“My mom didn’t really like me having people over,” he said kind of gruffly.
“So you went to their houses?”
Mom turned into the car loop at school and found a place to pull over.
“No,” he said, quickly exiting the car. “I don’t know! Okay?”
“Have a great day!” Mom yelled to us, way too enthusiastically, especially considering that Tony was starting to lose it. It was kind of Mom’s fault for playing Twenty Questions with him, when he clearly didn’t feel like talking. But I guess I shouldn’t have been asking him about his friends, either.
Mom had said I should show him around, but Tony was already through the doors before I even had a chance to get out of the car. I kind of missed Mr. Friendly Handshake from our middle-of-the-night cereal feast.
I went to the office after morning announcements. I had a feeling Mr. V just wanted to prove Long Branch had as much school spirit as his old employer—now rival—Centerville, because he’d given another pep talk over the intercom about getting as many groups as possible to participate in the contest. Yet there were only five other team captains there to draw our locations.
One of them, unfortunately, was Katelyn, who was representing the cheerleading squad. All the groups were school clubs or sports teams, with way more kids than just our BFF threesome. We were the only friend group participating. But I wasn’t worried. How many of them had studied design? How many of them had been paid, by real clients, to redo a room?
I pulled a slip of paper out of a basket held by Mrs. Abbott, the secretary. Outer office, it read.
“Oh no,” I groaned, then slapped my hand over my mouth.
“Something wrong, Maggie?” Mrs. Abbott asked.
“No, everything’s fine,” I said. Was it? The outer office was the space I was standing in right now, the little lobby area where Mrs. Abbott sat. Behind her desk was a hallway that led to Mr. V’s office, and some other administrators’ offices. Hardly any students ever came through here unless they were in trouble.
Next, Katelyn reached her fingers into the basket. I noticed her nails were glossy and pink, just like her lips.
She opened up the slip of paper and waved it around triumphantly. Main hallway. One of the other team captains—the head of the math club—yelled, “Dangit!” but I didn’t say anything, didn’t want to give Katelyn the satisfaction of knowing I was disappointed.
But by the time study hall came around, I had altered my thinking. Olive helped.
“There’s way more opportunities in the office than in the hallway, with a bunch of dumb old lockers,” she said. We had a sub who was letting us talk quietly.
“Yeah, but I won’t be able to try out my wallpaper mural idea.”
“Come on, Maggie, you know that wouldn’t have lasted anyway. Kids would have torn it down.”
She was probably right. There were just tons of things to consider in a space like the outer office, but that also made the job more interesting. The BFFs loved a challenge.
Ideas and questions started popping into my head immediately. “Do you have your BFF notebook, Olive?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said, pulling it out, along with her pink pen.
“I’m wondering if we want to decorate with books. Or if we need a rug. What kind of art?”
Olive scribbled.
I said, “We need to provide a cheerful place for visitors to the school.”
“But we’ve got to show there’s serious learning going on,” Olive added.
I nodded, getting more excited by the minute. “And calming colors, definitely,” I said. Nothing like calming colors when you’re going to visit the principal.
Ten minutes into our discussion, a kid came in to tell us all the teams were allowed to check out their spaces so they could start planning. Olive and I jumped out of our seats and practically ran down the hall. I texted Rachel on the way.
When we got there, Mrs. Abbott offered us lemon drops from the bowl on her desk. They were wrapped in white paper and coated in powdered sugar that got on my fingers when I uncovered one. I licked the sugar off, popped the candy into my mouth. Sweet and sour at the same time, and absolutely delicious.
“How many are in your group?” Mrs. Abbott asked.
“Three,” Olive said. She looked at me. “Has Rakell texted back yet?”
“Nope,” I muttered. I knew I couldn’t count on her much lately, but even thinking about the possibility of her not helping us set off a wave of panic. Winning this contest would require all three of us. And Katelyn was a team captain, which made me think, what if . . . oh, man . . . what if Rachel decided to work with Katelyn? Giving the enemy all our secrets and maybe even helping her win? Just the thought of it made me feel faint and wobbly, like a stool without a leg. I had to grab the edge of the desk.
