Hit the Beach! by Harriet Castor Read Free Book Online Page B

game of rounders, which was a real laugh. Aidan and Bethany had the afternoon off, so they’d both headed down to the serious surfers’ end of the beach. Rosie was dying to go and watch them, but Mrs Weaver said no.
    The rounders had really perked me up. I’d hit some great shots and made some seriously cool catches too, so by the time we packed up our stuff and headed back to the hostel I’d practically forgotten how bad I was at surfing.
    And the best of it was, there was still our midnight feast to look forward to!
    But when we got to the hostel, and everyone piled into their bedrooms to strip off their beach gear, I discovered that it wasn’t just Rosie who had the collywobbles about our beach-trip plans.
    “It’ll be scary, Kenny,” said Fliss, who was sitting on her bed, wriggling out of one set of clothes and into another. “It’ll be really dark…”
    “What about the romantic moonlight you were so keen on?”
    “There might not be any moonlight,” she said. “And then we’ll just have our torches, and what if there are, you know, muggers and murderers around?”
    “They might pick us off one by one,” saidRosie, her eyes wide with fright. “I’ll keep sweeping my torch beam round the group, and each time it goes round there’ll be one person less. Someone else missing…”
    “Don’t be ridiculous!” I snorted. “It might be a bit spooky , sure – but that’ll be fun! Won’t it?” Even though it was a blazing hot afternoon, Fliss shivered. I looked at the others.
    Lyndz shrugged uncertainly. “Well…what if a high tide comes in really quickly? We could get swept out to sea.”
    “What is it with you lot?” I said crossly, flinging down my damp swimming costume. “It’s all doom and gloom and the end of the world!” Though I couldn’t admit it, I knew they had a point. Going all the way to the beach in the middle of the night would be more daring than anything we’d ever done before.
    I tried to swallow my disappointment. “OK, OK,” I said. “So what’s it going to be instead? I guess we’ll just have to stay in our bedroom, like when we have sleepovers at home.”
    “Not necessarily,” said Frankie. She scrambled down the ladder of her bunk bed and headed for the window. “What about the garden here?” She leant over the sill for a moment, inspecting the view, and then turned back to face us. “I mean – we’ll still get the moonlight, if there is any, and the scars and all that. It’ll be dead quiet, so maybe we’ll even be able to hear the sea in the distance. It could be fun.”
    “Genius idea!” said Lyndz.
    I went to the window and squashed up next to Frankie to have a look. The garden was big, with lots of trees. It would be quite easy, I thought, to find a spot where we couldn’t be seen from the house. “And we’ll still have to think of a way to sneak out of the building,” I said. That was one of the bits I was looking forward to the most. I nodded. “Yep. I reckon it’ll be cool.”
    “Sounds good to me,” agreed Fliss.
    “Someone could hide in the bushes in the garden,” said Rosie. “And they could drag us off one by one…”
    “ Rosie!!!! ” the rest of us shouted together.
    She snapped to attention, as if she’d been daydreaming. “Sorry, guys. I think I’ve been watching too much rubbishy TV.”
    The tricky bit was staying awake after lights-out, waiting long enough for everyone else to have gone to sleep. All the surfing and running about we’d done today had left us pretty exhausted.
    “Couldn’t we just have a little nap first?” said Lyndz as we all lay waiting in the dark. She yawned. “I could set my alarm clock…”
    “I’ll feel groggy if we do that,” said Fliss. “I won’t want to get up if I’ve been to sleep.”
    “I…didn’t say you … had to snooze,” said Lyndz, sounding snoozy. “Just me…”
    “No one is going to sleep!” I laughed, flicking on my torch and shining it down into the bunk below