so, here it is! the first chapter that has been (hopefully) long awaited. I'm posting this chapter today because it's my friends birthday today! so HAPPY BIRTHDAY LIZZY! she has a fanfiction account, which she set up maybe... four or five months ago (LizzyJane23) soo if any of you want to go and read one of her stories, you know =)
But anyway, Lizzy is one of my beeeeessstest friends, so I promised her I'd post the first chapter on her birthday, rather than some distant and vague time in the future. In other words, if it wasn't for Lizzy, you'd be waiting another few months before I got off my arse and actually posted something (yeah, im, unfortunately lazy. I blame genetics).
Anywho, birthday wishes aside, I've given you a nice, even longer than usual post to make up for being lazy, and here it is!
Chapter 1~Anna
"Admit it," Dan tutted, "you're lost,"
"No! I know exactly where we are!" I snapped waving the map at him.
"Oh yeah, where are we then?" Dan asked, raising an eyebrow questioningly.
"Somewhere here!" I exclaimed waving the map at him again then stabbing a random section of it.
Dan laughed, "Try holding the map the right way up, Anna. It might help a bit,"
I paused and looked at the map. "I knew it was upside down! I was just holding it the wrong way round because... Because I find things easier to read upside down."
Dan shook his head, took the map off me and studied it for a few minutes.
"The house is there," He told me, pointing to a part of the map that I hadn't crumpled to death over the last few days, "We're here," He said, pointing to a part of the map I had crumpled to death over the last few days, "So we only need to go a few more streets and then we'll be fine," He grinned up at me, "As long as you're not the one leading the way. I have never seen someone sobad at reading maps before in my life!"
"So? I've never really felt any overwhelming urge to look at a map before. When have I ever needed to? I know how to get to a nearby supermarket and buy food, and the rest I can just make up as I go along," I replied sulkily.
"Come on, then. I want to get back reasonably soon and we're just wasting time standing around here," Dan complained.
"Right, because what exactly have we been doing all day?" I asked.
"Observing," Dan told me, grabbing my hand and pulling me along in the right direction.
"No, Dan, we were sitting on a park bench feeding stale bread to the ducks and eating ice cream. For three hours. My ice cream melted. All we saw was ducks," I complained.
"Well, all you saw was ducks, but I managed to actually get a look at our latest victim," Dan told me superiorly, his tone an edge mocking as he said the last word.
"Oh, yes, the guy with the bunny suit and penguin mask," I nodded, "Yeah, he wasn't our guy- he works part time over at that local shop by the park- it's called Bunny Buy or something bunny-ish- he was advertising. It's his job,"
"What? No! I was talking about the guy who was stomping around the park all in black with the long black over coat and black clothes and black hair and brown sunglasses! And how the heck did you know the bunny guy worked at a local shop and was advertising?"
"Ways and means, Dan, ways and means. And is it even possible to have brown sunglass lens type things?" I asked.
Dan shrugged as we turned and headed down another street, "I dunno. It kinda ruined the villainously evil look he had going, though,"
"True," I agreed, "His dark, mysterious look got screwed up too. Who knew? Maybe they don't have how-to-dress-like-an-evil-bad-guy-slash-maniac lessons at evil-people school."
We hurried across the road and into a narrow alley way. If it had been going-on-dark out on the streets, it was almost pitch black now that we were out of the way of all the lights. The alley stank of beer and rubbish and general not-nice smells. I could barely see Dan ahead of me.
"Christ. We're gonna have to stop with the late night shit, Dan," I muttered as I stubbed my toe and something went crashing to one side of the alley.
"This was your idea in the first place!" Dan exclaimed teasingly.
"Well I'm disowning it now! We needed it a few nights ago because a few nights ago we weren't getting anywhere!" I muttered, "Now we've got a couple of leads, we should drop it! Besides, I don't want to get picked up by the police. Two teenagers running around the streets in the middle of the night isn't exactly non-suspicious,"
"Well I'm not trailing all the way back across town now, only to come back tomorrow morning and find that the house is full of people," Dan said decidedly.
"Fine, fine! But you're gonna have to put up with me moaning for the rest of the night about my poor stubbed toes!" I hissed as we reached the end of the alleyway and found ourselves on a smaller side street which was all but deserted. Dan led the way carefully.
"You're pathetic, Anna- I didn't trip or stub my toe once in there," Dan told me.
