The Six Rules of Maybe

Your soon-to-be-baby has started its miraculous transformation from single cell to baby boy or girl. This week, the fertilized egg—or zygote—divides several times over to become a tiny ball of microscopic cells smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.
    Week four: The blastocyst that will be your baby splits to form the placenta and the embryo, and the specialized parts of your baby’s body begin to develop.
    Jitter had been going through eons of evolution before we even knew he or she existed. It felt important to know these things about him or her. Him or her. Which, I wondered? How do you picture a person in your mind without knowing this? I decided to refer to Jitter in my mind as a he, the generic he , the he in books that meant neither he nor she, just a someone. It seemed important to decide and clarify this, even in my mind. It seemed the best way to show how welcome he was, no matter what.
    I read further. As the first trimester comes to a close, your baby’s about the size of a peach. I thought about a peach wrapped in a soft blanket. I thought about wheeling a peach around in a baby carriage. I pictured me and the peach baby in the park, park ladies leaning in to look, cooing with love and envy. I found myself reading the next few paragraphs over and over again, the way you do when you haven’t been paying attention. I wasn’t thinking about babies or peaches, then, I was thinking about what it might be like to have someone wash your hair, a guy someone, a man, fingers through strands, a cool rinse, your hair slicked back, the drip of water down your neck caught by a towel.
    That’s when I heard their voices through the wall. Muffled and heavy. The thick crackle of an argument, her and then him. A pause, then rapid fire. More silence and then her again. Buddy Wilkes’sname said aloud. I listened to Juliet and Hayden and thought about my mother and Dean Neuhaus and my stalker, Reilly Ogden, and Nicole’s parents and even my own parents. I wondered if maybe we were just meant to love the people who would make us most unhappy.
    Juliet and Hayden fell silent. After a while, it was late enough, finally, for me to do what I needed to do. I went to my desk and took out the container of chalk; I’d first found it in the garage, still on the metal tray of the chalkboard Juliet and I had used when we played school. I crept downstairs, turned the door handle quietly. From outside, I could see Mom’s bedroom window light turn off. And then Juliet and Hayden’s, too.
    I crossed the street, the asphalt cool and bumpy on my bare feet. I could see Goth Girl’s drawing by the light of the streetlamp. Today she had finished her Last Supper drawing. I could see the figure in the middle where Jesus usually sat, but instead of Jesus there was a woman with brown hair and the checked coat I’d seen on Mrs. Saint George. Mr. Saint George was at the table too, I thought, next to a vampire in jeans and a T-shirt and a wild-haired witch in a tight black dress. And there was Goth Girl herself, in the figure that had her back toward the rest of them. There was Goth Girl’s straight black hair, anyway, her favorite black sweatshirt.
    I took my chalk and headed to the empty place just past the drawing, as I had done several times before. At first, I had tried the usual ways of being a nice person to someone who needed a nice person in their life—I had smiled at her in the halls at school and tried to make conversation when I saw her at home. But Fiona Saint George always averted her eyes, the way you do when you look straight at the sun. Her art was a message, a letter made from a single picture, and the most important thing about a message was for it tobe heard. You reach out, and someone reaches back; you give, and someone gives in return—it was one of the Fair and Right principles of the universe.
    So I knelt next to the painting. This is beautiful , I wrote, on the square of sidewalk nearest the drawing. You are incredibly talented . I signed my note: A friend who believes in you.
    I brushed the chalk from my hands, stood. Across the street in my own driveway I saw something then—a tiny orange light, the glow of the end of a cigarette. My first thought was of Buddy Wilkes, that Buddy Wilkes had somehow heard my sister was back, and that he was sniffing around our driveway for her scent. Maybe he’d throw pebbles at her window while she slept beside her husband.
    But when I crossed the street I saw