“Remember,” I told them. “The rule of threes works because our eyes are more attracted to odd-numbered groupings. It forces our eye to move around, looking for patterns, which makes for a more stimulating visual experience.”
“So, we could use fives or sevens, if we wanted?” Olive asked.
“Sure, if we had a big enough table.”
Olive was scribbling with her favorite pink pen in her notebook. She was the official notetaker. And Rachel (or Rakell now, I guess? I just couldn’t make the name stick in my head) was the one who added the “wow factor” to my designs. The three of us made a great team, perfect complements. Like a trio of knick-knacks on an end table.
Rachel would be the thriller. I would probably be the filler, keeping everything else in place, and that left Olive as the spiller. She was often more emotional than me or Rachel, and I imagined her moods—whether good or bad—filling up the planter, and then cascading right over.
“I love the little piggie,” Olive said.
“Me too,” I agreed, and Rachel added, “Bronze animals are very on trend right now.”
“Yes, they are,” I said, surprised Rachel knew that. Maybe she actually had read that article from House Beautiful I’d copied for her and Olive last week.
The tablescape would be nothing without that pig. Take out the pig, or the picture frame, and your brain would say you’re missing something, even if you didn’t consciously realize it. Add one more item, and your brain would say too much.
Three is perfect. Look at us—three BFFs. And there were three members of my immediate family, just me and my mom and dad. They always talked about us being a team, and I knew we were a lot closer than families with a ton of kids. There’s one family in our town with twelve kids, and I wondered how the parents could even remember all their names. Some people talk about a “third wheel” like it’s a bad thing, which I don’t get. I mean, think of a stool, a tricycle, my family. Think of our tablescape! Three is balance.
I heard a car door slam, then my dad’s heavy footsteps downstairs, crossing the living room floor. The doorbell rang, and Mittens, my cat, came shooting into my bedroom.
“Oh, sweet kitty!” Olive said and scooped her up. “You are such a sweetums,” she said, nuzzling her. “Such a sweet little wittle . . .”
“Shhh,” I said. I was back at the window. The old woman was standing on our front stoop now, looking the house over with a critical eye, like she was thinking about buying it or something, even though it wasn’t for sale. The boy was still in the car.
Olive was being so noisy with the cat that I didn’t hear Mom come upstairs. She stood in my doorway, resting her hand on the frame as though she was trying to steady herself. All the blood had drained right out of her face.
“Mom?” I said.
She looked around my room. “Are you almost done?” she asked, kind of breathless, like she’d just run a race instead of running up the stairs.
“Um, well, not quite,” I said. I looked at Olive, who shrugged. Rachel had retreated to my loft.
“Hey, Mrs. O,” Rachel called down.
“Yes, hi, Rachel,” Mom said.
“Actually, Mrs. O? It’s Rakell now. R-A-K-E-L-L.”
“Uh, okay, sure,” Mom answered, not looking at her. She hadn’t taken her eyes off me. It was like I’d done something bad, but what could I have done? Put a glass on the coffee table without a coaster? Left my towel on the floor in the bathroom? Nope and nope. I’d only been home from school for an hour. How much trouble could I have gotten in?
Mom said, “I need you to finish up, Maggie, now, please,” in a tone that made the “please” seem out of place. She leaned closer to me. “We have some family business to discuss.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. I heard Dad coming up the stairs. Of course, he wouldn’t be the one to tell me to finish my meeting or that I was potentially in trouble. It was always my mom who did that type of thing. If they had some good-cop, bad-cop arrangement, Mom was always bad-cop. Maybe that’s why me and Dad got along especially well.
He said from the hallway, “Susan, I need you down here.” He never called her that. She was always “Sue” or “Susie.” Maybe she was the one in trouble.
As Mom left my room, she said, “Robert, I’m trying. What do you want me to do?” The two of them moved across the hall to their own bedroom.
“What’s that all about?” Olive asked.
I didn’t know, but I didn’t like this whole using-full-names thing. My dad was always, always “Bob.” Outside, I heard the unmistakable thump of a basketball and the clang as it bounced off the rim of the hoop in our driveway.
