Agatha Parrot and the Mushroom Boy Read Online Free Page B

mum HATES buying raffle tickets and she makes it totally embarrassing. Usually she tries to sneak away early, but this time weall had to wait for Dad’s cake to be weighed, and that was going to be after the raffle. Thank goodness! If they’d weighed the cake before the raffle, it would have ruined my revenge on James as you’ll see.
    Mum was standing in the middle of the playground with Tilly swinging on her arm, and chatting away with some other mums (who all got tickets for themselves AND got tickets for their kids by the way).
    Suddenly . . .
    â€˜I say, COO-EE! Mrs Parrot? HELLO!’

    Mrs T cruised up alongside Mum, clutching a cake tin full of money. All the other mums laughed a bit and dived out of the way leaving our mum to face the Mighty Twelvetrees all by herself. Mum was already trying to be tough and pull her
no thank you
face, but it’s not as if she had any choice about it. Headteachers are specially trained to hunt down mean old mums.
    â€˜I just wanted to say . . .’ said Mrs T sadly, ‘. . . how jolly sorry I am that Tilly only got to say two words in the infants concert last week.’
    â€˜Pardon?’ Mum was caught completely by surprise. ‘Oh! It really doesn’t matter . . .’ she said feebly, trying to ignore the rolls of raffle tickets being waved right under her nose. Tilly was staring up at her crossly.
    â€˜I’m sure you’d want her to geta few more lines next time, wouldn’t you?’ said Mrs Twelvetrees. Tilly started hopping up and down excitedly. Mrs T did her killer lipsticky smile. ‘Tickets are five for a pound –
oh thank you!
– and who knows, maybe one day Tilly might get to sing a whole song . . .’
    KUD-DINK. Before Mum even knew it, she’d dropped some money into the cake tin and Mrs T had whizzed off to trap her next victim. ‘YOO-HOO! HELLO! I just wanted to say how jolly sorry I am that we didn’t have space to include Henry in the lunchtime ping-pong group this term . . .’
    Good for Mrs Twelvetrees. She needs to grab all the money she can to keep the staffroom emergency biscuit cupboard topped up or the teachers will start rioting. And that’s true.
    So anyway, Mum had bought ameasly five tickets. That meant it was one for her, one each for James, Tilly and Dad (wherever he’d got to) and OH YIPPEE WHAT A TREAT one whole ticket for me. It was number 610. Whoopee.
    Once Mrs T had worked out that she’d hoovered up every single bit of spare cash in the place, she rang her handbell CLANG DANG BLANG. ‘Action stations gang!’ she called out. ‘We’ll weigh the cakein a minute, but first we’ll draw the raffle. There’s lots of super-dooper prizes so good luck everybody!’
    â€˜WOOO!’ Everybody gave a big cheer for the super-dooper prizes.
    Martha was getting all excited. She was desperate to win a great big green peppermint milkshake thing somebody had made up. YUK! But that’s Martha for you. (The important thing is that the milkshake had a long stripy strawsticking out of it which you’ve got to remember. It turns up later on.)
    â€˜Now then chaps,’ said Mrs T. ‘Who would like to come and pull some numbers out of the bucket and pass them to me?’
    Ellie Slippin’s little brothers immediately ran forwards and then couldn’t stop so they both banged their heads on the bucket donk donk! They shoved their hands in and threw bundles of scrunched uptickets at Mrs Twelvetrees. Gosh if me and Ivy had done that we’d be DEAD, but a couple of the dads started laughing, so the Slippin twins went on to have a full-on ticket snowball fight which was brilliant, especially when all the other little tiddly tots joined in.
    I expect headteachers are supposed to get a bit ratty when this happens, but Mrs Twelvetrees had her cake tin full of dosh so she wastoo happy to care. She just picked a few tickets out of the kids’