Authors: Megan McDonald
Rule of Three
Contents
Formerly Known as Human Piñata
The Greatest-Ever Little Women Fake-Out
Scream and Scream 2: Double Feature
Once Upon an Audition, Part Two
Will the Real Princess Please Stand Up?
Having My Cake and Eating It, Too
I Know What You Did Last Winter
Knife, fork, spoon.
Rock, paper, scissors.
Lights, camera, action.
Everywhere you look, things come in threes. It’s the Rule of Three.
Honest. It’s a real rule. The Rule of Three says that things are better when they come in threes.
Think about it: Red, white, blue. Snap, crackle, pop. Bacon, lettuce, tomato.
I’m in the middle of three. Sisters, that is. There’s Alex, oldest and (still!) bossiest, and Joey, youngest and not really a pest anymore, except for when it comes to
Little Women
.
And me.
Me, Myself, and I.
Stevie (not Steven!) Reel.
My dad used to be an actor, and he teaches classes and workshops in drama. He says most plays have a three-act structure. Act I, Act II, Act III. Introduction, Confrontation, Resolution. Dad calls it some fancy name, like Aristotle’s Incline or something. But really it just means Beginning, Middle, End.
Once you start to pay attention, you find threes everywhere.
They started popping up in science class:
Solid, liquid, gas.
Crust, mantle, core.
Igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary. It even works for rocks.
Columbus had three ships. Space has three dimensions. Even Plato said the soul has three parts. The whole world is made up of threes!
Believe it or not, you can find rules of three in math, myth, and music; in plants, animals, and nature; in art and in architecture.
See? I am not making this up. It’s a real rule (not a Reel rule!). Like an actual law of the universe or something.
What goes up must come down.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
With three sisters, we know all about stuff going wrong. But at least it’s not boring. That’s what my best friend, Olivia, says.
She’s an Only. She’s always going on about how lucky I am to be in a family of three sisters. I try to get it through her head — lots of times, sisters are like . . . well, like this magnet Joey has stuck on her bulletin board:
Big sisters are the crabgrass in the lawn of life.
Olivia doesn’t know about the crabgrass. Like fights. Fights over bathrooms and black shirts and boys, cupcakes and pancakes and parts in school plays.
Of course, I have to admit, Olivia doesn’t get to be in the Sisters Club, either. She doesn’t get to stay up half the night laughing till she pees her pants with her two best friends in the world, who are most times right in the next bed, or the next room, or just down the hall when you need them.
Alex has this old-fashioned poster hanging in her room that’s been there for as long as I can remember. The edges are all curled and it’s sun-yellowed now, but it’s a painting called
Two Sisters
by some guy named Bouguereau. (Joey calls him Booger-O!) He’s the one who painted all those pale, sad-eyed orphan girls who look lonely. In this one, the older sister has her arms around the little one, who’s holding an apple. The older sister has a blue ribbon in her hair, and dark, sad eyes, with smudges of bruise-colored roses on her cheeks.
When I was little, I used to go into Alex’s room and point to that poster, and ask, “Why is she so sad? Does she miss her mom and dad?”
Alex always answered the same way: “No, she misses her sister.”
“But her sister’s right there,” I’d say, pointing to the curly-headed cherub with the juicy green apple.
“Not that sister. The other one. The one in the middle.”
I always loved Alex for that. For making me feel like there’s a hole there without me. For making me feel missed.
Sisters are better in threes.
That’s the truth.
The whole truth.
And nothing but the truth.
I was making my famous Don’t-Bug-Me-I’m-
Baking cupcakes when Joey came into the kitchen, waving a moldy old copy of
Little Women
in my face. Even though the spine is cracked, the pages are yellowed, and the mustiness factor is a seven, Mom says it’s not old; it’s
classic
. Joey could read it by herself, but it is (a) about as long as three
Harry Potters,
with teeny-tiny print; (b) full of old-fashioned kinds of words; and (c) um, well, let’s just say Joey likes to ask a lot of questions. So, we’ve been reading it aloud together.
“Stevie, want to read
Little Women
?” Joey asked.
I held up my wooden mixing spoon dripping with chocolate peanut-butter banana cupcake batter, as if to say, “Can’t you see I’m busy right now?” but Joey’s face looked so eager and hopeful, I had a hard time letting her down. “Maybe while the cupcakes are baking, we can read for fifteen minutes.”
“Only fifteen? How about longer?”
“That’s enough to get us past the boring part.”
Joey looked insulted. “Huh! There are no boring parts.”
“Yah-huh. What about all that stuff about Meg and her bonnet? Admit it, Joey. Bonnets are boring.”
“Says you.”
Something you should know about Joey: when she gets into something, she gets
way
into it. Her latest phase: all
Little Women
all the time, bonnets or no bonnets. Case in point:
- She gave up presents for Christmas because in
Little Women,
the dad’s away at war and they don’t have any money, so they have to give up Christmas presents. - She started saying stuff like “I dare say! Nothing pleasant ever does happen in this family!” and “It’s a dreadfully unjust world.”
- She’s growing her hair to give it away to charity, so she makes me measure it a gazillion times a week!
She even wants us to call her Jo instead of Joey. I don’t mind reading with her, but lately, I’d been stalling and making up excuses because we were on Chapter 38 and in two chapters is the “Valley of the Shadow,” when Beth dies.
Joey is going to freak!
All of a sudden, we heard a crash from the next room, where Alex had been clickety-clacking on Dad’s laptop. Joey and I went running and saw Alex teetering on the arm of the big overstuffed chair, staring in horror at Dad’s laptop, which had crashed to the floor.
Good thing Dad was out in his garage/studio/workshop. He was putting in long hours building a giant genie lamp for some fat guy to pop out of in a play they’re doing at the Raven Theater, next door.
“Is it broken?” Joey asked.
“Just the battery popped out, I think,” Alex said, finally reaching to pick it up.
Mixing bowl and spoon in hand, I was still stirring, trying not to lose count. “Alex, Dad’s going to kill you if you break that,” I said.
“What’s so big and important that you have to look it up every five seconds, anyway?” Joey asked.
“The Drama Club at school is putting on a new play, and Mr. Cannon said they’d be announcing what it will be on the website by five o’clock today.”
“It’s only 4:33,” I pointed out, still stirring counterclockwise.
“
By
five o’clock,” she said, like I’d never heard the word before. “Not
at
five o’clock. That could mean before five.”
“Sheesh.” Sometimes
sheesh
is all you can say when your sister’s a DQ. Alex has taken every one of the quizzes in her teen magazines, and she always comes up DQ (Drama-not-Dairy Queen).
“What do you think it’ll be?” Joey asked.
“I hope, hope, hope it’s
Romeo and Juliet,
” Alex said. Surprise, surprise. She’s been wanting to play Juliet since the late Pleistocene era (a.k.a. 1.8 million years ago).