Rule of Three (3 page)

“I’m a kid,” Joey said. “And I think it’s funny.”

“And (c),” said Alex, ticking off the letters on her fingers, “I can’t sing.”

“What do you mean, you can’t sing?” Dad asked. “You have a perfectly nice singing voice.” Mom stopped clacking on her keyboard and nodded in agreement.

“You know singing’s not my thing. Not like Stevie.”

Alex always does this. She says bad stuff about herself so people (Mom and Dad) will talk her out of it.

I, for one, was not going to talk her out of it. I was way-down-deep secretly crossing fingers, elbows, and toes, hoping Alex was
not
going to try out for the play. Because ever since I’d heard that the school play was a musical, I had the idea that I could just-might-maybe try out myself.

Alex may be the Actor in the family, but I’m the one with a good singing voice. And there are hardly any speaking lines in a musical — most of the lines you get to sing. But can I just say: if Alex found out I wanted to be in the play, she’d start acting all weird, doubting herself.

I knew Mom and Dad would tell me that if I wanted something badly enough, I should go for it. But half the reason Alex is into acting is so she can be in the spotlight.

It’s one thing for her to compete with Arch-Actress-Enemy Jayden Pffeffer. But I’m her
sister.
Even though I had as much right as she did to try out for the school play, I knew she’d think I was betraying her.

My face grew hot just thinking about trying out. I looked from my sisters to Mom and Dad. Could anybody read it on my face? Tell what I was thinking? I tried to look like maybe I was coming down with a fever.

“And (d) —” said Alex.

“And (d),” I said for her, in a sarcastic voice, “Scott Towel is not going out for the part of the prince, right?” Scott Towel (real name Scott Howell, but Joey and I prefer the paper-towel version) was this kid Alex has been crushing on since the fourth grade. He happened to be the Beast in
Beauty and the Beast
when Alex played Beauty.

“Frog Lips!” said Joey (it’s her other favorite name for Scott Towel). “Maybe the part isn’t hairy enough for him.”

“Ha, ha, very funny. FYI, I haven’t talked to Scott Towel, I mean Howell. So I don’t know if he’s going out for it or not.”

“So what’s your other reason, then?” Joey asked.

“Hel-lo! It’s a comedy. You have to act all goofy and trip over stuff and everything.”

“You’re good at that!” said Joey, unfolding herself from the chair-and-a-half she’d been tucked into with a book for the last hour. She was referring to the now-famous Volcano Incident, when Alex tripped and broke her toe in
Beauty and the Beast
. At the last minute, I had stepped in to take her part since I knew all the lines. That’s when I’d started to figure out that my Human Piñata days were over and maybe I could actually be in a play without dying of stage fright.

“We all remember Alex’s Big Trip,” Dad teased.

“Not every play has to be Shakespeare, honey,” Mom said. “Musicals are wildly popular now, and they’re so much fun.”

I’ll skip the part where Mom and Dad chatted it up about the Good Old Days (a.k.a. BTHK, Before They Had Kids) and reminisced about all the musicals they were in Once Upon a Time. Major snooze.

After Dad’s Big Trip (down Memory Lane) he started in on one of his famous speeches. “Mom’s right, Alex. Comedy is just as valid. Shakespeare wrote comedies, too, you know. They have puns and plot twists and mistaken identities. Take
As You Like It
or
Much Ado About Nothing.
They’re much more lighthearted in tone than his other works.”

“Some of them even have happy endings,” Mom added.

“Learning to use your body to create humor can be challenging for an actor. It’s called physical comedy, and it’s harder than it looks.”

Dad yakked on and on about Kramer, Mr. Bean, and the Three Stooges and how they were masters of physical theater. Sometimes Dad forgets we aren’t students in his classroom. He launched into explaining the pitfalls of a pratfall (i.e., landing on your butt).

How hard can it be?

“Why don’t they just call it a buttfall?” I asked. Nobody heard my joke. They were too busy walking into walls, making weird faces, tossing the jester hat back and forth, and falling down on their butts, laughing. The Reel Family Clown School.

I was used to feeling left out when it came to this family and acting. Joey tumbled off the couch. OK, so acting has never been my thing, but if that’s acting, I can fall on my butt as well as the next person.

“Watch this,” I called, joining in. I held the back of my hand to my head in a fake faint, took three steps backward, stumbled over the “half” part of the chair-and-a-half and crumpled to the floor, landing on my butt, legs in the air. Joey pointed and laughed the hardest.

Acting
, I thought, catching my breath.
How hard can it be?
But if I tried out for an actual play, would I fall on my butt for real?

