“Okay!” The reporter rubbed his hands together gleefully. “Now to show off the whole menu!” The girls all giggled again, enjoying the photo-shoot even more than they expected to with the charismatic reporter acting as director. “Go pop your panties on the table and get back into these positions for me.” The girls did not need telling twice and, moments later, were lining up in the same formation stark naked, the younger girls kneeling proudly in front showing off their cute young cunts.

“Wow what a menu!” Frank exclaimed cheerfully. “Let’s do arms by the side first. Chests forward, remember!” The girls all grinned and posed as they were told, their delicious young bodies totally exposed. Blushing furiously, Colin took the pictures then signalled to Frank that he was done. “Okay, upsetting as it is to cover those tasty treats,” chuckled Frank, “We’re going to need to do some covered ones. So, elegantly as you can, please, put one arm across your chests and a hand covering your crotches. Hmm…” He looked at the tableaux before him. “That doesn’t look quite right.” The standing teens and those kneeling sideways on looked elegant and somewhat provocative but the four youngsters at the front looked like they’d been walked in on in the shower. “You four, stand up for me.” He instructed and the stew girls did as they were told. “Now you and you, and you and you,” he divided them into pairs, “face each other and hug then turn your faces towards me. Yes!” He looked pleased with himself as the giggling young girls, still on their knees, embraced, their bodies sideways on to the camera and naturally covering each others’ modesty. “Let’s have you two a little further in.” He instructed the kneeling buffet girls and they both shuffled forward on their knees.”Perfect!” he grinned. “Go ahead, Colin!”

“How about we try a couple of other poses?” He suggested once the photographer was finished. “Sound good?” The naked school-girls all agreed enthusiastically. “Let’s have you all lined up, sideways on, in height-order this time, tallest to shortest.” He waved his hand to indicate they should go from left to right. “There’s not a lot of space so squash up nice and close!” The girls giggled as they did as he asked, little Sabrina at the front of the line with Lisa behind her, then Nina then Tiffany and so on all the way to Janice right at the back. “You second from the front,” he pointed, “Lisa was it?” the pretty brunette smiled and nodded. “Pop your arms around your friend in front’s chest like your hugging her,” he instructed, “and, Sabrina? Put your arms over to top of hers and hold her hands with yours. Lovely! Now the rest of you, reach forward and put your hands on the elbows of the girl in front then turn your heads to me and smile.” Colin captured the lovely scene then Frank thought for a moment about the final pose.

“Ah-ha!” He grinned as the composition occurred to him.”Let’s have you four up on the edge of the roasting pits.” he told the youngest girls. “Lean back and hold onto the spits, but try not to actually put your weight on them. Two on each side.” The stew girls giggled as they hopped up onto the stone platforms. “Now let’s have the rest of you lined up with your backs to me, tallest four in the middle.” The teens lined up as instructed with Helen ending up on one end of the line and Laura on the other. “Now slip your arms around each others’ waists and look over your shoulders at me.” The girls all grinned as they posed, showing off their meaty rumps. “Surely the most prudish of censors couldn’t object to a view like this!” The camera let out another burst of clicks while the girls held the pose.

“There we go!” Frank smiled. “I think we’ve got everything we need?” He looked at Colin who confirmed. “Lovely. I want to thank you all for bring so delightful and obliging.” He smiled with genuine warmth at the girls, many of whom blushed and all of whom smiled back. “I really am going to try to come back on Saturday and make a follow-up report about the event itself and hopefully sample some of the meat! I can’t promise, as if something else comes up that I have to cover, I’m going to have to go deal with that but if I can be there, I will!”

“I’m sure we’d all like to thank Mr… Frank.” Mrs Henderson smiled, using her assembly voice. “And Colin of course. I am certainly looking forward to reading your story. Let’s show our appreciation, girls!” The still-naked school-girls all clapped politely and Frank gave a formal bow before giving a cheeky wink that every girls felt was directed at them. The two journalists shook hands with the head mistress and waved at the girls before Mrs Jennings, the school secretary, came to escort them back to their car.

“Well I think that went very well indeed!” Mrs Henderson addressed the girls who were awaiting further instructions, wondering if they should be putting their uniforms back on. “Now I’m pleased to tell you that, since everyone will be busy on with the feast on Saturday, in one capacity or another,” she added with a grin which made the girls chuckle, “this afternoon’s lessons have been cancelled so everyone can enjoy a little free time today instead. Pop your clothes back on but then go to your rooms and change into your casuals for lunch then the afternoon is your own!”

