For the rest of the evening, before Lily’s mum came to pick her up, the girls worked on their posters.

Mr Mack had turned the voting into a class project on leadership, and they had spent a whole lesson talking about the difference between being a good leader and being popular. Even if you didn’t want to run for captain, you still had to make up a poster and think about what a good captain would do for the school.

Holly got out Mr Mack’s sheet of instructions.

Instructions for your poster:

1. Use one sheet of ordinary printer paper.

2. Only write about you – don’t say anything about your opponents.

3. Tell us what changes you would make to improve life at school.

4. Tell us why we should vote for you!

It was hard to fit all of that on one piece of paper, but Holly thought she and Lily had done a great job.

First they’d got dressed up in Holly’s mum’s nice work jacket, and taken photos of each other looking all serious and grown-up.

Then Holly had printed the photos out on the computer and Lily had written VOTE! above them in glitter glue. It looked amazing.

Holly didn’t know how Lily managed it, but she always did headings and stuff just perfectly.

The hard bit was next – coming up with reasons the other kids in class should vote for them.

‘What are we supposed to say?’ Holly wondered. ‘Like, if you put, Vote for me because I’m really nice, that sounds like you’ve got a big head, doesn’t it?’

‘Yeah …’ said Lily, thinking. ‘Well, what if you said, Vote for me, I’m only quite nice?’

Holly snorted. ‘Thanks, you’re a big help. All right, we’ll skip to the next one. What would we do as class captains?’

‘Easy! Ban the boys from playing footy near the handball courts. They’re always wrecking our games when they kick the ball too far.’

‘Ooh, yes!’ Holly wrote it down. ‘Can we do that?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lily admitted. ‘But we can try. What else?’

‘Umm … get the canteen to sell frozen watermelon? They do that at my friend’s school, and she says it’s yum.’

Slowly they came up with a list of things they could put on their posters.

‘We can’t have the same reasons, though,’ said Holly. ‘We should split this list so that both our posters are original.’

‘Good thinking,’ Lily agreed. ‘Why don’t we each take the ideas we thought up ourselves?’

‘Right! You know, we’re such a good team. Wouldn’t it be great if we could captain together?’

‘Totally,’ Lily said with a grin, and they did their special hand slap.