The Six Rules of Maybe (26 page)

“Maybe I’m getting my period,” she said. “Or having an epiphany. Does this look awful?”

“You’re only wearing one shoe.”

“You’re right.”

“What is this? Big date?”

“Dean’s taking me out to dinner. He has something important to ask me.”

My stomach dropped. It was beginning to make sense, the clothes, the strange talk, the resignation. Please, no. It wasn’t possible, was it? Was she giving up hope of something better? She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t
marry
him, would she? She couldn’t. Maybe I’d been watching the wrong disaster in the making. Maybe it was Mom I should have been saving all along. “
What
does he want to ask you?”

“I don’t know, Scarlet. It could be anything.” But when she looked at me, I saw the lie on her face. It sat there plainly. It was as obvious as spilled red wine on a white tablecloth.

I didn’t know what to say. Dean Neuhaus would shatter us. When she finally spoke, it was more to herself than to me.

“Oh, the power of imminent loss,” she said.

I went to my room, folded about eight paper cranes, fast. Four for me, four for Clive Weaver. It was sort of like praying, only in origami. The ceiling of my room was getting full, a purple and red and yellow and green sky of swaying paper birds. I stood on my bed, taped these up with the others. Let that keep all of the badness out.

If Dean Neuhaus moved in with us, I would move out. I would find my father, maybe. I imagined this—a phone call, an invitation. Or else, Hayden would appear in my doorway. He’d look straight at
me. He’d say something simple, but charged.
Let’s get out of here.
I’d grab a few things, follow him out to his truck. The fantasy got a little hazy after that, except for a long highway and the feel of his jeans under my hands. It was stupid the way a fantasy could actually make you feel better for a while, even if it wasn’t real. You had a few minutes when you could really just feel it, and it was actually terrific.

The paper sky was crowded. Like the rain forest canopy that protected all of the delicate living things underneath. We needed protection. Right then, we had no canopy, no ozone, no anything. There were only the straight, hot, poisonous rays of the sun beaming down.

My phone rang. Nicole.

I stared at her name on the screen until the very last possible moment when I finally answered. A part of me was ready for just one more thing to go wrong. It was that sick piece of me that says, go ahead. Bring it on. You feel disaster building and you push things a little further.

“Do you have a minute?” Nicole said. Her voice was everything cold. Icicles and the arctic and vast, empty polar regions.

“Go ahead. You might as well get mad at me too, since everything else is turning to crap now.”

She ignored this. But of course she ignored this. When did she ever actually listen to
me
? When did she hear my stories or support my problems or
give
? We’d been best friends since the fifth grade, when she had had that operation to fix the bones in her knees. Or something like that, the details escaped me—we were eleven. She was in a wheelchair for months, and then on crutches, and it was me who wheeled her around and fetched her lunch tray and carried her books and kept her company at recess when everyone else played.
I was the one who for years afterward listened to her problems and helped her out of situations and into other ones—I even wrote that note she gave to Geoff Standish in middle school, declaring her love. Maybe I should have charged an hourly rate. Minimum wage times all of the hours I’d been her friend. People like me were made for people like her. Maybe I was having an epiphany too.

I could hear Nicole breathing. “I just want to say, any person who would do what you did is not what I would consider a friend.”

“And what did I do? What exactly did I do?”

She let out a disgusted sigh, the one that’s somewhere between a cough and a choke, when it sounds like you’ve got a revolting thought caught in your throat. “I think you know full well, Scarlet.”

“I talked to someone who wanted to talk to me. I don’t think you have a relationship with Jesse that requires actual loyalty.”

“I have one with
you
that requires loyalty.”

I stumbled. For a moment I had no idea if she was right or not. But something was building in me, too, my own momentum. Hayden and Juliet, and Ally Pete-Robbins and Clive Weaver, and the Martinellis’, and now the threat of Dean Neuhaus, of Mom and Dean Neuhaus forever and ever … Anger was there, suddenly, sitting right at the surface. The kind of anger that explodes things. “You have a relationship with him in your mind. That’s all. It’s not even real.”

“It’s real to me. My feelings are real.”

