The Strawberry Sisters Read Free

telling us not to leave things to the last minute,’ Chloe said.
    Mum still had tons of work to do before she went back to teaching Year Two next week.
    ‘I know, but I didn’t want to waste the holidays on work when I could spend time with you girls instead.’
    We had a brilliant summer. We stayed in a caravan in Cornwall, then we visited my cousins, and even when we were at home my mum thought up theme nights and competitions for us. She’s
really good at finding fun things for us to do.
    Mum picked up a folder and a load of bits of paper fell on the floor. She isn’t so brilliant at being organised.
    ‘Did you get the rest of my new uniform?’ I asked her.
    ‘Uniform? Um, yes, it’s on your bed,’ Mum said. ‘Except tights, but I’ll get those really soon. I absolutely won’t forget.’ She wrote TIGHTS! on a
Post-it note and stuck it to her laptop.
    On Monday, I was starting Year Seven at St Mark’s where Amelia and Chloe went. The bright side of going to secondary school was that my two best friends would finally get to meet each
other. I didn’t exactly have loads of friends, but I did have two brilliant ones and I wanted us all to be friends together more than anything. If you have friends then people don’t
laugh at you. Or, even if they do, you don’t care so much because you’ve always got someone to be nice to you.
    When I was little, we lived in London and I had two best friends. It was fantastic: we did everything together and, even when one of them was ill, I still had someone to play with. But then we
moved here. I think it’s safest if you go to nursery and primary school and secondary school all in the same place; that way you always know someone. It’s quite a stupid idea to arrive
in the middle of Year Three when everybody has already got their own group of friends, but nobody listened to me when I said I didn’t want to move.
    Amelia and Chloe had no problems fitting into our new school. Chloe is so friendly and energetic that no one can help liking her and Amelia is so smart and funny that people feel lucky to be her
friend. I don’t really stand out like they do. I never know what to say to people when I meet them. For the first two weeks at our new school, I hid in the bushes at playtime. Then one day
this girl called Kayleigh tapped me on the shoulder. She had brown, shiny hair like a conker, which was falling out of a ponytail. She smiled at me and said, ‘Let’s play
unicorns.’ So we did. Everybody liked Kayleigh and I kept expecting her to go off with someone she liked better, but she hasn’t yet.
    After we’d been mates for a while, I asked her why she was my friend. ‘Don’t you think I’m a bit quiet?’ I asked.
    ‘Not with me,’ she said.
    And it’s true. Kayleigh is so good at having ideas and getting excited about things that it isn’t hard for me to join in. I don’t even mind being silly with Kayleigh because
she’s always much sillier and she never, ever laughs at me. She’s also the only person I ever sing in front of. I haven’t got an amazing, swoopy voice like Amelia, but I do like
singing. Sometimes me and Kayleigh get dressed up like pop stars and borrow her mum’s karaoke machine. I get the giggles a lot, but it’s really good fun.
    My other good friend is called Ashandra. I met her six months ago when I was at my dad’s new house (we stay there every Wednesday night and every other weekend). Ashandra lives in the
house next to his. One day I was sitting in the garden so that I didn’t have to listen to Amelia shouting at Dad and Ashandra leant over the fence and said, ‘How long have your parents
been divorced for?’ I thought that was a bit of a rude question, but then she told me about her parents splitting up and her mum getting married again and how her brother hates her stepdad.
So she is quite an expert on divorce. Ashandra’s also very smart and doesn’t think I’m weird because maths is my favourite subject.