by Meg Cabot
But I didn’t quit ballet. There is only one thing I like better than ballet, and that’s baseball, which is a good sport because you get to hit a ball with a bat. The harder you hit it, the better.
But unfortunately, you don’t get to hit the ball all the time. There is also the boring wait-until-it’s-your-turn-to-hit-the-ball part.
This is like ballet. The best part of ballet is the grand jeté. This is when you run and leap—as high as you can go with your legs spread far apart, like you’re flying, almost—into the air.
The worst part of ballet is anything to do with the barre, which is this thing they make you hold on to while you do pliés and stuff, which are a warm-up to the grand jeté.
I don’t mind when I swing my bat and I don’t hit the ball.
And I don’t mind when Madame Linda doesn’t think my grand jetés are the best in the class, and so she lets someone else wear her tiara during cooldown.
What I do mind is when people try to make me do things I don’t want to do. Such as move when I don’t feel like moving. Or not quit gymnastics when my body just isn’t very sproingy.
Not like the girl who was doing the back handsprings in her front yard. Her body was very, very sproingy.
Then I noticed that the girl who’d been doing the back handsprings had stopped doing them. Instead, she was standing up and staring at me over the hedge that surrounded her front yard and separated her yard from the alley between our houses.
“Hey,” the girl said, looking right at me. She had a big smile on her face. “Hi. Are you the new girl?”
I almost looked over my shoulder to see who she was talking to. Because, the new girl? That sure wasn’t me. I’m Allie Finkle. I’m not the new girl.
Then I remembered where I was.
And I remembered that, here, I am the new girl.
“Oh,” I said. “Hi. Yes. I’m Allie Finkle.”
“I’m Erica Harrington,” the girl said. She was smiling like crazy. It was hard to imagine her crying just because someone said she wanted to be the girl lion for a change. “And this is my sister, Missy.”
“Melissa,” the older girl with the baton corrected her, not in a very friendly way. She hadn’t stopped throwing the baton in the air and catching it. She was really very good at it. As good as Erica was at gymnastics.
“I’m in fourth grade at Pine Heights Elementary,” Erica went on, not even stopping to admire how good her sister was at baton throwing and catching. Which I guess would be natural, if you saw that kind of thing every day. “Missy is in sixth grade over at the middle school. What about you?”
“I’m in fourth grade, too,” I said. I was beginning to feel less sad than I’d felt before, when I’d been in the backyard and inside our terrible new house. In fact, I was beginning to feel a little—just a little—excited. I was beginning to feel excited because I was figuring something out. I was figuring out that Erica was the same age as me, and might—just might—end up being my new best friend.
I know it was too early to tell and everything. But, I mean, she lived next door to me and was in my same grade.
The thing was, she looked like she’d be so much better a best friend than Mary Kay, at least so far. She could do flawless back handsprings, had a sister in middle school who could toss and catch a baton, and she had shown no sign of crying during a nearly two-minute conversation.
Which was practically a world record as far as I was concerned.
But I really didn’t want to get my hopes up, because the whole day had already been such a big disappointment, what with the house and my room and everything. I mean, chances were a girl like Erica already had a best friend, anyway. I knew I shouldn’t let myself get too excited.
“I go to Walnut Knolls Elementary,” I said, trying to stay calm but already tripping over my words a little in my haste to get them out. “Only, I’ll be starting at Pine Heights Elementary next month, after we move in.”
Erica let out a polite scream to show she was excited, too.
“Maybe we’ll be in the same class,” she yelled. “Do you know who your teacher is going to be? Because there are two fourth-grade classes at Pine Heights. There’s Mrs. Danielson. She’s nice. But there’s also my teacher, Mrs. Hunter. She’s really nice. I hope you’re in my class!”
“I hope I’m in your class, too!” I yelled back. I yelled because Erica yelled. If someone is yelling from excitement, the polite thing to do is to yell back. That’s a rule. Or it would be when I got home.
