The Six Rules of Maybe (8 page)

Juliet and Hayden fell silent. After a while, it was late enough, finally, for me to do what I needed to do. I went to my desk and took out the container of chalk; I’d first found it in the garage, still on the metal tray of the chalkboard Juliet and I had used when we played school. I crept downstairs, turned the door handle quietly. From outside, I could see Mom’s bedroom window light turn off. And then Juliet and Hayden’s, too.

I crossed the street, the asphalt cool and bumpy on my bare feet. I could see Goth Girl’s drawing by the light of the streetlamp. Today she had finished her
Last Supper
drawing. I could see the figure in the middle where Jesus usually sat, but instead of Jesus there was a woman with brown hair and the checked coat I’d seen on Mrs. Saint George. Mr. Saint George was at the table too, I thought, next to a vampire in jeans and a T-shirt and a wild-haired witch in a tight black dress. And there was Goth Girl herself, in the figure that had her back toward the rest of them. There was Goth Girl’s straight black hair, anyway, her favorite black sweatshirt.

I took my chalk and headed to the empty place just past the drawing, as I had done several times before. At first, I had tried the usual ways of being a nice person to someone who needed a nice person in their life—I had smiled at her in the halls at school and tried to make conversation when I saw her at home. But Fiona Saint George always averted her eyes, the way you do when you look straight at the sun. Her art was a message, a letter made from a single picture, and the most important thing about a message was for it to
be heard. You reach out, and someone reaches back; you give, and someone gives in return—it was one of the Fair and Right principles of the universe.

So I knelt next to the painting.
This is beautiful
, I wrote, on the square of sidewalk nearest the drawing.
You are incredibly talented
. I signed my note:
A friend who believes in you.

I brushed the chalk from my hands, stood. Across the street in my own driveway I saw something then—a tiny orange light, the glow of the end of a cigarette. My first thought was of Buddy Wilkes, that Buddy Wilkes had somehow heard my sister was back, and that he was sniffing around our driveway for her scent. Maybe he’d throw pebbles at her window while she slept beside her husband.

But when I crossed the street I saw that it was not Buddy at all, but Hayden himself.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said.

Hayden exhaled up toward the sky. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, just his cargo shorts hanging at his hips. His skin glowed from the streetlight. I felt a little shy, seeing that much of him, and a strange feeling filled me, a feeling I did not want to call desire or anything close to desire. He didn’t seem surprised to see me crossing the street. Or maybe his thoughts were so much somewhere else that anyone could have appeared then and he wouldn’t have blinked. The president of the United States, even, and he’d have only exhaled into the night same as he just had.

“I don’t really smoke. At least I haven’t in a long while.”

“You shouldn’t,” I said. He looked strange smoking. He wasn’t the type. You pictured him making his own juice with carrots and ginger and raw honey, not smoking some stupid cigarette.

“Juliet likes it,” he said.

“She
likes
it?”

“She likes the way it tastes.”

“That’s idiotic,” I said. “I’m sorry, but, God.”

He didn’t say anything. He leaned against the side of his truck. He took another drag on the cigarette and exhaled again. It sounded like a sigh. He seemed to have the capacity for moody introspection. Juliet liked moody. I was wondering right then if maybe I liked moody too. Rational thoughts and irrational feelings were dancing badly together inside of me, out of step and offbeat, something that would have to be fixed, and fast. “You’re not close,” he said finally. “Some sisters are close.”

“We used to be close. Closer. I did her math homework for her. She’d let me hang out with her and her friends. Complain about how unfair Mom was being. I always wished we were twins so we could do everything together. But, you know, she left. I’m still here. Do you have a sister?” I asked.

“Only child.”

“Maybe we’re just too different,” I said. I waited for him to acknowledge this, but he said nothing. “Maybe she’s … more like our father.”

The thought had made a sudden, stunning appearance. It shocked me. This had never crossed my mind before. Our father never crossed my mind. We hadn’t ever even seen his picture, so
he, his, him
—they were empty, single-dimensioned words unconnected to an actual person.
He
was that wisp of smoke now disappearing by the streetlight. I might remember what he smelled like. A cologne that smelled like oiled wood, thick as incense. At least, I had smelled incense burning once, and it had triggered a memory that couldn’t quite become a memory.

