The Six Rules of Maybe (19 page)

“Oh, I know. I know,” Mom said.

“I’m just glad I didn’t buy that dress, is all.”

“Things have a way of working out for the best,” she said. We flinched right then.

We both heard Juliet: “
You act like everything is my fault!
”

And Hayden: “
I’m doing everything I know how to do!
”

“I saw Juliet today,” I told Mom. I think I needed her help. It felt like things were growing too big for me to handle on my own. “At the cemetery.” She looked puzzled. “With Buddy Wilkes.”

“No,” she said. She shook her head. I thought she was shaking her head in disbelief, at the tragedy Juliet was playing out. Some small form of outrage. But then I realized it was something worse. She held both hands up as if she wanted to hear no more. The
no
was for me. “This isn’t our business, Scarlet.”

“You’re kidding me,” I said.

“She’s a grown woman.”

I knew it had nothing to do with being a grown woman. This was how it always went. When Juliet was caught skipping school in the seventh grade, Mom only gave her a lecture about making life choices. In the ninth grade, she took Mom’s car and drove onto the ferry and over to the other side and back, and Mom just had a talk with her that left them both crying. Eleventh grade, she was hanging out with Buddy and Jason Dale and whoever, drinking. Caught by Officer Beaker, and there were only more
whispered, urgent talks, them with their heads tightly together like they had private issues I would never grasp. Juliet could even yell and slam doors, and the next day Mom would be making her lunch as usual. Juliet could do no wrong, ever.

“This time she’s hurting other people,” I said. I would risk the conflict this time, even welcomed it. But Mom’s voice was firm and calm.

“Scarlet, you need to let this be her business. I mean it. She’s got to work things out herself.”

“He doesn’t deserve this,” I said.

“I’m sure it was nothing.”

Right then I knew we were all liars, Mom and me and Juliet. I just lied to other people. Mom lied to herself. Juliet, it seemed, did both.

His voice woke me that night.

“I don’t know, I don’t, boy,” he said. I thought I was dreaming it. Through my open window, below me, rising from the night, I heard the truck door open and close, and then the rustle of cellophane. The
flick, flick, flick
of a lighter. He was having trouble getting it to work. “Fuck,” he breathed. And then
flick, flick, flick
again.

I didn’t care that I was only wearing my long T-shirt, the one Nicole had brought back for me from Las Vegas, the time her mom took her on a pissed-off spending-spree trip to run up her dad’s credit cards. I didn’t stop to check how I looked, only swiped on a quick fingertip of toothpaste as I went past the bathroom and headed downstairs. I knew where Mom kept the matches gathered from various restaurants over the years or from somewhere—I didn’t exactly even know where they came from, because I doubted she’d ever been to those places. I grabbed a red box labeled
The Flame
. No
restaurant by that name around here. Some objects—pens, matches, coins—liked to travel.

The air was wet and thick and it smelled like it had rained, even though it hadn’t yet—that wet earth smell, wet streets, wet evergreen boughs, wet, simmering campfires.

I threw the book of matches and he caught them against his chest. “Here. In spite of the fact that it’s not who you are either.”

He was shirtless again—the night was warm. My whole body noticed this, the valley of his chest, the curve of his muscled arms. The noticing surprised me—it was a bold feeling, and I was not exactly known for being bold.
Want
, even, and I was not known for wanting.

“I woke you,” he said. “You shouldn’t have gotten up. And you’ve got school tomorrow.”

“Hmm,” I said. “I didn’t look at the clock, but if it’s past midnight, it’s officially Saturday.”

“Jesus,” he said. He shook his head as if it needed clearing. He struggled with the matchbox, lit his cigarette. He inhaled deeply. Zeus lay down at his feet, as if it were okay to rest now that someone else was on duty. “Another week gone by,” he said.

“Time flies when you’re having fun,” I said.

“Ah. You heard.”

“She’s not the easiest person in the world.”

He blew smoke up to the sky. “This isn’t the easiest way to begin a relationship.”

I thought about what to say. I looked down at my feet on the cool cement, curled my toes under so I couldn’t see the polish and then out again so that I could. I wanted to be careful. The moment was careful. The night held its breath.

“Maybe you shouldn’t love her so much,” I said quietly.