"Shut up and stop drawing attention to us," I retorted crappily.
We carried on like this for another five minutes, until we found ourselves at a house on the end of the street. It was two storeys high with a small yet abused front garden full of weeds and a small little wall going around the outside. Dan and I opened the metal gate and made our way through the garden to the front door. I tried it quietly. Locked.
"The lights are all off- he's either not in or asleep," I noted.
"You should probably have checked before you tired the door!" Dan muttered back.
"We'll try the back door next," I decided, ignoring Dan.
We walked around to the back garden which was equally as abused and disused as the front one. Dan tried the door. It didn't open.
"Any plant pots or mats he could be hiding a key under?" I whispered anxiously. If we made too much noise, the neighbours would get suspicious eventually.
"Here," Dan stood up grinning as he produced a key, "It was taped under the window ledge,"
I sighed in relief. This was the third time in four nights we were sneaking into someone's house and both times previously we'd had to get in the hard way- climbing through unlocked windows that were luckily not so hard to open. I had bruises. I'm serious- falling in through a window hurts.
Dan unlocked the door and we darted inside, shutting the door carefully behind us. We slipped off our shoes and started double checking the rooms were empty. The shoe slipping thing? Trust me on it.
The first house we snuck into we left muddy footprints everywhere. All nice and dandy when you're trying to insult the owner of the house, but the aim of it was for them to never know we'd been there. Hence the taking off of our shoes. Besides- if we were creeping around bare foot, we made less noise. Kinda...
Dan and I finished checking the first floor and it was empty which meant- obviously- that if there was anyone in, they'd be upstairs or invisible ninja's. I was hoping for no one in or upstairs. There was no one upstairs.
"Ok, we're good." I told Dan, coming out of the last room, "There's no one around,"
Dan nodded, "I'll take downstairs and see you in ten minutes maximum, ok?"
I nodded and went back into the room, looking around for anything with a massive sign above saying in capital letters INFORMATION! CLUES! LOOK OVER HERE YOU MORON! So far? ... Nothing. I sighed and got to work.
The room I was in was evidentially some sort of playroom type thing. I knew the guy who lived here had two little kids, who were staying at their Mum's for the rest of the week, luckily enough. I doubted anything informationy would be hidden in any of the kid's rooms- they might get their hands on it and that wouldn't be good.
I moved on from the playroom, skipped out the two kid's bedrooms and found myself in an office room. I booted up the computer and started plugging in memory sticks to see what was on them.
While I waited for the computer to load, I looked through everything else in the room. The guy was obviously not keen on paperwork as there were about five pages in all lying around the office. Which was fine by me, since it was less to look through. Well... not really, if it was all on the computer.
Dan appeared in the doorway and saw me at the computer. He sighed, "He's another computer fanatic, isn't he?"
The second house we'd been in had been obsessed with computers. I hadn't had enough room on my memory stick to keep it all, and had ended up having to go through half the stuff there and then just to make enough space! Since then, I'd set up an online account thing where I had 'unlimited' space to save all my files.
"Uh huh, but it'll only take me a few minutes to sort it out. Do you mind searching his bedroom while I take care of this?" I asked as the log in screen came up and I was told to give a password.
"Fine," Dan sighed, heading off again.
Five minutes later, I'd logged off, found Dan and we were out the back of the house and locking it up.
"Well, that was a good night's work!" I said cheerfully.
"If you say so. Right now I'm tired and hungry. Let's head back," Dan sighed.
Chapter 2~Anna
It was exactly a week since Dan and I had done a runner and left CHERUB. A week of the two of us and –despite several honest, made-with-good-intention promises- no contact with anyone else. We'd had an idea yesterday, and put it into action, but we weren't expecting something immediate. So, that aside, no contact with the outside and/or real world. Well, apart from random people that we'd never met before in our lives. But the one minute conversations we had with them didn't really count.
Dan and I had set up our 'base' now. It was, in all honesty, a pile of crap. We'd found an old housing estate on the outskirts of Manchester –since that was where the main shit kept happening in our lives. The houses were due to be demolished, but that wasn't for about another month. In the mean time, most of them were empty. Only the occasional house owner was left, petitioning against the demolition.
