Moving Day by Meg Cabot Page B

able to fit me into.
    While I was waiting for Mom and Dad to come pick me up, though, an even worse thought occurred to me. What if the fourth-graders at Pine Heights Elementary School didn’t like me ? It wasn’t totally impossible. At least two fourth-graders in my current class—Scott Stamphley and my own ex-best friend—already didn’t like me. It could totally happen!
    This made me so nervous that I sort of started feeling like I might throw up.
    “You know,” I said when Mom and Dad arrived to pick Mark and me up for our school visit. Kevin was already with them. “I’ve been thinking it over, and if Pine Heights really can’t squeeze me in, I’m fine with just staying in Walnut Knolls.”
    “Nice try,” Dad said, totally unsympathetic to my situation. “Get in the car.”
    We drove to the new house and parked in the driveway there. “Because,” Mom said, “your new school is so close, you can walk there. We thought we’d show you the way.”
    “Cool,” Mark said, picking up an acorn that had fallen off one of the huge trees in our front yard and throwing it at a bird, which of course had the good sense to fly away long before the acorn came anywhere close.
    “Dad,” I said, because as a future veterinarian I cannot tolerate even potential cruelty to animals.
    “Mark,” Dad said.
    “I knew that acorn wouldn’t hit that bird,” Mark said.
    “Let’s all try to have a nice time together,” Dad said, “and not throw anything.”
    Which was very easy for Dad to say. He didn’t have to worry about a bunch of fourth-graders potentially hating him.
    “Have you ordered the velvet pirate wallpaper for my new room yet?” Kevin wanted to know.
    “We’re working on it, honey,” Mom said. “What if it was just pirate wallpaper, and not velvet?”
    “I’ll die,” Kevin said.
    “Oh, look at that house,” Mom said, pointing at a huge house across the street. “Look at the gingerbread trim around the porch. Isn’t that beautiful?”
    It’s amazing how your parents can concentrate on things like gingerbread trim when their children’s lives are potentially going down the drain right before their very eyes.
    Pine Heights Elementary did turn out to be close to the new house. Too close, if you ask me. Way too close to give the butterflies in my stomach a chance to go down. Only two streets away…and they weren’t even busy streets. Like, you didn’t even need to wait for a crossing guard to help you cross them. There was nochance of getting hit by a car while skateboarding without a helmet and having your brain splattered everywhere on those streets.
    Because there were no cars.
    But that didn’t exactly make Pine Heights Elementary a very nice school. I mean, maybe it was nice if you like superold buildings, like my mom does.
    But if you actually had to go to school there, and you were used to things at your old school such as, oh, a cafeteria that was not also the gym and was not also the school auditorium…well, that was not something you would find at Pine Heights Elementary School, where the cafeteria tables slid up into the wall to make room for kids to play basketball when it was time for gym class, and where, later on, someone would set up a lot of folding chairs for when it was time to watch a play on the stage (over which also hung one of the basketball nets).
    Also, Pine Heights Elementary School was very dark, just like our new house, having been built around the same time, practically. Also, Pine Heights Elementary School smelled funny.
    And even though the principal, Mrs. Jenkins, was very nice and said they were doing everything they could to find a space for me in one of the fourth-grade classrooms, I didn’t like her office, which had a redheaded boy in it who was there because he was in trouble for something. Who knows what? But he looked pretty scared.
    Probably because Mrs. Jenkins kills you if you get sent to her office, unlike the principal back at my old school, Mrs.