Rule of Three Read Free Page B

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.
    How did this happen? Me. The Pea. I was supposed to be the Practical One. Instead, it felt like that first time I’d jumped off the high dive when I was seven. Reckless and brave . . . and exciting.
    The part I hated to imagine was telling my family my secret. I tried not to picture Mom and Dad looking at me like I was a Benedict-Arnold-size traitor and Joey gaping like I’d gone stark-raving, Jane-Eyre mad and Alex running from the room, stung, the same as if I’d just slapped her fresh across the face.

     

     

 
    “What’s up with you?” Joey asked me in our room that evening, sitting on a giant green bouncy yoga ball.
    “What do you mean? Nothing’s up,” I told her. But my insides were screaming, I decided to try out for a part in the musical!
    “Yah-huh. You’re acting weird.”
    “Am not.”
    “Yah-huh. I have proof.” Joey handed over her notebook with a list of seven ways I’m acting strange.
    “OK, Joey. But you can’t tell. Not anybody. Especially Alex.”
    “What? What?” Joey started bouncing on the yoga ball.
    “Listen to me. This is a big-time Super Sister Secret. You have to triple cross-your-heart-hope-to-die, quadruple-zip-your-lips promise you won’t tell.”
    “I promise. This is so great.” Joey clutched her hands to her heart. “Now I’ll know a secret. Like how Jo, when she meets Laurie, is sure he has a dark secret. A tragic European secret.”
    “OK, but if you tell . . .” Snip, snip, snip. I made scissors with my fingers, threatening to cut off her ponytail.
    “Blast and wretch,” said Joey, reaching to protect her ponytail.
    I cleared my throat. I coughed. I sputtered. “Guess what? I’m going to try out for the play.”
    “You? What play? Not —”
    “Once Upon a Mattress,” I finished the sentence for her.
    Joey stopped bouncing. Her