The houses were a bit run down, but we still had electricity, so we could use my laptop whenever we wanted without worrying about running out of battery. There was a weak internet signal, which sucked, but it was decent enough and we could come back to this place, it was free and it was easy to find.
We'd already tried the free-camping shit, before we'd found this place- two nights sitting in the rain under a tree with a one-man tent Dan had managed to dredge up from God knows where, wrapped in two thick blankets with no hot meal or hot drink to keep us going. It had not been nice, and we didn't have enough money to waste it booking rooms in bed and breakfasts or whatever.
In the week we'd been out of CHERUB, I'd managed to get to my Dad's apartment and rescue the papers there. After several trips back and forwards, we even had a mini cooking stove –seriously, my Dad was either insane or could see the future because, why else would you have shit like that in a flat in Manchester?- lots of food that had been left and a whole array of containers that we were using to store water in, since we didn't have any running water.
Peter had been contacting us regularly. He hadn't been exactly happy that we'd ran off from CHERUB permanently, but since we were the only ones able to run around with relative freedom, he couldn't complain too much. He knew that Arron and himself were still being watched and couldn't do anything to help out just yet. So Peter had been directing us on how to look after ourselves and where to go to see the right people. He was also the reason for our nightly –although the night thing, as Dan had pointed out, had been my idea- visits to random people's houses.
Of course, Dan and I still had to be careful- we knew that at the very least, the police would have been notified about two missing children. They wouldn't exactly be out searching the streets for us, but if we got caught breaking in, or they found us wandering the streets looking a little grubby and smelling none too fresh, they might connect the dots.
"I'm hooooommmmmmeeee!" I called into the empty house as I squeezed through the back door.
Both the front and back doors on all of the houses had been bordered up, but despite appearances, nailed in boards aren't too hard to kick to death. Just hard to completely remove.
"Shut up! What if someone hears you?" Dan hissed as we turned a wooden table onto its side and shoved it up against the gaping hole in the door in an attempt to stop too much of a draft attacking us.
"No one has yet, Dan. Chill out, will you?" I sighed, heading through a door-less doorway and into the sitting room.
Two old, dusty and kinda smell chairs greeted me, and I dunked my heavy bag happily on the first before collapsing on the second. Dan followed me in chucked my bag off the chair and flopped into it himself.
"We should shut the windows before it gets cold," Dan sighed.
We opened all the upstairs windows in the morning because the place, even after a week, was as dusty as hell and stank still. The downstairs windows were mostly boarded up.
"Ugh. Do we have to?" I moaned, tired after being woken up early because there wasn't any fucking curtains and apparently, they don't border up windows properly anymore.
"Yes, Anna. Or, more accurately, you have to, since I had to do it yesterday," Dan told me forcefully.
I groaned and pulled myself up, grumbling about windows and boards and crappy shit. I trudged upstairs and picked a random room to start with. 'Closing' the windows didn't mean literally- any glass that hadn't been removed and sold or whatever people do with it, had been smashed by morons with bricks- we had to find random house hold objects to wedge into the windows. Dan had managed to find some floor boards and I demolished some crappy wooden chairs, so, for the most part, it was easy enough to block the windows up using boards. Until they started falling out of the window again. Which happened a lot. And was incredibly annoying.
I stomped back downstairs half an hour later, to see Dan trying not to laugh at me.
"What took you so long?" He asked, faking ignorance.
"Those bloody windows hate me!" I declared, "Why do they hate me?"
Dan shrugged smugly, "Maybe you're just not very good at closing windows,"
"Hey! I am freaking talented at closing windows! I'm just considerably less talented at closing windows that hate me," I said defensively.
Dan laughed and got up, "I'll make dinner tonight, since you can't cook for toffee either,"
"I can! I just can't be arsed to sit and wait for it to cook through!" I defended myself once more.
I heard Dan's laugh from the room where the kitchen had once been.
"Fine, fine, I'll just go back to reading through all this shit then," I grumbled to myself, heading to the back of the room.
There was a pile of shit that Dan and I had yet to go through leftover from my Dad's apartment. Then I would need to get back to looking through all the shit Dan and I had 'acquired' recently.
"What's for tea then, maestro?" I asked sarcastically.
"Beans on toast," Dan told me with little enthusiasm.
"Brilliant," I called back, my tone mirroring Dan's.
Chapter 3~Emma
"Emmmmmmmaaaaaaa!" Gabby whined, "Where did you put Sybil?"
