The Six Rules of Maybe (12 page)

Oh God, it was Clive Weaver outside again, naked as the day he was born. He was out by the mailboxes. He muttered something. And then he said, “Roscoe Oil, those bastards!” so loudly that he caused a far-off dog to bark and Ally Pete-Robbins’s porch light to go on.

“Mr. Weaver!” I whispered as loudly as I could.

He looked around as if God were talking to him. I could only imagine how surprised he’d be when God turned out to be a seventeen-year-old girl.

“Up here!” I whispered. “It’s me, Scarlet.”

“I thought maybe the mail was late,” he said.

“It’s not late,” I said. “It came this afternoon.”

“They’d never have let us get away with that shit,” he said.

“I think you’d better go inside and go to bed,” I said. His nakedness was not as shocking the second time around.

“What?” he shouted.

“Go inside and go to bed.”

“So long,” he said.

Mr. Weaver shuffled back in the direction of his front door, his
slippers scuffing along on the sidewalk, his flabby white ass making a sad retreat. I climbed back into bed. Someone was going to have to do something about him. Probably that someone was going to be me. Ever since way back in kindergarten, when Mr. Keneely needed “someone” to walk with Renee Horton to the office when she was about to throw up and nobody,
nobody
offered to help, I’d been the someone who would finally raise their hand. Whether someone ever got to be anyone—that was what I wasn’t so sure of anymore.

Chapter Ten

I
n the morning, there were cars out in front of Clive Weaver’s house. Two cars. Serious-looking cars. I hoped he hadn’t died or anything. It didn’t seem like a death-type morning. The guys working on the house behind us were getting an early start; I heard the cheery
chink, chink, chink
of the ladder rising, the clatter of lumber being dropped. A crow heckled his nasty
caw, caw
from a tree, as another, more positive-thinking bird group twittered cheerfully from farther off. A milk truck from Daly Farms was stopped in front of Ally Pete-Robbins’s house, the driver hopping into the wide-open truck door and starting the engine back up with optimistic vigor. Blue sky, a tree shimmering in a slight breeze. All in all, not a day someone’s life was over.

I walked past Juliet’s closed door. It seemed heavy with sleep and secrets and entwined bodies and sheets in disarray. I tried not to think about what my sister had said, about Hayden in bed. I pretended not to see the door the way you pretend not to see things not
entirely hidden that should be entirely hidden, life’s little moments of too much information—Wiley Rogers’s older brother selling drugs across the street from our high school, for one example; Hailey Benecci’s anorexia, for another.

It was not exactly like I hadn’t been faced with Juliet’s sex life before. There were countless times she’d come home with her hair smashed up and tangled and her makeup long gone, and sometimes I’d actually catch her and Buddy on the couch in our living room. There would be a panicked flurry of jumping up and adjusting clothes and Buddy looking around on the floor with one hand for his shirt that had fallen, wearing underwear so tight he could have been on the swim team. But this was different, even though Juliet was married now. Hayden wasn’t Buddy or Adam Christ or Harrison Somebody. He was more real. He had strong-looking shoulders, and life goals, and a dog he scruffed under the neck and crooned at. He wasn’t some idea of a man, he actually
was
a man. It made that closed bedroom door—

“Morning,” Hayden said from the kitchen.

“Oh!” I said. I felt some weird relief at the sight of him standing there in his jeans and his favorite soft green T-shirt, his cheeks stubbly and unshaven, his hair a bird’s nest tangle of curls. Assumptions were sometimes tricky territory.

“I’m afraid this coffeepot may have stopped working.” He was holding an empty cup,
World’s Best Mom
written on it, with a picture of a trophy cup. Mother’s Day from a thousand years ago.

“Mom unplugs it every night,” I said.

He shook his head to indicate he couldn’t believe his own stupidity, looked behind the coffeepot, and lifted the cord up as evidence that I was right. “I see,” he said. And then: “Every night?”

“She’s convinced it will burst into flames.”

“Mothers,” he said.

“Mothers,” I agreed. “Do you have one? I mean, where is yours?
Are
yours. Your parents?” It was true what Mom had said—we didn’t know anything about him. He could have been raised by wolves for all we knew. I got a cereal bowl, poured breakfast. Mom had already gone to work, and if I wasn’t waiting at the curb in fifteen minutes, Derek would drive on without me.

