The Six Rules of Maybe (14 page)

You could almost hold a wide sea in your hand, an endless, beautiful valley, a whole city where anything could happen. The biggest sky, stretched on forever. Was it true, really, that you could get what
you want? That you could desire it and seek it and make it your own? I thought about those hands under that water, the slippery skin, some shiver of need, and right then it seemed like a want was doomed to be either a small flame too impossible to fan or else a secret fire blazing out of control. Never just a daily thing, yours, both wild and confined, burning bright in your very own fireplace. Juliet could have whatever she wanted though. It was right there for her. A life was there, a pair of outstretched arms,
two
pairs, something wonderful, and she was going to ruin it.

Welcome to the second trimester! Your baby is now about the size of a clenched fist….

Right then, I told myself I wanted only one thing. I convinced myself, or thought I did. I wanted only what was best for Juliet and Jitter and Hayden. Coming to the rescue of other people was something I knew, and something I was good at, and so was wanting the best for other people. I
could
have those things. I took the note from Buddy out of my pocket. I ripped it up and ripped it up until it was only a hundred tiny flakes of paper. I put them into my garbage can, thought better of it, and wrapped them in an old lunch bag full of sandwich crusts and orange peels and then threw that away again. I shoved some old Biology handouts on top. I buried those words so far down that they would never hurt anyone.

That night, I claimed to have too much homework to even have time for dinner. I ate in my room instead of acting like the stupid younger sister with a crush. I did not look for long minutes at the photo of Hayden with his eyes closed that I had taken out at Point Perpetua, now taped up on my wall with all the others. The one where his
whole face seemed to be taking in the sea and the rocks and the sky, taking in the pure pleasure of the day. I made it equal in my mind with the photo of Mr. Martinelli’s crew cut. Sometimes willpower is really more like won’t-power.

I let Zeus come and stay in my room. He’d eaten two rolls of LifeSavers out of Juliet’s purse, and his breath still smelled a little minty fresh. I did my Math and Biology and English homework, and after that, I started a new assignment. I planned the steps, imagined the end result. It made me pleased to think about. I decided to call it the Make Hope and Possibilities Happen for Clive Weaver project.

I went downstairs, to the back porch, looked around in the recycling bin for old mail. The screen door opened. Hayden stood there with an empty beer bottle in his hand.

“I was just going to toss this in,” he said. Zeus peeked around his legs. He still looked fluffy from his bath.

“Don’t mind me,” I said.

“You okay?”

“Yep.”

“Did you lose something?”

I stopped and looked up at him. His face was stubbly with the day’s beard. The porch light gave him a soft glow. “I’m just doing something for a friend. A depressed friend.”

“Oh,” he said. I thought this would send him on his way, but instead of going back in, he opened the screen door and came outside. He sat just outside the door in the old wicker chair that Mom had had forever, the one that needed repainting, the collector of jackets and tossed-off things, where we’d sit to take off our muddy shoes before coming in.

“That’s too bad, about your friend.”

“I don’t know. Somewhere along the line, life seems to give you
something to be depressed about. Seems like it’s just a predictable season in the human condition.” He didn’t answer. I was still looking through the old mail, but I glanced up at him. He was spinning that bottle on its end in his palm, thinking.

“I suppose you don’t stand much of a chance if you think that happiness is the absence of unhappiness,” he said. “Good luck ever being happy, then.”

“Yeah, the odds just aren’t in favor it, of things being perfect your whole life long. I don’t know. I think it’s a basically acceptable fact. Like Halloween candy. You’re always going to at least get some disgusting Good & Plenty.”

“Oh God,” he groaned at the thought. “Or those Root Beer Barrels. That single Root Beer Barrel in cellophane. I can’t believe they still make those.”

“They don’t. People have had them in their cupboards for thirty years.”

“That explains it,” he said.

I stopped hunting through the bin and watched him. He tilted the bottle back to get some last drop, and I looked at his long neck, arched. “Maybe we’d all be happier if we expected to be sometimes miserable,” I said. I guess I was trying to tell him something about Juliet.

