by Meg Cabot
Just like me. I mean, sure, things weren’t working out really great right now at my old school.
But shouldn’t I have the choice of whether or not I wanted to go to this new school? It wasn’t fair that no one was even letting me have a say in the matter.
Just like that turtle.
That was the exact moment that I knew what I had to do. I didn’t want to, but really, what choice did I have? When you finally figure out what the right thing to do is, you have to do it, even if you don’t want to.
That’s a rule.
I said, “Excuse me,” interrupting Uncle Jay’s story about his new girlfriend, Harmony, whom he wanted us all to meet really soon because, besides being his journalism class’s star student who frequently got her stories printed up in our local paper’s feature section, she was also a really excellent cook and foot massager.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.
“Well, honey,” Mom said, “you know where it is. You don’t have to announce it. Just go.”
I put my napkin beside my plate of mostly untouched sweet-and-sour pork (which is sort of reddish in color but really it’s orangish pink, so it’s okay to eat) and went to the bathroom.
Once I was finished in there and had washed my hands, I opened the door a crack and peeked out. The ladies’ room was located directly across from the plastic pond, which was right across from the hostess stand. As I watched, some people came into the restaurant, and the hostess, in her shiny Chinese dress, picked up some menus and led them to their table, all smiling and happy.
Now was my chance! No one was looking.
Quick as I could, I darted out of the ladies’ room and went to stand by the plastic pond.
I had almost done it! All I had to do was reach down inside, grab the turtle, then run outside and let him go!
Then the Lung Chung turtle would be free!
And so, in a way, would I.
But just as I had grabbed the sides of the turtle’s slimy, hard shell, I heard footsteps. Someone was coming!
Holding my breath, I lifted up the turtle. He was heavier than I had thought.
Also, stinkier.
That’s when I realized he was a snapping turtle. I didn’t know they made soup out of snapping turtles. I only realized this when the turtle turned his head around and, wondering what was going on, lazily snapped his jaw in my direction.
I couldn’t believe it. Here I was trying to save his life, and the Lung Chung turtle tried to bite me! Not like he really meant it—I guess he’d been around the Lung Chung waiters and waitresses so much he was practically tame.
But still. Thanks a lot, turtle.
Trying to keep the turtle as far from my body as I could so his teeth—do turtles even have teeth? If I was going to be a veterinarian, I was going to have to learn these things—couldn’t sink into me, I ran for the restaurant’s front door.
But too late! Because I heard someone call my name, and spun around just in time to see Uncle Jay as he turned the corner on his way to the men’s room. When he saw what I had in my hands, he got a very surprised look on his face.
“Allie?” he said. “What on earth are you doing with the Lung Chung turtle?”
“I’m setting this turtle free,” I said. “Don’t tell anyone!”
“But…” Uncle Jay started to say.
And that’s when I saw her. The hostess, coming up behind Uncle Jay. She was smiling all nice—
Until she noticed me.
And what I was doing.
Then her smile disappeared. And she yelled, “Little girl! Where do you think you’re going with that turtle?”
That’s when I ran through the restaurant’s front door for all I was worth.
RULE #12
When You Are Setting a Turtle Free and People Are Chasing You, the Best Thing to Do Is Hide
I knew the hostess lady wouldn’t catch me, since she was wearing high heels and a dress. The dress was really tight, too.
So I figured she couldn’t run very far.
Still, I knew she’d probably go get my dad. And my dad can run far. He plays basketball every Saturday at the Y.
So I knew the best thing to do was hide.
And I knew from playing hide-and-seek with my brothers that the best place to hide is the most obvious—the one place no one would ever think to look. If you were running around downtown with a turtle, where would most people look for you? The park, right?
By the pond. Because that’s where you’d most likely take a turtle to set it free.
That’s why I didn’t go there.
Instead, I decided to wait everybody out in Uncle Jay’s car. He never locks it (he says there’s nothing in it worth stealing). Also, it was parked right in front of the restaurant. So it was really easy just to dive inside.