I looked over my shoulder, "I put him back in the cage, Gabby! Now go away, I'm trying to have a conversation with Andrew," I saw Gabby's face and quickly backtracked, "With Andrew and my friends!" I yelled quickly.
"Funny how Andrew is separate from your friends," Gabby noted slyly.
I glared at her. God, she was almost as annoying as Anna! I was beginning to think that Anna had paid Gabby to make sure she teased me every waking moment about Andrew.
"Actually, I might have left Sybil's cage open, Gabby," I frowned, pretending to be worried. I hadn't left it open of course, but, well... "You should go check,"
Gabby looked at me in horror, "You left Sybil's cage open? What if he escaped and got stood on?"
"Funny," I said, mocking her earlier tone, "how you say escaped. Why would a lovely hamster like Sybil want to escape?" I'd met Sybil. He was not lovely. Trust me.
Gabby glared at me and ran off.
I turned back to Andrew, Elizabeth and Raine, who were looking on in a mixture of surprise and amusement, "So, what were you guys saying?" I asked briskly, trying to avoid thinking about how I'd just been mean to Gabby. I hadn't been that mean. Not really.
"Um... we think Gabby's right. You guys should totally get together," Elizabeth said abruptly, almost grinning.
Andrew coughed and looked slightly embarrassed. I could feel my cheeks going bright red. I look at Elizabeth in a seriously-you-had-to-bring-that-up-again-didn't-you glare, "Moving on," I muttered.
"No, seriously you guys!" Elizabeth cried, "You two are like... I dunno... You two just should totally get together!"
I looked at Raine to get her opinion. She remained frustratingly neutral.
"Anna and Dan are together!" Elizabeth added.
"So...?" I asked carefully.
Elizabeth faltered, "I don't know. That usually works or pisses off whoever I tell it to,"
"Ok then," I said brightly, "Let's move on now whilst Elizabeth is still distracted. Why did Tom and Liam want us to meet up here anyway?" I asked Andrew.
Andrew shrugged, "I dunno. They just said that we should be here, not in the hall or anywhere when we meet up,"
I think it had begun to be a tradition- we always got up at roughly the same time and made our way down to the hall to eat breakfast. By the time we'd all eaten, everyone was there, so we just took it from there and hung out wherever. Tom and Liam, though, had told us yesterday to meet up out here, which resulted in several people going hungry to avoid meeting someone else in the hall.
"Helpful," I sighed, looking around the Red shirts block, "Could it not have been anywhere else?"
There were about thirty kids running around us and our conversation didn't exactly feel private. I spotted Jonah heading over with Lilly, and waved them over.
"Hey you guys!" Lilly grinned, "Nowhere to sit, I take it?"
"Unfortunately no- Elizabeth did not feel the need to dirty her fingernail in helping us secure ourselves a bench and, well, younger kids just don't seem scared of us any more," Andrew sighed.
"Hey! It's not my fault I arrived first!" Elizabeth grumbled.
"But it is your fault you didn't grab us a bench," I reminded her.
Raine grinned and tried not to laugh at Elizabeth's indignant expression.
"Anyway, any of you guys have a clue why we're here? And not somewhere nice and comfortable enjoying ourselves and eating nice food?" Jonah asked.
"None of us have a clue. Liam and Tom still haven't turned up," Raine shrugged.
Elizabeth looked up, startled, "Oh! I thought you guys knew- Meryl demanded the two of them over to her office this morning. Tom reckoned she wanted another interrogation session," She rolled her eyes.
Meryl had, over the past few days, called all of us into her office more than once and asked us a few 'simple' questions about Anna's disappearance. I would've had an excuse, since I wasn't supposed to have an contact on missions, and, by the time I'd arrived back, Anna had already been discovered missing, but, of course, since the whole ringing-CHERUB-to-tell-MI6-they-had-a-spy-and-it-could-screw-up-all-of-their-plans thing, it had been made pretty clear they knew just how many rules I'd broken.
I sighed, "She has to have gathered by now that we either don't have a clue what Anna is doing or we're not gonna tell her,"
"Yeah, but she's one persistent bugger," Tess muttered from behind.
I swung around to grin at her and joined in the chorus of hello's from the rest of the group.
