The Six Rules of Maybe (5 page)

“No one really likes banana bread,” Hayden said. “You know who makes banana bread? The few people in the world who feel guilty about black bananas.”

I watched the corner of Mom’s mouth go up in a little smile. For the record, the only time I ever saw my mother smile at Buddy Wilkes was the time we saw him pulled over to the side of the rode by Officer Beaker, the red light on the patrol car spinning slowly, telling everyone who passed that Buddy had finally been caught at something.

It seemed like Hayden was just going to be one of those
few, few, few
people who just kept getting better the more you saw of
him. And even Mom, who could see danger in an unwashed apple, could tell that.

I had to wake up Juliet for breakfast. She was the same lump in her bed I remembered from when she lived at home and had stayed out late the night before. And when I called her name and threw one of her stuffed animals at her butt, I heard a muffled “Goddamnit, Scarlet” from way down in the covers, just like the old days too. But when she sighed and sat up, she looked different to me. It felt like the past but not the past, because she looked like a woman, somehow. Maybe because I expected her to be a woman now, but maybe not just that. Her face looked older, like she’d been somewhere and back, and not just to Oregon, either. She rubbed one eye with her hand and said, “Oh yeah,” as if her life had just returned to her, the way it does sometimes when you first wake up. I wasn’t sure, though, if it was her old life that was returning or her new one.

I was aware that there were two sides of the bed, now, too, and that Hayden had slept in that bed, with his head on that pillow. It was very husbandly-wifely. There was a small pile of loose change on the end table, a paper clip, a beat-up peppermint candy wrapped in cellophane, as if he’d emptied his pockets before bed. His backpack was on the floor, unzipped, and I could see some of the contents inside. The blue stripes of a pair of boxers, the open zipper of Levi’s, the cotton of a dress shirt stuffed way down inside.

“Hurry up,” I said. “Hayden made breakfast.”

Juliet sighed. “Hand me that, I can’t reach,” she said to me, gesturing to her bag on the floor by the bed. I handed it to her and she sorted through it, pulling on a pair of underpants and then her jeans. I wondered if Hayden slept naked too.

“Eggs are getting cold.” Mom popped her head in the door. She
probably felt uncomfortable down there alone with Hayden.

“Look at this,” Juliet said. She showed Mom her gaping zipper—the impossible space between the jeans’ button and the buttonhole. “Look.”

“It’s still mostly water, not baby,” Mom said.

“Hurry up, people,” I said. No one seemed to be very considerate of the fact that this great guy had just made all this nice warm food. Besides that, I felt weird talking about the odd things my sister’s body was now doing.
Mostly water
… I wanted that talk to stop right there. I’d put endless sun lotion on that back, braided that hair, handed those arms a towel, but her body seemed unknown to me then, capable of private and unimaginable things.

As we finally left Juliet’s room, I noticed something else there too, on Juliet’s side of the bed. On the small round table that held her old CD player and that candleholder shaped like a butterfly that Buddy Wilkes had given her one birthday, there was another fat chunk of paper—a note, folded and folded once more. From Hayden again, I knew. It seemed to hold possibilities right there where it lay.

I made a silent promise to myself—I would come back when no one was here, and I would read those words. Maybe at that moment I knew what a thief must feel, a jewel thief. The way his heart would quicken with need and envy and want when he gazed down at the promise of diamonds and rubies. The way he knew he would soon hold them in his hands, pretending they were his even if they could never be.

Chapter Five

D
uring the spring and summer of that year, and all of the years previous, too, I had a secret, and that secret was that I lied a lot. It felt like a lot—I did it more than truly necessary, anyway. Sometimes there was no good reason for it. At school, I would lie about what I did on the weekend. If I stayed home and read I would say I went into the city or visited my cousins, when I don’t even really have cousins, or none that we actually ever visited. I would say I went to Hair Apparent to get my hair cut when I trimmed it myself with Mom’s kitchen scissors (probably a lie people saw right through), or that I had a salad when all I ate was fries. I told people I wanted to be a photographer, when I didn’t know what I really wanted to be, and I didn’t say that I’d never been on an airplane. I’d say I went to Hawaii once or to California, because everyone had been to California. I never admitted to liking horror movies, when I actually loved them. The gory ones. The true crime books too, where some clean-cut suburban type, someone
you’d never expect, kills someone in their own garage.