I was sitting on the floor with all his CDs, listening to everybody yelling outside about me, when I heard the driver’s door open, and Uncle Jay slid behind the wheel.
“Allie?” he whispered, like he’d known I was in there all along. Which he probably had. Uncle Jay and I get along pretty well, he says, because we’re both independent thinkers.
“Don’t tell them I’m here,” I whispered.
Uncle Jay looked down and saw me. The turtle was still snapping in midair and kind of making swimming motions with his feet. You could hear him rustling, even though I myself was being excellently silent.
“I won’t,” Uncle Jay said, with a kind of smile. “But you’re going to have to come out sometime.”
“I’m not giving them back the turtle,” I said. “They’re just going to make soup out of it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know,” I said. “Like it says on the menu. Just because no one has ordered turtle soup yet doesn’t mean someone won’t someday.”
Uncle Jay looked like he was about to laugh. Instead, he said, “Right. That’s totally true.”
“It’s not fair,” I said. “This turtle should have a say in what happens to him. He should be allowed to be free. I’m going to let him go in the park, where he can be with his own kind.”
“Well,” Uncle Jay said, “that’s a nice idea. But you know, that turtle has lived in captivity its whole life. I doubt it knows how to look for its own food. And it’s starting to get pretty cold out. Soon it will be winter. It might starve. Or freeze to death.”
I hadn’t thought about that. Suddenly, I realized that my plan of letting the Lung Chung turtle go in the park might not be such a good plan after all.
Actually, I hadn’t put a whole lot of thought into it. It had been a kind of spur-of-the-moment plan, really.
Still.
“But if I give him back,” I said, “he’ll get eaten! I can’t stand thinking about him here, knowing at any minute someone could come along, and just…order him for dinner.”
Outside the car, I heard my dad yell, “Jay! What are you doing? Are you going to help us look for her, or what?”
Uncle Jay yelled back, “Just getting my gloves!” Then, to me, he said, “Okay, Allie. I’ll make you a deal.”
“What kind of deal?” I asked. I hate to admit it, but I was crying a little. Mostly because the turtle really did stink, and that was making my eyes water.
But also because I knew I was in trouble.
And I hated being in trouble. Which I knew was surprising, considering how much trouble I’d been in lately.
But still.
“I thought we already had a deal,” I said. “About what really happened to the scuba watch. I never told, you know.”
“This is a different deal,” Uncle Jay said quickly. “The thing is, I really shouldn’t have let you watch that zombie-hand movie. So I kind of owe you one. So the new deal is, I’ll keep the turtle. You can leave him here, in the car, and I’ll take him home with me tonight to my apartment. We won’t tell anyone. It’ll be our secret. And in return, you’ll stop giving your parents such a hard time about moving into the new
house and pretend to be okay with the whole thing. The thing about pretending to be okay with things is that sometimes you actually start to be okay with them. So…you never know. Maybe you’ll actually start to be okay with the moving thing. What do you think about that?”
I chewed my lip. The turtle living with Uncle Jay was actually an excellent idea. He didn’t have any pets, and his apartment was very messy, anyway. So it wasn’t like he’d even notice the turtle was there.
And I wouldn’t have to worry about anyone eating it. So that would be one worry, out of many, off my mind, anyway.
I wasn’t so sure about the pretending to like the new house thing, though.
“What about the thing that boy said?” I asked.
“What boy?” Uncle Jay asked. Across the street in the park, I could hear my dad calling my name. “Allie! Allie, where are you? Allie, come here right now. This isn’t funny.”
“The boy next door,” I said. “At the new house. He said the people who used to live there did something bad in the attic.”
“I will use all my investigative powers to determine whether or not this is so,” Uncle Jay said. “But I’m thinking this guy might have been teasing you. Besides, I’m actually very sensitive to psychic phenomena, and when I was at your new house, I sensed only the most harmonious vibrations.”