"Great, so now we're just waiting on Tom and Liam and ultimately on whenever the heck Meryl decides that interviewing the two of them today wasn't going to work," Jonah announced.
"We could be some time then," Raine sighed glumly.
"Or not- I think that's Tom now," Andrew pointed to him, struggling through a group of red shirts.
"So where's Liam?" Elizabeth asked.
Tom had got near enough to overhear us by now and supplied us with the answer, "Gone to print something out," He shrugged, sidling up next to Elizabeth, "He'll be here any minute,"
I smiled sympathetically, "How was the interrogation, then?"
"It wasn't so bad- Meryl had the decency to offer tea and cookies this time. But if she thought that was gonna bribe us into telling her, she's forever doomed to be in the dark," Tom smiled slightly.
"So- why did you tell us to meet here this morning?" Lilly finally asked the question we'd all been wondering.
"Oh, well Liam got an email yesterday, and he showed it to me. We were gonna tell you guys about it yesterday, only we got sidetracked, couldn't remember exactly what the message was and, well, didn't really want anyone overhearing it," Tom explained sheepishly.
"And you think no one is going to overhear us here?" Jonah asked, gesturing to the kids all around us.
Andrew shook his heads, "They're practically all under ten and are playing with their friends- they're not paying us the slightest bit of attention. They don't care what we're talking about. What I don't get why this message is so important and who would overhear us in the lunch hall anyway?"
"Well, Anna wasn't exactly all out popular and friendly to everyone, was she? Dan was pretty much neutral with all people and Karlie hadn't really been here long enough to make an impression, but I know one person who would really like to get her own back on Anna," Elizabeth said thoughtfully.
The others nodded in realisation and I gathered I was the only one who didn't have a clue who Elizabeth was going on about, which sucked, considering Anna was my sister, and my twin.
"Um... Who is this?" I asked reluctantly, having a silent battle inside over my pride. Better to ask than to make out like I knew and completely embarrass myself.
"Oh! I keep forgetting- you won't have met her probably. Or seen her. What, with BT, then on your mission," Raine slapped her forehead, "It's this obnoxious brat called Sandi. She and Anna got into several fights while you were on your mission- and several fights while we were all in Basic Training, too, apparently. Although, thinking about it, she was due to go into BT with Anna and Karlie- and that starts tomorrow,"
"Ok, I'll keep an eye out for her and avoid her at all costs, then, until she goes tomorrow," I muttered.
If Raine was insulting someone that I had never met- I'd found out long ago that Raine was big on people having their own opinions, so if Raine was insulting someone I'd never met, I decided to brace myself for the worst, just in case.
"Here's Liam- finally," Tess muttered, bringing us back to the present.
Liam jogged up holding a piece of paper in his hand and carrying his laptop under his other arm.
"You took your time!" Tom muttered to him.
Liam shrugged, "Don't blame me- blame that bloody printer! It was a nightmare!"
Tom tutted disbelievingly and pulled the sheet off Liam, placing it in front of me, "This is the email Liam got last night. We think it's from Anna, since Anna hacked Liam's email address a while ago. His email account recorded that it was sent yesterday afternoon- when we were messing around in the paintballing arena trying to avoid Meryl,"
I looked down at the sheet and realised why I'd been given it specifically. It read;
EmailsToMyself (gmail)
EMMA!
School Website Background Redecorated
I'll email my(other)self again soon cos I've got nothing much to do =)
A&D
"The A and the D obviously stand for Anna and Dan, and if Anna's sent it, you could count as her other self, and all that shit," Liam started.
"The email address at the top is obviously the one we'll be using if we want to talk to her, and we think the message to you is the password," Tom finished, barging in so he could say it before Liam.
I looked at the message Anna had given me, "Perfect, I know just what the password is,"
"What?" Was the general response from the group.
"Lemon tree, of course!" I grinned at their puzzled looks.
"Why would your school website have a lemon tree for their background?" Andrew asked, bemused.
"Well Anna got bored," I began, and was cut off with a round of I've-heard-too-many-stories-beginning-like-that groans from Liam, Tom, Andrew and Elizabeth.
"C'mon guys, let's at least find somewhere to sit down and then we can check out this email account and see if we've got any mail," Tess suggested, gesturing to Liam's laptop.
So that was what we did, and ten minutes later we were sitting down to read Anna's rather insulting email.
