The Six Rules of Maybe

something? What should I do? The tiny dangly penis was understandably distracting. His slippers scuffed along the sidewalk until he reached the mailboxes. His wide white ass sagged in the direction of the street. He opened his box, empty, and he shut it again.
    “Fools,” he said loudly.
    I was too embarrassed to move. His exposed flesh had stunned me into inaction. Instead, I peeked from a distance and made sure he got back into his house. I hoped he was okay. I wondered if I should tell Mom or call his daughters, something. Then again, he hadn’t continued out to the freeway or anything. He’d just gone to get his mail and had forgotten his clothes. Maybe this happened after a person worked forty-five years for the postal service.
    Mom must have left Quill Stationers early, because her car was in the driveway. Hayden’s truck was gone, though. I had no idea what combination of people I might find there, in my formerly predictable house. Inside, though, it was as quiet as it usually was when I got home. No sign of my mother or Zeus. I heard the scrape of a lawn chair against the cement patio, though, through the propped-open kitchen door. Juliet was outside, lying out in the sun in her bikini. She reached one arm down to a squirt bottle of water, sprayed herself down and up as if she were a dry houseplant.
    “Hey!” I shouted. “I’m home!”
    “Out here,” Juliet shouted back without sitting up.
    I dropped my backpack, grabbed a Fresca from the fridge. The whole bottom shelf of our refrigerator had been packed with diet sodas since Dean had come along to blow my mother’s self-confidence to smithereens. I made my feet happy and took off my sandals, headed out to the back. I noticed that Juliet had a Fresca too popped open beside her.
    “Oh God, don’t look. I’m so fat,” she said. She looked fine to me: she had only the small mound of stomach us regular people always had. She made no move to cover herself up. That was another difference between us. Juliet was never shy about her body. I loved my body and all that, I just loved it more covered up.
    “Clive Weaver was just outside naked,” I said.
    “Who?”
    “Clive Weaver ? Come on, it’s not like you haven’t lived across the street from him practically your whole life.”
    “Maybe he was hot,” she said, and squirted her calves with the bottle.
    “Where’s Mom?” I asked. I wanted to ask, Where’s Hayden? but I didn’t.
    “Next door. Wacky Mrs. Martinelli couldn’t sign on to the Internet and she came over all frantic.”
    I sat on the lawn near Juliet. Picked up a tennis ball that must have been Zeus’s and threw it against our fence where it bounced and landed in Mom’s oregano bush. One of the neighbors behind us was getting their house worked on. I heard the chink-chink-chink of a ladder rising, the bass hump of music, lyrics drifting. Some people call me the gangster of love, yeah. Some people walking round calling me Mau-rice… . “I like Mrs. Martinelli. I like her a lot, actually.”
    Juliet turned her head on the lawn chair and looked at me, annoyed. It was the same look she’d been giving me throughout our whole childhood, the kind I’d gotten in the backseat of the car when she felt I had taken too much space for myself or when my elbow accidentally touched hers. “What, are you going to fight me about whether Mrs. Martinelli is a kook now too? What is your problem? You’ve argued with every word I’ve said since I got home. You never even said congratulations. Not really.”
    I waited. I guess it was true. “Congratulations, Juliet,” I said. I let my sarcasm show. I wondered how often people meant it when they said that word; congratulations was probably one of the biggest mixed-feelings word in the English language.
    She rolled her eyes in exasperation. It was weird to look at herbody sprawled out like that. She didn’t seem to realize that she was different now, at least to me. I looked at that small mound. I remembered the pictures from the book; the tiny curled baby sea creature who now waited and grew inside of her while she swigged her Fresca, then set it on the glossy pages of the magazine she was reading. But it wasn’t just the tiny creature that made her different. Decisions could make you different too. A person could decide something that made them seem totally unknown and unknowable, even if you’d been with them nearly every day of your life.
    “You shouldn’t drink that diet stuff. It’s