“Hey you know what we should do?” Laura grinned to Helen as they trotted up the stairs to their bedroom, their uniforms distinctly more dishevelled than they had been earlier that morning.

“What?” asked Helen. “Go on?”

“We should find the others and edit those photos we took the other day! I only got a quick look at them and I’d love to see the project finished before I… you know!”

“Get chopped up for my dinner?” Helen teased and stuck out her tongue, making her friend giggle. “Great idea! Let’s talk to them at lunch!”

A little less than ninety minutes later, the four room-mates, dressed now in comfy casuals, were in the computer lab picking out the best fifty photos of the several hundred they had taken in the woods and applying filters that tuned them into sepia-toned, Victorian-style works of art.

“Let’s try some in colour!” Helen suggested, taking a group shot and softening the focus then over saturating the colour giving the image a surreal, arty look.

“Wow that’s great!” Emily grinned. “Let’s pick some different ones and do them like that. Then maybe we can turn some into greyscale and enhance the contrast?” The girls all took it in turns making adjustments to their personal favourites.

“We can get these printed up, right?” Charlotte asked. The printing for exams and work-sheets was all done on the large, industrial printer in the computer lab which was also used for printing up the school brochures, certificates and event programmes, capable of compiling and producing finished booklets or paperback books if programmed properly.

“Of course!” Helen grinned. “I want my mum and dad to have one and we should really donate one to the school library!” She giggled. “Hey, maybe we should give them out to the catering students too as a fun keep-sake!”

“Let’s think about that!” Chuckled Charlotte, loving the artistic pictures but not sure quite how widely she wanted her nudes distributed. She was not a meat-girl after all! “I think there’s templates for photo-books on here…” She took control of the mouse. “Yeah! Here we are!” She opened a desktop publishing program and selected the square photo-book template. “Let’s get the photos ready and get it compiled then we can ask Miss Lawrence about printing it out!” Miss Lawrence was the IT teacher and also the only member of staff with a full grasp of how to operate the industrial printer.

The book template offered whole-page images or grids of four quarter-page pictures. The girls opted to alternate between the two, the very best photos, edited in different ways, getting the whole-page treatment and the less striking ones laid out four to a page. For a couple of their favourites they presented them as full-page images then, on the page that would be facing it when the book was open, the same picture but with four different filters.

“Hey look!” Helen brought up another part of the template. “You can do a grid of twelve two. I think it’s meant as a sort of index. You know?” She turned to her friends. “Like you get on the back of a calendar?” The other girls nodded. “But you can add as many of these pages as you want!” She exclaimed. “I reckon we should put all the pictures we took, the ones that didn’t get messed up anyway, unedited. I think people would like to see that, like a behind the scenes sort of thing?” The other girls agreed and soon the book was finished apart from the cover. For that, they selected a colour picture of Laura, Charlotte and Helen which Emily was carefully edited into from another shot. With the slightly blurred focus and over-saturated colours, nobody would be able to tell that she was not part of the original composition unless they already knew.

“What are we going to call it?” Laura asked, leaning back in her chair to admire their handiwork. Before anyone could answer, the door to the computer lap opened and Miss Lawrence came in.

“Hello, girls!” She smiled. “Nice to see you here! What are you working on?” She came over and looked at the screen over their shoulders. “Oh how lovely!” She exclaimed. “Like classical nymphs!”

“That’s the perfect title!” Emily sat up and grinned. “Classical Nymphs! Thanks Miss!” She typed out the title in a large, swirly font and super-imposed it, with an embossed effect, on top of the picture. Then, in smaller characters but the same font, she added all four of their names along the bottom, in alphabetical order by surname to avoid arguments. “We should do a title page too.” She opened a blank page and wrote the title and names out again, in the same font but solid black this time. “Then if anyone asks for a signed copy, we’ve got space!” She grinned again, very pleased with herself and their combined work.

“That looks really professional, girls!” the teacher who was always keen to support her students’ personal projects congratulated them. “Just let me get this started then I’ll come check through the formatting with you and we can look at getting you some copies printed out.”

“Oh thank you!” Helen beamed. “That’s what we were hoping for!”