Chapter 4~Emma
Anna is speaking;
Hey you guys! If you're reading this you're not as completely moronic as I originally thought you were! Congratulations! So, I promised I'd talk to you miserable lot, and this is how we'll do it. Make sure though, you guys, that you put your name at the top of the email whenever you send one, otherwise this is just gonna get confusing! Just follow my example! Anywho, letting you know that all is nice and dandy, Dan and I are not in danger of immediate of dying – apart from maybe food poisoning, since Dan is cooking. We've got ourselves a base with electricity, food, water, internet and all that shit. We're also in regular contact with Peter, and through him, kinda Arron, but not much, since both of them supposedly don't know where we are and are being stalked by MI6 and we're not sure whether their phones are bugged or not. We're going to act like they are anyway.
The one person we need contact with now is Karlie so if any of you guys come up with a vaguely good idea, let me know and I'll tell you how immensely thick you are and point out all the reasons why it'll never work!
Dan's Part Of The Email Because Anna Decided He couldn't Have A Whole New Email Just To Say This;
Hi everyone. Bye.
"Well, at least they're ok," I said after a few minutes.
"Yeah," Elizabeth agreed, "But I was expecting something... more, you know. Like, information or something,"
"Maybe they don't want to send us anything unless it's major- in case someone managed to read it," Andrew suggested.
Raine frowned, "I can't think of any way we can get a hold of Karlie- she left her phone here, no one knows her email address, where she was heading, any of the important factors,"
"Now, this is the part where, if it were Anna here, she would've produced some sort of face-recognition software and tracked Karlie down to the exact square-meter, seem as though she's such a technical genius," Tom frowned, "Although, she probably wouldn't have, since I doubt she'd have thought up something like that,"
I grinned, "More likely she'd be pinning up posters with messages for Karlie saying stuff like 'The name of my sister's hamster' or something and another email address underneath,"
Lilly and Jonah were discussing something quietly, and Tess was frowning to herself. Liam and Andrew were talking about new avoidance tactics since both of them had decided they were thoroughly fed up of Meryl. That left Elizabeth, Raine, Tom and I to think things through.
"There isn't a fool-proof, bound-to-work plan, really. None of us have a clue where she is," I said glumly, at last.
"I hate to say it, but I kind of have to agree. What exactly can we do to find her? If any of us were good at hacking, I suppose we could hack into a member of staff's accounts on the computers and they'd probably have something we could use. But none of us are that good," Tom agreed.
Raine was frowning thoughtfully, but Elizabeth had decided to go for the 'think out loud' option, "You know, Karlie was running away because she said she hadn't finished with Dasakota- she said most of them had been picked up by MI6, but MI6 didn't have a list of all the members, so they wouldn't have arrested everyone. And not everyone must've been at that whole prison break thing, and only some members from Manchester must've been arrested when MI6 rescued Anna and Arron last year,"
"Hang on; Karlie said they didn't have a list of all the members? If they didn't how would she have a chance of finding anyone? And how does she know there's a list in the first place?" Raine interrupted. We all looked at her as she started to grin, "Don't you think it's a bit presumptuous of her- MI6 couldn't possibly get everyone, but she could?"
I frowned, "From what I've seen of Karlie- although I haven't been around her that much- I don't think she's that kind of presumptuous,"
"So maybe she had some sort of list of all the members?" Tom suggested.
Elizabeth bit her lip, "When Anna had her laptop confiscated, she spent, like, the whole of the next day on a cute little mini one that I'd never seen before in my life. Then it disappeared until I spotted Karlie packing it to take with her. Perhaps it's on there?"
"It's a possibility we could consider, but I don't see what exactly this has to do with getting in touch with her," Tom pointed out impatiently, after a couple more minutes of silence.
Raine frowned, "Um... pretty much nothing, really, I was just wondering,"
We went back to the silent thinking, Raine looking slightly put out and Elizabeth no longer speaking out loud. Andrew and Liam presently rejoined our non-conversation.
"So, what're you guys doing?" Liam asked.
"Thinking," Was Elizabeth's short reply.
"About...?" Andrew prompted.
"Stuff?" Raine suggested.
"What sort of stuff?" Liam scowled, sensing Raine was mocking them slightly.
"Stuffy stuff," I told him, keeping a straight face.
"What kind of stuffy stuff?" Andrew asked, sounding slightly annoyed.
