The Six Rules of Maybe

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 wasso 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.” Theonly 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 hiseyes, 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.
    By the end of the afternoon, there was a small stack of job applications on the seat between us. We’d gathered one for the Hotel Delgado, the old ivy-covered building by the marina where Teddy Roosevelt supposedly had once stayed; one for Johnny’s Market; one for the ferry terminal. The Franciscan nuns used to run the