“But not always miserable. Not when miserable becomes a way of life.” He tossed the bottle into the bin for glass, and it clanged against the bottom. I didn’t want him to go in that direction. Not at all. His words opened a door of possibilities I hadn’t considered—his not sticking around. Not putting up with her crap. Juliet going too far with that barbed wire that was Buddy Wilkes. But Hayden
had
to. He had to stick it out. He couldn’t run and disappear forever. Jitter needed him.

I didn’t know what to say. I went back to the conversation we were having before, tried to steer him there too. I hoped he’d stay on that path, not go off onto other, dangerous ones. “My friend’s depression—it isn’t about unrealistic expectations, anyway. He’s seen a lot of life already. He knows it isn’t always perfect.” Clive Weaver’s wife, Mary, had died a dozen years ago. A wife he had loved and who had loved him back; at least, he still had her high school graduation picture on the fireplace, her with horn-rimmed glasses and swooped-up hair and a string of pearls. He’d told me once, too, the story of how he had helped invade the peninsula during the Korean War. He left out the most important details. A former soldier was under no misconceptions about what life held.

“Well, it’s a fine thing that you’re helping him,” Hayden said.

“I don’t know. Maybe it just makes me feel better.”

We both stood there on the porch. Zeus was peeking at us from the other side of the screen. It was all quiet there between us.

“Remember, Scarlet. A good lot of the time, nice people are doomed.”

I smiled, and so did he, and then he went inside, letting the screen door slam shut behind him. I looked at the moon for a while. It seemed both so far away and close enough to touch. Finally, I went inside too.

I laid out the mail I had found. Credit card applications, a magazine subscription solicitation, ads for mainland appliance stores, and a seed catalog. I stuck some white labels over Mom’s name, wrote in Clive Weaver’s instead. I filled out a postcard of the Eiffel Tower that I’d snitched from Mom’s craft box from her scrapbook club.
Dear Mr. Weaver
, I wrote.
Paris is enchanting. Wish you were here
. On a whim, I took a pizza advertisement, cut the paper to make a square, folded it corner to corner and back the other direction into
a triangle. A thousand paper cranes makes a wish come true, right? Wasn’t that what they said? Maybe a few less than that could make your wish come pretty close. I made a good day’s worth of progress toward the goal, stashed away the whole project in an old shoe box.

I woke that night from a dream. It was a smell that woke me, not a sound. A smell drifting in my window. The smell of a cigarette. I sat up, got out of bed, and crept to the window. I could hear the night screech of the island hawks, who circled endlessly above us looking for rabbits to swoop down upon. I expected to see Hayden’s muscled back, his skin white in the moonlight, his jeans around his hips, the orange tip of cigarette. If it had been him I might have gone out there again, because I was still sleepy and sleep could soften things, could make you forget your promises. But what I saw instead was a pair of triangular red lights. The red lights of the back of Buddy Wilkes’s El Camino, heading down our street.

Chapter Twelve

I
trusted you,” Kevin Frink said.

“What’s the matter?” He stood by my locker. His big face was red. His arms were folded across the front of his puffy coat.

“I thought you were my friend.”

“God, I am. What? Tell me! I’m so sorry.” I didn’t know what I was apologizing for. It was a cover-your-bases apology. A please-don’t-bomb-my-locker apology.

“She said no.”

He looked crushed. He hit the side of his head with his palm as if his ear had water in it. Or maybe as if he were trying to displace the memory of prom rejection.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“You set me up.”

“No,” I said. I put my hand on his arm, but he yanked away. “I swear, I know she wanted you to ask her.”

Two red Volkswagens. Henderson Law?
Goth Girl?
Was she out of her mind? In terms of hope and possibilities, this seemed ridiculously out of reach. She had to know that.

“She’s a vampire,” Kevin said. And he was Bomb Boy. They would have made a great couple.

“I know,” I said. “You’re right. I am so sorry. I don’t know what happened.” Henderson Law happened. How could this be? This was terrible. I felt awful.

“I didn’t want to go to that stupid fucking dance, anyway.”

“It’s all my fault,” I said.

“You can say that again.”

I would have—I would have said it again and again if it would make him feel any better. But Kevin Frink had already turned and slumped away, his huge head morose over his huge body.

