Moving Day

by Meg Cabot

  So I pretended in the car to be happy about going to see our new house.

  But inside, I wasn’t so happy. Inside, I was thinking about running away. Because it was all so unfair. I mean, I had never wanted to move in the first place, or change schools, or throw out my rock collection. And now the one thing—well, besides the fact that I was going to get to go to school with Erica and Sophie and Caroline and maybe have Mrs. Hunter as my teacher—that I had been looking forward to—Mewsette—was being taken away from me.

  That was just wrong. So wrong.

  It seemed like it would totally serve Mom and Dad right if I ran away. Especially considering the fact that I was a celebrity animal activist now—which had turned out to be a pretty big surprise to my parents, but still hadn’t kept them from taking away my kitten—and all. If I just took my overnight bag—because all the rest of my clothes were packed up into boxes, I just had a few things, like my toothbrush and a change of clothes and my Anno Doll (which is the Raggedy Ann doll that I sleep with, which I’ve had since I was three and that’s all dirty and had a leg broken off where Marvin chewed it when he was a puppy, but Mom sewed it back on), and my book of rules stuffed into an overnight bag—and left, I could probably make it to Uncle Jay’s apartment building. It’s a long way to campus from our old house but from the new house it’s only a few blocks, actually.

  And then I could just live there with Uncle Jay and Wang Ba and get a kitten and no one could tell me not to. Uncle Jay would never tell me not to. He’d never even notice a tiny kitten, his apartment is so messy.

  But I never got around to running away, because I guess I fell asleep instead of packing, and by the time I woke up we had to get ready to go see the new house.

  Still. I was thinking about it. Don’t think I wasn’t.

  I knew I wasn’t going to like my room no matter what Mom had done to it. How could I? You can’t make a dark, drafty room warm and bright, no matter how much paint you throw at it.

  But I had promised Uncle Jay to pretend.

  So I pretended to be excited all the way over in the car. I pretended to be excited all the way up the front steps to the house. I pretended to be excited as Mom was unlocking the door.

  And then I walked through the door.

  I have to admit…I was surprised by what Mom had done to the place in just a few short weeks. While I’d been busy at school being tortured by Brittany Hauser and Mary Kay, Mom—with Dad’s help—had been busy painting, dusting off the chandeliers, changing the lightbulbs in them, and scraping the floors, making them all shiny and nice-looking.

  Oh, she hadn’t gotten to everything yet. The back passageways were still dark and scary-looking. And the backyard was still just mostly dirt patches with some scraggly grass growing in it here and there. And the new stove and refrigerator and dishwasher hadn’t arrived yet, so there were just empty spaces in the kitchen where these things would go.

  But all the spiders were gone.

  Until we got upstairs to the third floor, where the kids’ bedrooms were, and I saw that all the spiders were in Mark’s room. Only, fortunately, they weren’t alive. They were on his wallpaper.

  And not babyish cartoons of spiders, either, but actual grown-up drawings of them, and insects, too, with their scientific Latin names written next to them.

  Of course, Mark freaked out, he was so excited. Don’t ask me why anyone would want to live in a room with drawings of spiders and beetles and bees and flies and wasps and ants all over his walls. My brother wanted to, apparently.

  And Kevin was only slightly less happy than Mark with his room. He had pirate wallpaper—pictures of pirate ships and skull-and-crossbones flags. But it wasn’t velvet wallpaper. Because there really is no such thing as velvet pirate wallpaper…at least that Mom could find.

  She gave him blue velvet curtains, though. So he was happy about that, anyway.

  I didn’t expect much when I pushed on the door to my room. I was preparing a happy smile to plaster onto my face, anyway. I figured once all my stuff was moved into it, I’d grow to like my room. Eventually. In, like, twelve years.

  I never thought I’d see what I saw when I got the door all the way open.

  And that was a room that was even prettier than my room back in the old house.

  I don’t know how Mom and Dad had done it, but they had. With a combination of cream-colored wallpaper with tiny blue flowers on it and a matching blue carpet—not to mention white lace curtains and the window seat Mom had promised Dad would make me—they had made what I thought was the worst room in the whole house into the nicest room I had ever seen.

