Moving Day (2 page)

“Mom,” I said.

“Isn’t it
great
?” Mom said, all excitedly. “Look at the gingerbread trim around the front porch! And how exciting is the fact that we even
have
a front porch, where we can sit outside and enjoy the summer breeze?”

“And have ice cream,” Mark said. “Right? We can sit out there and enjoy ice cream.” Because ice cream is all Mark thinks about. Besides bugs and trucks and sports.

“We sure can,” Mom said. “And see that bay window on the third floor in the front? That’ll be your room, Allie.”

My room looked darkest and creepiest of all.

“Those trees sure are big,” Kevin said.

“Those trees,” Mom said, “are over a hundred years old. Just like the house.”

Which, looking at it through the car window, I could totally believe. Our new house looked
more
than a hundred years old. It looked so old that it was falling apart, practically. It looked like all those houses on those TV shows my mom likes to watch, TV shows called things such as
Please Come Fix Up My House
and
My House Is Really Old. Won’t Someone Fix It, Please?

Only this wasn’t a TV show. This was real life. And no nice team of carpenters and pretty designers was going to come and fix it up. My mom was going to have to fix up our house—with Dad’s help, I guess—herself.

I don’t mean to sound like a spoilsport, but the truth is, I really didn’t think she was going to be able to do it.

Because the house we were sitting in front of looked beyond fixing.

Also, the house we were sitting in front of looked something else. I didn’t want to mention it in front of Mark and Kevin, because one of the rules—which I was going
to write down as soon as I got home—is that
You shouldn’t scare your little brothers
(unless they’ve done something to deserve it, of course).

But the truth was, that house looked haunted to me.

Suddenly, I didn’t want my ice cream anymore.

Also, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to move anymore, even if it
did
mean Dairy Queen every night, a new, possibly noncrying best friend, and a kitten.

Instead, I wanted everything back the way it was, before Mom and Dad said I could have a kitten, before they said we were moving, and before I’d accidentally touched my best friend’s uvula with a spatula.

Only that turns out to be one of the hardest rules to learn of all:
You can’t go back.

But even though you can’t go back, you
can
keep things from changing more. If you try hard enough.

And I knew then that that was what I had to do.

I just didn’t know how. Yet.

Mary Kay cried when I told her that it looked like we were moving. Which I guess was no big surprise, since Mary Kay cries about everything.

Except that this was one of the few times I actually felt like crying with her.

“You can’t move
now
,” Mary Kay said. “It’s the middle of the school year. It’s against the rules.”

There’s a lot of stuff I don’t know about—like friendship and fixing up old haunted houses, for example.

But one thing I do know about is rules.

“I’m sure that’s not true,” I said. “Because if it were, my mom and dad wouldn’t be making us do it.”

“Well,” Mary Kay said, “you’d better make sure they check. Because this new school might not even let you in in the middle of the semester like this.”

That’s the other thing about Mary Kay. She kind of thinks she knows everything.

“Well,” I said, “Mom said if we move, we
have
to go to this new school, because we’ll be living in a new school district. So I don’t think I have much of a choice.”

“You make it sound like you want to move,” Mary Kay said, all accusingly.

“Of course I don’t want to move,” I said. I hadn’t even told her the part about the house maybe possibly being haunted. But I did tell her the part about the kitten.

This just made her cry harder. Which didn’t make any sense at all. I mean, you would have thought she’d have been a
little
happy for me, on account of the kitten.

Except that she wasn’t.

“You know if you get a kitten I won’t be able to come over,” she said through her tears as we waited for the crossing guard, Mrs. Mullens, to let us cross High Street. “I’m allergic to cats!”

“You never come over, anyway,” I pointed out. We always play at Mary Kay’s house, because she says my brothers are too rough. All because one time when she came over to my house and we were playing lions (the only game Mary Kay will
ever
play), Mark decided he was a killer lion from a rival pride and pounced on Mary Kay from the coffee table. Not surprisingly, this made her cry.

“Yes,” Mary Kay said. “But now I
really
won’t.”

“It will be okay,” I said, to reassure her. “I’ll come see you.”

“No, you won’t,” Mary Kay said, still crying. “You’ll be too busy with your new friends, and your k-kitten!”

I knew this was probably true, but I didn’t say so, because one of the rules of friendship that I wrote down is
You should only say nice things to your friends, even if they’re not true.
This makes them feel better, and then they like you more.

Being liked is important. If no one likes you, then you have to eat lunch by yourself, like Scott Stamphley did when he first came to our school and no one could understand anything he said because of his New York accent.

