by Meg Cabot
“I hated Pine Heights,” I lied. “I hated it a lot.”
“Allie,” Mom said, sounding hurt. “We met Mrs. Hunter. She seemed really nice. I know the principal is doing everything she can to get you into her class.”
“She is?” I didn’t mean to sound hopeful. “I mean…I don’t care.”
“And you seemed to like those girls we saw you with at recess,” Dad said.
“Yeah,” I said with a shrug. “They were…okay.”
“What about your kitten?” Mom asked. “Don’t you want a kitten anymore?”
That was the thing. Of course I still wanted a kitten. More than anything. Every time anyone said the word “kitten,” my heart gave a pang.
But was having a kitten worth suffering the fate of the ZOMBIE HAND?
No. No, no, no. And also, no.
And I couldn’t let nice, pretty teachers and fun new girls distract me from the fact that I still had a war to win.
The war on my family moving.
RULE #8
Don’t Put Your Cat in a Suitcase
On the day of the open house, Mom and Dad dropped each of us kids off at different people’s homes to play, so we wouldn’t be in the way. They even took Marvin to stay with Uncle Jay at his apartment on campus so he wouldn’t bark at all the people coming in and out of our house or get muddy paw prints on the newly shampooed carpets.
I got dropped off at Brittany Hauser’s. Even though Brittany has no best friend potential because she’s a bat thrower, she’s fun to play with sometimes because she has two older sisters and thus owns every Barbie and Bratz (plus all their accessories) known to humankind.
Plus, the Hausers have very excellent snack foods at their house that we aren’t allowed to have at mine, including Coca-Cola of the non-diet variety and homemade brownies, because Mrs. Hauser stays home all day making delicious baked goods.
On top of which, there was Brittany’s mom’s new cat, specifically, her show cat, meaning the kind you take around the country and get judged in contests. Only not like the county fair. Important national cat-judging contests like they have on TV.
Mrs. Hauser, who is a mom who wears high heels to pick up her daughter from school, instead of jogging shoes like all the other moms, really wanted a show cat, so finally, for their anniversary, Mr. Hauser bought Mrs. Hauser one of her own. Mrs. Hauser was very proud of it, and when she found out I might be getting a kitten—because I did my informal oral essay on it in class as soon as I knew I was getting one (but before I’d found out about the zombie hand), and Brittany heard it and told her mom—she told Brittany to invite me over to meet her registered purebred long-haired blue colorpoint Persian, Lady Serena Archibald.
Even though I knew I wouldn’t be getting a kitten anymore (especially not after what I knew was going to happen at the open house), I was very excited to meet Lady Serena Archibald. It is not every day you get to meet a registered show cat. When I had found out I might be getting a kitten, I had checked out all the books on cats that were available in my school library, so I had read quite a lot on Persians and I knew that they were one of the oldest breeds of domestic longhairs.
So I couldn’t wait to go to Brittany’s house.
I was also a little bit excited not to be spending time with my brothers and parents. It was going to be nice to be away from my own worries about moving and the attic and to have someone my own age to talk to outside of a school setting for a change.
At least, that’s what I was thinking until Mom and Dad dropped me off at Brittany’s house. When I walked in the door, I stopped thinking my time hanging out with Brittany was going to be so fun.
That’s because as soon as I walked in, I right away saw that the whole thing had been a setup—at least from Brittany’s side of things. In fact, it all turned out to be part of Brittany’s “brilliant plan” to make Mary Kay and me be friends again.
“Surprise!” Brittany yelled as soon as I came through the door. “I invited Mary Kay, too! Now you guys will have to start talking again! Because you can’t be in the same house all day and not talk.”
“Wanna bet?” Mary Kay asked, glaring at me. It was obvious Brittany had not warned her beforehand, either, of the touching reunion she was planning for the two of us.
It was also obvious from her angry expression that Mary Kay was not backing down one inch on the whole still-being-mad-at-me thing.