Everybody knew Alex was the Actor-with-a-Capital-
A.
The Pretty One. Just like Joey was the Smart One and the Funny One. And I was the Sensible One. Calm. Even-tempered. Levelheaded. We each had parts to play, even in our own family. I felt like I was breaking a major rule just by
thinking
about acting in a play. Like when I crossed the line of tape into Alex’s room — the one we weren’t supposed to step over without her permission.

So, I had a secret. I had decided — I was
going to try out for the play. And I was dying to tell Best Friend Olivia, even though it wasn’t the gossipy kind of secret she always tells me, like when you know something about somebody you’re not supposed to know. The kind Olivia always knew about kids at school or people on her street. Olivia lives in a tree-lined, ride-your-bike neighborhood, where all the houses are thirty-three shades of beige and fly flags with pumpkins and hearts and snowmen at the exact right time of year.

According to Olivia, there’s always somebody to spy on, which I guess you would do a lot of if you were an Only and didn’t have any sisters to bug or hang out with. There was the time Olivia saw a stolen lawn gnome from Mrs. Jaszczak’s front yard in a seventh grader’s locker at school, and the time she heard Sean Vandemeer’s dad yelling his head off when he found out that Sean drove the car even though he’s only fourteen.

We Reels live in Acton’s oldest house, a run-down Victorian right off Main Street that is as shaggy as a eucalyptus tree from all the peeling paint on the outside. Mom likes to joke that the termites have eaten all the fancy gingerbread trim around the roof and porch.

Our neighbors are the Raven Theater, which my family owns, the fire department, and an empty lot that used to be a Christmas-tree farm in the way-old days until a Scurry of Pocket Gophers decided to use it as their home address.

“Look at the bright side,” I told Mom and Dad the other day when they were remembering the Christmas-tree farm and lamenting. “At least it wasn’t taken over by an Implausibility of Gnus.”

This, by the way, is what you’d call Applied Learning. We were studying animal group names (a Glint of Goldfish, a Quiver of Cobras) in school, and I
applied
what I was
learning.
Kind of like using a vocabulary word in a sentence.

Hint: It’s always a good idea to show off What You Are Learning at School right before hitting up your parents for a hundred big ones.

It was hard to concentrate on schoolwork or cupcakes, though, because all I could think about was the musical. At first it was just an idea. A wish. A possibility. My pulse raced just thinking about it.

Then it started to grow, taking up more and more space in me. No matter how much I tried to brush it away, I just couldn’t swat it dead like it was one of a Business of Flies or something. Pretty soon I was thinking about it while I was reading
Little Women
to Joey or watching reruns of Mom’s cooking show on basic cable or making Cavalcades of Cupcakes (I made that one up!) for the Cascade County Cake-Off.

That once-tiny pulse had turned into heart-thumping excitement. Me! In a play! Singing my heart out. Onstage. But I couldn’t breathe a word of it to anyone.

Why the big secret?

Well, when you happen to have a big sister who’s good at everything and is the Actress in the family, and when you’ve had stage fright ever since your first acting role as a Human Piñata, and when you have always been the one in the family who hates acting, and when you’ve spent eleven and a half years trying to be good at other stuff even though you finally got to stand in for your sister in
Beauty and the Beast
because she broke her toe and you knew all the lines and you realized your stage fright was all in your head and that standing in that small spot of light in a room full of breathless dark with everybody holding their breath because of you, YOU . . . well, then it was kind of hard to admit that you even wanted to act in a play.

To get up onstage. To sing.

In fact, it was absolutely-positively terrifying, especially because Alex is, was, and always would be the Princess. Oldest sister. Snow White. Dorothy. Beauty. And if Alex was the Princess in the family, what did that make me?

The Pea.

I am the pea.

I finally called Olivia to tell her for real. Since this was only the Biggest Secret of My Life, I took the cordless phone down into the basement and hid behind the gurgling water heater, whispering the whole time just in case.

For the rest of the week, every time I caught myself getting excited about the play, I tried to shrink my secret down to pea size.
Don’t get your hopes up too high,
I warned myself.

But a little voice inside me would not be quiet. What if I got to stand in the spotlight for once, the way I had for one shining moment in
Beauty
? What if I wasn’t the pea? What if the princess was me?

What if, what if, what if . . . ? In no time, my excitement had suddenly double-triple-quadrupled until I was staring at a secret the size of a Pandemonium of Parrots.

So I pretended not to have a secret. Pretending was kind of like acting, which was kind of like practicing for an audition without anybody knowing.