The Six Rules of Maybe (3 page)

The truth was, though, I had never really had a golden heart; that’s not why I did any of those things. Not really. It sounds awful, but, honestly, I didn’t even really want to be friends with those people. Gillian Tooley, for example, was weird to the point of obnoxiousness, Kevin Frink was almost scary, and Sarah Volley had a disturbing tendency to grasp my arm with both hands while we walked, as if she were Helen Keller and I was Anne Sullivan. When Renee Wilters started hanging around Jackie Tilsdey instead of me, I felt the giddy relief you feel when you pass off the joker to someone else when you’re playing Go Fish.

The real reason I was so supposedly “kind”—well, it was just less painful to put up with a weird person’s company than to feel the horrible weight of their loneliness. I had a low tolerance for other people’s pain; that’s what it was. And a low tolerance for other people’s pain guarantees that you win the booby prize of hangers-on and clinging, irritating oddballs. You’re probably destined to grow up to be the sort of person who’s nice to telemarketers and who gives money to starving children in Africa while everyone else buys some great new pair of shoes instead. You’re definitely the one the dog stares at during dinner.

But on the other hand, Gillian Tooley had alcoholic parents, and Kevin Frink’s mom drove a hearse, and Renee Wilters lived in that creepy house with all the cats, and you could see they were hurting inside. I guess I also had the old-fashioned beliefs that if everyone turned their back on hurting people, the world would not be a very nice place. And that
nice
was a great word, even if it was a stepped-on and shoved-aside word, and even if nice people were stepped on and shoved aside too. That’s what I told myself anyway, every time I felt hollowed out by someone’s need, the kind of hollow that makes your insides feel like the wind is rushing through and that
sends in the loneliest of lonely thoughts:
How did I get
HERE
?
You tell yourself that what you’re doing is good, because
nice
is sort of the reward for your efforts. A limp reward, a forever bronze medal, but still a reward. Helping people becomes who you are and what you do. It’s your job in the universe, and no one likes their job all the time. Still, you do it.

When I went to my room later that day, then, the day Juliet and Hayden came home married and pregnant, I shut the door and pulled out the boxes of books under my bed. It was clear that
something
should be done, although I had no idea what or for whom, which was probably a lie I was already telling myself. I saw those eyes, his eyes, again in my mind and the helplessness in those shoulders and I felt a true want, the urge to help maybe for the first time out of actual desire and not out of a painful sort of pity. I hunted through a few of the books—
Principles of Psychology, Behavior Understood, Casebook of Abnormal Psychology, Personality Disorders of Our Age
—looking for the right kind of advice. All of the psychology books I read said that too much information was bad for kids, but if you wanted too much information, they were a great place to start.

Personally, I loved information. The more, the better. Knowledge was a personal life preserver you could always count on when you were swimming in the deep end. I ran my finger down the glossaries. Teen pregnancy wasn’t exactly accurate—Juliet was twenty. I didn’t know how to define the problem. I couldn’t exactly find Nonmaternal Sisters Suspected of Getting Pregnant on Purpose. Or even, Nice Guys About to Be Destroyed.

I gave up on the books for the moment. I ignored a call from Nicole, who was likely only going to tell me about her father’s recent legal maneuver, or her mother’s, or a sighting of Jesse Waters from our American Government class whom we nicknamed Shy,
because that’s what he was. Jesse was cute and quiet and never said a word to anyone, and Nicole loved him madly and was convinced he loved her back only he couldn’t express it. She’d use her camera phone to sneak-take pictures of him, or even better, herself with him in the background. She could study those pictures for hours. She’d give his elbow or ear or jacket sleeve fine qualities, like sensitivity or generosity.

I was at a loss about what to do with myself and my thoughts. I tried to do my biology homework for a while, but the pictures of the swimming organisms in a marine biome only made me think of one thing. Right then at that moment, a creature was growing inside my sister—
creature
was the word I thought of first. Cells dividing and forming.
Baby
. I tried to make this more than a word. More than science or a Fisher-Price commercial, with chubby-cheeked toddlers and sturdy dump trucks; more than the pink, soft smell in the baby aisle at the grocery store. This would be a real person, with real toes and real lips and real things it needed from us. But no matter what I did, baby just seemed like an idea, an unreachable concept like
Paris
or
Mardi Gras
or
husband
.

