On the other hand, they
do
have to grow up sometime. And this was, after all, a matter of life and death.
“The thing that could come out in the night and—” I pantomimed a hand choking me to death.
“Allie,” Mom said, “has your uncle Jay been letting you stay up to watch horror movies with him when he babysits you kids?”
“Maybe,” I said. Like I would ever give away my secret pact with Uncle Jay. He swore he’d never rat me out about the horror movies if I swore I’d never rat him out about what really happened to Dad’s scuba watch.
My mom says Uncle Jay, who is Dad’s brother, suffers from Peter Pan syndrome, meaning he never wants to grow up. But Dad says he’s just like all the other graduate students in his classes—slightly irresponsible.
Which is what they keep calling me for going over to Erica’s house without telling them and not watching my brothers like I was supposed to.
But if you ask me, going over to Erica’s was
very
responsible. Because if I hadn’t, no one in our family would know the truth about our new house.
That’s probably why Mom and Dad were able to get it for so cheap. How else could they afford such a big house, with so many bedrooms, even if Mom
does
have a job now, and Dad has a chair? Haunted houses are cheap. Especially ones you have to fix up yourself. Everybody knows that.
“Sweetie,” Mom says. “There’s nothing in those boxes but some old junk that we’re planning on throwing away as soon as we get the dumpster delivered. The next time we go to the house, I’ll take you up into the attic and show you.”
“
I’m
not going up there,” I declared firmly.
“I’ll go,” Mark said, cherry dip dribbling down his chin in a disgusting manner. “I’m not afraid.”
“I’m not afraid, either,” I said. “Except for you. I just don’t want to see either of you murdered in your bed by a zombie hand.”
“There are no zombie hands in the attic,” Dad said. “I don’t know what that boy next door was telling you, Allie, but he was pulling your leg.”
But they don’t know. Zombie hands can’t be stopped, no matter what you do to them. Even if you come after them with a chain saw, like the guy did in that movie I watched with Uncle Jay.
But what does that matter to Mom and Dad, anyway? They don’t have to sleep up there on the third floor right beneath the attic, with that trapdoor and that cord hanging down.
The truth is, we’re doomed.
And they don’t even know it. Or care. Mom even said, “Allie, I don’t like this kind of talk. You’re scaring your little brothers”—“No, she’s not,” both Mark and Kevin said, but she ignored them—“and if you keep up this kind of behavior—going over to strangers’ houses without
telling us and spreading wild stories about zombie hands—I know one little girl who may not be getting a kitten after all.”
But if she thinks that’s going to stop me, well, she doesn’t know me at all.
And that night when we got home, after Dad got back from giving Marvin his evening walk, I sneaked out and wrestled that for sale sign Mrs. Klinghoffer had sunk into our yard right out of the ground. Then I hid it behind the dirt pile of the house they’re building behind ours.
I know if I ever get caught, it will mean worse than having to give up dessert. It will mean I won’t get my kitten for absolute sure.
But if no one else is going to try to save our family, well, I guess I’m just going to have to be the one to do it. What’s a kitten (especially one that you don’t even have yet) compared to keeping your whole family safe from potential evil, particularly in the form of a zombie hand?
Although I would have really liked a tiny gray-and-black-striped kitten like the glass one in Erica’s dollhouse. I’d
have named her Mewsette—Mewsie for short—and given her a pink collar and let her sleep next to me on my pillow every night.
If I had a kitten like that, it wouldn’t matter if I looked out my window and didn’t see the electrical tower blinking on and off anymore every night. I’d have been able to fall asleep just fine without it, with Mewsie purring away next to me.
But what kind of pet owner would I be, bringing a kitten into a cold, dark, depressing house where she was just going to get her guts ripped out of her by the disembodied hand living in the attic? I mean, I couldn’t let that happen to an innocent kitten!
Especially if the only way I was going to get a kitten anyway was if we moved.
And I knew for one hundred percent certain that that was the
last
thing I wanted to do.
Oh, sure, I was going to miss not having Erica as a friend. It would have been totally nice having a noncrying friend.
