The Six Rules of Maybe

heard it again; we did. “Zeus!” Hayden’s voice pleaded too.
    “Zeus! Over here. Come here!” I called.
    Please .
    And then, like in a dream, like your best dream possible, like every hope you’ve ever had finally coming true, there he was. With his butterscotch fur and triangle ears, there he was, trotting around over by our back fence. Trotting around like it was any other day and he was any other dog.
    “Zeus!”
    I did start to cry then. I did. Hayden laughed out loud. I cried, and tears just streamed. Every piece of me was flying—with relief, with happiness. Something a hundred steps beyond happiness.
    “Oh, thank God,” Hayden said. “Thank God he’s okay. Damn you, boy. Damn you for doing that bad thing. You stupid dog! Come here, you idiot.”
    And Zeus did. He looked thin and scruffy and mangled, but he came right back to us with the weary joy of homecoming.

    I was surprised to hear her voice.
    “Reilly Ogden has been calling me endlessly,” Nicole said.
    I didn’t answer. Our friendship seemed like something from a long time ago. Maybe it was me who wasn’t sure I wanted to be friends anymore.
    “Are you there?” she said.
    “Yeah.”
    “He says he keeps having this bad feeling that something is wrong with you. He’s worried. He even went to your house.”
    “He did?”
    “ Is something wrong with you?”
    “Reilly Ogden has no business worrying about me.”
    “He’s a freak, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
    “I’m fine.”
    “Kevin Frink blew up your neighbors’ garage. That’s reason to worry right there.”
    She waited. But I didn’t do what I had done for the last weeks or the last years. I didn’t give, explain, plead, ask her to talk, or apologize. “Do you want to get together or something?” she said.
    Images flashed—me carrying around her books all those months while she was in those casts. Me listening to every feeling she had had since the sixth grade, staying with her on the phone while she cried, even when I was tired, or when I had my own problems, or when there were other things I wanted to do. Giving, without any end point or boundaries or even the giving back that might make my own constant generosity justifiable. Maybe I should have just let her come into my house, my room, and take everything that belonged to me. That’s what I’d basically said—I’d said, Here. Take it all. “I don’t know, Nicole. I’m rethinking a lot of things right now.”
    “Oh,” she said.
    I stayed silent. I didn’t feel like giving anything anymore, even words. That’s what happens when you give too much. Suddenly you reach a point of over . You don’t even necessarily know that point is coming. It just arrives. It’s a long overdue passenger on a long overdue train, but finally it’s there.
    “I saw Shy at the pool. He asked about you too. Everyone’s asking about you since you sort of … disappeared. He said I should tell you to give him a call if I saw you.”
    Jesse , I thought. He had a name. “Great,” I said.
    “You can’t make someone love you if they don’t.”
    “Yeah. It’s too bad, the thing about people having their own free will,” I said.
    She didn’t speak, and neither did I. There was only the infinite dark universe sound of open phone lines minus voices. I didn’t mind this. I hoped she felt a little of my pain, as un-nice as that was. That was the truth, is the truth, of nice people pressed too far. We could start to feel a little mean. A little angry. A lot angry. Anger stores up in there, whether you know it or not.
    “Well, I guess I better go,” Nicole said.
    “Yep,” I said, and I hung up without saying good-bye.
    A week and a half had passed since the explosion, ten days. Kevin Frink and Fiona Saint George arrived back home in the rental car. I saw them go inside the Saint George house, and a few moments later, Officer Beaker showed up. Kevin Frink walked out beside him, Officer Beaker’s hand firmly on his arm. There were no handcuffs or sirens or any of the excitement you might see if it were a movie. In the true crime books, too, it was always more exciting. But Kevin Frink just walked out and got into the car, and that was that.Somewhere along the trip, we learned later, Fiona had told Kevin what she had told her parents from a phone booth in California. She hadn’t wanted any of this. She hadn’t wanted to go to California. She wanted to go to Yale. She hadn’t wanted to tell Kevin before; she’d