Free Moving Day by Meg Cabot

in there after her she’d chop off my head (I saw that in a movie Uncle Jay and I watched once).
    On the other hand, we’d had a really nice time playing with her dollhouse, and she hadn’t murdered me then.
    “Allie?” I heard Erica’s voice float out from the bushes. “Are you coming?”
    I decided to risk it. It seemed highly doubtful Erica was a murderer. And what if there were something really cool back there, and I missed it? I ducked down and crawled into the bushes after her.
    When I came out the other side, I was surprised to see that the bushes only went on for a little while, and then you burst on out into all this open space and could stand up and walk around. What the bushes did was, they acted as a kind of privacy screen, so that from the playground what you couldn’t see was that, really, there was all this room between the bushes and the brick wall, so you had this little private alley, practically, all to yourself, with a beautiful rooftop of golden autumn leaves over it from the trees in the yards next door as their branches drooped overhead.
    Only Erica and I didn’t have the alley all to ourselves, I saw to my surprise. Because there were these other two girls standing there, looking at me. It was another opportunity, I saw, for me to make a first impression. My stomach reacted again by getting all nervous.
    “Hi,” said one of the girls, who was tall and skinny.
    “Hi,” said the other girl, who was short and round.
    “Allie,” Erica said. “These are my friends, Caroline and Sophie. They’re in Mrs. Hunter’s class, too.”
    “Hi,” I said, recognizing them now from Room 209. Caroline was the tall, skinny one. Sophie was the short, round one. “I’m Allie Finkle.”
    “We know,” Caroline said. Caroline didn’t smile. She seemed very serious. “Erica already told us all about you. She said you like ballet. Also, cats and baseball.”
    “Yes,” I said, “I do. But I see you guys play kick ball here.”
    “Yeah,” Sophie said. “That’s just at recess, because there was a problem with some people throwing bats. So Mrs. Jenkins took them all away. Now we can only play kick ball.”
    “Oh,” I said. I thought this was pretty smart of Mrs. Jenkins. Also that this was a policy that ought to be implemented at my school.
    “Erica also said you have a big imagination,” Caroline went on. “That’s why we said it was okay for her to bring you here. We only tell people about this place if theyhave a big imagination. If they don’t, they can’t see how magic it is.”
    I looked around.
    “I can see how magic it is, all right,” I said, admiringly. “I wish we had a place like this at my school. What do you guys do in here? Play like it’s a fort?”
    “Actually,” Erica said excitedly, “we play like it’s a castle.”
    “Cool,” I said. Because it did look a lot like a castle, with the bricks and all. “And you guys pretend to be princesses?”
    “Queens,” Sophie said, looking disgusted. “Princesses don’t have any power.”
    “Right,” Caroline said. She was starting to look less serious and more excited. “We’re queens. You can be one, too, if you want. Usually we play that an evil warlord wants to marry Sophie, because she’s so beautiful.”
    Sophie smiled modestly at this when I looked at her. But with her curly brown hair and pink lips, she did look beautiful. So it really could be true.
    “Okay,” I said.
    “Only she won’t have him, because she’s pledged her heart to another,” Caroline went on. “So we’ve barricaded ourselves in our castle, and the evil warlord is attacking us, and we’re readying ourselves for battle.”
    “Yeah,” Erica said happily. “We’re going to pour boiling oil on his forces!”
    “Cool,” I said again, the butterflies in my stomach finally going away.
    I was happy to have found girls who played such a neat game at recess. At Walnut Knolls Elementary, the new game Brittany Hauser was trying to get