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bodies started to shake.
    Their teeth looked long and sharp.
    Then they started to yell. (If you asked them, they would say they were not yelling. They would say they were talking sternly. But if you ask the girl, she would say that whatever you want to call the way they were talking was even scarier than the way they looked.)
    With their mad voices and their mad faces, they told the girl how upset they were with her and some of her choices. They talked in their mad voices and with their mad faces for a very long time. (They talked for so long that the girl began to tremble and shake and wonder if she would ever be OK and happy again and could only hope that her friends who were still downstairs in their sleeping bags and pajamas would send someone up to get her.)
    But unfortunately for the girl, no one came to get her. Then, just when it didn’t seem like her parents could make her feel any more scared than she already did, they did.
    They told the party girl that she was free to go.
    (NOTE #6 TO READER.: I bet you are thinking that this was good and it made her happy, but it didn’t. It made her even more scared, and here is why.)
    As the party girl walked down the stairs to join her friends, she knew she had not heard the end of this.
    She knew what her parents really meant when they said she was
free to go
was that she was
free to go FOR NOW.
    Even though she had been plenty scared by her parents’ scary looks and scary voices, she knew that the scariest part of the story was yet to come.
    She crawled into her sleeping bag next to her best friend. Then she rolled over and tried to sleep. But she could not sleep. Something deep inside her ten-year-old body told her that the scariest part of the story would begin in the morning after her friends would all leave.

    And she wasn’t looking forward to that part of the story at all.
    The End. But only for now.
    AFTERWORD
    One more thing happened when the girl crawled into her sleeping bag next to her best friend. She came to a decision. She decided that all the bad stuff that happened at her sleepover wasn’t all her fault. It was her best friend’s fault too.
    Her best friend was the one who told her to invite a lot of people even though she knew the girl’s parents had said to keep things small. She was the one that said to leave the kitchen a mess and to go make water balloons in the house. She was the one who told the girls to throw the balloons. And she was the one who laughed when some of the girls at the party started decorating another girl at the party. She was the one who had not been acting like a best friend.
    The more the girl thought about the things her best friend had done, the madder she got. So when her best friend said, “Good night, sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite” (which is what they always say at sleepovers before they go to sleep), the girl looked at her best friend and said, “I hope they bite you.” And she told her why.
    Then she closed her eyes and pretended to go to sleep. But like I said before, she couldn’t sleep because she was scared, and now to top things off, she was mad too.
    And to be perfectly honest, a little bit confused.

T-R-O-U-B-L-E!
    All of my friends and my brother and my parents are having hot chocolate and French toast for breakfast. That’s what I’m having too, except mine is being served with a side order of trouble. I can tell by the way Mom is not looking at me that my side order will be served the minute my friends leave.
    And I’m right.
    As my friends start to leave, I give out the beaded picture frames that Mary Ann and I made for party favors. When I try to give one to Mary Ann, she shakes her head like she doesn’t want it. I know she’s mad that I’m mad at her, but I don’t see how that gives her the right to be mad at me.
    As soon as my last friend walks out the front door, Mom and Dad tell me they want to see me in my room.
    “Someone’s in T-R-O-U-B-L-E,” Max whispers as I walk