Moving Day Read Online Free Page B

happy birthday for her after all.

RULE #4
Brothers—and Parents—Can Be Very Insensitive
    The good part about being in a fight with my best friend was that it was going to make moving away from her much easier. For instance, now I wouldn’t have to worry about setting up “playdates” with her after we moved, or about buying her a going-away present, such as one half of a locket and myself the other half so we’d each have half a locket to remember the other person by (I saw that in a movie once).
    But the bad part about having a fight with my best friend was that I didn’t have anyone to talk to about how upset I was about the actual moving thing. Because even though I was trying not to show it, because I didn’t want to upset my little brothers, I was really, really upset,especially after Mom and Dad signed all the papers and finally got the keys to the new house. Because that’s when we went from “maybe” moving to “definitely” moving. Also when they took us over there for our first big tour, I couldn’t believe what I saw. I mean, if I’d thought the front of our new house was scary-looking, well, that was nothing compared to how scary it turned out to be on the inside.
    Because it was way worse than anything I’d ever seen on any episode of Please Come Fix Up My House.
    In fact, if you asked me, Mom and Dad could not have picked a gloomier, more depressing place to live in.
    Well, maybe if they had picked the haunted house that Uncle Jay took me to at the county fair last summer. But that might actually have been nicer than the house we were supposedly going to live in.
    Because at least the county fair haunted house had bowls of grape eyeballs and spaghetti-noodle guts you could stick your hands in.
    But our new house didn’t have any gross yet cool stuff like that. Instead, it had these walls that were paintedsome sort of dark gray (which Mom said she was going to paint over. Like that was going to make a difference) except where the people who owned the house before us had hung their paintings. There, the walls had these rectangular patches of brown.
    And the house had these ceilings that swooped up forever that Mom kept going on all excitedly about. “Twelve-foot ceilings!” she kept saying, but I didn’t see what was so great about them. They just ended up in these cobwebby chandeliers that weren’t even a bit sparkly like my geodes.
    And even though Mom kept going, “And just look at these magnificent wood floors,” the truth was, the wall-to-wall carpeting back at our old house was way nicer, if you ask me, than the nasty dark brown wood floors that we were walking on that went creeeeaak when you stepped anywhere on them.
    As if all that weren’t bad enough, there were spiders everywhere , not just in the basement. And every room was colder than the last one. The whole place felt as if no one had lived in it for at least a hundred years.
    But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was my room—the one Mom had pointed out from the car on Dairy Queen night. Because it turned out to be the coldest, darkest room of all. And the floor in there was also the creakiest—whoever heard of a bedroom that wasn’t even carpeted? And even though it had what Mom called a bay window that was like a turret in a castle that was round and almost all glass that she said Dad was going to build a window seat in that I’d be able to sit on and read my books, you couldn’t even see the town electrical tower from the windows, just trees and the tops of other people’s houses.
    How was I going to be able to fall asleep at night if I couldn’t see the red light from the electrical tower blinking on and off, on and off, warning airplanes not to fly into it?
    How?
    When I asked Dad about that, he just went, “Well, Allie, you’re just going to have to learn to fall asleep a different way.”
    Like that was even possible.
    As I stood there in the giant echoing cavern that was supposed to be my room,