Oops, I Lost My Best(est) Friends

Dylan's sorry, sad secret There had been an explosion of gerbils. Not a crash bang wallop kind of explosion; a 'population explosion', that's what Mum called it. Basically, that meant that loads of gerbils had been handed in to the Paws For Thought Animal Rescue Centre where she worked, and they'd all had heaps of babies. There'd been so many litters of gerbils born that they'd run out of space to keep them all. Which was why we had a cage full of gerbils plonked on our kitchen worktop right now. "How many babies are there, Mrs Kidd?" asked my bestest friend Soph. "Six in this litter," Mum replied. "How old are they?" asked Fee, peering at the snuffly, pink blobs in the straw. Fee is my other bestest friend. Soph and Fee came round after school today to work on the poems our teacher asked us to write. Instead, we were staring at the newest foster pets in our house. 'Cause of Mum's job, we often have foster pets here, and some of them end up becoming proper pets, like Dibbles the not-very-pretty-but-totally-adorable dog did not so long ago. "They're only a few hours old," I told Fee. "They were born this morning, weren't they, Mum?" "Yes, Indie, that's right. Oh dear ... it is worrying," Mum sighed. "Why's it worrying?" asked Dylan. Dylan is my step-brother. He hadn't come round to write poems; he'd come round to hang out with Dibbles and our other dogs, Kenneth (the Scottie) and George (the greyhound), since he's not allowed pets at his house. "Well, Dylan, it's worrying because it's going to be very hard to find homes for all these little guys!" Mum said. Mum was so caught up in worrying that she'd totally forgotten she'd scrunched her hair into a (sort of) bun and (sort of) fixed it in place with a pencil a pencil with a green-haired, rubber gonk on the end. "Right, I must make a note of the gerbils' feeding rota!" she mumbled, heading out of the kitchen. "Now, where did I leave my pencil...?" "Oooh, Indie those babies are just the cutest thing!" cooed Soph, once Mum had left the room. "Yes, I know," I said, thinking that Soph was so close to the cage that her breath must have felt like a warm breeze to the gerbil babies. "Urgh! Are you kidding?" Fee laughed. "They look like slugs with noses!" "Oh, yeah, Fee? Well, you look more like a slug with a nose than they do!" Soph burst out. "I do not!" "Yes, you do!" Soph insisted with a big cheeky grin. "Then again ... you look more like a slug in a wig!" Fee did a big gasp then, pretending to be hurt, though she wasn't really. "If I look like a slug in a wig, Sophie Musyoka, then you look like a ... a ... a daddy long legs in a hoodie!" Now that they'd both started to get silly, I wasn't sure what they'd come up with next something dumb about me being like a bluebottle with bunches, maybe? But then a car horn went honk! outside, waking our cat Smudge up from her snoozles for a whole nanosecond. "That'll be my dad," said Soph, as Smudge's eyelids started drooping and she carried on with her snooozles in the laundry basket. "WanMcCombie, Karen is the author of 'Oops, I Lost My Best(est) Friends ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780440421979 and ISBN 0440421977.