Rule of Three (14 page)

Quiet anger is worse than the yelling kind.
With the yelling kind, you scream at your sister, “Don’t talk to me again. Ever!” and after you yell, the tight fist inside you lets go, and you can breathe again.

But quiet anger is like that experiment we did in Girl Scouts in the third grade — the one where they pass out a can of soda and a nail and you think you’re going to get to make some cool rocket or something. Instead, you drop a nail in a can of soda and wait to see how long it takes to rust out and fall apart. The soda slowly eats away and eats away at that nail until it dissolves and disappears.

And guess what? The nail is supposed to represent the inside of your stomach. (Needless to say, I didn’t drink a soda for weeks and weeks after that experiment.)

After play practice, I felt the anger, like that nail, eating away inside me, poisoning my insides way worse than sugar and chemicals.

Alex is my sister. How could she do something so mean-awful-wicked? This wasn’t like sneaking into your sister’s room or peeking into your sister’s diary or borrowing your sister’s shirt without asking. Normal sister stuff. Petty crimes.

But this — she had actually gone and told Mr. Cannon that I would not be able to handle a big part. Even though he said that’s not why he put me in the chorus, the truth was, Alex had still gone behind my back and tried to turn him against me.

So not fair!

I felt like screaming. I felt like ripping out every hair on her head. I felt like breaking down her door and yelling,
YOU ARE NOT MY SISTER.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I regarded my sister like a science experiment. The nail in the Coke. Something to watch. Observe. Maybe if I watched closely enough, it would give me a hint, a clue, an inkling about how a person could go behind my back, betray me, break every rule of sisterhood.

Friday night.

It was time. Time to take all my cupcakes out of the freezer.
Baa, baa, black sheep, twelve bags full.
Except there weren’t twelve bags full — there were only eleven, thanks to a family full of Sneaky-Pete Cupcake Snitchers.

By my calculations in the margins of my Language Arts notebook, I needed one dozen more to finish my castle. By tomorrow.

I got to work.

It felt good to bake one last and final batch of cupcakes. One perfect dozen of My-Sister-Can-Drop-Dead-and-I-Don’t-Mean-Gorgeous cupcakes.

While the cupcakes were baking, I decided to work out my anger on icing. Brown icing, blue icing, white icing.

After an angry whirlwind of stirring, mixing, folding, and whipping, my tempest had subsided in a dust cloud of powdered sugar, and I was ready to begin building.

I started with the foundation, using cupcakes to form a giant rectangle for the base of the castle. Then I slathered icing across several cupcakes at a time, stacking them one on top of another on top of another until they were high enough to form walls.

The most fun was stacking cupcakes, one stack on each end, for towers and turrets, and one inside the walls for the castle keep. Upside-down ice-cream cones made perfect spires, and a licorice lace wrapped around the tower looked like a spiral staircase.

It must have been nearly midnight by the time I finished the drawbridge over the moat and crept upstairs.

My last thought as I fell asleep was not about cupcakes or castles or cake-offs.

My last thought was about Alex.

I wished I had the courage to sneak into my sister’s room while she was sleeping and paint her whole face green! Then everyone would know. Her secret would be out. The whole wide world would see that my sister Alex was not a princess at all. Not even a porcupine.

My sister Alex was the Wicked Witch.

After all, wasn’t it the Wicked Witch who had to have the ruby slippers, no matter what the cost?

Saturday morning

7:36

I woke up and thought, “Today’s the day! The day of the cake-off!”

Then I remembered I was mad at Alex. I yanked the covers over my head. Curled up. Fell back to sleep.

8:36

I overslept! I woke up to what sounded like a lawn mower (or was it a bulldozer?) right outside my door. Either way, it sounded like somebody was about to bulldoze the house down. When I padded out into the hall, I realized it was just Alex and her blow-dryer.

8:39

Downstairs in kitchen. I popped a blueberry Toasty Pop into the toaster. I stuck my tongue out at my toaster-reflection, which looked like somebody who had been up half the night icing cupcakes and hadn’t bothered to brush her hair yet.

