The Six Rules of Maybe

you got when you’d been listening to music and were therefore in some mood to be profound. I didn’t care about any of that. Profound was just a way to keep your distance from prickly life truths. I didn’t want soft, misty talk. I hated conflict, hated it , especially with Mom, but I chanced the truth. “You don’t seem that upset,” I said quietly.
    “What?”
    “Not really. You’re not that mad at her.”
    Mom shook her head. She looked at me like she couldn’t quite understand where I was coming from. Her face changed, lost its softness. Her voice was irritated. “I’m just trying to do the best I can here.”
    I kept tracing the threads with my fingertip. I could go farther, but it might mean a real argument, a guilty and unsettled night’s sleep, and the dreaded waking up with the knowledge that things were wrong between us. I kept quiet. We just sat there silently. I listened to Mr. Martinelli drag his rubber garbage cans down thecement driveway to the curb.
    “All right, Scarlet. If this is the way you want it … ,” Mom said. She waited, but I gave her nothing back. She got up and left me alone again.
    I tried to get into bed and go to sleep, but sleep was stubborn and taunting, staying just out of reach. I wondered if I should make a list of things we needed for the baby. I listened to crickets and folded up my pillow and tried it that way and then unfolded it again. The sheet had gotten all scrunched at the bottom of the mattress and I was sorting out my confused bed when I heard a noise out on the street. Footsteps. A voice? I peeked out my window.
    Oh God, it was Clive Weaver outside again, naked as the day he was born. He was out by the mailboxes. He muttered something. And then he said, “Roscoe Oil, those bastards!” so loudly that he caused a far-off dog to bark and Ally Pete-Robbins’s porch light to go on.
    “Mr. Weaver!” I whispered as loudly as I could.
    He looked around as if God were talking to him. I could only imagine how surprised he’d be when God turned out to be a seventeen-year-old girl.
    “Up here!” I whispered. “It’s me, Scarlet.”
    “I thought maybe the mail was late,” he said.
    “It’s not late,” I said. “It came this afternoon.”
    “They’d never have let us get away with that shit,” he said.
    “I think you’d better go inside and go to bed,” I said. His nakedness was not as shocking the second time around.
    “What?” he shouted.
    “Go inside and go to bed.”
    “So long,” he said.
    Mr. Weaver shuffled back in the direction of his front door, hisslippers scuffing along on the sidewalk, his flabby white ass making a sad retreat. I climbed back into bed. Someone was going to have to do something about him. Probably that someone was going to be me. Ever since way back in kindergarten, when Mr. Keneely needed “someone” to walk with Renee Horton to the office when she was about to throw up and nobody, nobody offered to help, I’d been the someone who would finally raise their hand. Whether someone ever got to be anyone—that was what I wasn’t so sure of anymore.

Chapter Ten
    I n the morning, there were cars out in front of Clive Weaver’s house. Two cars. Serious-looking cars. I hoped he hadn’t died or anything. It didn’t seem like a death-type morning. The guys working on the house behind us were getting an early start; I heard the cheery chink, chink, chink of the ladder rising, the clatter of lumber being dropped. A crow heckled his nasty caw, caw from a tree, as another, more positive-thinking bird group twittered cheerfully from farther off. A milk truck from Daly Farms was stopped in front of Ally Pete-Robbins’s house, the driver hopping into the wide-open truck door and starting the engine back up with optimistic vigor. Blue sky, a tree shimmering in a slight breeze. All in all, not a day someone’s life was over.
    I walked past Juliet’s closed door. It seemed heavy with sleep and secrets and entwined bodies and sheets in disarray. I tried not to think about what my sister had said, about Hayden in bed. I pretended not to see the door the way you pretend not to see things notentirely hidden that should be entirely hidden, life’s little moments of too much information—Wiley Rogers’s older brother selling drugs across the street from our high school, for one example; Hailey Benecci’s anorexia, for another.
    It was not exactly like I hadn’t been faced with Juliet’s sex life before. There were