“It’s that kid,” Olive said, “from the car.”
Olive nodded toward the window, then back at me like she was waiting for me to do something. What was I supposed to do? So the kid had a basketball, and we had a hoop, and it was a free country, and if he was waiting for his grandma or something, which reminded me . . . where was his grandma? Downstairs? In our house? Alone?
I could hear my parents’ voices, low and angry, seeping under their door. I heard my mom say, “I told you, Robert,” and the way she said it made my stomach turn loops like I was right back in second grade and crying on my way to the bus stop. I went over to my desk, grabbed my phone, and turned on some music so we couldn’t hear them.
“You don’t have to do that,” Rachel mumbled from my loft. “I’m used to it.” I knew without asking that she was scrolling through Teen Vogue on her phone.
“Used to what?” Olive asked.
Rachel didn’t answer. I busied myself with our prop box, trying to stuff everything in. I picked up the cheap silver-plated frame, which still contained the photo that came with it, of a boy being pushed on the swing by . . . his father, I supposed? The boy smiled out of the picture at me, like, Whee, isn’t this fun?
I stuffed him into the box. I put the vase in next, then the pig, who perched on top of everything, smiling away, like he knew the sweetest secret. When I bought him, I thought he was some kind of angel-pig, considering he had wings and all, but when Dad saw him, he told me about this figure of speech: when pigs fly.
“It means something’s impossible,” he’d explained. “So, if somebody thought something would never, ever happen, they might say it would happen ‘when pigs fly.’”
Mom came back into my room while Dad ran down the stairs in a blur. She rubbed her forehead like she had a really bad headache. Thump, thump, clang went the ball outside.
“Maggie, do you think you could . . . go to Rachel’s or Olive’s or something? Just for a bit? While your dad and I get some things . . . sorted out?” Thump, clang.
“But I thought we had family business to discuss,” I said.
“Well, we did, Maggie, but you’ve been goofing around with your little arrangements, and now it’s too late!”
Olive sucked in her breath while I went to my desk and sat down in my chair, stretching out my finger to touch the special shell I kept behind my pencil cup. Little arrangements, huh? Not cool. How would she like it if I said for sale by owner? There were certain things we didn’t say around our house.
“You just told me that a few minutes ago, Mom.” My skin was feeling all prickly and warm. I wiped my suddenly sweaty hands on my pants. “What’s the big deal? Who are these people anyway?”
I tapped my phone to turn the music off, which made the room seem way too quiet. Even the basketball had stopped bouncing.
“I’m sorry,” my mom said softly. “I’ll . . . explain later. I’ll send you a text when you can head back home.”
“You can come to my house,” Olive said. She was still holding Mittens, but now she brought her over to me and transferred her to the back of my neck. I liked to wear her that way, like a black-and-white scarf, and Mittens seemed to like it, too. She started purring. Her body was very warm, and that relaxed me, like my shoulders were wrapped in a blanket.
“So will you?” Olive asked. “Come to
my house?”
Rachel had gotten down from the loft and was zipping up her backpack. She didn’t even look up, so it seemed clear I wouldn’t be going to her place, which is where I’d normally hang out. Olive’s house was a lot more chaotic, with the baby around. At Rachel’s, we were pretty much ignored.
“Thank you, Olive,” Mom said, as though Olive was babysitting me or something. Mom turned and went back downstairs.
I quickly gathered up my homework, figuring I’d get a start on it at Olive’s. I heard the strange woman’s voice downstairs. Maybe she was an accountant or something. I remembered once when Mom and Dad had someone to the house to go through some retirement stuff. But this seemed different. And why would she bring her grandson, if that’s who he was, to a meeting? And why were my parents acting so weird, and angry? I felt that buzz in my brain again. Something was definitely off. Something that probably couldn’t be fixed by moving a vase three inches to the right.
That Basketball Boy
The three of us moved through the kitchen with Mittens darting around and between our legs, almost tripping us. I caught a glimpse of my parents sitting stiffly on our living room couch, the gray-haired woman across from them on the loveseat. I paused, wanting to eavesdrop, but thought better of it when Mom turned and gave me a look that said I’d better be on my way. We tumbled out the door.