He looked at me, straight on. Hs eyes were direct, his gaze shooting straight inside me. My stomach dropped. It was like he was staring right in, seeing the way I worked; seeing, maybe, all the things I wanted to hide and couldn’t say and might never say.

“But that wouldn’t be the truth,” he said.

“If you knew her … I don’t mean to say you don’t
know
her, but if you knew-knew her … She likes the cool, distant thing, right? You hold back, she chases, you get; she pulls back again, you pull back, she chases… .” I was talking fast. He needed to know these things if Juliet was ever going to love him like he wanted. “It’s dangled, I think. Out of reach. Somehow she wants it more then.”

“If I did that …” He thought. “I’d be acting more out of fear than love, wouldn’t I? Fear would make me a liar. I shouldn’t have to be a liar to make someone love me. I shouldn’t be so afraid of losing someone that I’ll do anything to make them stay.”

He was looking right into my eyes, and all at once my throat
closed up. All at once, I felt the hot press of tears. They came out of nowhere, and I swallowed hard. I didn’t feel ashamed about what I’d said. I didn’t feel like I’d been stupid to give him such unwanted advice. No, instead, I saw his compassion, and the way he understood things about himself and about me, too. He’d seen it in me, or just felt it himself, the way you try to do certain things and be certain things and give and give more and change and fix and hold back and not hold back all in order to keep people close. A million little lies to get that one thing.

I felt a clear truth, and that truth hit some deep part of me, the deepest, most secretive part. The part of who I most am and why I am that way. You can hold a secret, hold it so far in that it drives nearly every thought and every move you make, your very heartbeat, almost. And then someone can come along and name it, gently name it, call it forward in kindness, and when that happens, all you can do is stand there in the night doing everything you can not to cry.

“I know, Scarlet Ellis,” Hayden whispered. “I know exactly.”

Chapter Sixteen

M
aybe Mom was right, maybe Juliet just needed to work out things on her own, because for the next few weeks before the end of the school year, Buddy Wilkes seemed mostly gone. There was no yellow dress in the cemetery after school, no laughter filtering through leafy trees. Maybe Juliet had just needed to see him to get him out of her system the way you need to eat a little chocolate to get over your craving.

Jitter was growing—Juliet’s form was becoming blocky, and, according to my book, at over five months, Jitter had eyes and eyelashes. I would find Juliet with her hand at her back from her growing weight, and she said she could feel flutters like a butterfly let loose inside. I had heard her once on the phone, muffled voice through her bedroom wall, angry words that were not directed at Hayden, who had come through our front door not a moment later, whistling. Juliet had greeted him with a long kiss, and he had put one hand in the back pocket of her shorts. She seemed so happy
with him sometimes, the real and true kind, not the Buddy Wilkes anxious and uneasy kind. The butterfly candleholder by her bed had gone missing, too. There one day. Then, not.

I saw Buddy Wilkes during that time, not at school in his El Camino, not driving down our street but, oddly, at the library. The library was one of the most beautiful buildings on Parrish Island, and I liked that about it, it seemed fitting. The library should be the best building. It was a tall white structure with a long set of steps and a pair of elaborate columns; inside, the floor was shiny and wide, and the stairwell curved toward a domed ceiling painted like the sky. It was a place for book reverence, reverence for ideas and words and thoughts, not a place for boys with narrow hips and thin, sallow cheeks—manipulative boys whose only special talents were unhooking bra straps with one hand and talking middle-age grocery clerks into selling them beer.

But there he was. Sitting at one of the dark, solid tables, right there where I wanted to be, in fiction. Creeps didn’t belong near fiction. I could smell already-smoked cigarettes coming off his jacket. He might as well have been a rank-smelling animal in an art museum. He had a book open in front of him, but he wasn’t reading. It was a big book, with glossy pictures of Victorian furniture—red velvet sofas and heavy chiseled chairs, nothing he’d be interested in. I looked around for the real reason he must be there. One of his friends was in the stacks, maybe, Jason Dale or Kale Kramer, preparing to pull some kind of practical joke on the respectful people there; or maybe some girl, some Alicia Worthen, trying to graduate in a hurry before it was too late. I’d know her when I saw her—she’d be wearing a tiny tank top and the shortest shorts possible, clothes somehow not fitting for the religious place that was the library.

