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

call her right after dinner.” I popped the last buttery hunk of garlic bread into my mouth, washed it down with some milk.

“Help me with these dishes first?” Dad asked.

Mom and I cleared the table while Dad filled the sink with water, then Mom went to check her phone for texts. People always liked to bother her about house listings during dinnertime.

“Wash or dry?” Dad asked.

“Wash,” I said. I always said wash. Dad knew not to make the water so hot that I couldn’t put my hands in it. I dipped my fingers into the suds. Ahhhh . . . just right.

I started washing the spaghetti bowl while Dad loaded the dishwasher with the plates and cups and silverware.

“So, this contest sounds pretty cool,” he said.

“It is! It’s going to be awesome. I’m just hoping we get a good location to decorate. And that Olive and Rachel are as excited as I am.”

“Why wouldn’t they be?” Dad asked. He pulled a yellow checked towel from the drawer.

“Well, Rachel is acting, I don’t know, just kind of different.” I scrubbed at some dried sauce on the edge of the bowl. “She’s just . . . acting like she wants to do different things and have new friends and stuff since we got to middle school.”

“That happens,” Dad said.

“It happened to you?”

“Sure. I made different friends as I moved through school, depending on what kinds of sports or clubs I was involved in. But I kept some of those old friends, too. I still talk to a friend I met in kindergarten, in fact. That might be the way it goes for you, too.”

“Yeah, but I like the friends I have.”

“Of course you do. No one is saying you need to go out looking for new friends, but if you meet some people you hit it off with, sometimes new friendships just happen naturally, and sometimes old friendships might move a bit into the background.”

I handed him the bowl, and he dried it off. I didn’t want my friendship with Rachel, or Olive, to move into the background.

Dad must have noticed I looked worried. “Everything looks worse at night,” he said. “You’ll feel better in the morning. All you have to do is just keep being the great girl you are, and the right friends will be attracted to that.”

If he was Mom, he’d be grabbing his laptop right now to email the school counselor, or texting Rachel’s mom to discuss the situation, or getting me to make a ten-step plan for dealing with changing friendships. But that wasn’t Dad’s style.

We finished the dishes while he hummed a song I recognized from a Beatles movie we saw recently, about a marketplace and life going on.

“I better call Grandma,” I said. “Mom says not to count on her being very alert after seven p.m.”

“You shouldn’t count on me being alert after seven p.m. either,” Dad said, swatting me with the dishtowel. “Or before seven p.m., for that matter.”

I grabbed his towel and swatted him back before running upstairs to my room.

It took Grandma five rings to pick up.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Grandma, it’s Maggie.”

There was a pause, and I glanced at the clock. It wasn’t seven yet, only 6:45.

“Oh! How are you, sweetie?” she asked, her smile coming right through the phone.

“I’m fine. How are you?”

My grandma wasn’t like my friends’ grandmas who constantly complained about all their aches and pains and how things cost too much and how kids didn’t act like they were supposed to anymore. In fact, Mom said she sometimes wished Grandma would complain more, just so she’d have a heads-up when something was wrong with her, especially now that Grandpa had died.

“Oh, I’m doing very well,” Grandma said, “just looking through some seed catalogs, thinking about putting some Cardinal flowers along that shady part of the fence next spring.”

“Grandma, it’s not even fall!” I laughed.

“No harm comes from proper planning,” she said breezily. It was something she said a lot, something I’d taken to heart. I always put lots of planning into my room designs. Grandma had taught me I should measure the rooms and sketch out just where everything should go, so there wouldn’t be any surprises.

“Grandma, guess what? The school is going to have a contest where we get to decorate hallways and stuff!”

“Hallways? What about the . . . the metal . . . containers . . . where you put your bags . . .”

“The lockers?” I asked.

“Yes, lockers. How are you going to design around those?”

“Ummm,” I said. I didn’t have any idea, not yet. I didn’t even know any details about the contest. “There might be some classrooms, too, not just hallways,” I said.

Grandma wasn’t saying anything, and I felt my excitement droop like the philodendron on my bookshelf I was always forgetting to water. “It’s going to be great!” I said, but my heart wasn’t quite in it anymore.

“Of course it will, sweetie,” she said, then paused again. “It’s probably bedtime, isn’t it?” she asked.

I wasn’t sure if she meant her bedtime or mine, but I said, “Yeah, I should probably go. Do you want to talk to Mom?”

“No, that’s okay. It was nice to chat with you, honey, and I’ll talk to you soon, okay? Bye, Margie.”

I hung up, not sure if I’d heard her right. Did she just call me Margie?

Little Red Car

I might not have noticed the little red car pull up outside our house the next day if its brakes hadn’t screeched so horribly, pulling me, Rachel, and Olive away from our meeting and over to my bedroom window. The car skidded to a stop just past our place, then backed up, then jerkily drove forward again, very slowly turning into our driveway, the woman behind the wheel squinting at the house numbers painted in white on our mailbox.

“Who’s that?” Rachel asked.

The driver was a gray-haired woman wearing large glasses. She stopped the car, pulled a purse onto her lap, and started digging through it. I saw her turn and speak to a kid sitting in the back. I couldn’t see his face very well.

“Probably somebody with the wrong