by Meg Cabot
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.
RULE #4
Brothers—and Parents—Can Be Very Insensitive
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 pr
oblem. 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.”
Mark said, “You know what, Allie? You’re ugly. Hey—I’m telling! Then you’re not going to get your kitten!”
I didn’t care, though. I didn’t care if he told on me for punching him. Because I didn’t punch him that hard, for one thing, and it was only on the foot, anyway, the only part of him I could reach with him in the tree.
It doesn’t count if it doesn’t hurt. That’s a rule.
Or it would be when I got home
and wrote it down, anyway.
So I turned my back on them—even though I guess technically I was sort of supposed to be keeping an eye on them—and walked down the alley (there’s an alley between our new house and the house next door) to the front yard and was standing there feeling ugly—as ugly as Mark had accused me of looking—when I heard voices and looked over to the house next door and noticed something I hadn’t noticed before.
And that was that there was a girl about my own age doing back handsprings in the front yard of her own house.
RULE #5
You Can’t Let Your Family Move into a Haunted House
Not only was there a girl my age doing back handsprings in her front yard, but there was an older girl there as well, tossing a baton—a real one, like the kind majorettes in parades on TV use—in the air, and actually catching it as it came down.
At first, I kind of just stood there staring at them because they were the only forms of life I’d seen in our new neighborhood the whole time we’d been there. All the houses on our new street were just like ours—big and scary-looking with lots of turrets and windows and yards surrounded by tall hedges and old trees with creepy branches—and so I just assumed old people lived in all of them.
But now I saw that some actual young people lived in one of them.
And not just young people but girls who could do back handsprings and toss—and actually catch—a baton.
The girl who was doing back handsprings was really good at them. She had obviously been doing gymnastics for a very long time because she was quite sproingy. She was sproinging all over the yard.
I have never been able to do gymnastics. I have been taking ballet for two years. I kept on with it even after Mary Kay quit because Madame Linda never chose her to wear the tiara during cooldown. Before ballet, Mary Kay made me try tap lessons (hideous) with her and then gymnastics (even more hideous). My dad says quitters never win, but I say quitters always win, because when you quit things you end up making more time for finding out the things you love, such as rock collecting.