I didn’t see how Uncle Jay could even say this, considering the dark gray walls and brown floors and all of that.
But I was willing to let that slide since he was being so nice about the turtle.
“Now, what do you say?” he asked. “Will you come back to dinner?”
The truth was, I didn’t really have any other choice. I couldn’t sit in Uncle Jay’s car holding the Lung Chung turtle for the rest of the night.
So I agreed to his deal.
Uncle Jay got out of the car and went to pretend-look for me in the park with my dad so it wouldn’t seem suspicious when I suddenly appeared right after he did. I counted to twenty, and then I put the turtle down on the floor of Uncle Jay’s car. It stopped snapping at me and kind of looked around, like, Where am I? What’s going on?
“You’re going to a better place,” I told him. “One where no one is going to order you for dinner. I promise.” Then I told him I’d come to visit real soon.
Then I got out of the car and went back inside the restaurant.
Everyone was really mad at me. Everyone except Mom. She was glad to see me.
At first.
Then she got mad.
“Don’t you ever do anything like that again, young lady,” she said when she was done hugging me. “Do you know how scared I was? Your father and Uncle Jay are still out there looking for you!”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “And all the restaurant people are really mad at you, because you stole their turtle. They said we have to pay for it. And we didn’t even get to eat it!”
“Never mind that,” Mom said, giving her credit card to the waitress, who was giving me dirty looks. I wasn’t just imagining it, either. She was really giving me dirty looks. “Let’s just settle our bill. I must say, Allie, I might have expected behavior like this from one of the boys, but I never expected it from you! What in heaven’s name came over you?”
“I just can’t stand the idea of someone eating that turtle,” I said.
“Eating that—?” Mom gave me a strange look. “Oh, Allie! No one—”
“See,” Uncle Jay said as he and Dad walked in suddenly. “She’s right here, safe and sound. I told you.”
“Allie.” My dad looked mad. “There you are. We were looking everywhere. Where’s the turtle?”
“Never mind,” Mom said, getting up. “Come on. We’re going.”
“What do you mean, never mind?” Dad asked. “Allie, just tell us. What did you do with the turtle?”
But I wouldn’t tell. Even when the restaurant manager came up and pleaded with me and then told me I was a very bad little girl and that I was going to be in big trouble and that I was lucky they hadn’t called the police. That’s when Dad stepped in and said, “Look, we paid for the turtle; cut it out—you’re scaring her, okay?”
But the restaurant manager wasn’t scaring me at all. I was just thinking how funny it was going to be the next time Dad went over to Uncle Jay’s apartment to watch a ball game, and he saw the turtle there. Would he even know it was the same turtle?
“Come on,” Mom said after she signed the bill. “We’ve had enough celebrating for one night. Let’s go home.”
And so we did.
But not before Mark and Kevin made sure they jammed a chopstick into the change release slot of the pay phone right outside the men’s room, so no one could ever get change from it again. I high-fived them in the car.
But not so Mom and Dad could see.
RULE #13
You Can’t Take Your Rocks with You
I may not be the greatest promise-keeper in the world. I know I didn’t do such a great job keeping my promise to Mary Kay on her birthday not to tell anyone I was moving.
But I kept my promise to Uncle Jay.
From the night of my stealing the Lung Chung turtle, I pretended that I was happy that we were moving. I didn’t complain anymore about the ugly gray walls of our new house. I didn’t talk ONCE about how creaky the floors were. I stopped mentioning the zombie hand. I pretended I was happy about moving away from our old house to the new one. I pretended I wanted to start all over in a new school.
And you know what? Uncle Jay turned out to be right. At least, a little bit.
Once you start pretending you feel a certain way, you kind of do start feeling that way. Like, once I started pretending that I was happy to be moving, I kind of didn’t feel as bad about it.
I guess it wasn’t that hard, considering that everybody back at my old school hated me. Well, everybody except Courtney Wilcox.
