The Six Rules of Maybe (20 page)

“Reilly … ,” I said. I tried to make the word say everything I needed to.

“You’re mad,” he said. “I can’t believe you’re mad.”

“It’s a little embarrassing,” I said. The words oozed and seeped. Nicole had been right.

“Why would you be mad after what happened the other day?”

“What?
What
happened?”

Nicole showed up with the paper towels. She gave Reilly a look of disgust and began to wipe up the mess.

“I gave you some notebook paper in AP English and you took
it.”

“I said I was out, and you offered!”

“You could have said no. That means something. You can’t tell me it doesn’t.”

“Reilly,” I tried again.

Nicole clapped her hands like he was a bad dog on her lawn. “Get. Out. Now,” she said firmly.

He turned and left, just like he
was
that bad dog. Just like that. He slunk off. His jeans were too high on his hips.

“Just like that,” Nicole said, reading my mind. She handed me some paper towels. “Watch and learn.”

“So I know he comes out of the gym after second period,” Nicole said. We all knew who “he” was. “I wait there, over by the garbage cans? Every day. I pretend I’m throwing stuff away, and when I see him coming I turn and smile, and he smiles back.”

“You never told us,” I said.

“I know. It was just this thing I did. On my own. I didn’t want to tell you guys. But for the last three days, he hasn’t been there. We know he’s been at school. I think he’s taking a different way on purpose.” She looked a little sick. “Do you think it’s because he likes me? Maybe it’s just because he likes me, and he’s too afraid to show it.” Her eyes pleaded. It was one of the really bad things about rejection, the pleading that came with it. Maybe we should all have a personal law against pleading. We should forbid ourselves from doing it. That smallest person inside who was the one doing the pleading—they deserved our protection. They should be guarded to the best of our ability and only let out under certain careful conditions.

“Maybe he’s been hurt. Do you think that could be it?” she
asked.

“Probably,” I said.

“Definitely,” Jasmine said. “Stupid bitch, whoever she was.”

“Roses?” I asked. Mom snatched the little tiny card in its little tiny envelope out of my hand.

“Don’t look,” she said.

“Who are they from?”

Mom looked puzzled for a moment, then made a funny little gasp. “Oh my God, I can’t believe it. I almost forgot his name! I was drawing a total blank.
Dean
.”

The psychology books would really have something to say about
that
. “I thought Dean didn’t believe in wasting money on flowers,” I said. “I even heard him say so once, after you bought tulips.” I felt a small prickle of dread. I hoped flowers weren’t enough to veer Mom from the iciness she’d been showing Dean lately. Flowers may have worked for Juliet, but I thought,
hoped
, Mom was different.

“People change their minds,” Mom said. The vase of flowers still sat in the cardboard delivery box. She flicked this box with her fingernail. It was the trying-to-decide gesture people used with grocery store melons.

“But
why
did he change his mind?” I asked.

“There doesn’t always have to be a why.”

Maybe there didn’t always have to be a why, but there almost always
was
a why. If I had learned one thing from all my psychology books, it was that.

“Huh,” I said. And, then, just like that, I got it. “He’s afraid he’s losing you,” I said. Those were the kinds of things you did when you were afraid of losing someone.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

But she kept those flowers in that box, and that told me everything I needed to know.

Kevin Frink’s Volkswagen was parked on our street every day after school. The chalk drawings had disappeared. Kevin Frink would drive Fiona Saint George home, and they would sit inside the small curved space of his car. I could see his big head and her small dark one, and she was talking, the girl who didn’t talk. Sometimes they would get out; Fiona Saint George would sit on the rounded hood of Kevin Frink’s car with her ankles crossed in a way that was flirtatious, and Kevin Frink’s bare arms would be exposed to the sun. Once I saw him disappear into her house; he followed behind her, their fingertips touching. The Saint Georges were not home, and I imagined the empty house. Orderly rooms. Buster, the sausage-fat bulldog, too lazy to follow them up the stairs. And I stopped my imagining there. They were due their privacy, even in my mind, and I later saw Kevin Frink leave the house with his head down as he zipped up his jacket and headed to his car. He was smiling. The curtains of Fiona Saint George’s room were open just enough for her to watch him drive away.