“I’ll be right with you.” Mrs Lawrence smiled, walking over to the printer. She took a memory stick out of her pocket and stuck it into the control panel then pressed a few buttons and set the machine running to print out a test copy. It began to whir noisily, the inner workings clattering in that slightly mysterious way of large printers and photocopiers. Soon there was a hum and a thin, A4 brochure was spat out into the waiting tray. She picked it up and had a quick thumb through to check all was as it should be then told it to start printing the six hundred copies that had been requested.

“What’s that, Miss?” Laura asked innocently, genuinely intrigued.

“Ooh well I’m not supposed to show anyone just yet,” the friendly young teacher grinned, “but since it’s you…” She handed to test-copy to Laura and the other three girls circled around her, leaning in to see.

“Oh wow!” Helen exclaimed as the friends leafed through the booklet together. “That’s so cool!” The front cover was fairly plain – the same blue as their their uniform blazers with the school crest in the middle. The back had no test and was a picture of the front of the school, the grand facade that was the equal of any English Heritage property. The text on the front in gold letters, using an understated and elegant font said “Welcome To” at the top, “Hamilton Hall Private School for Young Ladies”, giving the school its full name, under the logo then at the bottom, in a slightly fancier font, was printed “Bicentennial Celebration” followed by the year, beneath which in the same font but much smaller letters was the full date of the feast written out formally, in long-form.

Inside the front cover was a reproduction of the painting of the three Hamilton sisters which hung in the dining hall, taking up the full page. On the first proper page was the more or less expected blub about the school itself, its ethos and achievements, re-using many of the photos of smartly-uniformed, smiling girls engaged in all number of scholastic and sporting activities from the brochures that were sent out to enquiring parents of potential new students. Next came a two-page spread written by the head mistress summarising the Hamilton’s adventure and the feast that was to be recreated, interspersed with italic quotes directly from Lord Hamilton’s own writings and reproducing some of the photos from the journal, including the three cooking girls and, Laura was pleased to see, Polly’s butchered carcass. Although separated by two hundred years, knowing next to nothing about her and sharing nothing other than the method of their death, the teen found she had developed a certain feeling of kinship for the oft-overlooked young maid.

The next pages were where things got really interesting! The next three double-page spreads contained profiles of the girls who would cook, presented in their “teams”. A half page was dedicated to each girl, prominently featuring the photos they had posed for at the second inspection. The casual one was by far the biggest, showing off not only the girls’ bodies but their personalities too. To the right of these, small enough that on top of each other they formed the same height was the larger picture, were the front and back shots. Next to the photos in each profile was a column of text listing the girl’s name, date of birth, top subject and favourite food.

“Guess they didn’t both with the quotes thing, after all!” Helen laughed, taking the brochure from Laura and flicking to the second spread of photos to find her own profile.

“Yeah well, what are we gonna say?” chuckled Laura. “Bon appetite? Enjoy my ass?” All four girls giggled.

“At least I look good!” Helen smiled contentedly at the small pictures of herself. “Nice memento!”

“Classiest porn mag I ever saw!” teased Emily. “Oh come on!” She giggled. “You don’t think the dads and brothers are gonna be enjoying all those nudie pics? Hey,” she turned to Laura, her brow furrowed, “where are you? Shouldn’t you be in this group?” The double-page spreads were arranged by age-group – the first one featuring the stew girls, the next the spit-roasters and the third the older teens for the buffet.

“I’m not cooking on Saturday, remember?” Laura sighed a little. “They probably didn’t put me in.”

“No, here you are!” Helen turned the page then turned the brochure around for Laura to see. “You’ve got your own page! Sort of, anyway!” she added with a giggle. Under Laura’s profile there was a brief explanation that she was had been butchered as a treat for the other meat-girls, to honour Polly the maid. Beneath this was a larger version of the photograph of the three naked Hamilton sisters standing smiling with the villagers who were soon to cook and eat them. Laura took the glossy brochure back and read her page over again – it was so strange to read about her own death in past tense but she supposed it made sense, since these brochures, the finished copies now starting to build up in the tray at the end of the printer, were to be handed out on Saturday but which time she’d be nothing but leftovers and happy memories.

“Wow…” The page after the one where her profile appeared was the inside of the back cover which was mostly test over a faded-out portrait of Lord and Lady Hamilton, thanking everyone for coming, listing all those to whom thanks and acknowledgement were owed including the various students from the local college who had helped out in various capacities as well as a message urging attendees to support the school by buying the Blu-Ray or digital file of the footage from the day, both of which would apparently come with digital access to the photographs that would be taken alongside the video. She closed the brochure and starred silently at it on her lap for a few moments.