“I don’t see my father much anymore. Not a great guy. Actually, a bad man. You know.” I did. “Mom is in Portland. She’s a sculptor. Really good. She’s getting pretty successful now, I’m proud to say.”

“How does she feel about …” I waved my arm in a circle.

It was quiet except for that stupid crow. He was cawing along and then got frenzied as crows do sometimes, the caws turning into that
garble-garble
strangled-turkey sound. Zeus leaped to his feet and trotted out to the kitchen window as if to protect us from imminent danger. In his mind, as long as he kept his eye on things, we’d be safe.

“That crow,” Hayden said. “Turkey murder.”

“I was just thinking the
exact
same thing,” I said.

I thought for a moment he would skip the answer to my question, but he finally spoke after the coffeepot began to burble. “Mom’s um … disappointed. I’m the only child, and this isn’t how she saw things going. Or how I did, honestly. She offered to help so we could stay in Portland, but Juliet …” He shrugged a well-you-know-how-this-story-ends shrug.

“But I guess you and Juliet have that in common,” I said.

“We both have disappointed mothers?” Hayden leaned with his back against the counter as he waited for the coffee. Zeus turned his attention back to him, looked up at Hayden as if he was the center of everything great—steaks and dog biscuits and shady spots and
car rides.

“Fathers. You know.”

“Asshole fathers?”

“Absent ones.”

“Mine was around; he just wasn’t a nice guy.”

“Maybe we had it better, then. We didn’t know
what
kind of guy he was.”

“You knew he was a coward,” Hayden said.

My chest filled with an unfamiliar feeling. Something large. It was the great rising flood you feel when the kid you know is cheating from you gets caught, or when the creep driver who’s been riding your tail gets pulled over. I didn’t answer him right away, though. It wasn’t something I liked to think about. But the place he’d just brought me to was a great place, where he was standing up to the bully just by speaking the truth.

“A coward?” I said.

“Absolutely, Scarlet.”

He held my eyes, driving his point home. I looked down. All the greatness was too much suddenly; the awareness of how much his words meant embarrassed me.

“Anyway,” I said. “You and Juliet. A match made in childhood.”

The coffeepot filled cheerfully. Hayden tilted his head and narrowed his eyes at me. “There you go again,” he said. “Jesus. Nothing much passes you by, does it, Scarlet Ellis? You are a life-watcher. You take it in, all of it.”

I willed myself not to blush. “I gotta run,” I said. I rinsed my bowl, jammed it into the dishwasher.

“Look both ways and don’t talk to strangers,” he said.

“Okay, Dad,” I said.

I waited outside for Derek. The day was sunny and you could
smell flowers blooming. I swear I could smell the orange red of Ally Peet-Robbins’s bed of primroses. I had that big, big feeling that sat right next to
giddy
. Where you feel like you could build a building or stop warring nations or create a masterpiece, and you want to start right then. I life-watched; I took it all in, it was true. That was me. That’s who I was. That’s who I was exactly.

Usually you could hear Derek Nakasani’s car before you could see it. The Camaro made the sound a large animal might make in the back of its throat when provoked. I once made the mistake of making Derek wait because I was late, or should I say making Derek not wait. So I tried to be early and stood in front of our house with my backpack at my feet. The cars still sat in Clive Weaver’s driveway, quiet with importance.

My eye caught on something on the sidewalk in front of Goth Girl’s house. Something pink. A new design started already? I crossed the street to get a better look.

A new design, yes, but it was nothing like anything she’d ever drawn before. It was simple. The sparest message. No hints of famous paintings, no family members in punishing poses. No vampires with fangs and blood. Just a red Volkswagen. A tuxedo. A dress, one that a princess might wear—pink, with a full skirt. Underneath it were the words
Prom dress
. A pair of shoes, and the words under that:
Prom shoes
.

Every bad thought I’d had the night before about helping people, about being a good person—they vanished, just like that.
This
was why you helped people. This was why you did the right thing. Because you could make a difference when no one else could. Because you were actually
needed
. You watched life, you took it all in, and then you did something about it. Goth Girl was
talking to me. Goth Girl was telling me her deepest secret.

Goth Girl wanted to go to the prom.

“Are you ignoring me? Because I have the feeling you’re ignoring me.” When I shut my locker door and turned around, I found Reilly Ogden standing there.