“You think he should like you simply because you
want
him to. You want him to, big deal. It doesn’t work like that. Other people get a
say
. You can’t just force your way onto someone else.”

She started to cry. Great.
Great!
I didn’t have a chance now. So much for anger! So much for speaking your mind! “I can’t believe how mean you’re being.”

My will and my fury were shoved aside by guilt. It was that easy. I could feel the anger there, turned down to a sudden simmer, but the guilt had gotten bigger and louder. “I’m sorry, Nicole.” I wasn’t a mean person. Hurting anyone was the last thing I ever wanted.

I tried again. “It’d be like saying
I
have to hate who
you
hate, or …” Wait. I
did
have to hate whom she hated. We stopped being friends with Ashley Brazlen when Ashley didn’t invite Nicole to her sleepover when we were fourteen.

“I just, I think …” She was crying hard now. I felt like shit. “I’m sorry, okay?”

“I talked it over with my mom, and I think we need to stop doing things together for a while. You can’t just let people think they can stomp all over your feelings.”

“What?”

“I think our friendship is over,” she said.

I was stunned. “Nicole, wait …” I mean, we’d been friends for years, no matter what. It was practically like your sister saying she wouldn’t be your sister anymore, or your mother or your
father
…

I felt a little panicky. I didn’t want her to just go off and leave. It seemed suddenly very, very important that she not. All of my earlier bravery turned to dust. “Please,” I said.

But I heard only dead air—no breathing, no fuzzy telephone background noise of traffic or televisions. Only the quiet that meant that someone was gone.

That night, I called Jasmine. I wouldn’t ordinarily have called Jasmine, but I did. I was unsure and abandoned and my conscience was bothering me, and if Jasmine was on my side, it might mean that none of those feelings was necessary. Jasmine didn’t answer—I got her chirpy voice mail and I didn’t leave a message. I called Kiley.
No answer. And then I did something else. I called Erin Redfly, this girl I used to be friends with in the sixth grade. We had nothing in common anymore—she was a volleyball player and was always traveling to far-off cities for some kind of tournament that would get written about in the
Parrish Island Courier
. Her picture would be there sometimes, her body extended and her arm raised as she reached to spike the ball. My only experience with volleyball was in ninth grade PE, when I was yelled at
en masse
by my team whenever the ball would splat right at my feet.

She answered the phone. I told her I’d been thinking about her, which was a lie. I never thought about her. She told me about a tournament they’d just come back from in Bellevue. There was an awkward empty pause that I finally filled by asking how her mother was. Her mother had given me a ride home once when I felt sick during the sixth grade Valentine’s Day party. She said we ought to get together sometime, which made me immediately regret calling.

I stayed in my room most of the night. I usually liked being in my room—I liked the cave comfort of being tucked away, knowing that Mom’s knock or the phone ringing were the only possible intrusions. But that night, my room felt too much like me, and it was me I needed an escape from. I sat in the living room, and then in the backyard in the cool night, and then went back to my room. No matter where I went, there I was. I was lonely but didn’t want company. Everyone was out, anyway. Hayden and Juliet had gone to Long Time No See, a small movie theater downtown with creaky rubbed-bare red velvet seats. They showed only old movies—
Kramer vs. Kramer
had been showing for almost a month and before that,
Zorro
.

I wasn’t even in the mood for Zeus’s companionship—he would have been too kind and warm and soft, loving me when I didn’t feel deserving of it. Instead, he slept right up against my door, as close
as he could to the only other creature in the house. I could hear his elbows and knees banging against the wood as he shifted around and his sighs through his nose, which sounded world-weary. He couldn’t have the actual me, so he took what he could and tried to be satisfied.

I heard Juliet and Hayden come in. Or rather, I heard Zeus’s toenails scrambling and scurrying like crazy against the wall—sometimes he had trouble getting all of his parts going in the right direction. Finally, he was up and barking even when he wasn’t supposed to and there was the sound of the front door and coats coming off and then silence except for a little stern crooning to Zeus from Hayden. Juliet said something sharp,
I can get it!
and I knew they were fighting again. The tension came right up the stairs. It was clear to me that when Buddy Wilkes was in her thoughts, they fought, and when he wasn’t, they didn’t. He was a wall between them, and Juliet didn’t always mind walls.

