘Nothing,’ I said. But in my head I could hear Lauren saying,
I’m really sick
. ‘She just gets tired sometimes,’ I said. ‘It’s because of when she
had glandular fever.’
    ‘I thought she had that ages ago.’
    I wished Chloe would stop going on. ‘She should just go to the doctor and get them to give her something for it,’ I said, shoving the garage door open a lot harder than necessary.
Chloe carried out the jam-packed green bin while I followed with a cardboard box crammed with the rest of the recycling.
    ‘Maybe there’s nothing the doctors can do,’ Chloe said. ‘Remember Nana?’
    It was awful when they told us that there wasn’t anything they could give Nana to make her better. ‘This is completely different. Lauren’s not really that ill and she
isn’t going to die.’
    ‘But still, sometimes even doctors can’t make people completely right again, can they?’
    I didn’t say anything.
    ‘And school are letting her not come in, aren’t they?’
    I remembered Lauren saying that school had sent home our drama play for her to read.
    Chloe upended the little green bin into the big green bin. ‘You’d have to be pretty pigging sick to get old Iron Hair to let you off school.’
    ‘I suppose.’
    Chloe flipped the lid of the big bin closed ‘See? You’re not furious now, are you?’
    She was right. I wasn’t cross any more. I was worried.

I fretted about Lauren all the next day. Finally, I decided that I’d go round to see her after rehearsal. While we were waiting for Mr Garcia and Mr O’Brien, I sat
with Milly, Olivia and Bethany. Everyone was talking about Nathan’s haircut. Last week, when Mr Garcia announced he’d got a solo, Nathan was flicking his shoulder-length hair about, but
now he’d had it all cut off so short that he looked like he’d joined the army. We were still staring when Mr Garcia clapped his hands for quiet and got us started on warm-up
exercises.
    I wasn’t concentrating on singing as hard as I should have been. I lost my place a couple of times when we were singing the group songs, but luckily Mr O’Brien didn’t notice.
It was probably a good thing that Mr Garcia had told me and Bartek that we wouldn’t be working on our duet until next week.
    Bartek was sitting behind us and, while Mr O’Brien was hunting for some music, he leant forward and said, ‘We’re going to sing great, yeah?’
    I turned round. He was grinning at me and I couldn’t help smiling back. Bartek always looks so cheerful. I bet he doesn’t tie himself in knots worrying about stuff. ‘If we
don’t sing well I’m pretty sure Mr Garcia will tell us,’ I said.
    ‘I hear he is very angry with bad singing.’
    ‘Yep.’ I nodded. ‘He screams and pouts and dishes out horrible punishments.’
    Bartek slowly moved his eyes sideways. I followed his gaze; he was looking at Nathan. ‘Maybe Nathan isn’t singing so good and Mr Garcia . . .’ He mimed a pair of scissors.
    I burst out laughing.
    ‘We must be good,’ he said. ‘Because this