“I’ll never be too busy for you, Mary Kay,” I said as nicely as I could, considering how mad she was making me. “Although raising a kitten
is
a lot of responsibility. More responsibility than raising a hamster.”

“No, it isn’t,” Mary Kay said.

“Yes,” I said to her. “It really is.”

“I don’t think you should be so happy about moving,” Mary Kay said. “Because, first of all, if you move it means you won’t be able to walk to school with me anymore.”

I just looked at her when she said this, because walking to school with Mary Kay isn’t actually all that much fun. She is so afraid of everything that if Buck—that’s the name of the horse who grazes in the last field that’s left in Walnut Knolls (without houses being built on it, I mean), and which also happens to be right next to the sidewalk we take to school—has his head over the fence, she runs away. She’s scared of Buck’s huge teeth, even though I
showed
her how to hold her hand flat so Buck’s teeth can’t nip her palm when we give him leftover Fruit Roll-Ups from our lunches or whatever.

You have to know about these things if you are going to be a veterinarian.

But, remembering the rule about only saying nice things to your friends so they’ll like you, I said, “Well, that
will
make me sad. But I’ll probably get used to it. Eventually.”

Apparently this answer wasn’t good enough for Mary Kay, though, because she added, “And also, if you move, you won’t be able to look for that kid’s brain in the bushes anymore.”

Which I didn’t think was a very nice thing for her to point out. Especially since she knows how much I want to find that kid’s brain.

And it wasn’t as if I weren’t already freaking out about maybe having to move into a haunted house and start at a whole new school. I mean, except for the part about the kitten—and maybe getting a better best friend than Mary Kay—I didn’t even
want
to move.

But I still didn’t know what I was supposed to do about it. It wasn’t like I had a choice about moving. I was just a kid!

“Look,” I said to Mary Kay, “let’s not fight. I’ll probably be moving in a few weeks, so let’s try to get along until then.”

“Quit saying that!” cried Mary Kay. “Quit saying you’re moving! It’s my birthday! I don’t want you to say you’re moving ONE MORE TIME TODAY.”

I felt even worse after that. I’d totally forgotten it was Mary Kay’s birthday…even though I should have remembered, since Carol was coming to school later with the pink-frosting cupcakes.

So I promised not to tell anyone that I might be moving for the rest of the day.

And I didn’t. I didn’t tell anyone at all that I might be moving, not even Ms. Myers when she told us we needed to pick a country that we would be studying individually for the rest of the year for our data reports. I didn’t say to her, “Well, Ms. Myers, you see, that will be a problem, because I might not be here anymore after next month.”

I didn’t tell Brittany Hauser I might be moving when she asked if I wanted to come over to her house to see the
fancy show cat her dad bought her mom as an anniversary surprise.

I didn’t tell Mrs. Fleener, the lunchroom lady, that I might be moving when she told me to remind my mother that she hadn’t paid for my lunch milk for next month.

I didn’t tell anyone at all that I might be moving.

At least until somehow I ended up standing next to Scott Stamphley during dodgeball in PE (which we were only playing because it was raining and so we couldn’t go outside to play baseball).

And the truth is, by then I was bursting to tell
someone.
And I figured it would be safe to tell Scott, since no girls in my class will talk to him. Not because of his New York accent. We all got over that after the first few days of meeting him. But because of his snake collection, which he insists on bringing to school every time there is a science fair. So it wasn’t like there was anyone he could tell, anyway.

“Want to know a secret?” I asked him as we stood in the back where the big red balls couldn’t get us. Mary Kay
was already out—she’d gotten hit by a ball first thing, because of course everyone wanted to strike her out on her birthday and make her cry. Which completely worked. So now she was sitting on the sidelines showing Mr. Phelps the red mark from the ball on her thigh and saying, “B-but it’s m-my b-birthday!” between sobs.

“Not really,” Scott said, about my secret question.

But since I know he was just saying that to be a pain, I told him anyway. “I’m probably moving.”

“Big deal,” Scott said. Which is one of the reasons why no girls like him. Because he is so rude to us. Also because he does things like burp loudly in class when Ms. Myers isn’t paying attention, which Brittany Hauser says is disgusting.

But I didn’t care that he was being rude to me, because it was just such a relief to tell someone.

“I probably won’t be going to this school anymore,” I told him.

“Good,” Scott said. “Then I won’t have to look at your stupid face anymore.”

Since this is just the way Scott is, I didn’t take offense. Also because I know if you gasp and flounce away when boys act like this, like Brittany Hauser does, you are really just giving them what they want.

