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

time to peruse all the rooms before casting our votes, I was so nervous, I thought I’d be sick. When we got to the office, Olive said, “Come on,” but I couldn’t do it.

“You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll stay out here.”

“Are you sure? Don’t you want to hear what people think?”

“No,” I said. That was exactly what I was afraid to hear. I sat on the floor and leaned up against some lockers.

When Olive came back out the door with a bunch of kids, she was smiling really big.

“It was so great, Maggie!” she said. She shifted a lemon-drop-shaped lump to her other cheek. “Everyone loved it! Although . . . some kids asked where the dancing sunflower was. Remember when you had Mrs. Abbott put that away in her desk because it detracted from the new focal point?” Of course I remembered. How could they ever notice the seating area if they were looking at that goofy sunflower?

“So, they really liked it?” I asked, and we went back and forth like that for a minute, me pressing Olive for more, and Olive sharing all the praise. She held out her hand to reveal two wrapped lemon drops. “From Mrs. Abbott,” Olive said. “She said to tell you good luck, even though we don’t need it.”

As I went around visiting the other rooms, a lemon drop poking from both my cheeks, I started to feel better and better. The gym hallway? Well, the boy I saw that morning with the roll of paper and markers must have been their entire decorating team. The only thing they’d done was tape paper to the walls with messages scribbled on it like “Go Long Branch!” Preschoolers could have done a better job.

Olive poked me when we walked by it. “This is not fantabulous,” she whispered, and we giggled.

“Yup,” I whispered back. “Amateur hour.”

The music room was better. The math team had decorated it, and they had a theme, which helped, although it wasn’t exactly an original idea. Cardboard music notes hung from the ceiling, and along the back wall they’d cut a music staff out of construction paper and written the football players’ names inside the notes. Sure, they’d put glitter on them, but as Grandma always said, you couldn’t put lipstick on a pig. It was so juvenile. I mean, you didn’t see any glitter in House Beautiful.

I’d already seen the science room during class. It also had glittery objects hanging from the ceiling; in this case, planets. And the student council—the student council itself!—wasn’t even finished with their area, which was the hallway that led to the pick-up loop. When we went to check it out, we found a sixth-grade boy desperately painting a papier-mâché thing that sort of, if you squinted, looked like our school’s wildcat mascot.

That left the main hallway, the cheerleaders’ hallway, which we’d walked through several times that day. I’d already gotten an eyeful of the hot mess of green and brown crepe paper. It was everywhere. If the colors looked bad in small doses, well . . .

They’d looped the paper from the ceiling, twisted it above the lockers, wrapped it around poles. There were signs, too, in the same clashing colors, with sayings that all made the same point, that Long Branch was supposed to crush Centerville in the football game, although the words were written in bubble font, which made the threats of domination seem way less serious. The signs were all over the wall, and some were even duct-taped to the floor.

“This hallway is giving me a headache,” I said to Olive.

“Yeah, same,” Olive said. “What’s that you always say, about the eyes getting tired?”

“The eye needs a place to rest,” I said. “You’re exactly right. It’s negative space, white space. If there’s too much stuff, your eyes don’t know where to focus, and it just gets overwhelming. It’s why your bookmarks look so awesome, Olive. They have just the right balance.”

Olive and I leaned against the lockers while the other kids were jumping from sign to sign like they were playing hopscotch. A piece of crepe paper came loose from the ceiling and landed right on my shoulder. Olive pointed, rolling her eyes.

“Typical,” I said, laughing. I was feeling so pleased. I didn’t want to jinx anything, but . . . I flicked the paper off and watched it float the rest of the way to the ground.

Katelyn was there, pointing out the posters on the floor to a group of kids. She was wearing her cheerleader uniform, and her lips were even shinier and pinker than usual. Clearly she’d just reapplied her gloss. She pointed. “See here, how it says to ‘Stomp Out the Rockets,’ and the sign is on the floor. Get it?”

“Yeah, cool,” the kids said.

Now I rolled my eyes. What was next? Backflips?

Olive was listening to Katelyn’s sales pitch. “Well, I guess that’s kind of creative,” Olive said, but I glared at her, and she didn’t say anything else.

At the end of the day, just before the dismissal bell, Mr. Villanueva’s voice came over the speaker. I was beginning to wonder if he’d ever announce the winners.

“I have the results of our Spirit Week Decorating Contest!” he announced. Nothing like waiting until the last minute, Mr. V.

He started going on and on: “. . . congratulate all the teams . . . examples of school spirit . . . hard work . . .”

Oh, get to the point!

“In sixth place . . .”

Great, he’s going backward.

“Is the basketball team for their decoration of the gym hallway.”

I felt my body relax, just a bit. Of course the basketball team got last place. They had put in zero effort. It was only fair.

“In fifth place is the student council. . . . ”

That stupid papier-mâché wildcat. You can’t put all your effort into one piece. It would be like buying a killer couch and sticking it in an empty living room. I mean, nice couch, but where are you going to set your popcorn on movie night?

“Science club takes fourth place. . . .” Now, that was a bit of a surprise. I thought they might take second. The planets were actually