But I couldn’t let my parents sell our house and move into the new one. I just couldn’t.
Because you can’t let your family move into a haunted house.
That’s not even a rule.
It’s a fact.
The only other person—besides Mary Kay, I mean—in my class who didn’t seem sad about the fact that I was maybe (okay: probably) moving away was Scott Stamphley. But that was no surprise.
At least Scott is consistent, seeing as how he hates all the girls in our class equally. Also, without any reason.
Too bad the same can’t be said for Mary Kay, who was still mad at me for the whole telling-Scott-I-was-moving-on-her-birthday-after-I’d-sworn-I-wouldn’t-tell-anyone thing.
And that hadn’t really been my fault.
Except I guess it sort of had.
But except for Mary Kay and Scott Stamphley, the rest of Ms. Myers’s fourth-grade class were all being super nice to me, now that they knew that I was moving.
For instance, I now got regularly nominated to be team captain in PE. This meant I got to pick whoever I wanted for my team every day in gym class.
Not only that, but at lunch every day, Mrs. Fleener let me have chocolate milk, even though Mom had only paid for regular for the month.
Also, Ms. Myers started putting my A+ science and math papers on the board next to her desk and picking my dog drawings to hang on the wall outside the art room (not to brag, but maybe because I live with a dog on a daily basis, I am pretty good at drawing them, especially in sitting or begging-for-bones positions).
These were the good things about moving—the
only
good things about it—the things that made me not want to say to everyone, “Um, you know what? Actually, if things go according to plan, we won’t be moving after all. But thanks.”
Then there were the bad things about moving—I mean,
aside from my having to leave behind my rock collection, the possible zombie hand in the attic, my horrible new room, having to start over at a new school, and all of that.
One of these bad things was that Brittany Hauser and some of the other girls—concerned about my falling-out with Mary Kay—kept trying to get us back together by making up reasons why we should have to sit by each other at lunch. Like, they’d go, “Oh, today everyone wearing blue has to sit on the right side of the table. No, the
right
side…” And they’d try to encourage me to pick Mary Kay when I was captain in PE so she’d be on my team and stuff (“Allie, you should pick Mary Kay. She’s really good at crab ball. No, really!”).
I guess their reasoning was, if we sat together, or Mary Kay was on my team, or whatever, we’d have to talk.
And if we talked, then we’d become friends again.
And then everything would be back to normal.
What these girls didn’t understand was that nothing was ever going to be normal again—not with my moving,
and definitely not between me and Mary Kay. Things had stopped being normal between us the day I’d poked Mary Kay in the uvula with the spatula. That’s why I’d had to start writing down the rules in the first place.
Not that any of them but Mary Kay knew about that. But still.
Anyway, none of the things Brittany and her friends tried to do in order to get me and Mary Kay back together again worked. Because every time Mary Kay ended up next to me—by accident or on purpose (because, truthfully, I was more than ready to end our fight)—Mary Kay would realize what was happening, get up, and flounce away, with her nose in the air.
Or, if she was on my team in PE, she would just stay as far away from me as she possibly could…like, in the way, way outfield, where none of the balls ever even come (which was just as well since Mary Kay would usually scream and duck and run for cover if a ball actually ever came close enough for her to catch it, anyway).
I told Brittany it was a lost cause. I told her to just give it up. Mary Kay, as my mom once said, can hold a grudge longer than anyone, including Grandma, meaning Dad’s mom, who still isn’t speaking to Uncle Jay because he dropped out of medical school to study poetry instead.
And that was three years ago.
But Brittany wouldn’t give up. She went, “Allie, you and Mary Kay can’t stop being friends. You two have been BFFs since kindergarten. That’s too long to just break up over something stupid like you telling Scott Stamphley you’re moving.”
“On her birthday,” I pointed out. “When she asked me not to mention it to anyone.” Breaking a promise to your best friend on her birthday is violating a major rule. I know that now. I mean, now that I’ve got my book of rules.
Too bad now is too late.
