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Me again! Let's hope I can be more helpful with this segment.

Zeda’s green eyes peeked at me sceptically from behind her teased mousy brown hair as we exited the bustling canteen

Too much physical description of Zeda in this one sentence. Focus either on the eyes or the hair; you can describe the other later.

I don't like all this background, friend profiling information that you give us about Kasia, Zeda, Lauren, and Phoebe. In a short story, you've got to keep extra information to a need-to-know basis, and most of the info-dump in the middle here is unnecessary. The best way to characterize the group and show how the interact is to, well, show how they interact. If you want to litter little how-it-all-began tidbits, you can do that subtly and work it through the prose. I especially think you should rework the paragraph where Kasia talks about herself. I'd keep all her self-description to this awesome line:

And me? I was just me, and I was damn proud of it.

The ironic thing is that you say this, like being "just me" is good enough and all that matters, but then you go on and keep describing. I think the effect of the character's personality will best show if you cut out the rest of the paragraph and keep this one line.

The banter between Zeda and Kasia is cute and humorous, but again, be careful about what needs to be said. In a short story (even a long-ish short story like this) everything needs to be important to the main plot/theme. Their back-and-forth conversation gives some nice character insight, but it's more background information than pertinent to the story. I'm not saying to cut it, necessarily, but think about how far you want to deviate, because the more you do, the more filler you're going to have.

I realised this was the first time I’d had the house to myself since mum and Russell married last year.

A ninth grader hasn't been home alone for over a year? At all? That's pretty hard to believe.

As I've been saying, the pace of this is dragging a bit, more like set-up for a novel than a short story. However, I'm intrigued as to how this will end, so good job! See you at part three.

~Evi