“It’s going to be really hard,” I told him. “I’ll have to make all new friends.”

“That
is
going to be really hard for you,” Scott said. “On account of how ugly you are.”

If Scott had said that to Mary Kay, of course she would have started crying. But I’m used to the way boys talk because of my brothers.

So I said, “Look at this bruise I got falling off my bike.” And I showed him this huge green-and-blue bruise on my elbow, which doesn’t hurt but is very disgusting-looking.

And Scott, just like I’d known he would, leaned in real close to look at it, going, “
Sweet
…”

And that’s when I jumped out of the way and, like, thirty balls hit him in the face.

Yesssssss. Talk about sweet.

But I guess Scott didn’t think it was so sweet, because
later, as Carol came into our class holding all the cupcakes, Mary Kay walked up to me, crying, and said, “Thanks a lot for ruining my birthday!”

I was totally shocked. I couldn’t see how I’d ruined Mary Kay’s birthday, since I hadn’t been doing anything but coloring in a picture of a lion, which I’d planned on presenting her
for
her birthday.

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

“Why don’t you just ask Scott?” she said, and flounced away.

I looked over at Scott and saw that he was making a
giant
card for Mary Kay, which said,
Too bad Allie’s moving, now you’ll have no friends at all. Happy Birthday!

And a second later, Brittany Hauser and her best friend, Courtney Wilcox, came up to me and were, like, “You’re moving? How come you didn’t tell us?” right as Carol and Ms. Myers starting singing “Happy Birthday.”

But the birthday girl had already put her head down on her desk and was crying.

So I guess it wasn’t a very happy birthday for her after all.

The good part about being in a fight with my best friend was that it was going to make moving away from her much easier. For instance, now I wouldn’t have to worry about setting up “playdates” with her after we moved, or about buying her a going-away present, such as one half of a locket and myself the other half so we’d each have half a locket to remember the other person by (I saw that in a movie once).

But the bad part about having a fight with my best friend was that I didn’t have anyone to talk to about how upset I was about the actual moving thing. Because even though I was trying not to show it, because I didn’t want to upset my little brothers, I was really, really upset,
especially after Mom and Dad signed all the papers and finally got the keys to the new house. Because that’s when we went from “maybe” moving to “definitely” moving. Also when they took us over there for our first big tour, I couldn’t believe what I saw. I mean, if I’d thought the front of our new house was scary-looking, well, that was nothing compared to how scary it turned out to be on the
inside.

Because it was way worse than anything I’d ever seen on any episode of
Please Come Fix Up My House.

In fact, if you asked me, Mom and Dad could not have picked a gloomier, more depressing place to live in.

Well, maybe if they had picked the haunted house that Uncle Jay took me to at the county fair last summer. But that might actually have been nicer than the house we were supposedly going to live in.

Because at least the county fair haunted house had bowls of grape eyeballs and spaghetti-noodle guts you could stick your hands in.

But our new house didn’t have any gross yet cool stuff like that. Instead, it had these walls that were painted
some sort of dark gray (which Mom said she was going to paint over. Like
that
was going to make a difference) except where the people who owned the house before us had hung their paintings. There, the walls had these rectangular patches of brown.

And the house had these ceilings that swooped up forever that Mom kept going on all excitedly about. “Twelve-foot ceilings!” she kept saying, but I didn’t see what was so great about them. They just ended up in these cobwebby chandeliers that weren’t even a bit sparkly like my geodes.

And even though Mom kept going, “And just
look
at these magnificent wood floors,” the truth was, the wall-to-wall carpeting back at our old house was way nicer, if you ask me, than the nasty dark brown wood floors that we were walking on that went
creeeeaak
when you stepped anywhere on them.

As if all that weren’t bad enough, there were spiders
everywhere
, not just in the basement. And every room was colder than the last one. The whole place felt as if no one had lived in it for at least a hundred years.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was my room—the one Mom had pointed out from the car on Dairy Queen night. Because it turned out to be the coldest, darkest room of all. And the floor in there was also the creakiest—whoever heard of a bedroom that wasn’t even carpeted? And even though it had what Mom called a bay window that was like a turret in a castle that was round and almost all glass that she said Dad was going to build a window seat in that I’d be able to sit on and read my books, you couldn’t even see the town electrical tower from the windows, just trees and the tops of other people’s houses.

How was I going to be able to fall asleep at night if I couldn’t see the red light from the electrical tower blinking on and off, on and off, warning airplanes not to fly into it?

How?

