Rule of Three Read Free

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