I lied partly out of insecurity, I knew that. I read all about insecurity in my books. Insecurity was a colorless sense of not being good enough that could sit upon your spirit the same as a filmy layer of dirt on a window; something you might not know was even there until the sun tried to shine through. Insecurity, too, was probably part of why I preferred to be alone, and why I was not always brave enough to show who I was, but it was more than that, the lying. I also did it to make people more comfortable. I’d say I was nervous for the AP U.S. History test when I wasn’t, or that something cost less than it did if a person was poor, or that I was bad at sports too when there were some I was honestly pretty good at.

I guess for me, lying evened things out. Smoothed the rocky spaces between people. It could settle a million possible tiny upsets before they actually happened, though I have to say, the thought of speaking the truth all of the time seemed like it would be the greatest thing in the world. The greatest. I couldn’t even imagine how great that would be and how freeing. But I didn’t think that would ever happen, because speaking your own truth on a fairly consistent basis seemed like one of the hardest jobs a human being could take on. A giant and endless wall to get over and one of those walls that are spiked with cut glass at the top. People were often in the greatest crisis just because they couldn’t speak the truth—
I don’t love you. I’m gay. I don’t want to go to that college. I don’t really want to be friends with you. I hate the way things are.
With lying, you walked a wide circle around it all. It kept things simple and running smoothly, even if that meant you held hard to your own secrets.

I didn’t know if other people did this too, the way I did. Lying wasn’t exactly something you told the truth about.

So that’s what I did when Mom asked me to show Hayden
around town while she went with Juliet to buy maternity clothes. I lied. I moaned and protested when the thought actually made me happy. Really happy. Too happy. I think I even said, “Can’t you guys take him later?” when right at that moment I was figuring out in my head what to show him. I guess when you lied, you were trying to be a better person than the creep you actually thought you were.

I waited for Hayden to be ready. I sang, “It’s a Big Dog,” to Zeus, to the tune of “It’s a Small World.” Dogs are patient about those things. Finally, when Hayden was ready, I wasn’t. I forgot my camera and had to go back upstairs to get it. Not taking my camera was the same as going shopping when you don’t have money. You go shopping without money and you see a ton of things you can’t live without. You have money, and … nothing. Going somewhere without my camera meant I was sure to see a hundred things I wanted to capture but that would be forever lost.

“Anyplace we can get Zeus’s nails clipped?” Hayden asked as we finally headed out. “He’s looking like Howard Hughes.”

“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t really know where. We’d never had a dog ourselves, or any pet for that matter, except the class guinea pigs I used to bring home on school vacations. Harold, for example. Juliet had put a tiny cowboy hat on him that had belonged to her Ken doll. I’d gotten mad at her and made her take it off. Probably guinea pigs didn’t get humiliated, but he looked like it anyway.

“Sidewalk artist?” Hayden gestured one thumb across the street, where Fiona Saint George was already sitting cross-legged on the cement, filling in a new disciple with yellow chalk. For the last few days, she’d been making a vampire version of Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper
. All the characters around the table had fangs and white faces—some bald, some with wild, flowing snakelike hair. Fiona’s own long hair was black and shiny as the crows that watched her
draw from the branches of nearby evergreen trees. When I saw her at school, I would smile at her, even though she’d only look back with her face as still as stone. Both of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Saint George, had gone to Yale. They had Yale window stickers in both of their cars so that you would be sure to know it when they drove off to work at the Marine Science Center. Fiona’s brother, Robert, had left home to go to Yale two years ago. Probably their dog, Buster, had gone to Yale too.

“Goth Girl,” I said when we got into his truck. “That’s what they call her at school. She’s depressed.”

“She’s also really good,” he said.

It pleased me that he could see beyond Fiona Saint George’s white face and black eyeliner, to who she really was. I’d seen her eyes up close once or twice. And even though Fiona Saint George never said much, her eyes wanted things badly.