When I asked Dad about that, he just went, “Well, Allie, you’re just going to have to learn to fall asleep a different way.”

Like that was even
possible.

As I stood there in the giant echoing cavern that was supposed to be my room, I couldn’t help remembering what had happened the night before. And that was that our Realtor, Mrs. Klinghoffer, had come over and put a big for sale sign in the front yard of our perfectly nice, noncreaky, nonhaunted split-level that for some reason my parents wanted to move away from.

Mrs. Klinghoffer had brushed her hands together all satisfied when she was done planting the sign and looked at me staring at her from the dirt pile that will soon become the house behind ours, where I was digging for more geodes to add to my rock collection (which I will soon have to throw away). She’d smiled, and then she’d said, “Don’t worry, Allie. This sign won’t be here long. Your old house will sell in no time.”

I know it’s a rule that
You’re not supposed to hate people, especially grown-up people.
I know it’s a rule because I wrote it down in my book of rules right after Mrs. Klinghoffer drove away.

But the truth is, I’d sort of hated Mrs. Klinghoffer right then.

And the thing was, Mrs. Klinghoffer had been totally wrong. I hadn’t been worrying about our house not selling. What I had been worrying about was somebody buying our house before Mom and Dad had time to realize what a horrible mistake they were making, selling it in the first place.

But I guess I was the only person in our family who thought that. Even Mark and Kevin didn’t agree with me about our new house stinking. I could tell by the way I could hear them crying, “Sweet!” and “Cool!” over their new rooms across the hall from mine.

And it wasn’t just that they each finally had their own rooms and didn’t have to share. They actually seemed to love their horrible, dark, boxlike rooms at the top of the third floor (all the kids’ rooms in the new house were on a floor by themselves, sharing one bathroom—that, by the way, was really old-fashioned with a bathtub that had feet on it and spiders in the drain).

The reason Mark and Kevin loved their new rooms (besides the fact that they didn’t have to share anymore) was because there was a heating grate in the wall that
separated their two rooms, and they’d figured out that they could open the grate up and talk to each other through it. And when they did that, their voices sounded all weird, like they were communicating from outer space or something. They’d already made up a new game: space shuttle. The game went like this: One person sat on one side of the grate and the other person sat on the other, each in his own room. Then each person opened the grate on his side.

Then one person went, into the grate: “Houston, Houston, this is the space shuttle. Do you read me? Over.”

Then the other person went, into the grate: “Space shuttle, space shuttle, this is Houston, we read you. Over.”

Then the other person went: “Houston, we have a problem. Repeat. We have a problem. Thrusters are ON FIRE. Repeat. Thrusters are ON FIRE. Over.”

And so on.

Yes, it
was
stupid. But what can you expect? They’re little brothers. It doesn’t take much to make them happy.

Mark and Kevin didn’t see the huge problems ahead—that this house was too big and too broken-down for Mom, even with Dad’s help, to fix by herself, especially
without the help of a TV carpenter or pretty designer. That we were going to have to switch to a whole new school in the middle of the year. That we were going to have to leave behind not just our rock collections—those of us who had them—but our best friends.

And okay, maybe our best friends hadn’t been the greatest, but they’d still been our best friends, who were, strictly speaking, better than no best friends. You don’t come across a best friend—even not-so-great ones—every day. Best friends are actually hard to find. Even the kind who aren’t actually speaking to you at the moment.

Mom and Dad were asking us to give up all this, and for what? Dairy Queen every night? A kitten? To move to a broken-down, possibly haunted house from which we couldn’t even see the electrical tower? It was so unfair!

Besides, Mark and Kevin were too young to see what Mom and Dad were doing: sticking us kids up at the top of the house—well, as close to the top as we could be aside from the attic, which you could reach by a trapdoor in the ceiling of the hallway between our three rooms. Yes, really, a trapdoor, which you pulled down
with a cord—on purpose so that they could Be Alone and Get Away From Us Kids.

Mom and Dad claimed this wasn’t true, of course. But when I accused them of it, I caught them smiling a little. Then they said, “Now, Allie…have you given any thought to the kind of kitten you want?”

They may think just because I’m nine I can’t see through what they’re doing—trying to change the subject of wanting to stick us kids on a floor by ourselves so they can be alone.

But I can see that that is
exactly
what they’re doing.

And all I can say is that when we finally move in and something (such as a disembodied zombie hand) comes crawling out of that attic to get us (I saw this happen in a movie once) and our screams pierce the night, and Mom and Dad have to come running up all those twisty stairs to get to us, well, they deserve what they find when they finally reach our bloodied and lifeless bodies.

