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

That last part, though, wasn’t very likely. No one came to our house selling anything, except during Girl Scout cookie season, but that wasn’t until spring. It was barely September. Honestly, no one came to the house unexpectedly at all, except the BFFs and sometimes my dad’s basketball friends.

I looked again at the car, noticed a dent in the front left fender. I’d never seen the car before, or the woman, who, although she looked like she could have been somebody’s grandma, definitely wasn’t mine. She opened her door and while she struggled a bit to get out of the car, her striped top rode up, giving a clear view of her elastic-waist pants, which didn’t match the top. Definitely nothing like my grandma, who always dressed very stylishly, even if she was just going to the grocery store. Grandma really loved colorful scarves and had four special hangers for them in her closet.

The boy turned his head then, glancing toward the house. He looked about the same age as me. He was wearing a blue hoodie, and a mop of black hair covered one eye, making him look both goofy and dangerous.

“He’s cute,” Rachel said, and I gave her a little punch to the arm, but not enough to really hurt. It’s just that I was sick of Rachel’s newfound interest in boys. She’d never even noticed them in fifth grade. In any case, he actually wasn’t cute, not really, but still, there was something about him that made me stare, something that seemed oddly familiar.

I felt that little buzz in my brain that I got whenever something was off. You could call it intuition, I guess, but that seemed too fancy and important. It was just a feeling, the same feeling I got when I realized a design project I’d been working on wasn’t quite there yet.

He looked up toward my window and saw me looking back at him. I quickly turned around. “Break’s over,” I said to my friends. “Let’s get back to our tablescape.”

I was so thankful to have our little trio, our design team, together that I didn’t want to waste another minute. Rachel had joined the swim team this year, and Olive had to help out a lot with her baby brother, so it was getting harder to meet. When we started the BFFs, in fourth grade, we didn’t have as much going on, and there wasn’t any pressure. We were just messing around then, redecorating each other’s bedrooms. But word got out. Soon, we were helping some friends with their rooms. Then we helped some friends’ moms, who actually paid us.

I started adding to my savings account, so that someday I could help pay for college, where I’d study interior design and do this for real. Grandma had told me once, if she’d had it to do over, she would have done just that. But she got too busy raising my mom, and meant to have more kids (though that never happened), and anyway, she said, “things were different back then.”

“Olive, could you move the vase a little to the right?” I asked.

Olive did.

“A little more,” I said.

Olive moved the vase too far.

“Now back, just a little, just a little. There. Perfect,” I said. “What do you think, Rachel?”

“Hmm?” She was sitting behind me, playing with my hair like she’d done ever since we’d shared a carpet square in kindergarten.

“The tablescape, what do you think of it?”

“Oh, yeah, it looks good,” she said.

“Are you actually looking?” I asked. She was trying to coax my curly black hair into a bun, and it hurt.

“I’m looking, Maggie, I’m looking, and it looks fine. And also, it’s Ra-kell now, remember?” She kept her grip on my hair, but leaned forward, looking at my face. “By the way,” she said, “I have some new blush you can borrow.”

“No, thanks,” I replied. I pushed her hands away from my head, let my hair fall.

Rachel laughed and said, “I would kill for your cheekbones. I mean, hello, they’re one of your best features, and you’re not even highlighting them. What happened to ‘Using Your Assets’?” she said. “Isn’t that rule number, I don’t know, five-hundred-and-something?”

Olive giggled, and I shot her a look. They could make fun of my rules if they wanted to, but those rules worked.

“Well, I think it looks fantabulous,” Olive said. Everything was fantabulous to Olive. If I’d told her once, I’d told her a million times, it’s either fabulous or fantastic, not both.

But she was right; it did look awfully nice. The tall yellow vase Olive had just moved was flanked by a little bronze pig, wings sprouting from its back, and on the other side, a silver picture frame. Grandma had taught me how to group things with her thriller-filler-spiller method. The rule was actually meant for plants that you’d arrange in a pot. The “thriller” was the tall, eye-catching plant. The “filler” was a plant that was pretty and lush, taking up space, and the “spiller” was something that spilled out over the edge.

I wasn’t into gardening as much as Grandma was, but the concept still worked. I had my tall thriller—the vase—and a chunky photo frame—the filler. The pig? Well, he didn’t actually spill out anywhere, but his wings were spread, and I thought it had a similar effect.

I’d bought all three items at the dollar store, adding them to my overflowing prop box. I was the keeper of the box and the unofficial leader of the team, which meant I always hosted the meetings of our design company, the BFFs, which stood for Best Foot Forward, along with the obvious, Best Friends Forever. Of course Dad liked to joke about whether this meant we were the Best Foot Forwards, or the Best Feet Forward. I also set the meeting agendas. Today: How to Create a Tablescape.

“Remember,” I told them. “The rule of threes works because our eyes are more attracted to odd-numbered groupings. It forces