  I just stood there in the doorway staring at it, smelling the new paint smell, hardly able to believe my eyes, while Kevin and Mark stood behind me, going, “Whoa, that’s fancy,” and “See, Allie? I told you.”

  Mom went, “Well, Allie? What do you think?” sounding very proud of herself.

  I was in such shock, I didn’t even remember to pretend smile. I said, “I love it!”

  Because I did.

  “Oh, I’m so glad,” Mom said. “And what do you think of the window seat Daddy made you?”

  “Well,” Dad said, “Home Depot made it, really.”

  “I love it, too,” I said, running over to it and bouncing on the cushion. Sitting on it, I could look out down to the street below. The leaves on the trees were changing, and all I could see beneath me was a kaleidoscope of colors, orange and yellow and red and brown, like a quilt spread out beneath me. It was like I could jump out the window and bounce on it, a trampoline of colors. It was the prettiest thing I had ever seen. Almost as pretty as my room. I could sit in that window seat and look out for hours. Who even cared if I couldn’t see the electrical tower from my room anymore?

  “Good,” Mom said. “We’re glad you feel that way. But we’re not through showing you things yet. Come over here.”

  I got off the window seat and went back out into the hallway.

  That’s when Dad pulled on the cord to the attic door in the ceiling.

  “Dad!” I yelled. “Don’t do it!”

  But it was too late. Dad was pulling down the folding ladder to the attic. The springs attached to it were making pinging noises.

  “Come on, Allie,” he said. “I’m going to show you there’s nothing to be afraid of. We’re all going up here.”

  “Sweet,” Mark said, and started climbing the ladder after Dad.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” I said, grabbing the back of Mark’s pants. “Dad, what are you trying to do, get us all killed?”

  Dad’s head and shoulders had already disappeared into the attic. “It’s perfectly all right, Allie,” he called down. “There’s nothing up here except a few boxes of junk. Look, come up and I’ll show you.”

  “Let go of me, Allie,” Mark said, trying to kick my hand away. “I want to go up with Dad.”

  “Mark,” I said. “Stop it! I’m trying to protect you!”

  “Allie,” Mom said, “let him go. You should go up there, too. It’s the only way to prove to yourself that there’s nothing up there to be afraid of.”

  I let go of Mark. I had to, because he’d been about to kick me in the face. He scrambled up the ladder.

  I sighed. I knew Mom was right. But…what about the zombie hand?

  “Whoa!” I heard Mark yelling from the attic. “Come up here, you guys. You have to see this. It’s incredible!”

  I looked at Kevin.

  “I’m not going up there,” he said. “I don’t want to get dusty.”

  “Go on, Allie,” Mom said. “I’ve been up there. I’ll stay here with Kevin.”

  Sighing again, I put my foot on the ladder. And I started climbing. I could see my dad’s head at the top of the ladder, against the rafters of the roof of the house. Also, I could see some sunbeams shining in from somewhere. The attic didn’t, I have to admit, look that scary.

  And when I got to the top of the ladder and looked around, I saw that it wasn’t scar
y at all (except for the being-on-top-of-a-ladder part). It was just a long room, with a really low, slopey roof. And it was practically empty, except for a few boxes. And my dad and Mark were bending over those, opening them up and tipping them over to reveal that all that was inside them was…

  “Christmas cards!” Mark said, in disgust.

  I didn’t believe him, at first. But then I went to look and saw that it was really true. Each of the boxes was full of Christmas cards. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them. Maybe hundreds.

  Used ones. They were written in. Some of them even had pictures. And they were really old. Like, twenty years old!

  “Well,” Dad said, “it’s no zombie hand, I’ll admit. But this one is pretty scary.” And he held up a Christmas card that was a family photo of some ugly people with really stupid-looking hair on vacation at Disney World.

  “Pick up those boxes and take them down to the dumpster while we still have it,” Mom yelled up the ladder.

  “Come on,” Dad said. “Hand me down a box, each of you.”

