The Rule of Threes by Marcy Campbell (android e book reader txt) 📕

Oh my god! This boy is my brother! I still couldn’t believe it.

I stood up quickly, and the metal stool teetered, but I caught it, pushed it carefully, quietly, under the counter.

“I should get back to bed,” I said. “I’ve got a math test tomorrow.”

“You mean today.”

“What?”

Tony pointed at the clock.

“Oh, yeah, today. Well, then, I really should get back to bed.”

“Yeah, me too,” Tony said, but he didn’t get up. Mittens had crawled into his lap, full of milk and loudly purring, and was doing the thing where she walks in a circle until she finds the perfect position to settle into.

She rubbed against Tony’s chest, and I resisted my strong urge to snatch her away. Then Tony suddenly turned to me, and said, “By the way, I’m Tony.”

He stuck out his hand.

I looked at it for a moment. Kids didn’t exactly go around shaking hands very often in middle school, even seventh graders like Tony. What do you do when a half-brother you didn’t know you had until a few hours ago offers his hand in a dark kitchen at 3:20 a.m. after you both ate two bowls of Lucky Charms?

I reached out and shook it.

In the morning, my mom was in the kitchen making scrambled eggs like it was any normal day, instead of the day after our world had turned completely upside down.

“You must be starving,” she said. “I’m making you a big breakfast.”

Dad was nowhere to be seen. Tony was asleep and snoring; I’d heard him when I walked down the hall, even though his door was closed. No one in the family snored. Guess that was another thing I’d have to get used to temporarily.

I put my backpack by the door and sat on a stool. “I had some cereal in the middle of the night,” I said. “I guess you didn’t hear me get up.”

“No, I didn’t. I was so exhausted last night, I wouldn’t have heard anything.”

She put my eggs on a plate and started buttering my toast.

“Mom, I can do that,” I said. Did she think I was a baby?

She came and sat next to me while I ate, watching me with that look adults get when they want to make sure a kid is okay, that the kid isn’t about to break into a million pieces, but what parents don’t realize is that the look, the look itself, can make a kid feel like breaking into a million pieces.

I couldn’t help it; I started to cry. Then I started to choke because I had eggs in my mouth.

“Oh, honey,” my mom said, pushing a glass of milk toward me. “Honey, I cannot imagine what you’re feeling right now, how hard this is for you.”

I drank the whole glass of milk. I thought about when I first saw Tony outside our house yesterday after school. Was it just yesterday? It seemed that time had both sped forward a hundred years and stopped entirely. My mom said she couldn’t imagine how I was feeling. Was it so hard? Confused, scared, angry—just for starters.

“Can we talk about this?”

I picked some more at my eggs.

“Maggie, you can’t keep this all bottled up. We talk about things in this family. You know that.”

It was really hard not to laugh. “Where’s Dad?” I asked.

“He went into work. He wants to see if he can get a few days off, use some personal time, or at least get some flex hours or something.”

“Well, don’t you think Dad should be part of our family talk?” I asked, feeling some sarcasm creep into my voice.

I imagined Dad trying to explain this to his boss. What was he going to say? For that matter, what was I going to say to Rachel and Olive? They’d seen him, after all. They’d ask about the mysterious boy from yesterday. Should I lie? But how long could I keep that up?

“It’s all very complicated,” Mom said, almost as if she could read my mind.

A thin tendril of smoke curled up by the cabinets.

“Mom, the toast is burning,” I said calmly. At that point, I didn’t care if the whole house burned down.

“Oh my goodness.” Mom jumped up, and in the commotion, I stuffed down my last bites of egg, threw on my backpack, and headed for the door.

“I don’t want to be late,” I said, though I was actually a few minutes early. I just had to get out of there, away from Mom’s worried looks.

“Okay, Maggie, but I thought, if you wanted to stay home, I could call the school? Given all that’s happened in the last day, I think it’s perfectly justifiable.”

“What’s he doing today?” I nodded toward the stairs. Seemed like he should be part of any family discussions as well. And what about Grandma? What was she going to say about all of this? We might want to call her in. At least I knew she’d always take my side.

“Tony? He’s staying home,” Mom said. “On Monday, you two can go to school together. Today, he needs to catch up on some sleep. You have no idea what he’s been through.”

Well, maybe I didn’t, but I really didn’t need to keep being reminded of my ignorance. “I’ve got a math test,” I said. “I need to go.” I wasn’t about to stay home all day and sit on the couch with Tony, sharing our feelings while my mom supervised, like we were on some weirdo playdate.

As I shut the door behind me, I heard Mom say, “Okay, then, have a good day!” But her sunshiny attitude sounded really fake.

I walked down the sidewalk. Thankfully, my tears had dried. Did Mom say we’d go to school together? I kicked a pebble across the street where the neighbor’s poodle was out front doing its business, squatting right there and pooping like it couldn’t care less whether anyone was watching. Too bad I couldn’t be so nonchalant about what people