“Something wrong?” Helen put a hand on her friend’s shoulder, worried by her sudden quietness. Miss Lawrence was gathering up the printed copies and stashing them in brown cardboard boxes to keep them safe until they were due to be given out on Saturday.

“No.” Laura assured her, patting the comforting hand with her own. “It’s just, reading this, is all suddenly seemed more real. It’s got a game or a play we’re doing or something. We really are going to be cooked and eaten and then that’s the end of our story.”

“True!” Helen sighed a little wistfully. “But it’s not like we’re going to be forgotten in a long time and honestly, I find it pretty hot and exciting that all those people are coming because they want to eat my meat! Makes me feel special!”

“I what the mums and dads are thinking?” Charlotte speculated as Laura smiled again and passed the brochure to Emily. “Like, are they excited about eating girl-meat? Do they think it’s weird and gross but they’ll try some to support the school?”

“Hey are you saying my ass is weird and gross?” Helen teased, turning around and wiggling it at Charlotte.

“No worse than your face!” Charlotte giggled and stuck out her tongue. “And less shit comes out of it too!”

“I was kinda wondering the same thing!” Helen admitted once everyone’s giggled had died down. “But more about whether they were looking forward to it because they want to know what cooked school-girl tastes like and are looking forward to a great meal or because they want to see naked girls and watch them snuffed?”

“Why not both!” Emily suggested with a giggle. “Dinner and a show!”

“Too bad I’m just the support act, huh?” Laura chuckled. “Are you looking forward to my meat, at least?” she asked Helen.

“Hell yeah!” The red-head replied with a broad grin. “Think they’ll let me watch while they slaughter you too? That would be kinda… interesting!”

“We can ask.” Laura smiled gratefully. “I’d like it if you were there, honestly.

“This is going to take a while, I’m afraid.” Miss Lawrence admitted, joining the girls in their little huddle. “But I love what you’ve been working on! Can you leave it with me? I’ll go through and do any formatting tweaks it needs then get you a copy each printed out by dinner time. Just pop in on your way to the hall, okay?” The girls all agreed to this happily and gave the teacher the memory stick which had all the original files on just in case she needed it. She promised to take good care of it and to return it to one of the girls who would be surviving the weekend. Afterwards, Emily and Charlotte decided to take books out onto the lawn and work on their tans while the two meat-girls opted to take a last bath together.

“Do you have any regrets about any of this?” Helen asked, laying back in the warm water with her head resting on Laura’s well-padded chest while the brunette idly teased her perky pink nipples with her finger-tip. “Wasn’t really the way I expected to go,” she admitted, as much to herself as to Laura, “and certainly not quite so soon but honestly, I can’t think of anything I could do with my life that would be more exciting or feel more important.”

“Just one, I guess.” Laura blushed a little. “I’ve never… you know! With a boy!”

“Nothing at all?” Helen tilted her head back a little to look up at her friend. “Not even hand stuff?”

“There was this boy the Summer before last…” Laura recalled. “When I was home for the holidays. I met him in the village near my parents’ house and we started walking together and we made out a few times but one evening we were going at it in the park, by the swings, and he’d just got up the courage to put his hand up under my shirt, not that there was as much to grab but then but still,” she recalled with a giggle, “when this woman came by with a little girls. It was his mum and sister. She pointed us out to her mum and she came over yelling her head off like something out of a horror movie! He just sort of froze and she grabbed him by his shirt and yanked him up, yelled at him something rotten then marched him off home, turning to tell me I’d better get home soon and better hope my parents didn’t find out what sort of girl I was!”

“Wow!” Helen gave a low whistle. “That sounds like a pants-pissing moment!”

“And the rest!” Laura chuckled. “I saw him out and about a few times after that but whenever I tried to talk to him he’d look terrified and just act like he didn’t notice me. I gave up after a while then I think they must have moved away by the next time I was home. What about you?”

“I sucked my brother’s dick at Christmas.” Helen informed her with casual abruptness. “Does that count?”

“Excuse me?” Laura laughed incredulously, sitting up a little and looking down at her friend in shock. “You what? Which one?”

“Michael, the older one.” She chuckled. “You know? The one you said looked like that actor when they dropped me off last time?”

“Oh yeah.” Laura nodded. The nineteen year old was no bad-looking, she remembered, and had nice eyes. Ginger hair like his sister. But still… “How come you never told me?”