The hollow hum of voices downstairs went on and on and finally stopped. At 12:00 a.m., my mother arrived home, the exact time she always did when she went out with Dean Neuhaus. Maybe she set her own curfew and she’d be in big trouble if she broke it. I heard her car, and then the engine turn off, and the key in the door. I heard her clink down her purse on the counter, her steps sounding tired on the way to her room, the click of her door as it shut.

I had a hard time sleeping that night. My feelings seemed hard to grasp and name, except for some sort of guilt and grief, which curled inside like ignited paper. It wasn’t that I actually felt I had done something bad to Nicole. I wasn’t even really sorry for what I did. But her going away had left me with this aloneness, an alarming aloneness, an abrupt, scary empty-something, like the time when I was four and I lost my mother’s hand in the crowd at the Parrish Island Fourth of July parade. I’d been so scared. It was alone-forev
er-and-ever scared.

This time it was me who got up and put on a sweatshirt over my tank top and pajama shorts. Maybe I was hoping that if I went outside and stood with my confusion out by Hayden’s truck that he would also come, the same as I had when he stood there with his. Kevin Frink’s Volkswagen was parked down the street, sitting cold and dark, and I wondered if he had sneaked into Fiona Saint George’s room. The streetlights made the Martinellis’
FOR SALE
sign look as bright and white as the moon. By then I was honestly and completely hoping for Hayden’s appearance, his toe kicking the ground, his eyes looking up to the sky, his cigarette, even. There were no maybes about that hope, except for one: Maybe it would be for the best if he didn’t appear right then. I wasn’t sure I could be trusted.

I was hoping so hard that I was shocked when it was actually Juliet who appeared. She came out through the side fence and started heading down the driveway without seeing me. She wore one of Hayden’s jackets, his denim one, over a tossed-on dress. I hadn’t realized how big she had gotten—
they
had gotten—her and Jitter. The streetlights and the night shadows showed her solid roundness and curve of her back in some way that the daylight never did. Her hands were shoved into the pockets of Hayden’s jacket. She walked fast; she knew where she was going.

“It’s one a.m.,” I said.

She froze, her hand to her chest. She spun around. “Jesus, you scared me,” she said.

“It’s one a.m.,” I said again.

“What are you doing, spying on me?”

Only a guilty person would have thought so. The psychology books have a word for it. “
Projection
,” I said, knowing she wouldn’t
know what I meant. “Not everything is about you, anyway.”

“I was just going for a walk,” she said.

“Right,” I said.

“Scarlet …”

“How about if I come along?” I said. That anger—it was back. I heard it in my own voice and felt it pushing against my chest.

She rubbed her arms as if she were cold. I bet Jitter would have preferred to be tucked into a nice warm bed, instead of out there in the night, staying up too late, heading to places he shouldn’t be heading.

“You know, you used to be nice. I liked you back then. What happened to the nice person that used to live here?”

“Oh,” I said. “I see. I’ve got it figured out now. You’re nice as long as you go along with what other people want. You do or say
something people don’t like for once, somehow you’re not nice anymore.”

She wasn’t looking at me, more at a point down the street, somewhere she was wishing she was. But then, she did look. “Are you going to tell anybody about this?” she said.

“Anybody? Like who? Like our mailman? Like your second-grade teacher? Oh, you must mean your
husband
.”

“Goddamnit.” She shook her head as if she couldn’t believe how unreasonable I was being.

“You get pregnant so you … what, have some sort of answer. Maybe so you don’t have to
be
all these things you were supposed to be. Right? Okay, I got that much figured out. You wanted some sort of rescue and you got it, but you picked a really fabulous rescuer. Really. It’s, like, the smartest thing you did in all this. Probably, the smartest thing you’ve ever done.” She turned away from me, but she didn’t leave. She just stood there and took it. Maybe she was relieved someone had a conscience, even if it wasn’t her.