“I can’t wait to see what you girls come up with,” Mrs. Abbott said. She had a purple pencil stuck behind her ear, which was sporting a gold earring in the shape of an owl. “So, do you need anything from me?” she asked.
“Well, it would be great if we could interview you,” I said. Steady now, I pushed the lemon drop with my tongue so it nestled inside my cheek. Mrs. Abbott was the only one actually occupying the outer office, so she would be our primary client. “Rachel usually asks the questions, though.”
Just then, the door opened, and I turned, hopeful, but it was only a teacher leading a boy, who, from his facial expression, seemed to be in deep trouble. Mrs. Abbott pointed to a chair sitting outside the hallway leading to Mr. Villanueva’s office. The boy sat down, hard, which made the chair thump against the wall. His face looked so sour, it was like he was sucking on a hundred lemon drops.
I stepped back to the room’s entrance, closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them quickly.
“What are you doing?” Mrs. Abbott asked.
“She’s finding the focal point,” Olive whispered, like it was a mysterious process that required silence.
“And there it is.” I pointed to the goofy plastic flower on Mrs. Abbott’s desk. It was wearing sunglasses, and dancing, and no one who came into the office could look at anything else.
“The flower?” Olive asked.
Mrs. Abbott reached out and patted it. “So happy, isn’t he?” she said.
“Mmm-hmm,” I replied, forcing a smile. I didn’t want to spring it on her so soon, but that flower was a huge distraction. We’d have to get rid of it.
“Should we take some measurements?” Olive asked. “We don’t need Rakell for that.”
“Good idea, Olive.” I asked Mrs. Abbott, “Do you have a tape measure?” I really should keep my mini tape measure in my backpack from now on, I thought. Never knew when I’d need it.
“No, but I’ve got a ruler.” She handed it to me.
I moved the ruler across the floor from one wall to the other, calling out numbers for Olive to write down in her notebook. It really was not a very big room. And yet, it was a room that had to accomplish many different things. I felt my shoulders start to tense up just thinking about it. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw some movement in the rectangular window to the side of the outer office door.
It was Rachel, and she was smiling. I felt myself relax.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said, breezing in, notebook in hand. “A kid told me I was excused to come down, but I got distracted, and then I forgot, until I saw your text.” How could she forget about something that quickly?
“I hear you’re going to interview me!” Mrs. Abbott said. She sounded actually excited.
“Sure, why not?” Rachel said. Too casually, I thought. She pulled a pen from her pocket and sat in the chair by Mrs. Abbott’s desk.
“Okay, if you could vacation anywhere in the world, where would it be?” Rachel asked.
Rachel had asked this question of other clients, and every time she did, I thought of the beach in Florida, of how I had felt so loved and safe and how our family was perfect and nothing would ever change. M
y parents knew about Tony when we were on that trip, I realized. They knew, and didn’t tell me. I wondered if I’d ever again think of the beach in quite the same way.
“Anywhere? Oh, Paris. Definitely,” Mrs. Abbott said. She had a dreamy look in her eyes like she was already there.
“Awesome,” Rachel said, writing it down. “Now, which words would you use to describe yourself? Casual and comfortable, or chic and stylish?”
“Goodness, I don’t think anyone’s ever called me chic. Or stylish. Oh, but I suppose my Paris answer might be misleading then. You might assume someone who answered Paris to be a stylish sort of person.”
“There are no wrong answers,” Rachel said cheerily, even though she knew there were answers that maybe weren’t “wrong,” but would make our job more difficult. When clients’ tastes were all over the map, it was definitely more difficult. Rachel was a good interviewer; even when she was doing an impromptu interview like this, she never seemed judgmental.
Mrs. Abbott played with her gold owl necklace, which matched her earrings. She was wearing a thick yellow sweater that looked very soft.
Rachel was staring at that sweater. “Should we go with comfortable?” she asked.