“Oops, sorry,” Rachel said, almost running into the basketball boy.
He was on our front stoop looping the ball around his waist. Faster and faster it went, but somehow he kept control, so the ball didn’t fly away and shatter one of our windows. He didn’t look at us and he didn’t move, so we had to kind of scoot around him, like he owned the place. Honestly, it was incredibly rude.
It was hot out, and I was already starting to sweat by the time we reached the corner at Maple. When Rachel turned, I instinctively turned, too. I’d been going to Rachel’s house for so many years, I could find it in the dark. I knew there were twelve stairs up to her bedroom, and the third one creaked. I knew all the outfit combinations in her closet, or at least I used to, until she went on a massive shopping spree just before school started.
Rachel turned toward me. “I have to work on that group project. With Katelyn,” she said. “That’s why I can’t have you over.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. We all just stood there for a minute, then Rachel gave a stiff little wave, and walked off.
Olive headed in the other direction, rattling off the things we were going to do at her place. “We’ll have a snack, like maybe some cookies, we have a pantry full of snacks, but you probably remember that, don’t you? My mom said she trusts me to make the right choices, so she’s just gonna keep that pantry full and trust me to choose wisely and to remember the difference between everytime foods and sometimes foods, which I think is really cool because, like, most moms would never do that in a million years but can I tell you a secret, I eat the sometimes foods all the time.”
She finally took a breath. “Is Katelyn the one with the super shiny lip gloss?” she asked.
“Yup,” I answered.
Olive’s mom was stirring some kind of fishy-smelling soup.
“Oh, hello, Maggie, what a nice surprise,” she said.
“Hi,” I replied. I tried not to wrinkle up my nose at the soup, but it really smelled bad. All houses had a smell, and Olive’s usually smelled like some kind of food I didn’t like. Rachel’s smelled like her mom’s flowery perfume. The houses my mom sold had all different sorts of smells, musty or lemony or sometimes cat pee. (Mom would insist they tear out all the carpeting before she’d even advertise any listing like that.) Really the only house that didn’t have a smell was my own, but that’s just because I was so used to it, whatever it was.
“Hey, Mom,” Olive said. “Hi, Noah-Boa.” Her baby brother zoomed across the room toward Olive in his exersaucer, bumping into her legs and laughing uncontrollably.
“He is getting so fast in that thing,” Olive’s mom said. She turned to look at him while her spoon hung in the air, dripping a thick red sauce onto the stove. “But just wait, pretty soon he’ll be even faster, on his own two legs.”
She had that weird, faraway look on her face that parents get when they think about kids growing up too fast. My parents got it sometimes, too, usually when I had to dress up for something. Noah gurgled and wrapped his arms tightly around Olive’s neck. That’s why she called him Noah-Boa. He had quite a grip.
I noticed nothing had changed in the Roselli kitchen since the last time I was over, which was unfortunate. The place was in bad shape. Two of the walls had a terrible mint-green paint that was so old, it might be in style again if they kept it around a few more years. The yellow floral wallpaper on the other walls was pulling apart at its seams and curling up around the stove. The cabinets were nicked and scuffed, doors hanging crookedly, and there were spice jars and plastic containers and baby bottles strewn across the stained laminate countertop. I couldn’t help but see the kitchen as a “before” picture.
The BFFs had never designed a kitchen, only bedrooms and a living room once. But I’d love to get my hands on this room. Quartz countertops would be great, but they were expensive, and I knew Olive’s parents didn’t have a lot of money, especially now that they had another mouth to feed. Another kid in the Roselli house meant Olive had to make do with less of everything, including her parents’ time. She said sometimes they were so busy with the baby, they even forgot to tell her good night. That never happened at my house. Still, Noah was pretty cute, I guess, and he wasn’t so close in age that he would fight with Olive over who got to do this or that, like Rachel did with her older brothers.
Olive was playing peekaboo with Noah, which set him off laughing again. The kid was so surprised every time Olive came back from behind her hands, like he must have thought for a minute she was really gone.
