Moving Day Read Online Free PDF

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 downwith 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’tmean 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