Rule of Three (15 page)

Alex just didn’t get it. She didn’t even seem to care that I was boiling mad. And to make things worse, by the time I woke up this morning, my enchanted castle looked more like a slumped-over Tower of London.

“But you’re not doing anything right this minute.”

“Yes, I am! I’m waiting for Olivia to call. She’s coming with me to the cake-off. Her mom’s going to drive us.”

“Well, I’m going with Scott and I’m going to be late —”

“Alex and Scott Towel, sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” sang Joey mockingly.

“Joey and Laurie, sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” I teased back, momentarily forgetting my anger.

“Laurie who?” Alex asked.

“You know. Laurie. The guy from
Little Women
. The one that likes Jo. Joey’s in love with him.”

“So? Alex is in love with Scott Towel and that Voice Man guy.”

“Let’s go, Joey!” Dad called up the stairs.

“I’m leaving, too. Good luck today, girls,” said Mom.

“Alex, you’re in charge,” Dad reminded her.

Alex in charge of me?

“And I don’t want to hear about any fighting,” said Dad.

That shouldn’t be hard. Since technically I still wasn’t speaking to her.

9:37

Alex barged into my room, waving Mom’s iron around. “Iron my hair!” she ordered me. She actually popped open the ironing board, laid her head down on it, and stretched out her long hair as if she were Rapunzel or something.

“You’re joking, right?”

“No! Dad said Mom used to iron her hair in high school. C’mon! Hurry up!”

“No way am I going to iron your hair!” I protested.

“You have to,” said Alex. “I’m in charge.”

9:41

I had never ironed so much as a sock, much less my sister’s hair!

If Alex knew how mad I was at her, she wouldn’t let me near her hair with an iron. . . .

I got the iron really hot. Huffing and puffing. I must have accidentally set it on Puff-the-Magic-Dragon, because hiccups of steam kept poofing out of the thing, even though I hadn’t added a single drop of water. I started by ironing Alex’s hair at the ends, about an inch at a time. Her hair is super-curly, and it took five minutes to iron one curl.

“Shouldn’t I be using a towel or something to put over your hair?”

“Just iron!”

Alex muttered lines she was rehearsing while practically leaning upside-down on the ironing board.

“Hey! I think it’s really working!” I said, surprised.

“Stop pressing the mist button,” Alex ordered.
Ssssss!
Steam hissed off of Alex’s hair, sending up cumulus-cloud puffs, like smoke signals.

I couldn’t help cracking up. “You look like one of those cartoon characters that are mad and have steam coming out of their ears.”

“As long as I look like a
straight-haired
cartoon,” she snapped.

9:45

Operation Straight Hair was going great, until . . . the phone rang.

Olivia! I grabbed the cordless, switching the iron to my left hand.

“Stevie!” Alex said, annoyed.

“Don’t worry. I got it. Just hold still. DO NOT move a hair.”

It was Olivia. Even though I was going to see my best friend in about twenty-one minutes, she started yakking away about all this stuff that happened yesterday since I’d seen her, telling me all about:

• A spitball catapult some kid named Dylan built in shop class
  
• How she fell asleep studying the night before and messed up Potamia (as in flubbed her test on Ancient Mesopotamia)
  
• Her new piano teacher’s hairy-toed bare feet (Hairy Feet wears flip-flops!)
  

9:49

“What’s that burning smell?” Alex asked.

All of a sudden, I smelled a stinking smell. An awful smell. A terrible, horrible
burning
smell, vile and odiferous. Worse than the Chinese Fried Rice Incident — the time I burned the rice in a skillet so bad it filled the whole kitchen with smoke.

Holy Hamlet! Alex’s hair!

I dropped the phone.

9:51

Alex yanked her hair out from under the iron. The iron and ironing board went crashing to the floor. I grabbed the iron, turning it off before it could burn anything else.

The back of her hair was . . . smoking! Way worse than a cartoon character.

Alex stood up.

All of a sudden, to my horror, I saw a big hunk of Alex’s beautiful, once-curly long hair fall to the ground. Then another. I’d left the iron on her hair too long!

Alex turned around.

The shape of the iron, like a big triangle, was burned out of the back of her hair.

