My Sister's a Yo Yo (4 page)

‘Oh my gosh, there it is!' she cried. ‘It's absolutely enormous! I think we'll have to operate!'

And then the phone rang yet again and Nurse left the room once more.

Zeke stood there with Eppie curled up like a snail deep down inside his shirt.

‘Operate!' gasped Zeke.

‘Operate!' gasped Eppie.

‘Blood and guts and pain and gore!' they gasped (at exactly the same time) and then they both just fainted.

They fell to the floor with a crash and a bang, knocking over this and bashing over that and spilling absolutely everything in sight.

When they came to, Zeke whispered loudly, ‘You realise this is all
your
fault!' and Eppie said, ‘No, it's yours.'

Then the nurse came back into the room to see a boy on the floor with no bumps at all talking to a tiny little girl with a yoyo on her head.

‘Aaaaa-a-a-a-aaaaaaaaaagh!' shrieked the nurse.

With a huff and a puff she rang the ambulance and wheezed rather urgently down the phone, ‘Come quickly, come quickly! Come and get me! I've gone quite mad. I'm seeing things!'

(And the ambulance came and tried to take her to hospital but she was so fat she got stuck in the doorway and that, by the way, is where she is right now.)

Zeke and Eppie couldn't simply walk out the door, because it was blocked by a big fat nurse, so they had to find another way out.

So with no choices left, Zeke put Eppie back in his pocket and went to climb out the window. Easy. No one would spot him. He'd just jump straight out and be free. Except for one teensy weensy problem: it was a lot further down than he'd imagined.

So he stood on the window-sill thinking of a plan. Thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. You could hear Zeke's brain creaking and groaning and straining, until a little voice inside his pocket squeaked, ‘Grab the branch and swing to that tree trunk, and then we can slide down to the ground.'

‘Oh — easy for
you
to say,' Zeke said rudely, but out of habit more than intentional impoliteness. Then he stood up straight and hurled himself forward, grabbed a branch of the nearby tree, and swung with all his might to reach the trunk. Everything was going well until he accidentally swung too close to another branch, and his shorts were snagged, pulled right down and off!

Well, there was Zeke in the tree, in his embarrassing Barbie doll undies. (It's a long story, too long to go into, but I think the lesson we can all learn from the Barbie doll undies incident is never to let your mother go shopping without her glasses.)

A cool breeze whistled as he watched his shorts swinging there, stuck out of reach on a branch back near the window-sill.

‘Oh no, don't let me get caught now!' he moaned as Eppie called out loudly from way over in the
pocket of his dangling shorts, ‘Hey, Mr Spunky Buns, come back across and get me.'

Now if Zeke had had the choice he would have left Eppie hanging there from that branch forever, until mice started to live in her ears and her hair turned into
creeping vines full of thorns and poisonous roses.

But he had to get his pants because he had to get his yoyo (which he loved), and his yoyo was attached to Eppie's hair, so most unfortunately he had to get Eppie as well.

So using the same branch that had got him to the tree trunk Zeke tried to swing back to the window ledge … but the branch snapped in half and plummeted to the ground.

‘I'm waiting, Mr No Pants,' Eppie called out.

Zeke thought of jumping back to the window, sticking a sock in Eppie's mouth and then joining a Barbie-undies-wearing-yoyoless monastery, but then he spotted the long green hose that was used to water the school garden. He reached over and down with his left hand, while he clung to the tree with his right, and he tried to grab the garden hose, but he missed it by just the tips of his fingers. (This was actually the one moment in all his life that he wished he was Captain Hook, or even a Transformer who could change himself into a massive jet fighter with claws that could hover over his shorts, take Eppie out of the pocket, drop her into a man-eating spider's web, and then bring the shorts back safe and sound ready to be worn back into class.)

Nup. He couldn't reach the hose with his hands, so he tried to reach it with his feet. He tried his
right foot first, and yes he could just touch the hose. But there was no way that he could pick it up. So he tried his left foot. Now luckily Zeke had a remarkably long big toe on the end of that foot, so he took off his left shoe and dangled his left foot down near the hose, and before you know it he'd scooped up the hose with his big, big toe and was ready to loop the hose over a branch and swing like Tarzan all the way back to the window ledge.

And that's what he did. He swung to the window-sill, picked up his shorts, put them back on (with Eppie still in the pocket) and then swung as hard as he could, hanging from the hose, through the air to get back to the big tree trunk. All was looking beeee-you-ti-ful when suddenly someone turned the hose on and completely soaked Eppie and Zeke.

And they landed on the tree trunk just as the bell rang for the end of recess, and all the kids went into class — except for Zeke and Eppie because they were both as sopping wet as facecloths soaking in a big cold bath.

Zeke sat waiting in the tree until all the other kids had disappeared, then he climbed carefully down the trunk to the ground, took Eppie and the yoyo out of his pocket and tried to get them all dry.

He stood in the sun and he stood in the breeze, but the drying was taking forever. So finally Zeke started to run, to make his own breeze and make himself hotter, and hopefully dry them faster. He started to run slowly, just around in a circle, with Eppie still tight in his hand, but then he got bored (of course) and he let the yoyo string unwind, and ran faster and faster with Eppie dangling on the end. It was great fun and they were squealing with joy, going faster and faster, but when they were all completely dry they stopped to discover that now, it wasn't just Eppie's hair that was tangled, but Eppie herself was tied in a knot!

‘Wow, bummer,' groaned Zeke.

He went back to class and sat down just as the lesson was starting. Then he quietly took the whole knotty mess out of his pocket and tried to undo Eppie under his desk. But as he fumbled and mumbled he pretty soon realised that she was actually in a super bad knot with her hands tied behind her back and her legs crossed with her feet up her nose.

Zeke tried to slip the string just once over Eppie's head. He tried to slip her arms around the string and tip her upside down very fast, and he tried turning her like a corkscrew while he counted to one hundred and sang
Row Row Row Your Boat
while breathing in. He also tried to lift her legs around her head and behind her back and between her fingers and under her nose and through one ear and out the other side — but that didn't seem to work either.

So finally Zeke said, ‘This is all your fault. You just aren't trying at all.'

‘I am so!' Eppie answered angrily.

‘You are not,' said Zeke. ‘You're just sitting there, happy as can be, while I do all the work.'

‘Am not,' said Eppie.

‘Are so,' said Zeke.