Moving Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 thatseparated 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 problem. 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, especiallywithout 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