“If you sucked your brother off would you go bragging about it?” Helen raised an eyebrow.

“I’d have to find it first!” Laura giggled, holding out her pinky-finger and wiggling it meaningfully. “Last I saw he was hung like a cocktail sausage!” Both girls giggled at the thought. “Mind you, even then he probably wouldn’t even notice unless I got in the way of his Playstation! But no, you’re right,” she admitted, “I guess I’d keep something like that to myself. So why’d you do it? Did you get drunk or something?”

“Kinda!” chuckled Helen. “But it was mostly to piss his room-mate off! He was trying so hard to get a blow-job off me that I blew my brother just to be contrary!”

“Okay!” Laura laughed, putting her hands on Helen’s modest boobs and starting to massage them gently. “You’ve got to tell me the story now!”

“Well, it was a few days before Christmas,” Helen began the tale, “after we’d gone home for the holidays. Mum and Dad were going to some boring work dinner and Josh had agreed to take Amy and her friend to a movie. They said I could go with them but I didn’t fancy it but didn’t really feel like being stuck at home all on my own either so I asked Michael if I could come over to his.”

“Makes sense.” Laura nodded, still fondling Helen while her own boobs served as pillows for the story-teller.

“So we’re there and we’re eating pizza and stuff when his mate Kyle he shares the flat with comes home and we’re all chatting but he starts looking at me funny. He asks Michael if he wants a beer and goes to the fridge but comes back with one for me too. Now I figure this is some kind of test to see if I’m cool or just some brat kid sister, or to try and wind me up for some reason, so I figured the best thing to do was just to drink it like it was no big deal.”

“Beer is so gross ‘though!” Laura made a face. “Did you suck his dick to get rid of the taste?”

“Call that a bonus!” laughed Helen. “So anyway, I’m drinking this beer, cool as you like as if I have it all the time when he says we should watch a movie but instead of some horror or action film like I expected he puts on this porn DVD!”

“Wasn’t that kinda awkward?” Laura frowned.

“Very!” agreed Helen, “And I really didn’t like the way he was watching me all the time so I just kinda shuffled closer to Michael and used his legs as a back-rest. He was on one end of the sofa by the way, and Kyle was on the other.” she explained, having missed out this somewhat important detail earlier.

“And you were on the floor?” asked Laura.

“Yeah!” Helen grinned cheekily. “Close to the pizza! So anyway, this movie’s playing and, I don’t really know what was going on as it didn’t have much of a story that I could see but anyway there’s this girl and guy in a kitchen and she’s wearing a school uniform even ‘though her tits are bigger than her head and she looks about thirty. They get into some dumb argument and she kneels down and starts blowing him. Kyle then starts going on about how talented she is and how hard it is to give a good blow-job. From what I could see, she was just bobbing backwards and forwards and I was getting a bit pissed off anyway so I told him he was full of shit and it was really easy but I understood why he didn’t know as he’d obviously never had one!” Laura chuckled at this, able to imagine the scene perfectly, down to the embarrassed look on the boy’s face.

“So then he tells me I’m just a dumb little girl who’s never done a blow-job in my life and I didn’t know what I was talking about. I mean, technically he was right but I wasn’t gonna let him know that so I just said ‘Whatever!’ and he said if I was so confident about it I should show him how easy it is! I don’t really know what he expected me to say to that but I smiled really sweetly and said ‘Oh, you’d like me to show you how easy it is to give a good blow-job, huh?’ and he said ‘Yeah, go on then!” and opened his legs wide but then I turned around and winked at Michael then started unzipping his jeans! Kyle was all like ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ and I told him ‘Showing you how good I am at blow-jobs of course!’”

“What did your brother say?” Laura asked, fascinated by this lurid tale.

“Well he didn’t get much of a chance!” giggled Helen. “I picked up a piece of pizza and shoved it in his mouth when he opened it to say something! By the time he’d chewed and swallowed I had him unzipped and in my mouth!” She grinned proudly. “And trust me, no boy is gonna stop a bee-jay once its started, even if it’s his kid sister doing it!”

“Well true!” laughed Laura. “So how was it?”

“Brief!” Helen giggled. “He came in my mouth in like a minute so I just swallowed, zipped him back and went back to my beer and pizza as if nothing had happened! Took Kyle at least half an hour to pick his jaw up off the carpet but he was way more respectful to me after that!”

“And what about Michael?” asked her friend. “Did it make things weird between you?”

