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

kitchen (he was always snacking), or doing his homework in the dining room. He stayed out of my room, thankfully, because I had a lot of planning to do for the contest, and I didn’t want anyone messing with my stuff.

I’d texted the BFFs after the assembly, and Olive had excitedly texted back, but Rachel hadn’t yet. Any team that wanted to enter had to draw their location, the area they’d decorate, out of a hat. I hoped we’d get something really visible, like the school’s main hallway.

I repositioned the three items on my bookshelf until they were just right. Then I started on my desk, carefully dusting around my shell; it never got dusty since I rubbed it so much.

“What smells in here?” Tony said, scaring the crud out of me. He was standing in my doorway, pinching his nose. “It smells like a grandma.”

Okay, scratch that previous thought. Tony used to stay out of my room. “It’s lemon,” I said, and it didn’t smell anything like my grandma, who smelled like her rose-scented perfume.

The lemon was covering up the new smell in our house, which I’d noticed right when I walked in the door yesterday. It wasn’t bad, just different, like grass or mud. Must be from Tony; our house never had a smell before.

I held up the can. “You can use it when I’m done, if you want. I doubt anyone’s dusted the spare bedroom in a long time.”

Tony shrugged. “I didn’t notice any dust in there,” he said.

You wouldn’t, I thought, but didn’t say it. He was looking around at everything in my room. He was always just silently looking at everything. He had done it at dinner, too, sitting across from me, staring into the mirror behind my head and at the pictures on the walls, but not at any of us. Thankfully, my parents hadn’t asked us to say “One Big Thing” that happened that day, which would have been, let’s just say, awkward. I’d eaten silently, moving my chair closer to Dad so I could see any birds that came to the feeder without Tony’s big head in my way.

I moved a stack of library books and swiped the dust rag across my desk. I thought if I kept working, Tony might leave my room, but he didn’t. Meanwhile, I could see all the dust particles dancing in a shaft of sunlight from my window, just partying, like all my efforts to eradicate them were worthless.

“Bedroom dust is mostly dead skin cells, you know,” I said. If he wasn’t going to move, at least I could attempt a conversation. Better that than having him stare at me. “Your skin is shedding old cells all day long, and they just settle all over the furniture.”

“Gross,” he said.

I repositioned the stuff on my desk. “Well, I’m all done here,” I declared. I held out the can and the rag to him, thinking he might want to do some cleaning in his room after all, but he looked away. Still didn’t leave, though.

“So . . . speaking of grandmas,” I said, “it’s my grandma’s birthday today. She’s seventy-three.” Wait. Was she my grandma? Just mine? Yes, yes, she was. She was my mom’s mother, which meant I didn’t have to share her with Tony. “We’re going to pick her up in a bit and take her to an Italian restaurant that has these never-ending bowls of pasta,” I said. Mmmm, my idea of heaven—all-you-can-eat pasta and breadsticks.

Oh no, I just realized, we’d had this dinner planned for weeks, but now with Tony here, maybe we’d have to stay home with him instead, or . . . he wouldn’t come along, would he? I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

“I have to stay home and talk to my mom,” Tony said. “On the phone,” he added, because I must have given him a weird look.

“Your mom? Is she calling you from—?”

“From her rehab house, yeah. It’s all arranged.”

“Oh, okay, well, that’s a bummer that you can’t come,” I said, secretly relieved. I wondered how she was going to call him. I hadn’t seen him with a phone, and we didn’t have a landline anymore. “Do you have a phone?” I asked.

“No, but she has Bob’s . . . I mean, Dad’s . . . number.”

He said it like the word left a funny taste in his mouth, like he wasn’t used to saying Dad with a capital D. It certainly didn’t sound right. In Language Arts, we’d been reviewing when words like dad and mom and grandma needed to be capitalized. It was only when you were referring to a specific one. Tony’s. Mine. Ours.

“You know, you could try calling him Robert,” I suggested. “I mean, you’re calling my mom Susan, right? That way it matches.”

Tony shrugged, then brought his thumb to his mouth and started chewing on his nail.

“Anyway . . . Dad will be at the restaurant,” I said.

“Yeah, no, he said he’d stay home, that you and your mom and grandma can have a girls’ night.”

A girls’ night? We’d been planning this for weeks, the whole family with Grandma. “That wasn’t the plan,” I said.

Tony shrugged. “The thing is, Dad has to kind of listen in to the call, well, not really listen, but he has to be sitting next to me while I talk, so the calls have to be set up ahead of time. We can’t rearrange it. She wouldn’t like that.”

“Who’s ‘she’?” I asked. “Your mom?”

“No, the social worker.”

“Oh, is that who brought you here? The gray-haired lady?”

“Yeah, that was her. She’s so annoying.” Tony started laughing, like he’d remembered something. “She packed my duffel bag for me. She even packed my underwear!”

He laughed harder, and I couldn’t help myself; I did, too.

“You can sit down if you want,” I said. I pointed to the beanbag. “It’s super comfy.”

Tony yelped as he sunk into it. The beanbag was huge and white, and it looked like he was being swallowed by a giant marshmallow.

“Do you have a grandma?” I asked him.

“My mom’s mom is still alive,” he said, “but they sort