“Uh!” I sucked in a horrified breath, my mouth gaping open. I covered my mouth with both hands, not daring to say a word.

“Look at me! My hair! And the play is tomorrow! What am I gonna do?” She shook a fistful of burned hair at me. “You could have burned me
and
this old house down!”

Alex zinged from mirror to mirror. In the bathroom, under the bright lights, she held up a hand mirror to inspect the back of her hair.

“Ahhhhh! Look what you did to me!” she yelled (and a bunch of other not-so-polite stuff. I think “canker blossom” and “be-slubbering fly-bitten rat’s bane” were in there somewhere). “I look like a scarecrow!”

“Too bad the play isn’t
The Wizard of Oz
!” I said, trying to lighten the mood, but it didn’t exactly go over.

Alex shook the hand mirror at me accusingly. “You did this on purpose, Stevie Reel! Don’t think I don’t know —”

“I did not! It was an accident! I was talking to Livvie and not paying attention for like one second. I didn’t do anything on purpose. You’re the one who had to iron your stupid hair.”

“Oh, yeah? You’re just jealous.”

“Me, jealous? Ha!”

“You know you’ve been dying to get back at me ever since I got the lead and you didn’t.”

“And whose fault is that? I didn’t even stand a chance, because you went running to Mr. Cannon, telling him that I was too busy and shouldn’t get the lead.”

If I had thrown a rock at Alex and hit her right between the eyes, I don’t think I could have stunned her any more. For once, my sister wasn’t acting.

Silence fell between us, thick and impenetrable, like a curtain that drops, separating actor from audience.

When I finally worked up the courage to look up at my sister and meet her eyes, I saw that they weren’t hard anymore. In fact, it was impossible to stay screaming-mad at somebody who looked so pathetic, standing there in her pajama top and princess pantaloons, with her hair sticking up like an inside-out umbrella.

“You know about that?” she half whispered.

Just then, I heard a car honk outside. The doorbell rang. Olivia! It was time for the cake-off.

Before either of us could say another word, I was on my way out the door, teetering down the sidewalk, trying not to topple my castle.

5:19

I came home from the cake-off to a house
full of short-haired strangers (a.k.a. Alex AND Joey!).

“Your hair,” I blurted in surprise, then covered my mouth.

“I know,” said Alex. “It’s shorter than Shakespeare’s.”

“But you’re not as bald as Humpty Dumpty!” Joey added encouragingly.

My sister reached up and tugged a short hunk of hair over her ears, as if yanking on it might somehow make it longer.

Joey jumped in. “It’s just like the Great Tragedy in
Little Women
!”

“How is this like Beth dying?” I asked impatiently.

“No, it’s like the time Jo tried to curl Meg’s hair, and she burned off all the ends.”

“This
is
a Great Tragedy,” said Alex, tragically touching her short mop of curls. She went on to tell about the dress rehearsal I’d missed, and the fact that her moth-munched wig fell off no less than seven times during rehearsal.

Then Joey told about coming home and finding Einstein Alex and getting her hair chopped off and giving it to Locks of Love.

“How does it feel?” I asked.

“Weird,” said Joey. “It was scary at first, but then
thrilling.
”

“Thrilling, huh?”

“You know. Just like when Jo March cut off all her hair and sold it for twenty-five dollars to help her family because they were so poor.”

“That was a brave thing you did, Duck,” I told her.

“Stop calling me Duck. Call me Jo!”

“And way generous.” I felt guilty, twirling a lock of my own long hair.

“Yeah, but then on the way home, at the supermarket, a guy stepped on my foot by mistake, and his wife said, ‘Say you’re sorry to the boy.’ Try explaining that I’m a girl named Joey with
this
hair,” Joey said.

At least she could laugh about it. “Now we’ll have to call you J-O-E instead of just J-O,” I teased her.

Mom and Dad came in. “Tell us all about the cake-off,” said Mom.

“They must have loved your enchanted castle,” Dad said.

“Did you win a blue ribbon?” Joey asked eagerly.

“Nope.”

“Did you win a gold ribbon?”

“Nope.”

“Did you win a red or green or purple or silver?”