The Six Rules of Maybe

big words,” I said.
    “I was just thinking that,” he said.
    We were sitting close. Our legs were almost touching. I could feel Hayden’s, I don’t know, presence, self, Hayden-ness, right there next to me. His watch on his wrist, the strength of his square shoulders. I was just being myself then. This seemed shocking. Even talking to boys at school made me feel I was on some swinging rope bridge high above a raging river, where the lines just ahead looked fuzzy and frayed. Myself wasn’t something I was all that often. Not without all the inner and outer monitoring systems working, the ones that looked out on the horizon for oncoming disasters. But I was just being myself, and you wouldn’t believe what a relief it was.
    “I like your places, Scarlet Ellis,” he said.
    “Yeah?”
    “I do.”
    “Everyone likes the beach,” I teased. “Who doesn’t like the beach?”
    “I like this beach.”
    We sat in that ease in the sun before a sparkling sea. It was one of those few right moments in your life that you might always remember. When something was as still and true as a blade of grass, when you wished you could hold your breath and make time stop for a good long while. On and on, it would go. On and on, and it would just keep being right.
    Mrs. Martinelli barreled in our direction the second we pulled intothe driveway. She stepped over the junipers between our yards like an army recruit in a row of tires.
    “Who is this young man? I’ve seen his truck,” she said, but you could tell she couldn’t care less if she got an answer. Bits of juniper now clung frantically to her white tennis shoes. She was wearing her favorite sweatshirt—the one with a pair of frogs sharing a single umbrella, sheltered from sequined raindrops.
    I made an uh-oh face toward Hayden so he’d be ready. You need advanced warning for some people, and, as much as I loved her, Mrs. Martinelli was one of them.
    She thrust a paper into my hands. “I’ve been waiting all day to see you. We have received a New Communication.” She was beginning to sound like the scam letters themselves—those Business Propositions written by criminals who were very fond of Capital Letters.
    I’d felt a little generational responsibility for her and Mr. Martinelli, ever since she first told me about getting the e-mails. Our elders had tried to warn us about the risks of drug use, something they knew about from personal experience. Maybe we needed to return the favor about technology use, something we knew about. They had no idea of the dangers involved. Rose Marie and Herb Martinelli had gotten their first computer about five months ago, and somehow word had gotten out that two new suckers were driving full speed along the Information Highway without their seat belts buckled.
    “This arrived via Electronic Mail,” Mrs. Martinelli said. Her eyes were big behind her glasses. “Mr. Martinelli experienced a Printer Jam. He had to dismantle the machine with a kitchen knife. You may notice a few words missing.”
    God, he’d killed that printer. There were long white spacesbetween some of the words, which Mrs. Martinelli had filled in with a pen, her handwriting as thin and fragile as the veins you could see all over her legs when she wore shorts.
    Dearest One,
    Permit me to inform you of my desire of going into business relationship with you. I must not hesitate to confide in you for this simple and sincere Business. I am MORIN JUDE the only daughter of late Mr. and Mrs. Boni JUDE. My father was a very wealth cocoa merchant in Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory coast. My father was Poisoned to death by his business Partners on one of their outings on a business trip to France. My mother died when I was a baby and since then my father took me so special.
    Before the death of my father in a private hospital here in Abidjan he secretly called me on his bed side and told me that he has the sum of Five million, Five hundred thousand United State Dollars. USD ($5,500,000) left in one of the prime Banks here in Abidjan. He asked that I should seek for a foreign partner in a country of my choice so that they might continue his cocoa plantation….
    “Mrs. Martinelli, just click the REPORT SPAM button on your e-mail page and don’t open up mail from people you don’t know. I told you, remember?” This was my version of the “Just Say No to Drugs” speech.
    “Scarlet. This sounds like a wonderful opportunity.” Her cheeks were