8:42

On the table, I found a shiny cupcake tin with a red ribbon around it. It was not from the thrift store. It was not from Goodwill. It was not from some old-lady garage sale. It was
brand-spanking new,
shinier than a toaster, and the cupcake hollows were filled with cake-decorating stuff — edible glitter, sparkle gel (looks like glitter-glue but you can eat it), even a pack of sugar-dusted rubber duckies made of icing.

Up popped my blueberry strudel. Toaster Girl was smiling now.

Mom walked in. “Mom? Is this for me? I ran over and hugged her. “I love it! I can put some finishing touches on my cake, and use the little rubber duckies like mini moat swimmers around my castle!”

“I know it’s last minute — but I had a gift certificate from work and I just thought you should have a few fun things to use for the cake-off. I’m so disappointed I can’t be there today, Stevie. I wasn’t counting on having to reshoot my Apple Slump segment. I guess the apples slumped a bit more than they were supposed to.” I laughed.

“I know you’ll do great, sweetie. Just remember, have fun.”

“I will.”

As Mom and I discussed plans for the day, I found myself dreaming of sugar-dusted rubber duckies bobbing on a moat of blue sprinkles.

9:09

Final dress rehearsal today. It turned out to be a good thing after all that I wasn’t a princess in the play. I don’t think I could handle the stress of wearing such a complicated costume. There were like seventeen pieces to the princess dress, and Alex could only find eleven of them.

She was acting normal to me, as if nothing had happened yesterday. Then I remembered — she didn’t even know that I had talked to Mr. Cannon. She was way too busy rushing around like a chicken in a rainstorm — darting from mirror to mirror, flinging velvety, satiny, lacy pantaloon-type clothing around all over the upstairs.

Anger bubbled to the surface again, flaring inside me like a hot flame. I guess no amount of cupcakes could put out that fire.

9:11

P.U. Alex was combing goopy, gross, smelly stuff into her hair, and it was making my eyes smart and stinking up the whole entire house.

“Greasy grimy gopher guts!” Joey said, pinching her nose and scrunching up her face.

I, for one, agreed.

“Something is rotten in the state of Delaware,” said Joey.

“Denmark,”
said Alex.

“What’s with the smelly stuff?” Joey asked.

“You mean thou odiferous stench?” I asked, tossing in some Shakespeare, too. “Foh! Prithee, stand away. ’Tis the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril.”

Alex, Queen of Shakespeare, rolled her eyes at us. “It’s to make my hair straight!” she informed us. “But it’s not working.”

“Why do you need your hair straight?” Joey asked. My question exactly.

“I’m
Princess Winnifred,”
Alex said, like that explained it. Joey and I shrugged. “Hello! You’ve seen the movie. The main princess does not have curly hair.”

“She does so have curls,” said Joey. “In the one where Carol Burnett is the queen.”

“Well, I’m talking about the Broadway one with Sarah Jessica Parker. I looked it up online, and for your information, Sarah Jessica Parker definitely does not have curls. Her hair is really long, almost to her waist — even longer than yours, Joey — and she has a long, tiny braid down one side.”

“Dare to be different,” I told my sister.

“I can’t. Zoe DuFranc is Larken, and she has dark curly hair, and we’ll look too much alike.”

“Well, you smell like an art project,” I snapped.

“And you look like a mop of wet spaghetti!” said Joey.

9:30

Dad suggested that Alex try sleeping with orange-juice cans in her hair (for curlers). The bigger the curler, the straighter the hair.

As much as I’d like to see Alex with orange-juice-can hair, she didn’t have time to sleep. The dress rehearsal was starting in a few hours.

“You could press your hair in the dictionary,” I told her. “Like we used to do with violets.”

“C’mon, Stevie, you have to help me.”

“Why me? What about Joey?”

“Don’t look at me,” said Joey. “Dad’s taking me to the Cascades Playhouse to check out their magic flying carpet.”

“Well, don’t look at me. I’ve got to get ready for the cake-off.”

“But your cake’s made, isn’t it? So you’re ready.”

“Don’t you get it?” I practically bit her head off. My eyes flashed with fury. “This is a big day for me, too, you know. Yours is only a dress rehearsal, but mine is like, like the Cupcake
Olympics.
”