“Neither of us have ever mentioned it again!” the red-head shrugged. “But yeah, that’s the full extent of my sexual experience with guys! Unless you count Mr Miller and that student guy getting to third base, that is?” she added with a giggle.

“I don’t,” teased Laura, “but I’m pretty sure that student guy is gonna count it! Do you think he’d ever seen a real pair of tits before?”

“Wow!” exclaimed Emily as the book was handed to her. “It looks even better than I expected!” The square, soft-back books that Miss Lawrence handed out to the four friends looked incredibly professional and the glossy paper they were printed on really showed the arty photographs at their best! The other three girls, not in uniform but dressed smartly for dinner as was required, all agreed.

“I hope you don’t mind,” the sweet-faced young teacher explained, “but I made a couple of extra copies. One to put in the school library as I think a book of this quality produced totally but students here could be a real inspiration to the others and one for myself because, well,” she smiled warmly, “I just think the pictures are so lovely!” The girls all assured her that this was absolutely find then, one at a time beginning with a spontaneous act of thanks by Charlotte, went up and hugged her.

To keep the brand new books safe, both from getting lost or from getting scuffed or scraps dropped on them over dinner, Helen offered to take them up to the bedroom, promising to catch the others up. It seemed to the others that she was gone a little longer than it strictly should have taken and, indeed, the dinner was already starting to be served when she joined that at the table but she assured them that everything was okay and she had just been taking her time.

“Did it feel weird knowing that was your last ever dinner?” Helen asked as she and Laura strolled back up to their bedroom.

“Kinda!” Laura admitted. “Too bad it wasn’t as special as yours will be!”

“True!” giggled Helen. “But I guess things have to stop somewhere, or start, rather. Like, you’re getting slaughtered to feed the meat-girls who will be eaten on Saturday, maybe they should have slaughtered a first year to feed you tonight, and call someone’s little sister in to feed her last night…”

“Yeah, gets a bit complicated after a while!” Laura chuckled. “Hey, as long as you’re looking forward to tomorrow’s dinner?”

“Oh hell yeah!” Helen grinned from ear to ear. “I think I’ve made my feelings about your tits very clear? And as for your ass…”

“Well remember you have to share me with eleven others!” teased Laura.

“Oh that’s no problem!” Helen slapped her friend on the backside. “There’s plenty to go around!”

The time between dinner and showering was considered the girls’ own and, although they were required to go to their rooms after showering, apart from trips to the toilet of course, there was no formal bed-time. Those responsible for the school’s rules had learned many decades earlier that a curfew and formal lights-out only leads to girls trying to get around the rules but a strictly-enforced wake-up time with mandatory morning showers and attendance at breakfast, unless the student in question was genuinely ill of course, led to a culture of self-regulation and sensible bedtimes. So it was that, although the live-in supervisors who filled the parental role while the girls were at school were available to any girl who needed them, however late the hour, there was little in the way of security and certainly no night-time corridor patrols, a fact that Helen planned to exploit in a plan she explained to Laura in hushed tones while they lay on the soft grass outside looking through their new books. The sun was hanging low in the sky and it would soon be time for their nightly shower.

“Sounds fun,” smiled Laura after Helen had explained what she would need to do, “but I don’t get why?”

“For that,” Helen replied with a broad and cheeky grin, her green eyes sparkling, “you’re just gonna have to trust me! But I promise it’s gonna be worth your while!”

Later that evening, once they had showered and returned to their room, Laura lay awake under the covers. As Helen had instructed her, she had already slipped the small flash-light she kept in her night-stand into the pocket of her dressing gown. Helen had considered it best to let the other girls in the room in on the plan so they wouldn’t worry about their prolonged absence but both Charlotte and Emily had promised not to let Laura in on the secret. The excited teen glanced at the glowing hands of the clock beside her bed – it had been seven minutes since Helen had slipped out, as if to go to the toilet, and she had been told to wait for ten. After the longest three minutes of her life, she slipped out of bed and into her slippers and dressing gown.

“Good luck!” Charlotte whispered to her, giggling.

“Yeah!” Emily agreed. “Have fun!”

“Are you still not going to give me any sort of clue what’s going on?” Laura whispered back, a hint of pleading in her voice.

“Nope!” Emily grinned. “You’re gonna have to find out the old-fashioned way!” Laura chuckled and shook her head a little but made no more comment and let herself quietly out of the room.