The Six Rules of Maybe

twenty-three, and he was a man, a man who was married and who was going to be a father.
    There was the sound of a hawk overhead, the Martinellis’ TV on, too loud. Hayden spoke finally.
    “I was on a date with a girl once,” he said. “And we had just gone to this Asian market. I had this white bag filled with hum bows. You know hum bows? Those white balls of dough stuffed with meat?”
    I nodded.
    “Well, I dropped the bag. We were parked on a hill, and the bag dropped, and one of the hum bows fell out, and I started chasing it. Instead of just letting it go, I ran after it, down this hill. Running and grabbing and missing. I didn’t stop to think what would be better for my dignity; I just kept going after it. I chased the hum bow down the street until it finally stopped underneath the wheel of a delivery truck.”
    He looked at me and grinned in the darkness. But it wasn’t a real grin—his eyes weren’t involved. It was politeness, the kind of grin you give as a gift even if you don’t feel at all like smiling. Hayden was a nice person, too.
    We just stood in silence. Something occurred to me then, and I said it. “A good lot of the time, nice people are doomed.”
    He laughed then, right out loud. A real laugh. A loud, surprised one. “Shit, Scarlet,” he said. “Shit. You.” He pointed his finger at me. “Yes indeed. God, I’ve got to have another cigarette now.”
    I wanted to make him laugh again. Or say another thing that pleased him. But nothing came. “It’s true, though, isn’t it?”
    “I think it’s one of the truest things I’ve ever heard,” he said.
    We were quiet. The night settled and filled in the spaces around us. The two of us had made something better, even for a moment. “You going back in?” I asked.
    “In a minute.”
    “Okay. See you in the morning, then.”
    “Good night, Scarlet.”
    I went back inside. I tried to close my eyes, but I kept feeling his presence there, standing just under my window, his bare skin white in the moonlight. I didn’t sleep until I heard the soft click of the front door, his footsteps climbing the stairs.

Chapter Seven
    I t was a stupid cliché, but I didn’t fit in at Parrish High. High school mostly felt like a sentence I was serving because of some crime I’d committed, maybe in a past life. Sometimes being there actually hurt in a physical way, the way it hurts when you have to keep running that last bit of the mile in the PE track unit, when you’re sure you can’t go on anymore. Some sort of burning in your chest and heaviness in your legs.
    I’d always known I was different from other people. I knew it, because I felt perpetually awkward, and I realized everyone else wasn’t going around feeling like that, at least not quite so much of the time. Mr. Kennedy, our high school librarian (I was his TA for a semester), said it was because I was a reading person , meaning, I guess, that all the books you read made you see things differently. But Mom said I was born mature, that I was a mini-adult from the time I was four and she caught me trying to write checks in her checkbook with my crayons. I once passed the Theosophical Societyout by Honey B’s Bakery, and that old lady that runs it, Cora Lee, told me I was an old soul. Then she gave me a pamphlet for their next lecture, “Understanding Ourselves in the Cosmos.”
    Maybe that was it, that I was a reading person, or a mini-adult, or an old soul, because I just never got the rules of high school. It all seemed silly. All the big emotion and drama and all the gushy love and spitting hate and lip gloss reapplied and reapplied and reapplied in the smudgy mirrors of the girls’ bathroom. The She’s such a bitch! And It’s just because he likes you! and What’d he say, tell us! All that. Most of the time, anyway, she wasn’t a bitch and he didn’t like her and whatever he had to say didn’t mean anything. I tried to be part of it all, but inside I knew I was only faking. To me, it felt like someone had pushed the PAUSE button of my life and I still had to wait another year until it finally might start to play again. The hope was, people like me got to finally find our place in college or in the actual world. People who understood this told you that high school wasn’t the actual world , that it was more like a temporary alternate reality you were forced to believe in for four years. A video game you played, where you could never get to the next level no matter how