Mom could see that I wasn’t too happy about the situation and that no amount of kitten talk was going to change things.

So she tried to make it better by going, “You know, you kids are going to get to be in charge of picking out your own paint color or wallpaper for your rooms.”

“Really?” Mark said. “Like, I can have wallpaper with trucks all over it? Or bugs?”

“Anything you want,” Mom said.

“Cool,” Kevin said. “I’m getting purple velvet wallpaper, just like at Lung Chung, the Chinese food restaurant.”

“Anything you want within reason,” Mom corrected herself. “Wouldn’t you rather have nice sailboat wallpaper, Kevin?”

“No,” Kevin said.

“What about pirate ships?” Dad suggested.

“If they’re velvet pirate ships,” Kevin said.

“I want pink-rose wallpaper,” I said. “And pink wall-to-wall carpeting.”

“But, Allie,” Mom said, “that’s what you have in your room in the old house.”

“Exactly,” I said firmly.

“But where’s the fun in that?” Mom wanted to know. “Don’t you want to try new things?”

“I do,” Kevin said. “I want to try velvet.”

“Why don’t you kids go outside to play for a while?” Dad said.

“Right,” Mom said. “Dad and I just have to do a little more measuring, then we’ll be ready to leave.”

Mark and Kevin groaned. They didn’t want to go outside. They liked playing inside the new house, not just because of the heating grate but because it has all these long hallways and secret passageways to play in (no, really: the house has these back staircases and rooms for the servants to use back in the olden times, when people had maids and stuff).

My brothers didn’t mind that the long hallways were dark and creepy and the secret passageways smelled like the inside of Scott Stamphley’s shoe that one time he dared me to sniff after PE.

The reason my brothers didn’t mind about this was because brothers are not very sensitive. Kind of like parents.

That is a rule that I have to remember to write down, by the way:
Brothers and parents aren’t very sensitive.
I don’t
mean that they aren’t very sensitive like Mary Kay, who cries all the time. I mean that, a lot of the time, little brothers just don’t
get
stuff. Like that long creepy hallways aren’t fun to play in, and that our parents are sticking us up on the third floor to get rid of us.

I, on the other hand, hurried to take Mom’s suggestion and rushed outside, even though it was fall and so getting kind of cold out, also dark earlier and earlier. I would have done anything to get out of that crummy house, even stand in the cold and dark waiting for Mom and Dad to get done measuring.

That’s how much I hated our new house.

The house had a pretty big backyard, but there was no swing set or anything to play on back there. Just trees and yard. And there were no geodes that I could find and use to start a new rock collection after my current one got thrown out. There was nothing in our new yard but some bald patches where there used to be grass.

But there was one tree that had branches low enough that you could climb them. So Mark and Kevin started climbing.

“Come on, Allie,” Mark called to me from the lower branches (which were sagging beneath his weight). “Climb with us.”

“You’re so dumb,” I said to him, in a spurt of disbelief over his insensitivity. “Can’t you see what’s happening?”

“No,” he said. “Except that you’re in a bad mood.”

“Mom and Dad are making a huge mistake buying this new house,” I informed him.

“I like the new house,” Kevin said. “I’m going to get velvet wallpaper just like at Lung Chung.”

While Lung Chung is Kevin’s favorite restaurant because it is very fancy, and Kevin likes fancy things, it’s not my favorite. Because in addition to having velvet wallpaper, it also serves turtle soup. It even keeps a turtle in a big plastic pond—with its own island to sit on—on the floor inside the door when you walk in.

So far no one in our town has ever ordered turtle soup. I know, because I check the turtle every time we go there, and it’s always been there.

But you never know. Someone could order the turtle
soup any day. And when that day comes, the turtle will be gone. This is cruelty to animals, if you ask me.

Thinking about that turtle always makes me mad.

“Mom already said you couldn’t have velvet wallpaper,” I pointed out.

“No, she didn’t,” Kevin said. “She said I could get velvet
pirate
wallpaper.”

“There’s no such thing, Kevin.”

“Yes, there is. And I’m going to get a lamp like they have on all the tables at Lung Chung, too.”

“You can’t have a red stained-glass lamp in your
bedroom
, stupid.”

“Yes, I can,” Kevin said. “And
you’re
stupid not to like this house. This house is the
best.
”

“No, it’s not,” I said. Maybe it was because I was thinking about that turtle at Lung Chung. Or maybe it was just because I was thinking about our house. In any case, suddenly, I was really, really mad. “It’s dark and cold and ugly.”