The next day I dragged my feet so slowly that I missed the bus and had to drag my extremely slow-moving feet all the way to school. I was nearly there when I heard someone running and panting behind me. I was not really in the mood to talk to anyone so I kept my head down and carried on dragging myself to the school gates.

‘Hey! Wait for me!’

It was Molly!

‘How come you are so late?’ she panted, catching up with me and stopping. She bent over and clutched her sides. ‘Ooh, I’ve got a stitch,’ she said.

Why people say this, I have no idea. A stitch is a pattern you make with a needle and thread on a piece of cloth. What has that got to do with having a pain in your tummy when you’ve been running? Or maybe it means that it feels as though someone has sewn through your tummy with a needle and thread . . .

‘You’re late too,’ I pointed out, a little bit grumpily.

‘Yeah,’ said Molly, standing up again and grinning at me a bit like a loony. ‘I stayed up too late last night getting to the next level in the agility trials on Puppy Power, so I overslept this morning. Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t call you last night, but this game is soooo ADDICTIVE – in other words, I just can’t stop play– hey, what’s up?’

I’m ashamed to say that Molly rabbiting on and on about her puppy game just felt a bit like the last straw and my eyes had gone rather leaky of their own accord.

‘Nothing,’ I muttered, angrily rubbing them.

‘Oh no, I’ve upset you, haven’t I?’ Molly said, suddenly looking really quite anxious and concerned, which is not a look she has that often.

I sniffed and shook my head. ‘It’s not you,’ I said, which was kind of partly true anyway. ‘It’s Mum, and April and . . . and Honey’s not going to have puppies now and it’s all Nick’s fault!’ I sobbed out the last part and went a bit HICCUPY just like my sister had done the night before.

‘What?’ said Molly, looking confused now. She linked her arm into mine and we started walking towards school as the bell for registration rang.

I told Molly everything that had happened and ended with a quite full-on impression of April screaming like the Creature from the Swampy Lagoon.

Up until that point Molly had listened very sympathetically, but when it came to my (even though I say so myself, extremely realistic) impression of my loonitistical sister, Molly’s face changed from Caring and Concerned to Giggly and Hysterical.

And of course that set me off too.

We were both seeing a quite hilarious picture of my sister in my head, and all we could do was laugh about it. This kind of thing happens quite a lot when you are the Bestest Friends in the Universe and you find yourself on the very exact same length of brainwave.

So that is how we both came to be walking through the playground, laughing the tops of our heads off and doing impressions of April, just as our form teacher, Mrs Wotherspoon, came out of the headteacher’s office.

‘Oh, so we think it’s highly amusing to miss registration, do we?’ she squawked.

Not for the first time I sighed inside my head and wished with all my heart that we were still in Year Four with Mr Elgin. Mr Elgin had been annoying in a mild sort of teachery way and would say doolally things like: ‘You have two ears and one mouth, use them in that proportion,’ and ‘Do I have to say everything twice?’ and ‘Act your age, not your shoe size’ (which never made any sense to me, as I was nine at the time and my feet were size twelve, so surely he should have said, ‘Act your shoe size and not your age’). But apart from this, he was actually quite nice, and he had even arranged for the Talent Contest which Molly, Honey and I had won hands (and paws) down.

Mrs Wotherspoon was in a completely different CATEGORY of teacherliness. After our first day in her class Molly had said, ‘If Mrs Wotherspoon was a dog, she’d be a Dobermann pinscher,’ (which is not a dog that belongs in the lovely, cuddly bracket of poochiness at all). She was tall and spindly-looking, as if she would get blown over in the lightest of summer breezes, but this does not mean that she was gentle.

Oh no! When she spoke you realized that she was spiky and fierce and probably had a Grip of Iron like the Bottom Shuffler. Her facial features were, as Molly said, ‘so sharp that if someone put a handle on them they would turn into a knife’, her eyes were like those glassy eyes you get on old-fashioned teddy bears and dolls, and worst of all her fingers were the longest and spideriest I had ever seen. Personally I was convinced she was a witch, but Molly said she couldn’t be as she didn’t have a Familiar.

‘A familiar what?’ I had asked.

‘You know, a cat or something,’ Molly said.