"Interesting stuffy stuff," Tom supplied this time.
"God you guys are so immature. It's like since Anna's not around, you don't have to try to act mature to keep her in line anymore!" Liam snapped.
"Hey! Come on! We were just having a bit of fun!" Raine laughed.
Tess peered over at us, "Yeesh, Liam, loosen up a bit will you?"
Lilly and Jonah turned around to see what was happening, but before Liam could make a snappy, defensive reply, Gabby ran up screaming at me.
"You did leave the cage open you moron! Sybil's got out and I can't find him!"
Everyone looked at Gabby, then at me and I shrugged defensively, "She was teasing me so I said I wasn't sure I'd shut the hamster cage. But I had!"
"Well it's open now!" Gabby cried, whacking me on the head with- ...was that seriously a bag of hamster food she just hit me with? "And Sybil isn't in there!"
"Woah, woah, wait a minute, back up- you're hamster is called Sybil?" Lilly asked, torn between confusion and laughter.
Gabby stopped hitting me to glare at her, "Yeah. So?"
"And it's a boy hamster?" Lilly continued.
"So?" Gabby repeated, in a get-on-with-it-I-want-to-go-back-to-killing-Emma tone.
I myself, meanwhile, was desperately signalling for Lilly to shut up immediately- Gabby was very touchy on the subject of Sybil typically being a girl's name. Lilly ignored my dire warnings.
"Why exactly did you call a boy hamster a girl's name?" Lilly spluttered out eventually.
Gabby chucked the hamster food bag at her and she- luckily enough, since that food bag had to feed all the red shirt's hamsters- managed to catch it without getting it spilt everywhere.
"Why does everyone always ask that? Why can't they just accept that I called my hamster Sybil! I even looked it up on the internet- it can be a guy's name as well as a girl's name!" Gabby wailed.
"Yeah, Gabby, that's true," I nodded, "But then, Alex, Jordan, Sam... um..."
"Charlie, Drew, Joe, Kai," Andrew filled in as I tried to think of more.
"And Harper Seven!" Jonah added on the end.
"... Who. The. Fuck. Calls their kid Harper Seven?" Gabby demanded.
"Gabby!" I snapped immediately, "Don't swear!"
Gabby stuck her tongue out at me, "Anna swears all the time!"
"Well... Anna shouldn't! Anna's a moron," I told her.
"Yeah, a moron who hacked into MI6 at the age of seven. She told me about that, you know?" Gabby grinned, pleased to know something I didn't. And I seriously hadn't known that.
I looked at the others, trying to see if they'd heard this from Anna. Apparently not.
"Um... Gabby- I think she was making that up," I muttered, bracing myself for a Gabby-tantrum involving lots of hamster food being chucked at me.
"Uh uh, ask Anna yourself, sometime!" Gabby said adamantly, "She said she hacked into Dad's secret website when she was seven and it was the MI6 weird thingie, like it was when she hacked into it last week,"
"Dad's secret website?" I asked sceptically.
"Bite me," Gabby shrugged, collecting her hamster bag, "That's what she said, if you don't believe me, fine. But you'll have plenty of time to think it over while you all," She glared viciously at Lilly, Jonah, Tess, Andrew, Elizabeth, Tom and Liam, then back to me, "help me find Sybil,"
And with that she stormed off, swinging the hamster food bag over her shoulder as she went.
"Christ," Lilly murmured, after a few seconds of stunned silence, "Your little sister is terrifying,"
"You can stop looking gormless and start looking for Sybil sometime soon!" Gabby yelled over her shoulder.
"One bossy, know-it-all sister leaves, and another one takes her place!" I moaned, starting reluctantly after Gabby.
if you made it to the bottom, you have to read this and then wish Lizzy a happy birthday.
even if you're just going to think it.
and if you're Lizzy...
maybe don't...
it's weird wishing yourself a happy birthday.
okay... for anyone still reading... mabe don't wish Lizzy a happy birthday out loud.
you'll probably look extremely weird.
but either way...
im just rambling now...
are some of you still reading this?
no, seriously, is anyone there?
HAPPY BIRTHDAY AGAIN LIZZY! =D
hope ALL of you enjoyed the chapter!
If you're still reading this for reasons beyond me, stop around now. go do something more productive. Like read. Or watch BBC Sherlock. If you can. It's awesome.