“Come on, you guys,” Brittany said, taking us each by the hand and looking into our eyes very meaningfully. “You’ve been best friends too long to let something as stupid as Scott Stamphley get in the way of your true bond. Mary Kay, Allie is only going to be in school with us for another few weeks. Are you really going to stay mad at her that whole time?”
“Yeah, come on, Mary Kay,” Courtney Wilcox said. Because it turned out Courtney had been invited to come along for the reunion, too. Even though I had no idea what she had to do with any of it. “Allie didn’t mean anything by it. Did you, Allie?”
I sighed. I could see all my fun plans for playing with Lady Serena Archibald—not to mention Brittany’s huge Barbie and Bratz collections, all of which, by the way, still have their shoes and feet—vanishing into thin air.
I thought about asking to use the phone and calling my mom and having her come pick me up. Only two things kept me from doing so. One was what I knew was about to happen at the open house with my rock collection.
The other was the fact that Brittany was standing kind of close to a life-size ceramic figurine of a cat (in addition to having a real show cat, Mrs. Hauser collects ceramic figurines of them, as well), and I was afraid if I tried to leave, thwarting her brilliant plan to get us back together, Brittany might throw it at me.
“No,” I said. “Of course I didn’t mean it.”
Mary Kay glared at the floor. The tops of her ears were turning red, a sure sign she was getting ready to cry.
Only not because she was sad. Because she was angry.
“Allie promised,” Mary Kay said. Only not to me. She was apparently speaking to the floor, because that’s what she was looking at. “She promised not to tell anyone she was moving, because it was my special day, and I asked her not to. And then what did she do? She turned around, and she told. Scott Stamphley, of all people. That’s who she told. After she PROMISED.”
“I know I promised,” I said. I seriously felt terrible. Like I hadn’t been feeling terrible about my broken promise—on top of a lot of other things—for weeks now. “But I temporarily forgot. Are you really going to hold temporarily forgetting for one minute against me for the rest of my life? I mean, you’ve temporarily forgotten stuff.”
Mary Kay lifted her gaze and fastened it on me. “Like what?”
To be honest, I couldn’t exactly remember anything at that particular moment that Mary Kay had temporarily forgotten. I was totally sure there’d been some stuff. I just couldn’t think what.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But, like…stuff.”
“This is ridiculous,” Mary Kay said, with a sniff. “I’m not staying here. I want to go home. I’m calling my mother.”
And she made a move to head toward Brittany’s kitchen, where the nearest phone was.
Brittany was too fast for her, though. She stepped right into Mary Kay’s path.
And sure enough, I saw her hand come to rest on the nearby cat figurine.
What’s more, Mary Kay saw it, too. And she grew very still.
Everyone knows about Brittany’s reputation as a bat thrower. Everyone.
“Nobody’s going home,” Brittany said in a hard voice. “Everybody is staying right here. I have some nice games planned, and some nice snacks for us to eat. And we’re going to play them, and eat them, and have a good time. Does everyone understand?”
Mary Kay looked a little scared. I didn’t really blame her. Brittany scared me a little, too.
But for once Mary Kay didn’t start crying.
Instead, she said, “Okay, Brittany,”
in this voice I’d never heard her use before, but which sounded kind of familiar.
Then a second later, when I heard Courtney go, “Oh, there’s Lady Serena Archibald!”
“Keep her away from me!” Mary Kay squealed. “You know I’m allergic!” That’s when I realized the reason why the voice Mary Kay was using sounded familiar to me. That’s because it was almost exactly like Courtney’s voice, which was actually almost exactly like Brittany’s voice. Because Courtney is always trying to imitate Brittany.
Then I realized Mary Kay was trying to imitate Brittany, too.
Which was kind of weird.
But I didn’t think about it then because I was too excited about seeing Lady Serena Archibald, a real-life show cat.
And to tell you the truth, the wait was totally worth it. Lady Serena Archibald was beautiful. She had long, silky gray fur and big blue eyes. And when I went over to pet her, Lady Serena Archibald turned those big blue eyes up to look at me and she opened her tiny mouth and went, “Mrow?” in the cutest way you could ever possibly imagine.