‘Oh,’ I had said, nodding wisely, but inside my brain I was thinking, What in the name of all things sane is a Familiar Cat? One you have got to know particularly well, perhaps? In that case, is Honey my Familiar Dog? And does that make me a witch?

‘Are you going to stand there all morning gawping like a goldfish with rigor mortis, Summer Love?’ Mrs Wotherspoon said, dragging me back into the present situation by the terrifying screechiness of her crone-type speaking.

‘N-no,’ I stammered, making a mental reminder of the word ’riggermortiss’ and thinking that I must look it up in the dictionary.

‘Good,’ snapped Mrs W. ‘I won’t bother asking you and your sidekick here the reason for your appalling lateness, but let me make one thing abundantly clear: if it happens again, you will be spending every break time from here to the end of eternity picking up the litter in the playground. Do you understand me?’

Molly and I nodded silently and tried desperately hard not to look at each other in case we started giggling again. Mrs W.’s voice is so completely freaky that it often makes us nearly wet ourselves with laughter once she gets going on something.

‘Good,’ she said again. ‘Well, hurry along to the hall. We have already started the English lesson. Everyone is ready to show the work they’ve done on the scenes from Romeo and Juliet. I hope you have at least done your homework?’

‘Oh no!’ hissed Molly as we followed Mrs W. on her clicky heels. ‘I forgot to do it!’

I hissed back, ‘So did I!’

Mrs W. did not even turn round. ‘That’s a shame, girls. I shall have to pair you up with some people who have done their homework, shan’t I?’

I didn’t think life could throw anything else at me that could possibly make me feel any worse and fall further down into the Pit of Despair which was where I was right at that very moment.

We arrived in the hall to find that everyone had taken advantage of Mrs W. not being with them to do what Mum would call Run Riot

- in other words, they were chasing each other round the place, climbing on the wall bars that we use for gym and screeching like monkeys at a rather EXUBERANT tea party.

‘SILENCE!’ Mrs W. screamed.

It was like a quite scary version of musical statues. Everyone stopped in the mid-tracks of what they were doing. The people on the wall bars looked particularly shaky.

‘I am beginning to think that teaching serious literature to you lot is rather like trying to get a fish to sing the national anthem,’ Mrs W. spluttered. ‘I really don’t think William Shakespeare would approve of all these shenanigans.’

I didn’t know what shenanigans were, but judging by the kind of language this Shakespeare person used in his olde worlde daye, I personally thought he would probably like shenanigans very much indeed.

‘Molly,’ Mrs W. continued, ‘I would like you to pair up with Rosie. She doesn’t appear to have a partner yet.’ I wonder why, I thought. ‘Summer, you can go with Frank Gritter. He is one person at least who seems to know what he is doing this morning.’

It seemed that the Pit of Despair had reached new depths of Despairedness.

‘Now, Frank, you had chosen to work on the balcony scene, hadn’t you?’ Mrs W. was saying. ‘I want you to think yourself into the character. Think love. Think romance.’

Oh my goodness dearie me. I wanted to die there on the very spot, but as I knew from the film, that didn’t happen to Juliet until some time after the balcony scene. I pulled a face at Frank as if to say, ‘I know this is horrendous, but it wasn’t my idea.’ I thought Frank would roll his eyes or something to show me that he agreed, but instead he just winked at me. I nearly groaned out loud. This really was the end of everything. Life would never be worth living ever again. I would never smile or laugh or run through the spring flowers with a pooch on a lead in my whole long miserable life. ‘Stop leering like that, Gritter. You are supposed to woo the girl!’ Mrs W. demanded.

‘OK,’ said Frank, with a distinctively mischievous look in his eye. ’like this?’ and he got down on one knee and held one hand to his heart and the other out to me as if he was going to ask me to marry him or something.

I thought I was going to be sick, so I closed my eyes tightly and prepared for total and utter Public Humiliation of the hugest degree. Then I heard a very strange noise.

‘Woooo! Woooo!’

Everyone in the class exploded into raucous and uproarious laughter and I opened my eyes to see the expression on Mrs W.’s face. Now she was the one who looked like a goldfish with rigorous ortis.

I did the only thing a girl could do in such a situation. I giggled so hard I left the Despairedness behind.