Mrs. Abbott nodded.
Then, Rachel turned to me. “Do you happen to have the colors with you, Maggie?”
“I do,” I said. I had stopped to get my design binder from my locker on our way to the office. Inside was a piece of cardboard with a bunch of paint color swatches glued to it, which the BFFs had put together months ago. I set the cardboard on Mrs. Abbott’s desk.
“Okay,” said Rachel. “Can you choose your top two favorite colors?”
When I redid my own room, I chose yellow and orange, which were adjacent on the color wheel, though colors that were opposites worked well, too.
Mrs. Abbott looked at the colored squares for what seemed like a long time. Just when her finger started heading toward one, she’d lift it back up. “No, wait, maybe not,” she said. She took the pencil out from behind her ear and tapped on the cardboard. “I can only pick two?”
“Just close your eyes,” Rachel suggested. Mrs. Abbott did as she was told. “Now,” Rachel said, “imagine a clean, white sheet of paper from your printer. Nothing on it.”
Mrs. Abbott’s eyelids fluttered, but remained closed.
“Okay, now open your eyes and look!” Rachel said.
She did.
“Where did your eyes land?”
“Here,” Mrs. Abbott said, pointing to a turquoise blue. “And here.” She pointed beneath it to a pale green. “Those two. Yes.” She held up the card in front of her. “I really like both of those.”
This was perfect. I had just reviewed an article at one of our BFF meetings about the calming properties of ocean colors. It was a wonderful choice for outside a principal’s office. Everything currently in the space, from the battered chairs, to the torn poster above the bookshelf, to the books themselves that happened to be sitting out on a long table full of school newsletter pages waiting to be collated, were in bright shades of red and orange—vibrant, but potentially angry.
I noticed that the boy sitting in the chair waiting to see Mr. Villanueva had slid so far down in the seat that he seemed in danger of crashing right through the floor. If a secret trapdoor had opened, he wouldn’t have looked back. Rachel noticed it too, and wiggled her eyebrows at me. I gave her a big smile. She’d done such a great job of helping Mrs. Abbott to focus.
Olive started making a quick sketch in her notebook of the room, showing where different items were currently located, while me and Rachel asked Mrs. Abbott some more questions—about how the space was used, how many people came through every day, what the traffic pattern was like, stuff like that. We only had a few more minutes until the bell rang, but we definitely had enough information to get started.
“Thank you so much, Mrs. Abbott,” I said. “We so appreciate your—” But just then, the door opened, and in walked . . . Tony. I had a sudden panicky feeling. I glanced at Olive and Rachel, who were giving each other knowing looks. They must have recognized him from the other day.
He nodded at me. “Hey,” he said as he went up to Mrs. Abbott’s desk.
“Hey,” I answered, so quietly I wasn’t sure he heard me.
He said to Mrs. Abbott, “Um, excuse me, but my stepmom said I had to get some forms to bring home? I’m a new student? Anthony Miller?”
Everything was a question. I realized I was clutching my color chart so tightly, some of the squares had come off and fallen on the floor. Midnight Blue and Dusky Dawn. I picked them up and put them in my pocket.
“Oh yes, I’ve been expecting you. Your stepmom called earlier,” Mrs. Abbott said. She looked up at us. “You girls better run off to class.”
As soon as the door closed behind us, Rachel immediately started grilling me.
“That’s your brother, isn’t it? What’s he like? Is he going out for basketball? What music does he listen to?”
“I barely know him,” I said. “We haven’t exactly been having heart-to-heart talks.”
“I bet he’s super nice,” Olive said. “I could just tell by the polite way he talked to Mrs. Abbott.”
“Yeah, he’s fantabulous, all right,” I said as I gathered my stuff. “Let’s get to class.”
Olive split off to go to art while Rachel and I continued walking together.
“I thought you said his name was Tony,” Rachel said.
“Anthony, Tony, same thing,” I replied.
Rachel stopped outside her classroom. “Did he tell you to call him Tony?” she asked.