“Still,” Brittany said. “You without Mary Kay is like peanut butter without jelly. It’s like salt without pepper. It’s like…like…”
“Me without you, Brit?” Courtney Wilcox asked hopefully.
Brittany eyed her. “Um, yeah. Whatever. The
point
, Allie, is that we have to figure out a way to get you two talking again before you move.”
“Well,” I said. I didn’t want to mention the truth—that I wasn’t so sure I was going to be moving after all. My plan of keeping my house from selling seemed to be working. So far my parents hadn’t mentioned that the for sale sign was missing from our front yard. I knew there was more work to do—Mrs. Klinghoffer had put ads in the newspaper and online, and there was supposed to be an open house this coming weekend.
But I could only handle one thing at a time.
Still, I’d learned a lesson from the Scott Stamphley thing. I wasn’t telling anybody any more secrets, just in case.
“Look,” Brittany said. “Just leave it to me, okay?”
I blinked at her. “Leave what to you?”
“The Mary Kay thing. I have a plan.”
“You do?” I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that.
“Uh-huh,” Brittany said. “A
brilliant
plan, if I do say so myself.”
I was
really
sure I didn’t like the sound of that. The last time Brittany had had a brilliant plan—getting rid of a substitute teacher none of us liked when Ms. Myers had been out sick with the flu—it had ended up with the substitute crying in the teachers’ lounge and Mrs. Grant, our principal, coming to our class and taking away our recess privileges for a week. Which may not have been a big deal to Brittany, who is no big fan of baseball or even softball.
But it was a big deal to me.
Still, I didn’t say anything.
Because one of the other things I don’t like about baseball (besides the whole waiting-until-it’s-your-turn-at-bat thing) is people who get mad while they’re playing it and argue over whether a ball was a strike or an out or whatever and waste everyone’s time and keep me from being able to take my turn and hit the ball.
These people are bad enough.
But the worst—the absolute worst—are the bat throwers. These are people who get so mad during the game that they throw their bat.
In professional baseball, throwing a bat can get you automatically suspended.
My dad says bat throwing is very bad sportsmanship. The only thing worse, he says, is golf club throwing, because golf clubs can splinter if they break (as I found out when I was trying to open geodes with them) and put someone’s eye out.
In our school, the worst bat thrower isn’t who you’d think. It’s not Scott Stamphley.
It’s Brittany Hauser. She once threw a bat so hard on the ground it bounced up and nearly hit the catcher in the head.
So that became a rule:
Never be catcher when Brittany Hauser is up to bat.
It’s not that Brittany’s a bad person. She just has a bad temper. And when things don’t go her way, she throws things.
That’s why,
Whatever Brittany Hauser says, just do it
(that’s another rule).
So when Brittany was saying she had a plan to get me and Mary Kay back together as friends, I didn’t say anything like, “Uh, Brittany, really, that’s not necessary.”
Because it just so happened that Ms. Myers’s stapler was sitting nearby.
The other thing was, I knew Brittany’s plan was going to fail. Because Mary Kay wasn’t about to forgive me. Ever.
I knew that because I had gone up to Mary Kay in the coatroom earlier that very day when no one was looking and said, “Mary Kay. Look. I’m really sorry I did what I did. It was the stupidest thing I ever did. I didn’t mean to hurt you. All I want is to be friends again. I’ve been writing down the rules of friendship and life and everything like I showed you and trying really hard to follow them. And I was just wondering…well, do you think you can you just forgive me now?”
But Mary Kay had turned around and flounced away. Like always.
So whatever Brittany was planning, it wasn’t going to work. And just about everybody in the entire universe seemed to know it.
Except Brittany.
But she’d find out soon enough.
I just had to make sure I was out of firing range when she did.
The thing is, I probably should have asked Brittany if she had any tips on how to keep our house from being sold. I’m sure she’d have had a plan for that, too.
It’s just that it probably would have involved setting the place on fire.
And I still wanted to be able to actually
live
in my house.
So that was no good.
