Moving Day by Meg Cabot Read Free Book Online Page A

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 withouttelling 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’dhave 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.

RULE #6
Whatever Brittany Hauser Says, Just Do It If You Know What’s Good for You
    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