“Um . . . I think so?” I didn’t remember. Maybe it was Dad who told me. What did it matter?
Rachel shook her head. “You should call people what they want to be called, Maggie,” she said and went into class, leaving me to wonder, what did I do? Then I realized, this was all about the Rakell thing. I didn’t understand why she cared so much about being called something ever-so-slightly-different. Weren’t there bigger things to worry about? Like a sibling who shows up out of nowhere, and whether your dad was going to love him more than you?
The bell rang, but I was still standing there, having that last, terrible thought, which I hadn’t dared to think before, but which had probably been lodged somewhere in my brain ever since Tony arrived.
It’s Only Temporary
I was hiding out in my room again, where I could make believe that nothing had changed. In my room, at least, nothing had. Olive was here, and we were putting together our “concept board” for the outer office, but Rachel hadn’t shown up. I guess that was one thing that had changed, that I couldn’t pretend away; Rachel wasn’t with us.
It felt weird working without her. We all had our roles, and there were certain things Rachel always did, like cut out pieces of furniture and decorations from magazines to affix to our room sketches.
Little did I know, however, that Olive could draw all those things, and really well, too. We didn’t need Rachel to cut out pictures. With her colored pencils, Olive drew a set of chairs and a bookshelf, complete with tiny titles on the spines of the books. Then she rubber-cemented them onto our poster board of ideas, along with scraps of fabric we liked, and the colored squares Mrs. Abbott had chosen.
The board was propped up on an old music stand I’d found at the BFFs’ favorite thrift store, the Good Samaritan Thrift Shoppe. I’d spray-painted it silver to give it a little bling. My wand from a Harry Potter summer camp served as my pointer for presentations. Yesterday, I brought a few initial ideas to Mrs. Abbott, who thought everything was great. She was kind of like Olive in that way, generally seeing the positive side of things, though, right now, this morning, Olive wasn’t her usual self. She seemed impatient and kind of snippy, especially when I wondered aloud whether Rachel was going to show or not.
“At least she could text to say she’s not coming,” I said.
Olive sighed. She was very slowly brushing rubber cement o
nto the back of a little desk to add to her sketch.
“Could you hurry up with that?” I said. “That stuff stinks.”
“Open a window if it bothers you,” she said sharply. She slapped the tiny desk drawing onto the board, the rubber cement oozing out from underneath it. The desk was crooked, so I tried to straighten it, but Olive knocked my hand away.
“You know, Maggie, it’s not like you haven’t smelled rubber cement before. I mean, what do you want me to do? Anything else you’d like to critique?” she said, her voice quivering. Olive’s jaw was clenched, her eyes squinty. She turned away from me.
“Olive?”
She crossed her arms and squeezed, like she was hugging herself. “It’s just that—oh, forget it. Never mind. Actually, no, you need to . . . you just . . . it’s hard when you’re so negative, about Rakell and everything.”
Me? I was negative about Rachel? After she pretty much abandoned us? “Come on, Olive, she hasn’t exactly been pulling her weight. I mean, we’re a team, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, we’re supposed to be a team, but you never let me do any of the important stuff, and when you do, it’s only because Rakell isn’t here, and then you can’t stop worrying about how we’re going to do it without her, and, ugh! I hate this!” Olive fanned both hands in front of her face, like she was trying to quickly evaporate any tears that might seep out.
“Olive, hey, Olive, don’t cry. It’s just that, you know we’re a threesome.” I pointed to my bookshelf knickknacks. “You know the rule of threes.”
She dropped her hands by her sides and choked back the tears that had started coming. “I swear sometimes you just don’t get it.”
“What don’t I get?”
“For one thing, Rakell isn’t coming.”
“How do you know?”
Olive hiccupped. “She texted me.”
“What do you mean she texted you?” Why would Rachel text Olive and not me?
“I mean she sent me a text,” Olive said softly while putting her notebooks and colored pencils into her backpack.
The Rule of Threes Page 8