“Stop all that yelling,” Melissa said. “You’re giving me a headache.”
“Oh,” I said, careful not to yell anymore. “Sorry.” To Erica, I said, “Do you like kittens? Because I’m getting one.”
“I LOVE KITTENS!” Erica yelled. “What kind are you getting?”
“Well,” I said, because I had been doing a lot of research on this ever since my parents said I could have one. “The breed really doesn’t matter to me, although I love Persians because they’re really fluffy, and I love fluffy cats. The important thing to me, though, is that I get a rescued kitten, because there are so many strays that need homes. So I’ll probably get whatever they have at the ASPCA when we go to look.”
“Our cat, Polly, is from the ASPCA,” Erica shouted. “Do you want to come inside and meet her? And see my dollhouse?”
“I’d love to meet your cat and see your dollhouse,” I shouted back.
“I said stop that yelling,” Melissa said. “And don’t you need to tell your parents where you’re going first?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “They don’t care. Sorry about the yelling.”
And that’s how I got to be friends with Erica from next door at the new house.
I’m not saying we were best friends, of course. Nothing like that! I mean, nobody mentioned anything about being best friends. I’m sure a girl like Erica has tons of friends, and maybe even three or four best friends. Who knows? It was fun just to be with her. Her house was almost exactly like our new house, only instead of being gloomy and depressing, Erica’s house was extremely cheerful and welcoming. That was because her parents had already done a really great job fixing their house up, so instead of gray paint on the walls there was pretty cream-colored wallpaper with tiny rosebuds on it.
And instead of the floors being dark brown, they were light brown and shiny, and they didn’t creak—or at least not in a bad way. And the chandeliers were sparkly and actually lit up when you turned them on, as opposed to the chandeliers in our house, which did nothing when you turned them on.
Erica introduced me to her cat, Polly, who is a beautiful calico who only hissed at me once. Then she showed me a funny button that you can press under the carpet in the dining room that rings a bell in one of the secret passageways by the kitchen. In olden times, that was to alert the cook that the family was ready for the next course to be served, like the salad course or whatever.
Erica and I had fun pressing the button until her mom came out and said if we went to play with Erica’s dollhouse she’d make us some hot chocolate.
So we went up to Erica’s room, which was just like my room in the new house, but fixed up all nice and pretty, with pink carpeting and a canopy bed like in my room back home.
Only Erica’s room wasn’t scary or depressing at all!
And in the turret part of Erica’s room sat this huge dollhouse—as tall as me—that Erica said had been in her family since her grandma’s days and that had lights you could really turn on and even actual running water so the dollhouse people could take a bath (except they couldn’t really because they were made of felt, and they’d melt if you put them in the water).
It was the nicest, fanciest dollhouse I’d ever seen. Kevin would have died of joy.
And best of all, Erica didn’t cry when I asked if I could be the girl doll. She didn’t even sniffle. She went, in a perfectly cheerful manner, “Okay. I’ll be the mother doll.”
And then, later, when I suggested that the baby doll get
kidnapped and a ransom note, including the baby doll’s cutoff ear, get sent to the house by the glass dolphin family, Erica didn’t get mad at all for my making the game too scary. Instead, she made the mother doll faint before she called the Counterterrorist Unit for help.
It was completely perfect.
We were making the glass cats solve the crime when all of a sudden Erica’s bedroom door burst open and this boy came in, going, “What’s with all the screaming in here?”
“Allie,” Erica said, all calmly, like boys burst into her room all the time, “this is my brother, John. He’s in eighth grade. John, this is Allie. Her family is moving in next door. We weren’t screaming, we’re just playing. These dolphins kidnapped the dollhouse baby. It’s a real tragedy. But it’s okay, because CTU is on the case.”
“You’re moving in next door?” John looked concerned. “Then I suppose you’ve heard.”
“Heard about what?” I wanted to know.
“About the reason the last family had to move out,” John said.
