THURSDAY 3 NOVEMBER

I gave the invites out to Jess, Poppy, Molly, Amber, Isha, Ella and Mia, and they can all come – yay!

Then at lunchtime we sat down together and tried to come up with a list for the remaining eight invites, but it was really hard because every person I wanted to invite led me to think of five other people to invite and it was hard to find a cut-off point, IYSWIM.

We’d been scratching our heads for ten minutes when Amber suddenly jumped up, grabbed the stack of invites and said, ‘I’ve got a really great idea.’ Then she ran off with them.

We were trying to work out what she was up to when she came back, clutching an even bigger pile of invites.

‘What are you planning, Amber?’ I said suspiciously.

‘It’s kind of difficult trying to narrow the invite list down to fifteen, right?’

’Yeeeeeeees …’

‘So I photocopied the invite and now we have lots more – problem solved!’

’AMBER, YOU CAN’T JUST –’

But it was too late. She was already walking around the canteen, handing them out. I put my head in my hands, sighed, and then went back to finishing my cheese panini. Yes, my parents were probably going to kill me, but you can’t waste a good cheese panini, can you?!

We’ve been getting cold calls again tonight. Toby, as ever, seems to be super keen to answer them, which is highly suss as it’s usually impossible to get him to take a break from his beloved Minecraft.

‘Why do you keep jumping across the room like someone’s put a scorpion in your pants every time the phone rings?’ I asked him.

‘I’m just trying to give Mum a break,’ he said. ‘She deserves to put her feet up in the evenings.’

’Riiiiiight.’

Some people might buy it, but I’m not one of them. Maybe he’s in some sort of trouble or maybe he has a secret girlfriend … One thing is for sure. There is definitely something fishy going on!

I called Amber for an update on the guest list and apparently nearly everyone she handed the invites to said they could come – great!

I asked her how many people she’d invited … She wasn’t sure.

So I asked her how many photocopies she’d made. She said maybe ten … possibly twenty … or was it forty? Certainly, no more than fifty …

GREAT!

Over dinner, Mum asked me how many people had RSVP’d because she was going shopping to get the hot dogs and buns. I couldn’t tell her that Amber had possibly invited half of Year Eight so I told her that I read something in the news the other day about a big growth spurt that twelve- to thirteen-year-olds go through that make them particularly hungry. I said everyone was eating LOADS at school because of it, so I said she should get approximately triple the amount of sausages that she’d been planning.

She looked at me a bit oddly but said she was proud to hear I’d been reading the news. I just hope she doesn’t try googling it.