The Rule of Threes, Marcy Campbell [short novels to read .TXT] 📗

heart. Then she stared out the bus window for a minute, though there was nothing much to see. Beauty parlor, coffee shop, dry cleaner, coffee shop. Everything was clean and neat. It looked pretty nice, our downtown. There were always potted flowers or, in the winter, holiday lights, hanging from the lampposts on the main streets. But the boring stuff was the same boring stuff as everywhere. If you’ve seen one Dunkin’ Donuts, you’ve seen them all.

Olive looked back at me suddenly, then slapped her hands on her thighs as though she’d just had some great insight.

“Well, this is just about the most amazing thing I have personally ever heard,” she said. “To think, you had a brother out there all this time, and now, now you’re reunited! It truly is the most amazing thing. Here you are, this whole family, and Tony, just coming out of nowhere in the middle of the night to be with you, just tiptoeing into your life, to make it complete.”

I noticed Olive’s lip quivering again. She cried when she was happy, or sad. She cried a lot. Her reaction made me wonder whether I was looking at this situation the wrong way, but that thought only lasted a second.

“Tony didn’t ‘come out of nowhere in the middle of the night,’ ” I said. “He came in the daytime, remember? And he didn’t ‘tiptoe into my life.’ He crashed around like an annoying boy with a basketball.”

I stole a glance at Olive. Her face had hardened. She didn’t say anything else. Olive always acted like everything was fantabulous, when it often wasn’t. The bus pulled up to the school, its brakes squealing, like it didn’t want to be there any more than I did.

Most School Spirit

What was 6-6/10 times 8/12? I clutched my pencil tightly and stared at the empty line, which was waiting for my answer. I couldn’t remember how to do it. I hated fractions! I was okay in math in general, but why did we have to start with fractions? I kept waiting for it to click, but so far, no such luck. My dad always said when you learned a new concept, not just in math, but anything, that it had to bump around in your brain for a while, and then everything would just click, like a puzzle coming together, or a light bulb flicking on, or fingers snapping.

“Wow, Dad, too many similes,” I had said to him. We’d been studying figurative language in English at the time, which I had no trouble understanding.

Part of my problem with the test was that I was obviously distracted, thinking about Tony hanging out in my house with Mom, and maybe Dad, too, if he’d gotten some time off work. Talk about a new concept bumping around in my brain. Instant brother.

Somehow, I’d kept the news to myself all day, only telling Olive. The next time I saw her was at lunch, when we met up at our usual table that we shared with Rachel and a few other kids from our language arts section. Today, though, Katelyn was there. She was at the end of the table, with her legs crossed and sticking into the aisle, so I could see her boots. Black suede, just like Rachel’s.

They were laughing as Olive and I walked up, and for a minute, I got that burning feeling in my chest because I was worried they were laughing about me. But Rachel smiled and patted the spot on the bench next to her.

“How’d you do on the math test?” Olive asked everybody.

“My group didn’t have a test today,” Katelyn said through her perfectly glossed lips. She was “gifted” in math, and didn’t like anyone to forget it.

“I think I bombed it,” Rachel said. “I couldn’t remember how to multiply fractions when there’s a whole number.”

“Me neither!” I exclaimed, grateful for one little thing Rachel and I could share.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Katelyn said, waving her hand. “You just convert the mixed number into an improper fraction, then you, you know, just do the rest.”

Rachel and I both looked at her with confused faces.

“I’ll show you later, Rakell,” Katelyn said. I noticed she had turned her body as far away from me as possible. Turn an inch more and she’d fall right into the aisle.

“Oh, who cares,” Rachel said. “I’m probably not going to need much math for the rest of my life! Why get upset about it?”

I stopped chewing my PB&J and glanced at her, remembering when she and I were younger and she wanted to be an astronaut, and I was in a veterinarian phase. Then she got interested in interior design with me. You needed math for design, a little at least, to figure out placement of things and stuff like that. And you sure as heck needed math to be an astronaut. Everybody knew that. But lately, Rachel didn’t seem interested in much besides which boys in our class were cute.

“Well, all the kids I’ve talked to thought the test was really hard,” Olive said, “and I studied for it. You did, too, Maggie, right?”

I was about to answer when Rachel said, “How could she study, with all that chaos at her place?” She turned her body so she faced me. Katelyn leaned in, grinning.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. I felt my face getting hot, like I was breaking out in hives, even though that was Rachel’s thing, not mine.

At the table behind us, a couple boys were arguing, one loudly calling the other a dillweed, which was the new insult of the week. Last week, boys would start yelling “Yeet!” for no reason. First a boy on one side of the room would yell it, then someone on the other side (“Yeet! Yeet! Yeet!”), so the lunchroom supervisor never knew for sure who was doing it. Today we had the mean lunchroom lady, who, unfortunately, had been at my elementary school. Guess she got transferred here, so she