Mrs. Hauser followed her cat into the room, her high heels click-clacking on the marble floor of the Hausers’ entranceway, and said, smiling, “Oh, Allie, I’m so glad you could come. You’re finally getting to meet Lady Serena. What do you think? Don’t you think you’d like a Persian now?”
Then Mrs. Hauser went on to tell me about the care of Persian show cats—like how you have to brush their fur every day because it’s so long they can’t clean it with their tongue, like cats normally do, and how Lady Serena Archibald had never been outside, and so how we had to be careful not to let her out of the house—even though I already knew most of it, from the books I read.
But I pretended like I didn’t know already—and that there was still a chance I was going to get a kitten when, in fact, after today there was absolutely no way—and listened quietly, because that’s the polite thing to do when an adult is telling you something you already know, especially when they’re doing it all excitedly like Mrs. Hauser was doing.
That’s a rule, by the way.
When Mrs. Hauser was finally done talking and said she had to go drive Brittany’s older sister Bethany to her band rehearsal—adding that we shouldn’t bother Brittany’s other older sister, Becca, who was in the garage with her friends painting posters for their school’s bake sale on Monday—Brittany muttered, “I thought she’d never leave,” and Courtney laughed. Even Mary Kay tittered a little.
But truthfully, I’d thought what Mrs. Hauser had been saying was interesting, even if I’d already known about most of it, on account of the books I’d read and my wanting to be a veterinarian when I grow up and all.
“Now that she’s gone,” Brittany said, “we can go to my room and get down to business.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that.
“What kind of business?” I wanted to know, hoping it was going to involve Bratz, or at least Barbie.
“The business of getting you and Mary Kay back together as friends,” Brittany replied. “Now, let go of that cat and come on.”
I let go of Lady Serena even though I didn’t really want to and followed Brittany up to her room, where there was absolutely no discussion about what we were going to do next. Brittany didn’t go, “So, do you guys want to play a game? How about queens?” or “Do you want to get out my sisters’ Barbies?” She didn’t even go, “I know! Do you want to play lions?”
Instead, she went, “Okay, we’re playing pop star. I’m the judge.”
She didn’t even explain how you play pop star, which, by the way, I had never heard of. We’re not allowed to watch reality shows or even music videos in my house, because my mother says they rot your brain. Instead, she makes us watch Quality Programming, even though I’ve explained to her that this puts me at a disadvantage in most social situations.
“Whoever does the best job,” Brittany went on, “wins a brownie. There’s the microphone. Courtney, you go first.”
And Courtney picked up this microphone that was lying on Brittany’s super-frilly pink canopy bed, turned on a mini-karaoke machine that was sitting in the middle of Brittany’s super-pink frilly room (which was even pinker and frillier than my room), and started singing along with this CD that was playing.
When she was done, Mary Kay clapped and went, “Oh, my gosh, Courtney, that was so good!” So I said, “Um, yeah, it was,” although truthfully, I didn’t like the dance Courtney had been doing along with the song. It was kind of boring. It didn’t have any jumps in it. Actually, the song had been boring, too, just the words “baby, baby” over and over again.
Frankly, I wished I were back behind the bushes by Pine Heights playing queens with Erica, Caroline, and Sophie. That had been much more fun.
But I didn’t say so out loud, because that wouldn’t have been polite. That’s a rule.
“Okay, Mary Kay,” Brittany said. She had taken up her judging position in the midst of all the pillows in the middle of her bed. “Your turn.”
Mary Kay looked all shocked. “Oh, no!” she said. “I couldn’t! I’ll never do as good a job as Courtney.”
“What are you talking about, Mary Kay?” I asked. “You sing songs like that all the time to the mirror in your bathroom.”
Mary Kay shot me a mean look.
“Well,” I said, “you do. And you do dances to them, too.” How was I supposed to know that was a secret? Mary Kay had never said so.
