The Six Rules of Maybe

were the shining silver tipsof a wave at sea, in contrast to the deep, gray watery depths of those other words in my head. My baby, Juliet had said. My.

Chapter Four
    I n the morning, the smell of burned toast climbed the stairs, drifted into my room, and woke me up. Someone was burning toast in the kitchen, and usually Saturday mornings just smelled like the same old dusty-vent smell of the furnace going on or last night’s baked-chicken odor that couldn’t bear to leave us. No one cooked breakfast anymore—Mom would eat a bowl of Total (I once caught Dean Neuhaus grabbing a pinch of her side as if it were excess flab even though Mom had a thin, careful body), and I would have a bowl of Life, but the days of week-end breakfasts of French toast or scrambled eggs appeared to be over, disappearing right around Juliet’s senior year, when Mom basically decided her cooking days were done. After Juliet left, the two of us ate like bachelors, quick dinners sometimes downed while standing at the counter, take-out eaten with plastic forks out of white Styrofoam containers. So the burning-toast smell made me feel happy. I actually hurried out of bed with the kind of childhood excitement brought about by simple things like OtterPops and a new lunch box and hot chocolate with marshmallows.
    I pulled my hair up and made sure I didn’t look entirely stupid and was pleased when I saw that what I had imagined was true—Hayden stood at the kitchen sink in his jeans and a soft green T-shirt that looked a million years old. He was rumpled in a way that made you think of sex and sheets and Sunday morning and the bed he’d just risen out of next to my sister. His face was scrubbly and unshaven, and he held a piece of toast in one hand, scraping the black off with the edge of a knife. There was something about that scraping sound and the black dust falling into the kitchen sink, though, that made me feel bad for him again. Black toast was plain old good intentions gone awry.
    “Toast fiasco,” he said when he saw me. A bowl on the counter was filled with the wet, wobbly yellow of cracked eggs. Zeus sat at Hayden’s feet, hoping for the jackpot of dropped food.
    “Need some help?” I asked.
    “Sure,” he said. “Maybe start the bacon?”
    “We have bacon?” I said. I didn’t remember bacon since Mom still felt motherly.
    “I went to the store this morning,” Hayden said.
    “Already? It’s only”—I checked the microwave clock—“nine thirty.”
    “Couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I had the scariest dream.” He held out the still-sort-of-black toast out to me. “Pre-breakfast snack?” he said. I shook my head, so he bit the corner off himself.
    “What was the dream?”
    “Don’t laugh,” he said, crunching.
    I made a very solemn face. “Promise.”
    “I was in the ocean. The waves were really high. You know, over my head?” One of his cheeks was a round ball of toast. “AllI had was this little dumb-ass toy to hold on to—a rooster. Those inflatable things you wear around your waist when you’re a kid. I actually had one in real life.”
    “A rooster? Not exactly a water animal.”
    “I know. Ask my mother. Maybe a whale or something, right? It was probably on sale. Anyway, forget my twisted childhood for a second, okay? I was gulping water and flailing around and then suddenly there was this shark.”
    “A shark.”
    He swallowed. Took another bite. Hayden was a vigorous eater. “But he was this …” He hesitated. “Very light white-red color.”
    “You mean pink,” I said.
    Silence. “Well. Yeah.”
    “A pink shark.” I laughed. I stopped. “I said I wouldn’t laugh.”
    “I believe you promised,” he said. I found the bacon in the fridge, opened the package. I laid out the flat slabs in a pan.
    “A pink shark, though,” I said. “You can’t exactly blame me.”
    “It was a horrible pink. Okay, shit.” He sighed. He ran his fingers through the loose curls of his hair. “I give up. I knew it would sound stupid. Nightmares sound so pathetic in the morning. ‘And then I was in the jaws of a giant hawk who turned into a can opener.’” Hayden held our own can opener, which he was aiming to use on the lid of a can of peaches.
    “Supposedly they’re your subconscious talking.”
    “My subconscious speaks in a foreign language,” he said.
    I tried to think what a pink shark might mean, but came up with nothing. I didn’t always believe much in the subconscious anyway. I