And since we were moving and packing everything, our old house wasn’t that great to live in after all. Everywhere you looked, it was just boxes, boxes, boxes! Who wants to live in a house full of boxes, anyway?
Plus, my dad took down my canopy bed and all my shelves to put up again in my new room, which Mom was giving a secret makeover. Since I’d never picked out new wallpaper and carpeting, she’d decided to pick some out for me. She said my room was going to be a surprise.
I pretended to be happy about that, too. Uncle Jay, it turned out, was a good advice-giver. It was amazing how my pretending to be happy made Mom happy, too.
At least until about a week before moving day. That’s when Mom noticed that my rock collection was still sitting in my bedroom, in the ten paper grocery sacks in which I kept it. That’s when she reminded me that I couldn’t take my rocks to the new house, and that except for three or four of my best rocks, I had to get rid of them.
“They’re not rocks,” I said. “They’re geodes. And I’m going to sell them on eBay and buy a cell phone.”
“Whatever they are,” she said, “you can’t take them all to the new house. And there’s no time to sell them on eBay, and you can’t have a cell phone. You have to get rid of them now, Allie.”
So that was how I was outside lugging one heavy sack of geodes after another to dump into the big hole in the construction site behind our house when Uncle Jay pulled up into the driveway, and then he and a pretty girl with long black hair got out of his car.
“Hi.” The pretty girl walked over to see what I was doing after Uncle Jay said hi, then went into the house. He’d come over to help my dad take down my brothers’ bunk beds. As repayment for this, my parents were going to buy him and Harmony pizza for dinner (I was getting cheesy bread). “You must be Allie. I’m Harmony.”
“Hi, Harmony,” I said. Harmony looked so clean and pretty, I hoped she wouldn’t hold it against me how dirty I was. Returning geodes to the construction site where you found them is pretty grimy business.
“I was hoping I’d get to talk to you,” Harmony said. “Jay told me what you did the other night
at the Chinese restaurant…how you rescued his turtle, Wang Ba. I was wondering if it would be all right if I interviewed you about that for my intensive writing and reporting workshop? I think what you did was amazing, and it would make a really good story for my class.”
I shrugged. “Sure,” I said. “I guess so.”
“Great,” Harmony said. To my surprise, she took a tiny tape recorder out of her pocket. Then she turned it on and said, “So, tell me, Allie, in your own words, why you stole that turtle from the Lung Chung Chinese Restaurant downtown.”
Telling Harmony the whole story of why I stole the turtle was pretty exhausting. Especially because the whole time I was talking, I still had to keep emptying my bags of rocks over the side of the construction pit.
Then Harmony wanted to know why I was doing that.
So I had to explain about my geodes, and how my mom wouldn’t let me bring my whole collection to the new house or sell it on eBay. I showed Harmony some of my best geodes, and when she admired how sparkly they were, I said she could keep one of them.
But she said unfortunately it wouldn’t fit in her purse.
It was weird, but the whole time Harmony was inter-viewing me, I couldn’t help noticing that Mary Kay Shiner and Brittany Hauser kept walking by my house. I don’t know what they were doing. They weren’t racing on their bikes or trying to do pop-ups or anything fun like that (Mary Kay has always been too scared to try a pop-up). They were just walking back and forth. Whenever they passed in front of me, they would start whispering and giggling to each other furiously. It was really stupid, and kind of annoying. I tried to ignore them, but at one point they started giggling so much that Harmony even looked over at them and went, “Oh, are those friends of yours? Maybe I should go interview them, too. You know, for another perspective to the story.”
“No,” I said, quickly. “Probably you shouldn’t. They used to be friends of mine, but now they aren’t.”
“Really?” Harmony asked. “Why not?”
So then I was forced to tell her about the cat in the suitcase incident, and how Mary Kay and Brittany weren’t my friends anymore. But I asked that those things be off the record. I knew to say that, thanks to a movie Uncle Jay let me watch with him once.