This is why I need the rules. Friendship is so COMPLICATED.
Mary Kay got up from where she was sitting on one of Brittany’s white beanbag chairs and took the microphone from Courtney. Then she turned on the CD and did the same song Courtney had done. And basically, the same dance along with it. Only Mary Kay’s dance was even more boring than Courtney’s had been. Except it was obvious Mary Kay had been practicing this dance a LOT in the full-length mirror on the back of her closet door, because she put a lot of hip wiggles into it.
When she was done, all three of us applauded, even though I thought I was going to die of boredom the whole time. At that point, I’d rather have been playing lions. I’d even have been the boy lion. I’d have gladly gotten rug burns going out and killing an antelope and bringing it home for all the mother lions and baby cubs to eat. That’s how bored I was.
“Okay, Allie,” Brittany said. “Your turn.”
I knew I was in trouble. I didn’t know the song, although I could see that the words came up on the karaoke machine’s screen, and I didn’t know the dance, either. There was no way I was going to win.
Which stank because I was really getting hungry. I could definitely have used one of Mrs. Hauser’s delicious home-baked brownies. It wasn’t fair of Brittany only to give out brownies as prizes. Really, everyone should get a brownie, no matter how well they sang. That was the polite way to treat your guests, after all.
Oh, well. Maybe when Mrs. Hauser got back from dropping off Bethany she’d give us all lunch. She was going to have to, right? I mean, you can’t let your guests starve. That’s a rule. I’m almost sure.
“Come on,” Brittany said from her pillow throne. “We don’t have all day, Allie.”
I was surprised to realize I was kind of nervous. Which was weird, because Brittany and Courtney and Mary Kay were my friends. Well, except for Mary Kay, who was my ex-friend. My ex-best friend.
Still, why should I be nervous about singing in front of them? It’s true I’m not the best singer, but I’m not the worst, either.
It’s just…I didn’t want to look dumb all of a sudden. It wasn’t even about the brownie anymore. I just didn’t want them to laugh at me.
“Come on,” Brittany said.
Realizing I had no choice but to get on with it, I switched on the CD. The words of the song came on. Boy, that was fast. It didn’t even give me time to warm up. Suddenly, I had to start singing.
“LOUDER,” Brittany yelled.
I tried to sing louder.
“You have
to dance, too,” Brittany yelled.
The problem was, I couldn’t read the words and dance at the same time. I mean, if I was dancing, I couldn’t see the words on the screen.
But as I stood there, I realized the words weren’t that hard. They really were the same words—“baby, baby”—over and over. And also, I had just heard the song twice already. So it turned out I kind of did know the words.
That’s when I got an idea. And my idea was to do a different dance than the one Courtney and Mary Kay had done. My idea was to do some ballet. To make the dance more interesting.
So I started doing some pliés and relevés and stuff.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Brittany demanded. I heard Courtney and Mary Kay laughing.
But I didn’t care. I was having fun. Ballet turned out to go kind of good with the song.
But it really needed something else. What it needed, I realized, were some jumps. So I started throwing in some grand jetés. It was kind of hard to do them and still hold the microphone—not to mention sing—but I managed. I started doing grand jetés all around Brittany’s room. They were good ones, too. If Madame Linda had been there, I’m sure she’d have let me wear her tiara during cooldown.
“STOP IT,” Brittany said. “THAT IS NOT PART OF THE SONG!”
But it was too late. The song was over, and so were my grand jetés. I did a curtsy—the ballet kind, which is called a reverence and is super low.
Courtney and Mary Kay applauded.
“Stop clapping,” Brittany told them. And they did, looking guilty.
“What,” Brittany demanded, glaring at me, “was that?”
“Ballet,” I said.
“Well,” Brittany said. “You do not win the brownie.” She looked at Mary Kay. “You do.”
“Oh,” Mary Kay said. “Thanks.”
“Go down to the kitchen and get one,” Brittany said. “They’re sitting on a plate on the counter.”
“Okay,” Mary Kay said. She got off the bed and left the room.