“No,” I said. “We never met them. They were all moved out when we got the keys.”
“Oh,” John said. He shook his head. “Then I probably shouldn’t say anything.”
“John,” Erica said, “what do you mean? The Ellises moved out because they retired and bought a condo in Miami.”
“Yes,” John said. “That’s what they want everyone to think. Just take my advice, Allie. Don’t go in the attic.”
“The attic?” I widened my eyes, thinking about that long pull cord in the middle of the hallway on the third floor and that movie I saw where the zombie hand came out of the attic and killed those people. “Why? What’s in there?”
John made out like he was shuddering. “Just don’t go up there. Okay?”
“John,” Erica said. “What are you talking about? There’s nothing—”
But then Mrs. Harrington came rushing in, going on about how come I hadn’t let my parents know where I was, and how they were looking all over for me and frantic with worry.
The whole time Mrs. Harrington was steering me down her cream-colored, rosebudded hallways, I kept thinking, How had this happened? How had I gone from happily playing kidnapped dollhouse baby with my new maybe best friend to there’s something evil living in the attic of my new house?
And what could that evil thing be? What could the Ellises have left behind that was so horrible an eighth-grader—who was as tall as my dad, practically—would drop his voice to a whisper when he mentioned it? As Mrs. Harrington guided me down the stairs and toward the front door, I went over in my mind all the things I’d heard of that lived in people’s attics.
Rats? No, that’s not scary enough to bother an eighth-grader.
Bats? Gross, but again, not scary enough.
Witch? Come on. They aren’t scary to eighth-graders. And they don’t live in attics.
Ghost? Well, it could be a ghost. But ghosts don’t really hurt people, do they? They just pop out and scare them.
And then, just as Mrs. Harrington was pushing me out the door, I remembered.
The disembodied hand. The disembodied hand had lived in the attic in that movie I had seen!
And I almost ran back inside Erica’s big comfy house and begged her mom to let me come live there with them.
Because that hand had been scary! Green, glowing, and so scary!
I didn’t have much time to think about it, though, because Mom and Dad were waiting for me in the Harringtons’ front yard, and they were really mad at me for going next door without telling them where I was going (even though back in Walnut Knolls I can go over to Mary Kay’s house without asking whenever I want. Well, pretty much).
But that apparently didn’t matter. I was in Big Trouble.
I tried to tell Mom and Dad what Erica’s brother had said. I tried to tell them all the way back to our house, and into the car, and all the way home.
But they both looked at me blankly. Mom kept saying, “Allie, we met the Ellises. They’re lovely people.”
Dad kept saying, “And we’ve been in the attic. There’s nothing there except a few old boxes.”
“Have you looked inside them?” I asked. “Because that’s probably where it is.”
“Where what is, Allie?” Dad wanted to know.
“The thing,” I said. I didn’t want to say it in front of Mark and Kevin, who were in the backseat with me, enjoying their vanilla twist cherry dip and vanilla twist butterscotch dip, respectively (my punishment for going off without telling my parents where I was going was that everyone else got ice cream at Dairy Queen on our way home. Everyone else but me).
“You know,” I said meaningfully to Mom and Dad. I didn’t want to scare Mark and Kevin by talking about what John had said in front of them.
On the other hand, they do have to grow up sometime. And this was, after all, a matter of life and death.
“The thing that could come out in the night and—” I pantomimed a hand choking me to death.
“Allie,” Mom said, “has your uncle Jay been letting you stay up to watch horror movies with him when he babysits you kids?”
“Maybe,” I said. Like I would ever give away my secret pact with Uncle Jay. He swore he’d never rat me out about the horror movies if I swore I’d never rat him out about what really happened to Dad’s scuba watch.
My mom says Uncle Jay, who is Dad’s brother, suffers from Peter Pan syndrome, meaning he never wants to grow up. But Dad says he’s just like all the other graduate students in his classes—slightly irresponsible.