Hayden backed out of the driveway. “Watch out, azalea,” he said, looking over one shoulder.

“You get run over enough, you’re immune to all pain,” I said.

“Same way I went this morning?” he asked. “Turn right at the sign that says
WHISTLING FIRS
?”

I nodded. “They don’t exactly whistle,” I said. We started down the street, drove past the Martinellis’ house with their big RV parked by the curb (
The Pleasure Way
was written in green script across its broad side) and continued past Ally Pete-Robbins, who was already in gardening shorts and a sun hat, kneeling on one of those cushy weeding mats you didn’t think anyone actually used. Jeffrey and Jacob, her twins, ran around on the lawn with squirt guns. They held them low, below their waists, and pulled the triggers to look like they were peeing. They screamed with laughter, raising the guns again the minute Ally Pete-Robbins turned her head to see what was
so funny.

“Huh,” I said.

“What?” Hayden said. He looked in his rearview mirror to check on Zeus, who sat straight in the truck’s back bed, prim as an old lady waiting for her bus.

Huh
was Shy, the boy Nicole was so crazy about, on his bike on our street. He was riding really slowly and looking at what I guessed were house numbers. He turned a long full circle in front of the house on the corner to get a better look, then cruised by Ally Pete-Robbins.

“Someone from school,” I said to Hayden. “I didn’t know he lived around here.” We drove right past him then, and I caught his eye. He looked shocked, caught. I wondered what he was doing. He seemed guilty and lost. I’d have to tell Nicole that he had even more of a secret life than we thought.

“He just ran into that parked Acura,” Hayden said as we turned the corner.

“You’re kidding.” I turned to look, but he was too far out of sight.

“Right into the side.”

“Oh man. Ally Pete-Robbins will lose it if she sees a scratch. She’s one of those people, you know—tight smile plus phony cheer equals utter control freak.”

“I know the ones,” he said.

“Her boys fake-belch instead of using actual words.”

“Ah, junior manhood,” he said. He flicked on his turn signal. I liked the sight of his big hands on the steering wheel. He still wore a watch. I liked that, too, the way it sat sturdily on his wrist. “You sure got that guy all shook up.”

“Me? No, he was probably looking for my friend Nicole.” The
only time I ever shook a boy up was in the sixth grade when I ran smack into Gregor Ybinsky while he was carrying his cafeteria tray. It was his first day of school in the United States, and after we collided, his dress shirt was splotched with mashed potatoes and school gravy. Okay, maybe I shook up Reilly Ogden, too. I went to a dance with him once just to be nice and now I couldn’t get rid of him. I had shaken up Kevin Frink a few weeks ago, but that was only because I caught him lighting a firecracker out by the school Dumpsters. He calmed right down when I promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone.

“You shook him u-up,” Hayden said, his voice doing that teasing dance. “I know it. You’re a heartbreaker, just like Juliet.”

He seemed to love saying her name. It was as if her name was made out of rose petals or soft rain or the sound a seashell makes. The way he said it—it made me wish what he said were true, and I had never before wished to be a heartbreaker. Breaking hearts was Juliet’s department, not mine—we were different in that way and in every other one. I had the long dark hair and wide brown eyes that our mother had, while Juliet had the golden-white hair and blue-ice eyes that must have been our father’s. I was too tall, too thin; I had too much of what there should be less of and too little of what there should be more of. And most of the time, I was only a visitor in a land that Juliet ruled, Gregor Ybinsky on a forever first day in a forever foreign country, where I didn’t speak the language and had school gravy on my shirt. Nothing happened to people like me and Gregor except occasional unfortunate accidents.

I wasn’t used to wanting things badly, except maybe for other people. I wanted my mother to ditch that creep Dean Neuhaus and I wanted Clive Weaver to be well, and Goth Girl to be happy, and the Martinellis to be safe. But as I looked at Hayden’s strong hands on the steering wheel, his wrists, the smile crinkle beside his
eyes, I felt some want in me grow, the way a snowball grows when you roll it. I prayed to the God in Mom’s Dream Big song, “Be.” Please, let me be a heartbreaker. God, if you’re up there, I wouldn’t mind being a heartbreaker just once.