The romance between Kevin Frink and Fiona Saint George was going better than I could have ever expected. I was actually happy about it. I didn’t stop to think about the things that might happen when you lit the personal fuse of a Bomb Boy, when you led two breakable people into the dangerous territory that was love.

If everyone right then was working hard for love, if Hayden was and Nicole and Reilly Ogden and Dean Neuhaus and Kevin Frink, well, I guess I was too. Or working hard not to love. Because that’s what my feelings for Hayden were, love. Wrong or stupid or forever hid
den—still, love. I would watch the way his thoughts showed themselves across his face like a movie screen, notice how the sun made his hair turn from brown to gold. He took care of things—fetched cold drinks and watered forgotten plants and noticed when Zeus’s feelings were hurt.
Crush
was flimsy and unfair and inaccurate. I knew why I loved him.

The feelings were good and awful at the same time, pressing against my insides, begging to be let out. I knew when you had that particular combination, the sweet and the terrible, the terrible always won out eventually. So I would write postcards and letters for the Clive Weaver project and try not to become distracted by that photograph on my wall—Hayden with his eyes closed and his face full of that moment when we sat on the rocks. I folded paper cranes for Clive Weaver and began to fold them for myself. I stood on my bed and hung them from my ceiling with strings and small bits of tape.

Sitting on the rock at Point Perpetua, I had felt an ease with Hayden that I was unfamiliar with. But I had been wrong then. I was still on a rope bridge, all right, one with fraying knots and old jute. He was my sister’s husband, and even if she didn’t love him, he wasn’t mine. I could stand on that bridge with all my wants and desires, but beneath me, there were the raging waters and the hard fall of heartbreak.

One thing I knew,
straightforward ease
did not cause you to awaken night after night, did not cause you to turn the knob of the front door and walk out to the only place that was really yours, your own truck, so that you could lean against it and feel the comfort of it. Straightforward ease did not cause others to go out after you because they worried, because some part of them wanted to save you, because they knew you deserved better.

Sometimes we would talk.

“We are the worst pair of insomniacs,” he said once.

I nodded, though I’d never had trouble sleeping before, not until he came and I would lie awake and listen for the sound of him, or sometimes, go outside myself first in hopes he might appear. “It’s the curse of the busy head,” I said. “They could make a horror movie with that title.”

“Too bad busy heads aren’t given mandatory work hours. Nine to five, no overtime,” he said.

“Otherwise, fired.” I slashed the air.

“We’ve got to be more strict with our heads.”

“Absolutely.” I shivered, even though the night was warm. “A mind is a tyrant.” Mine was, anyway. Sometimes, I got so sick of being in my own head, it would have been nice to be anywhere else for a while. I wished for a mind that was peaceful and orderly, like a well-run office. Mine was more like a hospital emergency room.

The smell of Hayden’s cigarette rose up and wandered off. It was one bad habit he had, a habit Juliet wrongly appreciated. I imagined her curling up to him when he came back to bed, her head on his chest, the smell she liked on his breath.

“So, what brings you in to see the doctor today,” I said.

“Hmn. I’m afraid I have a chronic desire to save people.” He put his hand through his curls and they fell back to where they’d been before. He wore cargo shorts low on his hips, the loose, soft-looking sea-green T-shirt he loved. That wedding ring, catching the streetlight.

“I know about that,” I said. “I’ve got it too. Maybe it’s catching.”

“Not catching enough,” he said. He thought about this. We both did. “The need to rescue …” His words drifted off.

“I know all about it,” I said.
It’s you I want to rescue
I wanted to
say but didn’t. It was funny. He saw Juliet in need of saving, when he was the one who needed it most of all. Sometimes, I guess, we couldn’t see past our own intentions.

“I was even a lifeguard in high school.” He shrugged. It was apologetic. God, he looked good in the streetlight on those summer nights.

“You were?” I tried to picture this. Maybe for a moment I saw myself pretending to drown. “Did you wear that white stuff on your nose?”

“Nah. Urban lifeguard myth. Mostly I had to tell little kids to walk, not run.”