“I’ve got a plan,” Reilly Ogden said next to me as I walked into the cafeteria. Nicole had gotten to our table early, and I gestured to her, indicating the salad bar. I’d skipped making my lunch that morning, purposefully avoiding the kitchen. I’d heard Hayden down there, sipping coffee and reading the paper and telling Zeus that he didn’t know what the world was coming to.

“Reilly,” I warned. He wore tight black jeans and a T-shirt that said
Hang Ten!
over a surfer cresting a wave. His eyes looked as big and wide and gawking as Mrs. Martinelli’s behind her glasses.

“Just listen. All I’m asking is that you commit to me until the end of the summer. Three months. And if you’re not satisfied, it’s over.”

I couldn’t help myself. I laughed.

“You don’t lose a thing that way. It’s like a money-back guarantee.”

“Reilly, no. I’ve told you a thousand times. You’re a great guy, but no.”

Evan O’Donnell and Jake Tafferty came along then, cut right between me and Reilly in the lunch line. Their girlfriends, Melissa DeWhit and Casey Chow, joined them, sending Reilly farther and farther back. I felt a little bad for him, but not bad enough, and it was other people’s cruelty anyway, not mine. I put my money into the lunch lady’s bread dough hand and moved ahead with my tray.

I reached for a pair of salad tongs just as Shy reached for the other. I looked up at him and he blushed red-fierce. And then he grabbed the tomato spoon just after me, and then the garbanzo one, and every other spoon just after I did. I looked at him again and he grinned a little, shrugged. He was playing with me, I realized. I smiled. Our eyes had a conversation.

“See ya,” he said.

When I got to the table, Nicole hit my arm with the back of her hand. “Did Shy just talk to you? I swear I saw his lips move.”

“He said, ‘See ya.’” Jasmine scooted over to make room for me.

“Are you kidding me? He talked to you? On his own? I’m so jealous.”

“We really got to know each other,” I said.

“I told you he was an intellectual,” Kiley said. She’d gotten over the breakup with Ben and was doing her Biology homework due after lunch.

“God, he’s cute,” Nicole said. She watched Jesse leave; we both did. I didn’t want to call him that name anymore, Shy—he had his own name. He had a Coke under his arm, his salad in his hand. He had a book, too. Some kind of Roman history, I thought, by the look of the cover. I didn’t know where he went to eat. Maybe the track. Maybe the lawn that looked over the north waters of the strait.

“What he said about politics and the economy was mind-blowing,” I said.

“Classical fucking music, too,” Jasmine said. Her life was that cello.

“He’s probably a science genius,” Kiley said. She was the science genius herself. She could do that homework with her eyes closed. She was pretty and smart but still managed to be mostly unnoticed by anyone but us and Ben, who was cute and smart and basically unnoticed, too.

“Definitely well rounded,” Nicole said. No one mentioned the Roman history book. The actual details of him didn’t matter. “Did I tell you I saw him running all the way out by the ferry terminal with the cross country team? Mom and I were picking up my aunt Suzie. Dad’s sister? Mom figures it’ll piss off Dad to have her stay with us instead of him. Anyway, I got this picture when we were driving past.” She took out her phone, pressed the buttons with her thumb. She passed various ghostly images her camera had accidentally taken of the inside of her purse until she came to an image that she handed over for me to see. A blur of white and a blur of blue. “That’s his tank top. The car was moving.”

“Nice. It really captures his true personality,” I said.

Nicole put the phone back in her purse. “I can’t believe he talked to you.” She seemed almost mad. It made me a little mad back. Shame on him for not following the script of her imagination.

“We’re getting married next month,” I said.

“Ooh, bitch fight,” Jasmine said in her little tiny voice.

*

Mrs. Martinelli’s flowered stretch pants were pulled tight over her big rear end as she bent over her sprinkler, adjusting it on a new place on the lawn. She looked up when she saw me slam Derek’s door shut.

“Scarlet! Wait right there.”

Oh no. I stood at the edge of her grass, surveyed things. There were no new messages from Goth Girl, and there was no sign of Clive Weaver. The twins sat on the sidewalk with their tennis-shoed feet in the gutter, eating Popsicles and watching Mrs. Martinelli’s sprinkler water disappear into the drain. Their mouths were purple.

“Let’s stick stuff down there,” Jeffrey said, looking down into the darkness of the grate.