Hayden just took this in. It wasn’t as shocking to him as it was to me. I still felt as if I’d been slapped, and it was me who had done
it. “Your mother’s boyfriend is a dick,” he said.

I laughed loudly. “You noticed.” The corners of his mouth turned up in a smile. I wanted to open that smile up wider, to see the Hayden of the afternoon back again. But I suddenly couldn’t think of anything else to say, and the smile was retreating. He was retreating. I could feel the moment of connectedness passing, my chance being lost. I wanted to play and volley and be back in that place we had been together before, that great place. I needed something, something quick—I grasped and caught something silly and lighthearted. Silly and lighthearted would do.

“So, Hayden Renfrew. What was your most embarrassing moment?”

It sounded workable until I said it. As soon as the words slipped out I knew I had done something horribly and terribly wrong. A humiliating misstep. I felt it all in one second of pause. The night, the cigarette smoke lingering in air, the heaviness of his thoughts—my words were inappropriate and idiotic. Oh God, why had I said that? Why, why, why? And why couldn’t you take back a moment sometimes? One little moment? Is that asking so much? God, I suddenly sounded thirteen. My red shorts and my white tank top felt young and shameful, my feet in my flip-flops did too. I felt so ashamed of my painted toenails in the streetlight.

“Why did I say that,” I said.

He finished his cigarette, threw it to the ground, and stubbed it out with the toe of his sandal. He picked it up and tucked it into his shirt pocket. I was filled with the disgrace of my own age and immaturity. I had widened some gap between us, and there was no way to close it again. Juliet had been right. I knew nothing about this. I was seventeen and he was twenty-three, and he was a man, a man who was married and who was going to be a father.

There was the sound of a hawk overhead, the Martinellis’ TV on, too loud. Hayden spoke finally.

“I was on a date with a girl once,” he said. “And we had just gone to this Asian market. I had this white bag filled with hum bows. You know hum bows? Those white balls of dough stuffed with meat?”

I nodded.

“Well, I dropped the bag. We were parked on a hill, and the bag dropped, and one of the hum bows fell out, and I started chasing it. Instead of just letting it go, I ran after it, down this hill. Running and grabbing and missing. I didn’t stop to think what would be better for my dignity; I just kept going after it. I chased the hum bow down the street until it finally stopped underneath the wheel of a delivery truck.”

He looked at me and grinned in the darkness. But it wasn’t a real grin—his eyes weren’t involved. It was politeness, the kind of grin you give as a gift even if you don’t feel at all like smiling. Hayden was a nice person, too.

We just stood in silence. Something occurred to me then, and I said it. “A good lot of the time, nice people are doomed.”

He laughed then, right out loud. A real laugh. A loud, surprised one. “Shit, Scarlet,” he said. “Shit. You.” He pointed his finger at me. “Yes indeed. God, I’ve got to have another cigarette now.”

I wanted to make him laugh again. Or say another thing that pleased him. But nothing came. “It’s true, though, isn’t it?”

“I think it’s one of the truest things I’ve ever heard,” he said.

We were quiet. The night settled and filled in the spaces around us. The two of us had made something better, even for a moment. “You going back in?” I asked.

“In a minute.”

“Okay. See you in the morning, then.”

“Good night, Scarlet.”

I went back inside. I tried to close my eyes, but I kept feeling his presence there, standing just under my window, his bare skin white in the moonlight. I didn’t sleep until I heard the soft click of the front door, his footsteps climbing the stairs.

Chapter Seven

I
t was a stupid cliché, but I didn’t fit in at Parrish High. High school mostly felt like a sentence I was serving because of some crime I’d committed, maybe in a past life. Sometimes being there actually hurt in a physical way, the way it hurts when you have to keep running that last bit of the mile in the PE track unit, when you’re sure you can’t go on anymore. Some sort of burning in your chest and heaviness in your legs.