Instead, I had to concentrate on making up my own plan. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but somehow I had to keep our current, perfectly nice house from selling to somebody else, so that Mom and Dad would have no choice but to sell the horrible new house to someone else.
I had learned enough about real estate in the past few weeks (from having hung around listening to Mom talk on the phone to Mrs. Klinghoffer) to know that we couldn’t afford to own two houses at the same time…at least, not for very long.
So the obvious thing to do was keep our one good house from being sold. Then Mom and Dad would have no choice but to sell the new house.
I realize this might sound unfair. But you know what’s
really
unfair? Buying a haunted house with a disembodied hand in the attic without even consulting your children about it.
Mrs. Klinghoffer had already said that it all boiled down to what happened at the open house this coming weekend. An open house is when the people who have a house for sale open it up to the public and anyone who wants to can come traipsing through it, poking around in every single room, looking through everyone’s stuff, and deciding whether or not they want to live there.
Yeah! Anybody! Total strangers, looking through my stuff!
Mom said no one would be looking at my stuff. She said everyone would be looking at the house, like measuring the square footage and checking out the water heater and things like that.
But if that’s true, why did she make us clean our rooms better than we’ve ever cleaned them before in our lives? Why did we have to sort our toys into two piles, toys we want to keep and toys we never play with anymore?
And why did she take the toys we never play with anymore to Goodwill, to “reduce clutter”?
And okay, it’s true I’ve sort of outgrown my Polly Pocket Pollywood Rockin’ Theme Park playset.
But that doesn’t mean I want some other kid I’ve never met to have it!
At least she didn’t make me throw my rocks out. Yet.
But that time is coming soon. I can tell.
“I can’t even vacuum around them,” Mom said, complaining about all the paper bags sitting on the bottom of my closet. “Allie, this is ridiculous. You can’t just have ten bags of rocks sitting on the floor. You’re going to have to get rid of them, Allie.”
“You said when we move,” I pointed out. “And we haven’t moved yet.”
“I’ve hired professional carpet cleaners,” Mom said. “How are they going to shampoo under ten sacks of rocks? Allie, you have to move these. Can’t you at least put them on a shelf or something?”
Actually, Mom asking me to put my rocks on a shelf made me think of something. Well, that and the fact that people would be poking around on the day of the open house, looking through our stuff.
So I did what Mom asked. I borrowed her stepladder from the garage and I moved each sack of rocks. Very, very carefully.
All I had to do was remember to move them again after the carpet cleaners left so they’d be in the perfect spot for the open house.
But I had plenty of things to worry about in the meantime. One of them was that Mom and Dad had scheduled an appointment at our new school—Pine Heights Elementary—for us to meet our new teachers. They were coming to pick us up in the middle of the school day. I
was going to miss my favorite subject, science. I was pretty mad about that.
But mostly, I was nervous. What if I didn’t like Pine Heights Elementary? What if I didn’t like my new teacher? They still didn’t even know for sure who my teacher was going to be, Mrs. Hunter, Erica’s teacher, or the other one, Mrs. Danielson, so I was going to meet both of them. Apparently, there were more kids in the fourth grade in the Pine Heights area than there were in any other grade, and they weren’t sure which class they’d be able to fit me into.
While I was waiting for Mom and Dad to come pick me up, though, an even worse thought occurred to me. What if the fourth-graders at Pine Heights Elementary School didn’t like
me
? It wasn’t totally impossible. At least two fourth-graders in my current class—Scott Stamphley and my own ex-best friend—already didn’t like me. It could totally happen!
This made me so nervous that I sort of started feeling like I might throw up.
“You know,” I said when Mom and Dad arrived to pick Mark and me up for our school visit. Kevin was already with them. “I’ve been thinking it over, and if Pine Heights really can’t squeeze me in, I’m fine with just staying in Walnut Knolls.”
“Nice try,” Dad said, totally unsympathetic to my situation. “Get in the car.”
We drove to the new house and parked in the driveway there. “Because,” Mom said, “your new school is so close, you can walk there. We thought we’d show you the way.”