The sky was beautiful, and we were both looking at it. Deep, dark, intense white speckles spread out like the grandest present ever. “That’s it, probably,” he said upward, to the night. “See there? Those people we want to save? They’re the intense flashes of fire across our otherwise empty black sky.” He nodded, as if agreeing with his own self. He sounded like one of his notes then. I could almost see the words written in his firm, small handwriting. Was he right about this? I just thought being a rescuer was who I was, and that helping others was the right thing to do. I didn’t like this idea, that there were people who were sky and people who were stars. I think I wanted to someday be a flash of light across a plane of darkness.

“I don’t know. Maybe we’re just nice people,” I said. “Not boring ones.”

He leaned down, stubbed out his cigarette on the driveway, showing the long curve of his back. He held the cigarette butt between his fingers, looked around for somewhere to toss it, then tucked it into his T-shirt pocket instead. Hayden never seemed to mind my presence there at night. Actually, he seemed glad
when I appeared. I wondered if that’s what us rescuers really wanted—that same feeling of protection offered back to us, just once. Maybe I wanted to give Hayden something because of how badly I wanted him to give me something. In my most private thoughts, too, I sometimes felt like Reilly had—I offered something and Hayden took it, and that had to mean something, didn’t it? I repeated rule four of
The Five Rules of Maybe
over and over. You had to place hope carefully in your hands.

“Think about it,” Hayden said. “At the center of the most empty, hollow places there’s a vortex of activity and motion … Astronomy 101.”

“Are you calling us empty?”

“I’m just saying that maybe we ought to be making our own vortex, you know? Instead of using everyone else’s? I’ve been thinking about this. I don’t even know how to put words to it. But we
could
stop getting sucked into every available black hole. We could want things.”

“We
do
want things.”

“For
ourselves
.”

What I wanted was to circle my fingers around his wrists, to feel his arms around me, to rest my head on his chest, to breathe the smell of night in his hair. That’s what I wanted for myself. He was looking at me, urging me to hear this thought of his, and I did hear then.
Want
was a shut door, and I opened it just a small bit, just enough to get through, the way you push a door just a bit with your toe when your arms are too full of other things. It’s what the rules said anyway, right? Before you got to rule four about holding hope carefully, you had one and two and three, about belief and pursuit of it, about clear determination.
Know what you desire… . Then go
.

At that moment, Clive Weaver came outside. He had rediscov
ered his robe, thankfully. He shuffled down his walkway and looked down the street as if it were two o’clock when the mail came. He was out there more and more often with us, the people who thought too much during the time when other people rested.

“Evening,” Clive Weaver said.

Hayden gave Clive a two-fingered salute in response.

“I believe I’ve lost Corky,” Clive Weaver said. Corky, Clive Weaver’s little black-and-white dog, was actually sitting upright on their porch step then, smiling. He never usually got to stay up this late.

“Behind you,” Hayden said.

“Ah,” Clive Weaver said, as if this were the answer to a great mystery. He looked at Corky for a while. “It’s over faster than you think,” he said finally.

You could hear crickets off in the blackness somewhere and the sound of a distant airplane. As we watched Clive
Weaver wander back across his grass in his tired robe on that June night, I suddenly wasn’t so sure about what Hayden had said, about wanting things for yourself. Hayden didn’t look so sure either, anymore. Clive Weaver wanted things badly.

“As you were saying … ,” I whispered.

“Shit, man.” Hayden sighed.

I looked up at our sky, stars
twinkling, twinkling, twinkling
their forever-ness. “If this were the movies, this would be the time a shooting star would streak across the sky,” I said. “To make us think something great was heading our way after all.”

Hayden looked up too. The sky just kept looking the same as it had before, and both of us caught the moment of hilarity at the same time. We both laughed, oh God, we laughed so hard, trying to be quiet, holding our stomachs. There was no shooting star, of course, not a one, and Hayden was bent over laughing and saying, “Fuck. Fuck,” and I was gasping for air. Then he mimed looking up again, and so did I, and of course there was still no dramatic cinematic moment, only regular life, and it was hysterical all over again.