I’d always known I was different from other people. I knew it, because I felt perpetually awkward, and I realized everyone else wasn’t going around feeling like that, at least not quite so much of the time. Mr. Kennedy, our high school librarian (I was his TA for a semester), said it was because I was a
reading person
, meaning, I guess, that all the books you read made you see things differently. But Mom said I was born mature, that I was a mini-adult from the time I was four and she caught me trying to write checks in her checkbook with my crayons. I once passed the Theosophical Society
out by Honey B’s Bakery, and that old lady that runs it, Cora Lee, told me I was an old soul. Then she gave me a pamphlet for their next lecture, “Understanding Ourselves in the Cosmos.”

Maybe that was it, that I was a reading person, or a mini-adult, or an old soul, because I just never got the rules of high school. It all seemed silly. All the big emotion and drama and all the gushy love and spitting hate and lip gloss reapplied and reapplied and reapplied in the smudgy mirrors of the girls’ bathroom. The
She’s such a bitch!
And
It’s just because he likes you!
and
What’d he say, tell us!
All that. Most of the time, anyway, she wasn’t a bitch and he didn’t like her and whatever he had to say didn’t mean anything. I tried to be part of it all, but inside I knew I was only faking. To me, it felt like someone had pushed the
PAUSE
button of my life and I still had to wait another year until it finally might start to play again. The hope was, people like me got to finally find our place in college or in the actual world. People who understood this told you that high school wasn’t the
actual world
, that it was more like a temporary alternate reality you were forced to believe in for four years. A video game you played, where you could never get to the next level no matter how hard you tried.

My mother thought my problem was all about leaping in and overcoming my
social anxiety
. She actually used those words, even though I knew from my psychology books that I didn’t have social anxiety. I looked it up. The only anxiety I had was dealing with everyone else’s anxiety about my being an introvert. There were always all these suggestions for how to make me less of who I was. Joining clubs—that was a big one.
Getting involved
in school events, like dances or some sport. To Mom, it was about being brave or not being brave, not about just being who you were. I’m convinced there are some people who are just born joiners of groups—fitter-inners,
seamless social creatures, lovers of half-fake
happy-to-see you
’s and insincere hugs and little screams of excitement that convincingly cover what’s probably boredom. And then there are others, the ones who feel every false moment to the point of bodily pain and who can’t be anyone except whom they are, as much as they try.

I never understood why it was somehow superior to be a joiner. Being an introvert is judged in some extreme way, as if you’re lacking some ability to cope because you don’t drink beer and smoke pot in Macy Friedman’s basement. In our society, introversion as an alternate lifestyle gets less respect than any other alternate lifestyle, in my opinion. You could be gay and go to homecoming with your girlfriend or boyfriend, you could go drunk, you could go and ditch your partner middance, but if you didn’t go at all, you were a loser. Introversion is distrusted—it makes people nervous. Maybe it seems like we’ve got secrets. They think the secret is that you’re depressed or something, that’s why you don’t seek their company, when the secret is really that you’re happy and relieved and almost flying at the near-miss escape of not
having
to be in their company. You’re looked at like you’re seriously lacking, when the only thing you feel lacking in is the ability to be an introvert in peace.

So that’s why it was so strange that I actually wanted to go to school on the Monday after Juliet moved back home with Hayden. I’d never wanted that, and there I was, feeling some sense of rest just doing my regular routine: first period Art with Mr. Wykowski (who always came in smelling like weed, not too different from several guys in his class), second period European History with Mr. Chester and creepy Reilly Ogden staring at me like I was water and he was desert. Bells ringing, locker doors slamming, guys yelling,
Fuck!
and cheating on tests, what’s-the-point-of-this homework, boredom—compared to being home with my now pregnant sister,
it was a
haven
.

I saw Nicole in third period AP English with Ms. Cassaday, just before lunch. The minute class was over, just after the bell rang and just after Ms. Cassaday said, “Be brilliant, people,” and swirled around in her batik skirt, Nicole grabbed my arm.

“Where were you yesterday? I needed you. Didn’t you get my messages? Kiley was looking all over for you. She wants to break up with Ben but doesn’t know how.”