Moving Day Read Free

noncryingbest friend. “If we move, I won’t be in the same class with her anymore! I won’t live down the street from her anymore!”
    “You can still go visit her,” my little brother Kevin said helpfully. “You can take the bus.”
    “I don’t want to take the bus!” I screamed.
    “Stop screaming,” Dad said. “Nobody’s going to be taking any buses. Allie, you’ll still see your friend. Just not at school. You can have whatever-they’re-called.”
    “Playdates,” Mom said. “Your father means we’ll organize playdates with Mary Kay.”
    Playdates? Whatever! I don’t want to organize “playdates” with Mary Kay. Mary Kay and I have never had to organize “playdates” before. Whenever Mary Kay and I want to play, I just walk down the street, and we play together. There’s no organizing anything.
    “I don’t want to move!” I cried. “I don’t want to give up my rock collection, or go to a new school, or organize playdates with Mary Kay! I want to stay right here!”
    “Allie,” Mom said. “Your father and I were thinking. If you can show you can be grown-up about this move, andgive it a try, and not cry about it, we might decide you’re old enough to have a pet of your own.”
    I was so shocked, I stopped crying. I have always wanted a pet of my own. We have Marvin, of course, and I love him very much. For instance, I am the only person in my family who brushes him, checks him for ticks, and walks him (well, Dad walks him, too, but only at night). I want to be a veterinarian when I grow up, so I am also practicing for when this happens.
    But I have always wanted a pet of my very own, one I wouldn’t have to share with everyone else, such as my brothers.
    “You mean,” I said, sniffling, “I could have a hamster, like Mary Kay?”
    “No hamsters,” my dad said. Dad doesn’t like hamsters, or even mice. The time Mary Kay and I caught a baby mouse in the field behind her house (where they are now building a new subdivision) and put it in my Polly Pocket Pollywood Limo-Scene, then showed it to my dad, he made us let it go in the woods behind our house (where they are also now building a subdivision), eventhough we explained to him it would probably die without us or its mother to take care of it.
    Dad didn’t care. He says he doesn’t like animals that don’t know any better than to poop in your hand.
    So when I wrote that down it became the rule of: Don’t get a pet that poops in your hand.
    “Actually,” Mom said, “we were thinking you might be old enough now to take care of your own kitten.”
    I didn’t think I heard her right. Had she said…KITTEN?
    “No fair!” Mark yelled. “I want a kitten!”
    “Me, too!” Kevin yelled.
    She did. She did say kitten! How had they known? How had they known I’d been wanting a kitten for my whole life, practically?
    And true, I had asked for a miniature poodle for my birthday and gotten a canopy bed instead, which isn’t as good.
    But it had never even occurred to me to ask for a kitten.
    Until they said I could have one.
    And then I knew I wanted a kitten more than I had ever wanted anything in my entire life. Kittens are way better than hamsters, who, by the way, poop in your hand.
    “When you guys show that you can be grown-up enough to handle the responsibility of having your own pet,” Dad said to my brothers, “we’ll talk. But I haven’t seen either of you brushing Marvin, or taking him on walks the way Allie does.”
    “I take Marvin on walks,” Mark said.
    “Hitching Marvin up to the sled and trying to make him pull you down the dirt piles in the new development does not count as walking him,” Mom pointed out to Mark. “Now, who wants to go to Dairy Queen as a treat for dessert?”
    We all wanted to go to Dairy Queen, of course.
    To get to the Dairy Queen from our house, you have to drive in the car. It was while we were in the car driving to Dairy Queen that Mom said, “You know, the new house is so close to