The Six Rules of Maybe

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. Sheprobably 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, someoneyou’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,