“Jesus, Reilly, you scared me.” Reilly had a way of appearing out of nowhere. That day, he wore a black dress shirt open to his chest, a traveling salesman stuck in the seventies, ready to pick up foxy chicks in a hotel bar. His hair had something slippery on it; it was stuck up in some punk-cool, circa 1980. His tennis shoes were high-tech millennium cool. Who knew what year the actual Reilly Ogden was inside.

I had seen Reilly’s house once, the night I made the mistake of going to the dance with him. It was one of those flat fifties houses with small windows and that white stuff that looks like Grape-Nuts sprayed onto the low ceiling. There was a BMW out front, his parents’ car. Inside, the living room smelled like someone had just cooked bacon. It had a sort of creepy basement. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m really only about sixty-eight percent okay with basements.

“Scarlet, what’s wrong? Things haven’t been the same between us.”

“Look, Reilly,” I said. “I’m just not ready to get involved with anyone, okay? Don’t take it personal.” Which you only said, of course, when something was
very
personal.

“We’re already
involved
. You came to my
house
… ,” he whined.

I shoved past him, remembering the cold sweat on his palm that night at the dance when he had tried to hold my hand. I headed for
Ms. Cassaday’s AP English. I sat in that hard plastic seat and tried to concentrate on
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
. My mind couldn’t be still, and that rarely happened in Ms. Cassaday’s class. She was bold and important and never spoke about her personal life, even though we all knew she lived with Elaine Blackstone, who worked at the oyster beds. You wondered what their house looked like inside, and if, every morning, sitting on the edge of their bed, Elaine put her work boots on—the green rubber ones you saw her wearing at Johnny’s Market, her jeans tucked down inside.

But that day I couldn’t be hooked in by Ms. Cassaday’s words. I was unfocused and gaze-y, staring out the classroom window which looked out over the baseball field, with its dry yellow grass and padded white bases set on dusty ground. I wondered if Hayden had played baseball in high school. I pictured him with a mitt on his hand, a dog running around his legs. I wondered who he was as a boy. If he rode his bike or collected bugs or grew a sunflower in a Styrofoam cup in the first grade. A person can seem like a whole country you’ve never been to.

The deep desire to see someone again, to know more: Was it fate shifting its pieces, or just what my psychology books would say—that instant connection is your past at work, the reminder of something, or the hope of something else? My mind kept bumping into him. God, I was acting like someone with a
crush
. I’d better
not
have a crush on him. First, he was Juliet’s husband, and that was not something you conveniently forgot. Besides that, I hated the word
crush
, a pink candy word, a frosting word, something for giggly girls who wrote their name with his surrounded by a heart. I wasn’t the kind of person who had crushes. I didn’t believe in stupid insta-connections with people you didn’t even know. It needed to matter, it needed to come to something, be
real
, or it wasn’t worth
all the wasted feelings. Everyone else, even Juliet, fell in love with Mr. Gregory Hawthorne (who let us call him Gregory), our middle school algebra teacher. But I’d only noticed how he paused by his reflection in the classroom window, and how his breath smelled of coffee when he stood too close.

And what was curiosity or gladness or intrigue, anyway? Just regular human being feelings. People could have all kinds of feelings, and that didn’t necessarily mean anything. It didn’t mean that anything would
happen
.

I hurried through lunch. There was someone I had to talk to. Goth Girl had reached out to me, and hers was a problem I could do something about. She had drawn a red Volkswagen, and there were only two red Volkswagens in our school lot. Henderson Law, super-jock, perpetual Homecoming King—I knew it couldn’t be him. But the other Volkswagen belonged to Kevin Frink. Bomb Boy. Kevin Frink, with his heavy jacket and averted eyes and pocket full of matches. It made perfect sense, the kind of perfect sense that’s actually the strangest and most bizarre perfect sense possible.

I knew Kevin usually hung out around the football field bleachers at lunch. The last time I saw him there he had a couple of firecrackers and a small package of matches from some seaside motel in Oregon. I walked through the stadium gate and down the bleachers, but didn’t see him until I looked out onto the field itself. He sat on the AstroTurf with his back against a goalpost. I wondered if I should ask him about Clive Weaver, but I could imagine Kevin’s voice.
Just because my mother drives a hearse doesn’t mean I know when everyone
dies. When I got down there, he looked up from a roughed-up copy of
The Anarchist Cookbook
.