Which is what they keep calling me for going over to Erica’s house without telling them and not watching my brothers like I was supposed to.
But if you ask me, going over to Erica’s was very responsible. Because if I hadn’t, no one in our family would know the truth about our new house.
That’s probably why Mom and Dad were able to get it for so cheap. How else could they afford such a big house, with so many bedrooms, even if Mom does have a job now, and Dad has a chair? Haunted houses are cheap. Especially ones you have to fix up yourself. Everybody knows that.
“Sweetie,” Mom says. “There’s nothing in those boxes but some old junk that we’re planning on throwing away as soon as we get the dumpster delivered. The next time we go to the house, I’ll take you up into the attic and show you.”
“I’m not going up there,” I declared firmly.
“I’ll go,” Mark said, cherry dip dribbling down his chin in a disgusting manner. “I’m not afraid.”
“I’m not afraid, either,” I said. “Except for you. I just don’t want to see either of you murdered in your bed by a zombie hand.”
“There are no zombie hands in the attic,” Dad said. “I don’t know what that boy next door was telling you, Allie, but he was pulling your leg.”
But they don’t know. Zombie hands can’t be stopped, no matter what you do to them. Even if you come after them with a chain saw, like the guy did in that movie I watched with Uncle Jay.
But what does that matter to Mom and Dad, anyway? They don’t have to sleep up there on the third floor right beneath the attic, with that trapdoor and that cord hanging down.
The truth is, we’re doomed.
And they don’t even know it. Or care. Mom even said, “Allie, I don’t like this kind of talk. You’re scaring your little brothers”—“No, she’s not,” both Mark and Kevin said, but she ignored them—“and if you keep up this kind of behavior—going over to strangers’ houses without telling us and spreading wild stories about zombie hands—I know one little girl who may not be getting a kitten after all.”
But if she thinks that’s going to stop me, well, she doesn’t know me at all.
And that night when we got home, after Dad got back from giving Marvin his evening walk, I sneaked out and wrestled that for sale sign Mrs. Klinghoffer had sunk into our yard right out of the ground. Then I hid it behind the dirt pile of the house they’re building behind ours.
/> I know if I ever get caught, it will mean worse than having to give up dessert. It will mean I won’t get my kitten for absolute sure.
But if no one else is going to try to save our family, well, I guess I’m just going to have to be the one to do it. What’s a kitten (especially one that you don’t even have yet) compared to keeping your whole family safe from potential evil, particularly in the form of a zombie hand?
Although I would have really liked a tiny gray-and-black-striped kitten like the glass one in Erica’s dollhouse. I’d have named her Mewsette—Mewsie for short—and given her a pink collar and let her sleep next to me on my pillow every night.
If I had a kitten like that, it wouldn’t matter if I looked out my window and didn’t see the electrical tower blinking on and off anymore every night. I’d have been able to fall asleep just fine without it, with Mewsie purring away next to me.
But what kind of pet owner would I be, bringing a kitten into a cold, dark, depressing house where she was just going to get her guts ripped out of her by the disembodied hand living in the attic? I mean, I couldn’t let that happen to an innocent kitten!
Especially if the only way I was going to get a kitten anyway was if we moved.
And I knew for one hundred percent certain that that was the last thing I wanted to do.
Oh, sure, I was going to miss not having Erica as a friend. It would have been totally nice having a noncrying friend.
But I couldn’t let my parents sell our house and move into the new one. I just couldn’t.
Because you can’t let your family move into a haunted house.
That’s not even a rule.
It’s a fact.
RULE #6
Whatever Brittany Hauser Says, Just Do It If You Know What’s Good for You
The only other person—besides Mary Kay, I mean—in my class who didn’t seem sad about the fact that I was maybe (okay: probably) moving away was Scott Stamphley. But that was no surprise.
At least Scott is consistent, seeing as how he hates all the girls in our class equally. Also, without any reason.
