A Story About Some Kids

Chap. 1
Amanda was a practical person. She preferred function over fashion. She took bad news like a cliff-side took the relentless crashing of the waves. She knew that fact was more important that feelings. But when her father had broken the news that her family would be moving, everything (at least on the inside) fell apart.

Home meant one thing, and that was 24783, Hawking View, Winchester Heights, California. Her house in the suburbs was all she had ever known. It was the setting in which all eleven-and-a-half years of her life had unfolded. The uniformed streets of her cookie- cutter neighborhood was the most familiar thing in the world, and leaving it meant leaving the structured and well-balanced society that routine had transformed in to life itself. In other words; moving was unacceptable.

But everyone had accepted it… easily.

Even Amanda’s stubborn as a brick little sister, Jolie, and taken to the idea. And so they moved, despite the complaints and hints and A+ worthy persuasive essays that Amanda had written to convince her parents otherwise. And it wasn’t fair.

Worst of all, the move had done nothing for them, or if it had, Amanda hadn’t been told. They had traded their perfectly good house for the rag-tag excuse for an apartment that she found herself entering at that moment. Amanda sighed as she took it all in. It was small, especially for five people. Four rooms: an area that worked overtime as a den, dining room and kitchen all at once, a bathroom, her Parents room and then the room that she fought her siblings for the mattress in. Amanda supposed she could call it a bedroom.

But the size was tolerable compared to the condition that they had found it in. The walls looked like they had taken abuse from several angry  tigers, the ceiling had been invisible due to the cotton-like cobwebs that frosted every inch of stucco. The carpet had her at a loss for words. It was sticky like slime and certain places hosted maggot hives.

After thousands of dollars spent on everything from carpet cleaners to pest control (Amanda had taken the cobwebs down herself) and thousands of snide ‘I told you so’s, the place was livable at best.

But it didn’t matter.

No matter what the family did to the old place, Amanda would never call it home.

Boxes lined the walls, a discouraging thing to see after coming home from school. They had remained unpacked for the lack of time to situate everything, but partially because inside, Amanda wasn’t ready to admit that all her things belonged here now. She dreamt of the day when her father would sit everyone down, just as he did when he had broken the news, and tell them that it had been a mistake. And then everyone would thank her for leaving the boxes unpacked, because they were going home.

Amanda navigated her way through the smorgasbord of boxes, playing a game of twister with the unpacked luggage. She made a beeline for the hallway behind the kitchen, glancing briefly at the pile of dishes that protruded the sink and dreading the game of rock, paper, scissors that would determine the unlucky washer. The hallway still had a few rough spots, but it was just a hallway, so the flaws could be ignored. She entered the bedroom, and took advantage of her sibling’s absence to allow herself to shuffle, zombie like to the mattress, and fall onto her chest like a wood plank.

The bedroom was filled, nearly to the ceiling with boxes, creating unlimited supplies for the kiddie forts that Amanda’s siblings refused to stop building. The mattress was squeezed into a corner and had Amanda positioned herself the right way, she would have enjoyed the spectacular view of the apartment across from theirs.

Homework seemed to call meekly from Amanda’s backpack, but at the moment, she was drifting woozily into sleep…

Across from the window in Amanda’s room, a set of top-of-the-line toilet paper roll binoculars were pressed discreetly against the window parallel to hers. Those binoculars happened to belong to Nicky Tomson who, at the moment, was chewing a piece of watermelon bubble-gum and wandering why out of the blue, a random family had moved into the infamous apartment 19B. As he peered through the circular cardboard tubes he saw only what he had seen for the last week. A dingy room, stuffed like a turkey with boxes. Nicky blew a bubble, which popped.

Anyone who had been in Chorus Valley apartments for at least a day knew that apartment 19B was haunted. The story went that a man named Charlie Nork had been born in 19B. His parents had abandoned him there for some reason and he grew up all alone, so he was basically a wild man. He ate rats from the walls and drank out of the toilet (Nicky had added that part himself). Anyway, apparently the guy had thought that his apartment was the only thing that existed, because when he accidentally got out one day, he went bananas, and ate someone! So he came up with a pretty twisted idea for a primitive like him. He decided that he liked the taste of human, so he hid in his apartment for a few days, and when a person walked by, he would drag them into 19B and then that person would die a sandwich. After a while, people stopped living in the apartments because they were becoming lunch meat like crazy. Eventually, ol’ Charlie ran out of rats and piece by piece, ate himself. Now, 19B was haunted by Charlie the cannibal’s disembodied appendages. The end.

The story never got old, especially since fellow eleven year olds such as himself were always adding little details. So the fact that people were now using the space to ''live in'' was something that could not be ignored. Nicky blew another bubble.

He peered through the window, focused and calm like the detective he was. He blew some of his messy red hair out of his eyes and his brow pressed against the cardboard as it furrowed. Nicky thought that he probably looked very cool and serious right then.

Who were these people who had the guts and/or stupidity to move into 19B? So far he had constructed four, highly probable theories.

1: They were Charlie the cannibal’s descendants, who wanted to continue his line of work.

2: They were a family of robots. (This was Nicky’s favorite because if he became friends with them than they could do his math homework for him)

3: They were being chased by a giant Jell-O monster and needed to hide in a place that even a monster wouldn’t dare set foot in.

4: They were a normal, average family who happened to not hear the rumor.

Nicky scratched number four out with a pen. Nobody could be that ignorant. Setting down his cardboard binoculars, Nicky spun in his office chair to face his room.

A bed in the corner, with his favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bedspread, bright blue walls, decorated with an assortment of superhero, power ranger and Minecraft posters were surrounded with shelves containing Lego creations, old army men and a single book, which he had never read in his life. The floor was layer of Lego bricks and paper ninja stars, obscuring the boring grey carpet. Nicky liked his room.

He would not, under any circumstances, allow a cannibal or robot or Jell-O monster to destroy it.