  So that’s how we cleaned out the attic to get it ready to put our own junk in. I was throwing a box of the Ellises’ old Christmas cards in the dumpster in our driveway when I heard a voice call my name and turned around to see Erica in her front yard, waving to me.

  “Hi, Allie!” she called, smiling. “Are you moving in today?”

  “Not today,” I said, running over to meet her at the hedge across the alley that separated our two yards. I saw that Missy was out in the Harringtons’ front yard, too, practicing her baton twirling, and that Erica’s older brother, John, was there as well, raking leaves. “We’ll be moving in tomorrow.”

  “Oh, good,” Erica said, smiling even more. “I can’t wait! Sophie and Caroline told me to say hi. We were all so happy when Mrs. Hunter said you’d be joining our class!”

  “Wait,” I said. “She did? I am?”

  “You didn’t know that?” Erica started jumping up and down. She was also yelling, like she always seemed to when she got excited about something.

  “NO,” I yelled back, jumping up and down, too. “I bet my parents were going to tell me later as part of the surprise!”

  “What surprise?” Erica wanted to know.

  “The surprise about my room,” I said. “Do you want to see it? They fixed it up really nice!”

  “Sure,” Erica said. “Just let me run inside and tell my mom where I’m going, so we don’t have the same disaster we did last time.”

  Erica turned around and ran inside her house. I watched Missy throw her baton high in the air, then do a spin and catch it just before it hit the earth. John, mean-while, leaned on his rake and went, “So, Allie. How’s it going?”

  “Good,” I said, a little bit suspiciously. That’s because I was wondering if he was going to bring up the thing about the attic.

  Sure enough, he did.

  “So,” he said. “Heard anything strange coming from…you know where?” And he pointed behind me, to the peak of the roof of my house.

  “If you mean, have I heard any weird noises from the attic,” I said loudly, “no, I have not. Because there’s nothing in there but some old boxes of Christmas cards. Which aren’t even there anymore, because we just cleaned them out.”

  “Well, that’s all you can see in the daytime,” John began. “But at night, when everyone else has gone to sleep, I’ve heard some pretty strange things coming from that attic. Like someone was trying to get out—”

  “Stop teasing me,” I said to him in my meanest voice. “I’m nine years old, you know, not a baby. I know there’s no such thing as ghosts, not to mention zombie hands. You should be ashamed of yourself, a boy your age, trying to scare little girls. What do you think your mother would say if she knew what you were doing?”

  John blinked a few times. Then he said, “You’re not going to tell her, are you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, folding my arms across my chest. “Maybe I will.”

  At that exact moment, Erica came bursting out of the house and ran over to where I was standing.

  “My mom said it was all right,” she announced, leaping over the hedge. “Let’s go!”

  “Good,” I said. “Come on!”

  We started to run to my front door but then, at the last minute, I remembered something and said, “Hold on a minute, Erica. I forgot something.”

  And I ran back to the hedge and said, “John.”

  John looked up from his raking. “What?” he asked.

  I burped as loud as I could.

  “That’s what,” I said.

  Then I ran back to grab Erica’s hand and pull her inside.

  RULE #16

  Don’t Be a Braggart

  The moving truck showed up really early the next day. So early that Mom and Dad weren’t even out of bed yet, and there was enough swearing that we got five more dollars for Marvin’s trip to the groomers’.

  So I woke up to the sound of the moving men honking their horn and Mom and Dad swearing. I jumped out of bed and got dressed real fast. Because I knew there was a lot to do.

  Mark was very impressed by the moving truck, which he said was an eighteen-wheeler. Kevin pointed out that the moving men wore special belts. Dad said this was to keep them from getting hernias when they lifted heavy things. We asked what a hernia is, and Dad said it’s when your stomach explodes. Kevin said he’d like to see that, and I agreed.

  So we sat on the steps for a while, hoping to see one of the moving men’s stomachs explode. That’s when Mom got the idea to send all us kids to spend the rest of the day with Uncle Jay at his apartment, where we’d be Out of the Way.

