Rule of Three Read Free Page A

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