Chapter One
The Terrible Move
"I do not," said Adam Joshua, "want to move.
"It is not," said Adam Joshua, "my idea. And it is not a very good one."
"Nonetheless'" said his mother, and she kept the move moving all around him.
She started the move in the attic. She took old clothes, and old books and a birdcage, and threw them down the stairs to where they landed in a heap at the bottom.
"Terrible," said Adam Joshua as a dusty army coat flew by.
"Terrible." He sneezed.
His mother kept the move going in the basement. She took old ball bats, and old
golf clubs, and Adam Joshua's old baby things, and threw them up the stairs to where they landed in a pile at the top. Adam Joshua ducked. A bear with one eye and one arm and no legs fell plop on the floor beside him. He tucked it under his sweatshirt.
His mother moved the move into his room. She took broken toys from his closet, and outgrown clothes from his drawers, and the collection of dried worms out from under his bed, and threw them with a crash into a throwaway pile in the hall.
Adam Joshua caught a truck with three wheels before it landed. He put it on the floor. Another wheel fell off.
"This still works fine!" he yelled. The bear fell out.
Adam Joshua started making piles of his own.
"I don't," said Adam Joshua, "like this at all. I don't understand why we have to move. And I don't think we have to really."
They were having strange things to eat. His mother called it cleaning-out-the-refrigerator. Adam Joshua called it something else.
He did not like cabbage.
He did not like beans.
And he was not partial to rhubarb.
But they were having them all the time, and every day, and sometimes alltogether.
Adam Joshua did not like his stomach confused.
"I, for one, am not going to move," he said each night as his mother tucked him in bed. She snapped out the light.
"I, for one, am definitely not going to," said Adam Joshua, all by himself in the dark.
Strangers came to look through his house. Strangers who might buy it.
"Keep your room neat," said Adam Joshua's mother.
"It's got bugs," said Adam Joshua to a girl who poked her head in.
He took all the things out of his closet and threw them on the floor.
He took all the things out of his drawers and threw them on the bed.
." . . and probably rats too," he said to the next girl.
"Good-bye," Ad am Joshua's best friend, Peter, said.
"No," said Adam Joshua.
With Peter, Adam Joshua once collected ants from the backyard and put them in a shoe box to keep in the house.
With Peter, Adam Joshua once collected ants from the house, where they got loose, and carried them out to the backyard again.
With Peter, Adam Joshua was sometimes an astronaut, and sometimes a star commander, and sometimes Frankenstein, and once a germ.
With the move, Adam Joshua would never be those things with Peter again.
"Your new town," said Adam Joshua's mother, "is my old town. Where I grew up. I miss it."
"That's not fair," said Adam Joshua. "This is my old town. I want to grow up here."
"Your new town," said his mother, "has your family. Your grandmother and your aunts."
"I don't want aunts," yelled Adam Joshua. "This town has Peter. This town has me!"
Adam Joshua stood on his toes and looked in the medicine cabinet. One time he drew a man with red teeth on the inside of the cabinet door. He used his mother'slipstick.
The man and the teeth and the lipstick were gone.
"It looks just like anybody's," said Adam Joshua.
The spot in the living room where he spilled milk and cleaned it with orange juice was gone. The kitchen drawer where he kept paints and a turtle was empty.
"Terrible," he said.
On the wall of his bedroom one time he drew around his foot with a pencil and made each toe into a face.
He wrote" Help!" inside the closet once when he was an outlaw and it was a jail.
He'd climbed a stack of chairs and drawn a tiny flag on the ceiling to show he'd been there.
Everything was gone.
Adam Joshua stood in the center and turned slowly around. It was nobody's. It was just a room again.
"This is a terrible thing!" he yelled. "And no one's doing anything about it!"
Adam Joshua found his father.
"I really hate this," he said.
"I know," said his father. "Moving is moving, and you can hate it, but that doesn't make it stop."
"I'm not moving anywhere," said Adam Joshua. "I'm stopping right now."
In the new town, Adam Joshua's grandmother and his aunts were waiting.
"Welcome," they said. "You're going to love it here."
"Bah!" said Adam Joshua.
In the new house, old friends and new neighbors and old family came to visit Adam Joshua's mother and father.
In the new house, Adam Joshua sat alone upstairs in a new room with boxes that weren't unpacked.
"Aren't those boxes unpacked?" an aunt said, sticking her head in the door.
"Never!" yelled Adam Joshua, slamming the door shut and pushing boxes in front of it.
He kicked his wall.
"Doesn't change a thing!" he said, rubbing his foot.
He put his hand on the wall and drew around his hand and drew a face oneach finger. He drew two fingers crying and two fingers growling and the thumb shouting:
" Kung fooey Bleck!" he wrote inside his new closet, on his new closet wall.
He looked at a map to figure out how to get home.
There were black lines that meant roads.
There were red lines that meant highways.
Janice Lee Smith is the author of the Adam Joshua Capers chapter books as well as the I Can Read Books Wizard and Wart, Wizard and Wart in Trouble and Wizard and Wart at Sea. She lives in Noblesville, IN.Dick Gackenbach, the illustrator of all the Adam Joshua Capers, is also the author-illustrator of more than a score of books of his own. Mr. Gackenbach lives in Washington Depot, Connecticut.