“Cool,” Mark said, picking up an acorn that had fallen off one of the huge trees in our front yard and throwing it at a bird, which of course had the good sense to fly away long before the acorn came anywhere close.
“Dad,” I said, because as a future veterinarian I cannot tolerate even
potential
cruelty to animals.
“Mark,” Dad said.
“I knew that acorn wouldn’t hit that bird,” Mark said.
“Let’s all try to have a nice time together,” Dad said, “and not throw anything.”
Which was very easy for Dad to say.
He
didn’t have to worry about a bunch of fourth-graders potentially hating him.
“Have you ordered the velvet pirate wallpaper for my new room yet?” Kevin wanted to know.
“We’re working on it, honey,” Mom said. “What if it was just pirate wallpaper, and not velvet?”
“I’ll die,” Kevin said.
“Oh, look at that house,” Mom said, pointing at a huge house across the street. “Look at the gingerbread trim around the porch. Isn’t that beautiful?”
It’s amazing how your parents can concentrate on things like gingerbread trim when their children’s lives are potentially going down the drain right before their very eyes.
Pine Heights Elementary
did
turn out to be close to the new house.
Too
close, if you ask me. Way too close to give the butterflies in my stomach a chance to go down. Only two streets away…and they weren’t even busy streets. Like, you didn’t even need to wait for a crossing guard to help you cross them. There was no
chance of getting hit by a car while skateboarding without a helmet and having your brain splattered everywhere on those streets.
Because there were no cars.
But that didn’t exactly make Pine Heights Elementary a very nice school. I mean, maybe it was nice if you like superold buildings, like my mom does.
But if you actually had to go to school there, and you were used to things at your old school such as, oh, a cafeteria that was not also the gym and was not
also
the school auditorium…well, that was not something you would find at Pine Heights Elementary School, where the cafeteria tables slid up into the wall to make room for kids to play basketball when it was time for gym class, and where, later on, someone would set up a lot of folding chairs for when it was time to watch a play on the stage (over which also hung one of the basketball nets).
Also, Pine Heights Elementary School was very dark, just like our new house, having been built around the same time, practically. Also, Pine Heights Elementary School smelled funny.
And even though the principal, Mrs. Jenkins, was very nice and said they were doing everything they could to find a space for me in one of the fourth-grade classrooms, I didn’t like her office, which had a redheaded boy in it who was there because he was in trouble for something. Who knows what? But he looked pretty scared.
Probably because Mrs. Jenkins kills you if you get sent to her office, unlike the principal back at my old school, Mrs. Grant, who asks you if everything is all right at home, then gives you a piece of licorice and sends you back to class (which is pretty bad since one of my rules is
Licorice is gross.
But that’s not as bad as killing you).
I had to spend a lot of time with Mrs. Jenkins because my mom ended up going with Kevin to kindergarten and Mark ended up going with my dad to the second grade. And Mrs. Jenkins said, “I’ll take Allie upstairs and introduce her to Mrs. Danielson and Mrs. Hunter, then, if that’s all right with you,” and my mom and dad said, “That sounds great,” even though I shot them both looks saying
Don’t! Don’t leave me alone with her!
But as usual, they ignored me. This happens a lot when
you’re the oldest. Your parents just assume you can take care of yourself.
Except when you go over to your new friend’s house without telling them where you’re going first, of course.
So then I had to talk to Mrs. Jenkins all the way up the long stairs (which, at my old school, we don’t even have. We have RAMPS), which was pretty hard because her knees were creaking so loud they sounded like bags of potato chips being crumpled up inside her pants, and I couldn’t really hear what she was saying.
When we got to the first fourth-grade class and Mrs. Jenkins said, “This is room Two Oh Eight, Mrs. Danielson’s class,” I was really shocked, because when she threw open the door and I peeked my head inside what I saw looked like a classroom from a television show about life on the prairie, or something, not a modern-day classroom.
I mean, sure, it had big windows that looked over the playground (which had swing sets and a jungle gym and a baseball diamond—which my dad had pointed out with a wink we could use as our personal baseball diamond
anytime we wanted, even when school wasn’t in session, since there was no fence around the grounds), and a chalkboard and everything.
