The Six Rules of Maybe

right—the list was harder than it seemed. To know why you wanted something, why you desired a person, the real reasons why, the behind-the-reasons reasons … It could be thorny and layered, the answers hiding in the shadows, submerged even, in some depths too far out of your view. Every night I wished for it under the sky of paper cranes. Let Jitter have Hayden. Let Jitter have this good father.
    “You don’t want to keep doing what you’re doing? Change something. Change one thing,” Juliet said.
    “Reilly Ogden,” I said.
    She drove me over to Reilly’s house in Mom’s car. You’ve got to say what you mean and mean what you say, she had said. Doubt in your voice is an open door people will shove right through. She waited in the driver’s seat and I saw that she was keeping her eye on me as I stood on his porch and rang the bell.
    Reilly’s mother answered. She was a thick woman with tightly wound hair and she did not meet my eyes. She invited me in, but it wasn’t a real invitation. Reilly was her boy, you could tell.
    “Well, it’s about time,” Reilly said.
    “Reilly … ,” I said. I remembered Juliet’s words. Nice is shitty self-protection, Scarlet. You’ve got a right to say who you want and don’t want in your life. Selfishness isn’t always a bad thing, in spite of what you think.
    “You didn’t mention my new contacts. They’re blue,” he said. He opened his eyes wide for me to peer into.
    “I have something to say to you.”
    “Come in,” he said. “We can talk in my room. My mother won’t mind.” He opened the door wider and I could see the edge of a recliner with a remote control on the arm. The sound of some war program from the History channel coming from the living room.
    “No,” I said. “Here.”
    He ignored me, stepped aside as if I’d come in anyway. He thought I’d do what he wanted because I’d never given him reason to think otherwise. You can collude with people like that , Juliet had said, whether you know it or not. Just by not saying no. “She’ll make us sandwiches if I ask.”
    “Reilly, I want you to hear me. I want you to leave me alone. I don’t want you to talk to me or follow me or come near me at all. Idon’t want to have anything to do with you and I never will. Never.”
    “Scarlet,” he said, as if I were being unreasonable.
    “Never. Leave me alone .”
    A bad thing like selfishness could be a good one, and a good one, like kindness, could be bad. I needed both of those things, I understood, in careful measure. So I turned and went back to the car. I left the fried food smells and the recliner and the creepy basement and those blue contacts and I left the ways all of that might make me feel sorry for him. I turned my back on it, so that, finally, finally, I could look after myself.
    The bedroom door was closed again, with just the two of them shut away behind it. I could hear intense, muffled voices, the sound of Juliet pleading her case. I thought I heard the word, but maybe I just hoped I had: Hayden .
    I watched Mom when she came out. She didn’t see me, just went downstairs for the rest of the evening; she sat cross-legged on the floor in front of our coffee table, her scrapbook supplies in front of her. When I went downstairs myself, I saw her there. She had her scissors in her hand and a paper image, which she turned in a careful circle as she cut. She looked at the page, thought, glued. And then she set down her scissors and shut the book.
    “Juliet’s leaving,” Mom told me the next morning. I stopped my spoon halfway to my mouth.
    “What?”
    Mom poured coffee into a cup. “I told her she needed to go back to Portland.”
    I’d wanted her to lay down the law with Juliet for as long as I could remember. But not now. This wasn’t the time. This was theworst time possible. “You can’t do that,” I said. Juliet couldn’t leave now. She just couldn’t. We needed her. I needed her. Jitter, our Jitter, was going to be born in ten weeks. “She can’t leave .”
    “It’s not okay to hide,” Mom said. “She’s got a husband she needs to face. Hayden loves her and that baby. The baby needs a father.”
    “Why can’t he come back here?”
    “We need to let them work this out on their own. Without us.”
    I thought of Hayden, with his kind eyes and strong hands. I thought of his handwriting on a page and his firm grip on Zeus’s collar. I thought of him with that sonogram image; I imagined it tacked up nearby