Moving Day by Meg Cabot Read Free Book Online

enough.
    Witch? Come on. They aren’t scary to eighth-graders. And they don’t live in attics.
    Ghost? Well, it could be a ghost. But ghosts don’t really hurt people, do they? They just pop out and scare them.
    And then, just as Mrs. Harrington was pushing me out the door, I remembered.
    The disembodied hand. The disembodied hand had lived in the attic in that movie I had seen!
    And I almost ran back inside Erica’s big comfy house and begged her mom to let me come live there with them.
    Because that hand had been scary! Green, glowing, and so scary!
    I didn’t have much time to think about it, though, because Mom and Dad were waiting for me in theHarringtons’ front yard, and they were really mad at me for going next door without telling them where I was going (even though back in Walnut Knolls I can go over to Mary Kay’s house without asking whenever I want. Well, pretty much).
    But that apparently didn’t matter. I was in Big Trouble.
    I tried to tell Mom and Dad what Erica’s brother had said. I tried to tell them all the way back to our house, and into the car, and all the way home.
    But they both looked at me blankly. Mom kept saying, “Allie, we met the Ellises. They’re lovely people.”
    Dad kept saying, “And we’ve been in the attic. There’s nothing there except a few old boxes.”
    “Have you looked inside them?” I asked. “Because that’s probably where it is.”
    “Where what is, Allie?” Dad wanted to know.
    “The thing,” I said. I didn’t want to say it in front of Mark and Kevin, who were in the backseat with me, enjoying their vanilla twist cherry dip and vanilla twist butterscotch dip, respectively (my punishment for going off without telling my parents where I was going wasthat everyone else got ice cream at Dairy Queen on our way home. Everyone else but me).
    “You know,” I said meaningfully to Mom and Dad. I didn’t want to scare Mark and Kevin by talking about what John had said in front of them.
    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