And okay, the kids weren’t wearing pantaloons, or anything.
But they were sitting at these old-fashioned desks that had lids that lifted up in which they kept all their stuff (they didn’t even have
lockers
at Pine Heights Elementary School).
And Mrs. Danielson was wearing her hair in a BUN! And she had on a very boring gray pantsuit instead of something modern.
Worse, she had decorated her classroom with thought bubbles, like the kind that come out of cartoon characters’ heads. Inside the thought bubbles were words about where stories come from. And the words said things like,
Stories come from ideas,
and
Ideas come from brainstorming,
and
After brainstorming comes outlining,
and
Good outlines come from good notecards,
and
Only after your notecards are in good order can you begin to write your story!
Things like that take all the fun out of writing stories.
Things like that make me want to skateboard on High Street with no helmet on.
Mrs. Danielson was teaching a lesson on photosynthesis. We’d done photosynthesis last month! How behind were the kids at Pine Heights Elementary?
And for a class that was learning about photosynthesis for the first time, the kids in Room 208 certainly looked…bored. Which didn’t make any sense, because photosynthesis (the process by which green plants and some other organisms use sunlight to process foods from carbon dioxide and water) is super interesting, not boring at all.
Unless it is being taught in a boring way.
When she saw me and Mrs. Jenkins there in the doorway, Mrs. Danielson laid down her chalk and asked, “May I help you?”
“Oh, hello, Mrs. Danielson,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “This is Allie Finkle. She might be joining your class in a few weeks.”
“Well, I don’t know where she’s going to sit,” Mrs. Danielson said, with a laugh that I have to admit sounded
kind, if a little Wicked Witch of the Westish. “We’re a bit crowded here. But she’ll be very welcome, of course.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that (the not-knowing-where-I-was-going-to-sit part). I looked out at the sea of unfamiliar faces that made up Mrs. Danielson’s fourth-grade class. Sure, their teacher might welcome me. But what about her students? They didn’t look particularly friendly to me. In fact, they looked downright mean…which made sense, in light of the thought bubbles.
Then I realized why they were all looking at
me
! They were waiting for me to say something!
This made the butterflies in my stomach turn into pterodactyls.
“Oh,” I said. Maybe they thought
I
was the one who wasn’t very friendly!
First impressions are very important,
you know. That’s a rule.
You can never make a second first impression
(also a rule). I saw it on TV.
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t believe it. Here it was, my one chance to make a good first impression, and I was already blowing it!
“Um…thank you.” Great! My one chance to make a good first impression, and I said “thank you.”
All the kids just stared at me. This wasn’t helping the pterodactyls in my stomach any.
“Well,” Mrs. Jenkins said, “we’ll let you get back to your lesson. Sorry for the interruption.”
“That’s all right,” Mrs. Danielson said, with a smile that didn’t go all the way to her eyes. After that, to my relief, Mrs. Jenkins pulled me away.
The next room, 209, was Mrs. Hunter’s room. Mrs. Hunter was Erica’s teacher, and sure enough, when Mrs. Jenkins opened the door to Mrs. Hunter’s classroom (which was exactly like Mrs. Danielson’s, only no one in it looked at all bored) and we peeked in, I saw that Erica’s head was one of the many that turned in my direction.
When she recognized me, Erica squealed and waved.
“Hi, Allie!” she whispered, smiling.
I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to make a good impression, but I wasn’t sure it was okay to wave back in front of everyone. What if Mrs. Hunter got mad?
But I didn’t want Erica to think I didn’t like her. I settled
for waving to Erica very small, and smiling, while I also paid attention to Mrs. Hunter, who was the total opposite of Mrs. Danielson. Her hair wasn’t in a bun. It was actually cut short but very stylishly. And Mrs. Hunter wasn’t in a pantsuit, either. She was wearing a very short skirt. With knee-high boots. With high heels! She looked really, really modern and nice.