Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls: Glitter Girls and the Great Fake Out Read Free

But I thought the thing about teamwork and competitiveness sounded good, anyway.
    “Twirltacular?” My little brother Kevin looked up from Mom and Dad’s bed, where he was reading a fancy furniture catalog that had come in the mail. Kevin likes to collect fancy furniture catalogs. “I want to go to Missy’s Twirltacular.”
    “Well, you’re not invited,” I said. Kevin was always trying to hang around with my friends. He thought they liked him as much as they liked me, which wasn’t true, actually.
    “Oh, dear,” Mom said. “Is Missy’s competition this coming Saturday?”
    “Yes,” I said. “But I’m sure Uncle Jay won’t mind.”
    “Uncle Jay’s not — ” Kevin started to say, but Mom interrupted him, even though one of the rules at our house is Don’t interrupt people.
    “Honey, I forgot to tell you,” Mom said. “This Saturday is Brittany Hauser’s birthday. And she’s invited you. And I’m afraid I already told her mother that you’d go.”

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RULE #3
    It’s Okay to Lie If No One Finds Out You’re Lying, and the Lie Doesn’t Hurt Anyone, and It Isn’t That Big of a Lie, and It’s Partially Based on Something True. Sort of
    “So the thing is,” I said to Erica, Sophie, and Caroline on our way to school the next morning, “I can’t go to Missy’s Little Miss Majorette Baton Twirling Twirltacular.”
    “What?” Erica looked crestfallen, which means really sad.
    “Why not?” Caroline asked. “Wouldn’t your mother let you skip your ballet lesson?”
    “Ballet isn’t really that good for girls,” Sophie said. “Toe shoes are a leading cause of twisted ankles.”
    “Not if you’re properly trained,” I said. Sophie was always reading about new ways you could get sick or hurt yourself. If you ask me, she was a little overly concerned about her own health, which is unhealthy. That should be a rule, actually. “And anyway, Madame Linda doesn’t let us go on toe shoes until we’re twelve.”
    “But stress fractures can occur in regular ballet shoes,” Sophie went on.
    “The point,” I said — sometimes it’s very hard to get to the point with my friends, because they are always going off in other directions conversationally, especially Sophie — “is that I can’t go to Missy’s event, because my mom says I have to go to Brittany Hauser’s stupid birthday party instead.”
    Erica, Caroline, and Sophie gasped. Kevin, who was walking between us on our way to school, sucked in his breath, too.
    But that was because I was pretty sure he was going to tell them about Glitterati. So I poked him in the back of the head. Not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to remind him about the deal we’d made at breakfast: He wouldn’t say anything about Brittany’s party, and I would give him all my dessert for the rest of the week. This was part of the plan I’d come up with the night before.
    “That’s terrible!” Erica cried. “Brittany Hauser?”
    “Who’s Brittany Hauser?” Caroline asked.
    “You remember, Caroline,” Erica said. “She’s that horrible girl from Allie’s old school who likes to put cats in suitcases and then shake them around.”
    “She sounds just like someone else we know,” Sophie said. “Whose initials start with C and O .”
    She meant Cheyenne O’Malley. Only I had never known Cheyenne O’Malley to be cruel to animals. Just other girls.
    “Brittany Hauser is rich,” Kevin said, because he couldn’t control himself. “You should see her house. It’s practically a mansion. They have real marble floors and a swimming pool. With a slide!”
    I squeezed the back of Kevin’s neck as a warning sign that he better not say anything else.
    “Oh, I remember you telling us about her,” Caroline said. “She’s horrible! Why would you go to her party when you could come with us to see Missy twirl?”
    “Yeah,” Sophie said. “What about Missy’s terrible self-esteem problem? I’m afraid this will be another