  “No junk food for lunch, please,” Mom instructed Uncle Jay when he arrived to pick us up, giving him a twenty-dollar bill. “Something semihealthy, like pizza and breadsticks.”

  “Sure,” Uncle Jay said, slipping the twenty in his pocket. “I hear you.”

  As soon as we got to Uncle Jay’s, he went, “Who’s up for Hot Pockets?”

  We were all up for Hot Pockets, of course. We always like staying at Uncle Jay’s, because he lets us have a whole can of Coke—each—instead of making us share one in glasses. Also, he has a television that is almost as big as my bed. He doesn’t have much else in his apartment, except for a futon couch. But the TV more than makes up for it. When we watch cartoons on it, it’s like we’re actually there under the sea with SpongeBob.

  The first thing I did when I got to Uncle Jay’s was check on Wang Ba. The turtle was living in the bathtub in Uncle Jay’s roommate’s bathroom (only Uncle Jay doesn’t have a roommate anymore because he says roommates stifle his creativity). Uncle Jay had made it all nice in the bathtub for Wang Ba, with rocks for him to climb on and some plants and plenty of water to swim around in. It was like Wang Ba’s own private pond.

  It’s hard to tell if a turtle is happy or not. But I have to say, Wang Ba looked pretty happy. I mean, for a turtle. He didn’t smell as bad as he had before, for one thing.

  “Why so glum, chum?” Uncle Jay wanted to know, leaning in the doorway with my ham and cheese Hot Pocket on a plate for me in one hand and a full can of Coke in the other.

  “Oh,” I said. I guess I’d looked sad. “I got in trouble at school on Friday for starting a cupcake fight.”

  “Awesome,” Uncle Jay said.

  “Not awesome,” I said, taking my Hot Pocket and Coke. “Now Mom says I can’t have a kitten.”

  “Obviously, your parents are unaware of your unique status in the community as an animal rights activist,” Uncle Jay said. “Anyway, Allie, I’m sure if you cool it for a few days and try to help around the house and stuff, your mom’ll come around. She always does.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She was pretty mad.”

  “Well,” Uncle Jay said, “I realize he’s no kitten. But you’ll always have Wang Ba.”

  I looked down at the Lung Chung turtle. And I remembered how the other night I’d planned on running away to come
live with Uncle Jay. Being here in the daytime made me realize I was kind of glad I hadn’t. I love Uncle Jay and stuff.

  But his Hot Pockets were kind of cold in the middle.

  After four hours of the Cartoon Network and about three more of video games, Mom and Dad finally called to say the movers were gone and Uncle Jay could bring us to the new house. So we got into the car and he drove us over.

  It was dark by the time we pulled into the driveway. But for the first time ever, there were lights on in the windows of the new house.

  And I have to admit, it didn’t look nearly as scary as it usually did.

  In fact, it looked kind of…well, homey.

  And, okay, Mom and Dad hadn’t had time to put curtains up anywhere but in our rooms or anything.

  And inside, hardly any of the boxes had been unpacked, and almost none of the furniture was where it was really supposed to go, because the movers had kind of just dropped it all off and left.

  But with our stuff inside, the new house looked like…well, it looked like home.

  And upstairs, in my new room, Dad had put up my canopy bed, and my shelves were on the walls, and my clothes were in my closet, and my books were where they were supposed to be.

  And with the lamp shining on my bedside table and my lace curtains blocking out the dark, it still looked like the nicest room in the whole world.

  And after I’d hidden my book of rules where it belonged (under the slats beneath the bed), I realized it really was the nicest room in the whole world.

  And, okay, the bathroom across the hall still needed some work—the tiles on the floor were super cold, and the water that came out of the sink was brown at first from no one having used it in so long.

  And, yeah, the attic door still looked creepy up there, with that cord hanging down from it.

  But the new house, I was starting to realize, wasn’t so bad. Especially when, as I was getting ready for bed, I heard Mark and Kevin going, through the heating grate between their two rooms, “Houston, this is the space shuttle. Are you there, Houston? Over.”

  “Space shuttle, this is Houston. We read you. Over.”