Free It's a Girl Thing by Grace Dent Page A

bright orange hair and amazing tangerine lashes who looks exactly like a Highland calf.
    By the time we’d arranged with Johnny Martlew, the Year 13 lad who designs the Blackwellschool.com website, to post the details on the Latest News page, then persuaded Edith to stick a note into the class registers so that form teachers could tell every class, we’d started to feel a bit like pop stars ourselves. In fact, by about 4:00 P.M., everybody was talking about the LBD. It was brilliant!
    However, better than all of this was what occurred at about seven o’clock this evening, just as I was lying down on my bed to do my French homework.
    Okay, I’ll admit that I’m not usually a big homework-done-on-time sorta lady, and let’s face it, I had a lot more than feminine and masculine pronouns on my mind after today’s events, but I had to get this stuff learned. You see, I’ve got one of Madame Bassett’s legendary vocabulary tests tomorrow morning and I cannot fail.
    No way.
    It’s simply not worth the hassle of giving M. Bassett a less than 50 percent result. She’d probably just pick on me for the entire double period, making me stand up and describe, in French, the complex details of planning a music festival or something equally horrendous. Can you imagine?
    â€œErrr . . . J’aime beaucoup le, sorry, I mean, la musique . . . et, ooooh la la . . . Je n’ sais pas . . . er . . . Et j’ai besoin d’une tente. . . . Errr . . . and j’aime le veggie burger . . . Oh, God, pleeeeease can I sit down now?” (Dissolves into tears.)
    She would love that, Madame Bassett would.
    La bitche.
    So anyhow, I’d just opened my Tricolor textbook and was becoming quite engrossed in a very interesting story involving a man from La Rochelle named Monsieur Boulanger who, rather spookily, also worked as a baker (fancy that, eh? What a coincidence) when a loud noise reverberated through my floorboards, almost shaking all of the teddy bears off the top of my wardrobe.
    This kinda made me angry.
    You see, not only was I the last to arrive in this family, therefore I got the bedroom which is the size of a gerbil hutch; worse still, I’m also situated directly above the Fantastic Voyage’s function room; hence, I’ve got to endure being woken up some Sunday mornings by noisy christening parties, or even kept awake some evenings by tipsy lunatics singing “I Will Always Love You” over the karaoke.
    (Hang on—maybe I am an abused child after all?)
    Okay, to be fair, Dad hardly ever hires the function room out these days as he says it’s not worth the bother (I think he means my moaning), but it certainly sounded like something was going on down there now.
    KEEEEEERRRRWWWAAANNNNNNNNG!!!!
    Yep, that sounded like a great big noisy guitar riff to me. So, after a lot of sighing and throwing myself about my room, blaming my father for my inability to break out of Ability Stream 2 for French, I popped down to stick my shneck around the function room door . . . only to find something so wonderful and unbelievably cool that I fully plan to bore my grandkids senseless with the memories of it when I’m a white-haired, false-hipped old nana.
    Jimi Steele and Lost-flipping-Messiah were practicing underneath my bedroom!
    I didn’t know Dad had said yes to this!
    I was frozen to the spot for the first few moments. I even considered running back upstairs, having a shower and ironing my best going-out clothes, then appearing back downstairs in full makeup. But even I could see the vague lunacy in that plan; they might have gone by then. So I stood at the back of the room, watching Jimi and Naz tuning up their guitars and arguing over chords. Now, okay, I do remember what I said about becoming a stalker, so I was trying to be cool about it, but heck, I was there long enough to notice how Jimi’s sandy hair seems to have acquired gorgeous honey-blond highlights since