Sleepover Girls in the Ring by Fiona Cummings Read Free Book Online

breathless from her turn on the trapeze, something I’d missed because I’d been so busy with Fliss. We explained about Molly.
    “But Fliss hates heights!” she gasped. “She’ll never even make it up the ladder!”
    We looked anxiously up the scaffolding.
    “She’s already up there!” Rosie gasped. “Boy, she must be mad to have climbed that far without throwing a wobbly!”
    Fliss was standing on the platform, as white as a sheet. I swear we could see her trembling, even from the ground.
    “It looks like she’s too terrified to even hold the trapeze!” Lyndz commented.
    “She’ll never do it,” Frankie predicted.
    “Just jump down, Fliss!” I yelled. “That’s the quickest way. It’s dead easy.”
    Fliss looked down, then quickly back up again.
    “Cluck, cluck, chicken!” went my stupid sister.
    “SHUT UP!” the rest of us yelled together.
    “I think Katya’s going with her,” Rosie said. “Look, they’re both on the trapeze together.”
    As we looked up, they both pushed off from the platform. And the strange thing was that Fliss looked dead composed then. She looked all graceful and natural, just like Katya did.
    “Crikey, Mischa’s swinging as well!” I told the others. “Well, that’s one way of getting Fliss to fall into the net, I suppose.”
    Mischa swung nearer and nearer until the trapezes were almost touching.
    “Now!”
shouted Katya and Mischa together.
    We all held our breath. A figure fell down, down, down into the net. But it wasn’t Fliss. It was
Katya
! Fliss had actually made the leap and connected with Mischa’s outstretched hands – and was now swinging there with him!!
    The whole ring just burst into applause. All the performers who’d been practisingthemselves had stopped to watch Fliss once they’d realised how terrified she was. And now everyone was buzzing with excitement.
    “Don’t tell me she’s going to try a triple back flip now!” I grinned.
    But all the excitement had obviously got to Fliss, who suddenly let go and fell into the net. One of the other trapeze artists rushed over to make sure that she was OK, and helped her down the scaffolding. All the time he was telling her how great she was. Then Katya told her how brave she’d been, and Ailsa’s mum, and Ailsa’s dad, and Ailsa and Bobby the clown and about a million other circus performers too. By the time she reached us again, Fliss was so pumped up with compliments I thought she was going to burst. She kept saying:
    “Did you see me? Did you? I never thought I could do that! Never in a million years!”
    I was pleased for her, I really was. But by the time Lyndz and Rosie had had their turns on the trapeze (and had fallen off after a couple of swings each), I was kind of sick of Fliss telling me how brilliant she was. Theonly good thing about it was that I could tease Molly mercilessly about it that evening.
    “Yeah, well, let’s see how you and your sad little friends get on with all the other circus skills, shall we?” Molly snapped nastily. “Before you get too big-headed.”
    The next day at the circus, we tried loads of other new skills like juggling, plate-spinning, stilt-walking and unicycling. And the following day Ailsa’s dad called us all together.
    “You’ll find that you take to one skill more easily than the others,” he told us. “So this afternoon I’d like you to start focusing on your specialist skill. It’s better to perfect that rather than know how to do a little of everything. There’ll be a group for each circus skill we’ve covered already. Feel free to try all of them again, then go back to the one where you feel most comfortable. And that won’t necessarily be the one where your
friends
feel most comfortable,” he concluded, staring hard at Molly and me.
    “I feel most comfortable on the trapeze,”sighed Fliss. “But I don’t suppose that counts, does it? I mean, I know yesterday was just a one-off and everything, but I was obviously a