After a while, the smell of lasagna came up the stairs—warm cheese and tomato sauce, a
dinner’s ready
smell that would have ordinarily meant I’d be called to set the table. But I heard Mom down there, opening drawers and cupboards and doing it herself, and when she finally called us to eat, the daffodils had been set in a vase in the middle of the table.

“Your sister is having a baby,” she said, as we sat around the table and she edged out a fat piece of lasagna and slid it toward Hayden’s plate which he’d held up at her request. Most people could manage only a single tone in their voice—disappointment, or sarcasm, or joy. But my mother could play an orchestra of emotion in
hers. In six words, she conveyed that she had been disappointed, gotten through it, and was now trying to view things in a positive light.

Juliet shouldn’t be trusted with a baby,
I imagined myself saying. But I didn’t want to say what I was really thinking in front of Hayden, who might get the wrong idea of me or, rather, the right idea of me. Instead, I ran the words through the nice and polite filter and out they came in their revised form, sort of like a doughnut going through the icing machine. “So I heard,” I said. “That’s great.”

“You’re going to be an
auntie
,” Juliet said.

There was something about this that made me feel suddenly sick. Maybe because she made the word cute, and Juliet never made words cute. Juliet was a lot of things—beautiful and aloof and strong, feminine enough that men seemed to want to rescue her. But she was never artificially adorable. Maybe being pregnant had done it—something about hormones and maternal instinct. Maybe after the baby, she’d turn into Ally Pete-Robbins, our neighbor with the rotten twin boys, who hung those holiday banners up in her yard, in case we might forget it was Christmas.

“Wow,” I said. I remembered suddenly the time Juliet was supposed to watch Ginger, the Martinellis’ dog, when they took their new RV, the Pleasure Way, out for its maiden voyage to Montana. She’d forgotten to feed the little dog for a full day and a half until I had reminded her. Maybe it was a good idea that she’d come home to have the baby after all. Maybe it would have to stay in my room so that I could keep an eye on it.

“You going out to the game or something tonight?” Juliet asked me. And just like that, we were transported to some sort of normal life. Or we were using my normal life to pretend everything else was normal. Juliet was inhaling her lasagna like one of those superpowerful vacuums you see on TV, the ones that can suck up nails.

“It’s May. Football season was over a long time ago.” This was a stupidity of hers I was comfortable pointing out.

Hayden laughed, covered Juliet’s hand with his. It was a sweet laugh. The sort of laugh that meant he thought everything she did was fabulous. She probably could have robbed a bank teller at gunpoint and he would have thought it charming.

“Game. Any game. Not just football,” she said. “I didn’t just mean
football
.”

“Football games are a singles bar with an ASB card,” I said. Hayden grinned at me across the table and I grinned back.

“Scarlet would never go to a singles bar,” Juliet said to Hayden. “She’s the good one in the family. She’s never done a wrong thing in her life.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not true.” She was right, though.

“Okay, she cut her own hair when she was three,” Juliet said.

“It was a
lot
of hair,” Mom said.

“After that, her days of wild living were over.”

“Ah, you don’t know. You don’t know that at all. Everyone has their secrets,” Hayden said.

He looked at me and grinned and I had one of those flashes of irrational thoughts you get sometimes, like when you’re sure a song on the radio has been played as a message to you, or when you think a certain star can bring you particular luck. When he said that, I felt like he might know things about me. Things I didn’t even know about myself yet. Things that might happen or would happen. “I’ll never tell,” I said.

“Okay, there’s no football. There are still spring sports to go to,” Mom said.

“Track meet … The student production of
The Music Man
. Whatever.” Juliet had gone to all those things when she was at
Parrish High. Some people are high school people and some people are not high school people, and that’s just a fact of life. Juliet was one, and I wasn’t. She could do high school because she didn’t care about it in the least, whereas I couldn’t because I cared too much.