“Can Maggie and I hang out for a little bit in my room?” Olive asked. “We’ll get started on our homework. Her parents are having a meeting at their house.”
“Sure,” Mrs. Roselli said. “And you’re welcome to stay for dinner, Maggie, especially if that would help your parents out.”
Would it help my parents out? I didn’t know. But I was not going to stay and eat whatever was bubbling on the stove. “No, that’s okay, but thanks,” I said. I checked my phone to see if my mom had texted yet. Nothing.
Olive opened the pantry, out of view of her mom.
“Choose wisely,” Mrs. Roselli said. “Dinner is in an hour.”
Olive grabbed two packs of Twinkies, two granola bars, and some red licorice and ran up the stairs. I ran after her.
“Are you going to get in trouble?” I asked, as she dumped the feast out onto her purple flowered comforter, the one splurge her mom had agreed to when the BFFs redesigned the room. I didn’t mind the comforter, but in combination with all the other colors in this small space—the pinks and yellows and oranges—I just found it too, too much. It certainly wasn’t what I had planned for the room, but Rachel had convinced me that the client, in this case Olive, always wins in the end. She might be right, but the room still bugged me every time I came over.
“How can I get in trouble if we destroy the evidence?” she said. “Have some.” Olive slid the Twinkies across the bed.
“I better not,” I said. “I don’t want to spoil my dinner.” I actually wasn’t a big fan of Twinkies. My mom told me they sat on the shelves for years.
Olive licked some cream off her finger. “It didn’t look like anyone was even making dinner at your house, or even thinking about it,” she said.
She was right, nobody was, I realized, as I noticed my stomach jump. I wasn’t feeling too well. I pushed the snacks aside and leaned against Olive’s pillows. Then I covered my face with a particularly soft, pink one. I could hear Olive unwrapping a granola bar, could hear her mom clattering pots downstairs in the kitchen. It was like covering my eyes had improved my hearing.
Everything felt weird
and wrong—not just right now, but these past few weeks. The year wasn’t starting out the way I wanted it to. I remembered our fifth grade science teacher, Mrs. Peterson, telling us things would be different in middle school, that lots of things might change, like our interests and even our friendships, and my dad had said the same just the other night.
But I already had the friends and interests I wanted. Of course, everything was perfect back in fifth grade. I mean, for starters, we were at the top of the food chain. All the little kids looked up to us. And our BFF business was really taking off. Plus, my parents hadn’t had an argument, as far as I knew, in years. Nothing needed to change. I wouldn’t let it.
Olive jiggled my foot. “Are you thinking about Rachel?” she asked. “I know she’s been really different lately, and I noticed you haven’t been calling her Rakell, which I admit is pretty hard to get used to. I hate when things change, too, you know, my mom always says change is much easier for kids than adults, but I don’t know if I believe that, I mean, it seems like maybe one of those things parents say to make themselves feel better when they screw up, you know?”
I did not take the pillow off my face. I felt a little bit like crying, and thought I’d better keep it there, just in case.
Olive jiggled my foot again. “Do you want some licorice?” she asked.
“No,” I mumbled.
“Are you okay? Are you worried about that basketball boy?”
“What? No,” I said. “Why would I be?” I threw off the pillow, checked my phone. Nothing. I texted my mom: Can I come home now???
Five minutes passed. Olive started her math homework. I stared at my phone.
“I’m just gonna take off,” I said.
“Oh, okay,” Olive said. “See you later. Have a fantabulous evening!”
I said goodbye to Mrs. Roselli and waved to Noah-Boa on my way out, careful not to get so close that he’d wrap me in one of his death grips. Then I stepped outside, and the sun hit me, almost pushing me back into the nice, cool house. The weather felt off, too. It was way too hot, considering it was after Labor Day. Then again, it always seemed like our town stuttered its way into fall. There would be a day or two of cooler weather, then we’d take a leap back, right smack into the middle of summer. I always felt tricked, and I didn’t like it one bit.
The Rule of Threes Page 2