Moving Day Read Free Page B

trees sure are big,” Kevin said.
    “Those trees,” Mom said, “are over a hundred years old. Just like the house.”
    Which, looking at it through the car window, I could totally believe. Our new house looked more than a hundred years old. It looked so old that it was falling apart, practically. It looked like all those houses on those TV shows my mom likes to watch, TV shows called things such as Please Come Fix Up My House and My House Is Really Old. Won’t Someone Fix It, Please?
    Only this wasn’t a TV show. This was real life. And no nice team of carpenters and pretty designers was going to come and fix it up. My mom was going to have to fix up our house—with Dad’s help, I guess—herself.
    I don’t mean to sound like a spoilsport, but the truth is, I really didn’t think she was going to be able to do it.
    Because the house we were sitting in front of looked beyond fixing.
    Also, the house we were sitting in front of looked something else. I didn’t want to mention it in front of Mark and Kevin, because one of the rules—which I was goingto write down as soon as I got home—is that You shouldn’t scare your little brothers (unless they’ve done something to deserve it, of course).
    But the truth was, that house looked haunted to me.
    Suddenly, I didn’t want my ice cream anymore.
    Also, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to move anymore, even if it did mean Dairy Queen every night, a new, possibly noncrying best friend, and a kitten.
    Instead, I wanted everything back the way it was, before Mom and Dad said I could have a kitten, before they said we were moving, and before I’d accidentally touched my best friend’s uvula with a spatula.
    Only that turns out to be one of the hardest rules to learn of all: You can’t go back.
    But even though you can’t go back, you can keep things from changing more. If you try hard enough.
    And I knew then that that was what I had to do.
    I just didn’t know how. Yet.

RULE #3
If You Don’t Want a Secret Spread Around, Don’t Tell It to Scott Stamphley
    Mary Kay cried when I told her that it looked like we were moving. Which I guess was no big surprise, since Mary Kay cries about everything.
    Except that this was one of the few times I actually felt like crying with her.
    “You can’t move now ,” Mary Kay said. “It’s the middle of the school year. It’s against the rules.”
    There’s a lot of stuff I don’t know about—like friendship and fixing up old haunted houses, for example.
    But one thing I do know about is rules.
    “I’m sure that’s not true,” I said. “Because if it were, my mom and dad wouldn’t be making us do it.”
    “Well,” Mary Kay said, “you’d better make sure they check. Because this new school might not even let you in in the middle of the semester like this.”
    That’s the other thing about Mary Kay. She kind of thinks she knows everything.
    “Well,” I said, “Mom said if we move, we have to go to this new school, because we’ll be living in a new school district. So I don’t think I have much of a choice.”
    “You make it sound like you want to move,” Mary Kay said, all accusingly.
    “Of course I don’t want to move,” I said. I hadn’t even told her the part about the house maybe possibly being haunted. But I did tell her the part about the kitten.
    This just made her cry harder. Which didn’t make any sense at all. I mean, you would have thought she’d have been a little happy for me, on account of the kitten.
    Except that she wasn’t.
    “You know if you get a kitten I won’t be able to come over,” she said through her tears as we waited for the crossing guard, Mrs. Mullens, to let us cross High Street. “I’m allergic to cats!”
    “You never come over, anyway,” I pointed out. We always play at Mary Kay’s house, because she says my brothers are too rough. All because one time when she came over to my house and we were playing lions (the only game Mary Kay will ever play), Mark