But I didn’t see anyone who might be with Buddy Wilkes. No
Jason Dale or Wendy Williams. Only Elizabeth Everly with her cart, shelving books. Sweet and quiet Elizabeth Everly, who’d graduated with my sister, with her whispered voice and teacup-fragile wrists—not exactly Buddy Wilkes’s type. Most likely we’d be reading in the morning about some crime that had been committed at the Parrish Library, and I’d know who did it.

I walked by Buddy’s table, but he didn’t look at me. I don’t know why I did it, but I knocked my hip into the chair across from him so he’d notice me. Maybe it was some useless attempt at warning on my part; I needed him to know that I was aware of things, and that he couldn’t always do as he pleased simply because he wanted to. The wood chair bumped hard against the table and Buddy Wilkes looked up. He saw me and I stared back at him, but it was as if he didn’t even recognize me. He did not hand me some note for Juliet, or speak to me, or even give me a look that said we knew each other. I’d seen him countless times—in my driveway, my kitchen, hopping around half-naked trying to get his pants back on in a hurry, but his gaze right then was as blank as if we’d never met. It made me wonder if he only saw you when he wanted something. Some people are like that. You don’t exist, unless you are of use.

I didn’t tell Juliet about seeing Buddy Wilkes at the Parrish Island Library. I had learned my lesson about opening closed doors that snakes and thieves stood behind. Anyway, Hayden seemed to be managing Juliet on his own, and full-time managing of Juliet was part of life with her; I knew that. Hayden seemed to have taken two pieces of my advice, and it appeared to be working. He was giving her both compliments and presents—flowers and soft words and little books of poetry and elegant slices of desserts from Alice’s Bakery. She opened them with delight as her stomach grew, the smallest mound forming into a more distinct rounded hillside. I had
to go downstairs to find the letters now, into their basement “apartment.” The letters were usually left on the nightstand, which was made out of the old crate that used to hold Mom’s college textbooks, and before that, according to the label, Valencia Oranges. I would hold the letters and try to breathe and let my secret be its own, full self for a while. I’d let my feelings out into the room, the way you might let out an animal who’d been traveling too long in a cage so that he could be free and remember how good that was.

Juliet—

Some decisions are a struggle, a thrashing effort of back and forth, the tormented wakefulness and night sweats and tangled sheets of a bad night’s sleep. But other decisions—there’s a purity. There is a simplicity and rightness about the decision. It’s the simplicity and rightness of air, of snow, of apples. Marrying you, Juliet, was that kind of decision for me. I made it with the straightforward ease of taking a drink of water, closing one’s eyes to rest.

I wondered about Hayden’s words.
Straightforward ease
. He didn’t seem to be feeling very easy. He seemed to be working hard, and what I was learning, beginning to learn, since he had come was that there were relationships that were hard work and relationships that weren’t. Most often, you worked hard like that when you were really worried you weren’t going to get what you needed back. Maybe he thought that working hard was honorable somehow, an honorable thing, but I saw something different. I saw him making himself small for her. Making himself less than and lower than and below. He said he didn’t want to be a liar to make someone love
him, but he was being a liar by doing those things, by trying so hard to get her to love him. Working hard with someone else—it was a sign of serious trouble ahead, bumps and heartache and things going unexpected directions; doom, even.

It was coming. We should have known that.

“Oh my God,” I said out loud when I saw my locker.

“It is
dripping
,” Nicole said. “This reminds me of people who write in blood in those awful horror movies.”

We stared at the metal door, with
I love you 4-ever
written in shaving cream, now sliding toward the floor. It looked less like blood and more like the time I made a milkshake in the blender with the lid loose. “This is so humiliating,” I said.

“I’ll get some paper towels,” Nicole said and hurried off. I think she just didn’t want to stand there any longer than she had to.

“You’re the one for me,” Reilly Ogden said.

“God, Reilly!” I hated how he appeared out of nowhere. His eyes were big and his breath smelled like a mix of onions and spearmint gum. He wore a
U2 World Tour
T-shirt tucked into his jeans that were cinched with a cloth belt.