“
Oklahoma
,” I said.

“Again?” Juliet said.

“Mrs. Phipps, the drama teacher, lacks imagination,” I said to Hayden.

“Well, it
is
Friday night,” Mom said.

Sometimes you’ve been lectured on a topic so often that all a person has to do is say a few words and all of their former lectures come pouring out of your brain like people from a crowded elevator. It’s a good time-saving trick for the person doing the lecturing. My mom, Annabeth Ellis, assistant manager of Quill Stationers, was under the impression that my life was lacking things—things like more friends, places to go, stuff to do, a
passion
, a boyfriend, maybe. I had held back from pointing out that these were precisely the things her own life was lacking—she had her job, sure, and her oldest friend, Allison Bond, and the women in Allison’s scrapbook club. She had her boyfriend, Dean Neuhaus, too. But when she came home from work, she’d flop on her bed, claiming exhaustion, and she complained often that she had nothing in common with the women in that club, who actually went on all the trips they were so decoratively remembering. And Dean—sure, he had a great job and a fancy car, but he was always pointing out how she could do things better. He had once taken out our own silverware tray from our own drawer and reorganized it so that only spoons were with spoons and knives with knives and he had cleaned it so that not a single bread crumb remained. Dean was more a promise of rejection than a boyfriend.

“Friday night. Why does everyone make such a big deal about Friday night,” I said.

“And New Year’s Eve, too,” Hayden pointed out. “Hate that.”

I smiled. “If you don’t have plans, you’re a loser.”

“If you don’t want to get drunk and wear those stupid hats,” he said.

“Those hats show disrespect for eons of evolution. We came out of the sea for
that
?”

He chuckled and stared back down at his lasagna because he knew, the same as me, that Mom’s level of irritation was rising. You could feel the silence being turned up as sure as if it were sound. I felt a surge of something. Happiness. It was that joy you feel when someone’s suddenly on your team when you were used to playing alone.

Mom’s lips were thin and tight. For some reason, she was being very motherly with me right then, probably because she wished she could do it with Juliet, but it was too late. She was never really much like that—even her lectures were more strong suggestions, darts thrown with best effort, with no expectation of actually hitting the bull’s eye. Honestly, how much could she actually care about my social life right at that minute? It felt a little like a mother performance. Displaying her authority to Hayden, the way teachers did on the first day of class to set the general tone.

“I used to love Friday night,” Juliet said.

“Scarlet, you have to make things happen for yourself. You can’t just wait around for the doorbell to ring,” Mom said, which, by the way, was exactly how she had met Dean Neuhaus. His Lexus had broken down on our street and his cell phone battery was used up, so he had asked to use our phone.

I rolled my eyes in Hayden’s direction, to let him know that
public humiliation had no effect on me, and then used the favorite line of social losers: “I’ve got a ton of homework anyway,” I said.

“Well, it’s your decision,” my mother said with that uphill warning-rise in her voice. A person who says
It’s your decision
is informing you that your decision sucks, but I pretended not to know this. Instead, I smiled and changed the subject back to where it belonged. Someone needed to.

“When’s the baby due?”

“October tenth,” Juliet said.

“She’s four and a half months along.” My mother’s fork
tinked
against the plate in a way that seemed either angry or heartbroken. It was a long time to keep a secret. Juliet probably even had known last time we’d come to visit. I wondered what it would be like to keep that big a secret for so long. That could change you, maybe. The press of it day in and day out. Pretending everything was the same when we all sat in her hotel room and ate room-service meals. But Juliet looked just the same as she always did, except for maybe a small mound under her sundress if you looked closely. She was plucking off a crunchy corner of Hayden’s lasagna with her fork. I hated when she did that. You never wanted to sit by her at dinner because her fork would come visiting your plate uninvited.

“You thought of names?” I asked.

“Scarlet,” Mom said. Maybe she thought if we ignored this, it would go away. But I didn’t think that baby was going to stay inside Juliet forever.