Page 91 of The Housemaid Is Watching

Also, I killed my next-door neighbor, Jonathan Lowell.

One more thing:

I’m not sorry.

How to Kill Your Creepy Next-Door Neighbor—A Guide by Ada Accardi, Grade Five

Step 1: Leave Behind Your Home and Everything You Love

Tomorrow, we are moving.

Mom and Dad are really excited about this. Especially Dad. He keeps talking about how we are going to live in this great new house and we are going to love it. They act like they are doing this wonderful thing for us, except I don’t want to move. I like it in the Bronx. All my friends are here. I even like this apartment that they say is “too small.”

But when you are eleven years old, you don’t have a choice. If your mom and dad tell you that you need to move, you have to move.

Anyway, that’s why I can’t sleep.

I’ve been lying awake in bed for the last hour, staring up at the ceiling. I like my ceiling. It has a lot of cracks in the paint, but the cracks look familiar. Like, there’s this crack right in the center that looks just like a face. I named it Constance.

I’m going to miss Constance when we leave.

“Nico?” I whisper into the darkness.

One thing my parents say is bad about our home is that Nico and I have to share a room. And because he’s a boy and I’m a girl, we shouldn’t have to share. Except Dad hung a curtain in the middle of the room, so it’s fine. I don’t mind sharing with Nico. I like knowing that when I go to sleep, he is in the room with me, on the other side of the curtain.

“Yeah?” Nico whispers back.

He’s awake. Good. “I can’t sleep.”

“Me either.”

“I wish we didn’t have to move.”

Nico’s mattress makes that loud squeaking noise that it always does when he rolls over. “I know. It’s not fair.”

Somehow, it makes me feel better that Nico also doesn’t want to leave. Because Mom and Dad are so excited. You would think we were moving to Disneyland.

But it’s not as bad for him as it is for me. Nico has always made friends more easily than me. Everyone likes Nicoright away. But I have had the same two best friends—Inara and Trinity—since I was in kindergarten. Also, I am only three months away from graduating from elementary school, and I am going to miss my graduation. Instead, I’m going to graduate with a bunch of kids I don’t evenknow.

“Maybe it will be awful,” Nico says, “and Mom and Dad will want to move back.”

“Probably not. I think this new house was really expensive.”

“Right. They said they can’t even hardly afford the garage.”

“You mean the mortgage?”

“Is that different?”

I don’t understand what a mortgage is, but I know it’s not the same as a garage. Like, I’m pretty sure. “We are stuck living in this new house until we go to college.”

He’s quiet on the other side of the curtain. “Well, maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe we’ll get to like it.”

I can’t imagine that. I can’t imagine making all new friends and getting used to a big scary house.

“Nico?” I say.

“Uh-huh.”