The Six Rules of Maybe
wonderful, and she was going to ruin it.
Welcome to the second trimester! Your baby is now about the size of a clenched fist….
Right then, I told myself I wanted only one thing. I convinced myself, or thought I did. I wanted only what was best for Juliet and Jitter and Hayden. Coming to the rescue of other people was something I knew, and something I was good at, and so was wanting the best for other people. I could have those things. I took the note from Buddy out of my pocket. I ripped it up and ripped it up until it was only a hundred tiny flakes of paper. I put them into my garbage can, thought better of it, and wrapped them in an old lunch bag full of sandwich crusts and orange peels and then threw that away again. I shoved some old Biology handouts on top. I buried those words so far down that they would never hurt anyone.
That night, I claimed to have too much homework to even have time for dinner. I ate in my room instead of acting like the stupid younger sister with a crush. I did not look for long minutes at the photo of Hayden with his eyes closed that I had taken out at Point Perpetua, now taped up on my wall with all the others. The one where hiswhole face seemed to be taking in the sea and the rocks and the sky, taking in the pure pleasure of the day. I made it equal in my mind with the photo of Mr. Martinelli’s crew cut. Sometimes willpower is really more like won’t-power.
I let Zeus come and stay in my room. He’d eaten two rolls of LifeSavers out of Juliet’s purse, and his breath still smelled a little minty fresh. I did my Math and Biology and English homework, and after that, I started a new assignment. I planned the steps, imagined the end result. It made me pleased to think about. I decided to call it the Make Hope and Possibilities Happen for Clive Weaver project.
I went downstairs, to the back porch, looked around in the recycling bin for old mail. The screen door opened. Hayden stood there with an empty beer bottle in his hand.
“I was just going to toss this in,” he said. Zeus peeked around his legs. He still looked fluffy from his bath.
“Don’t mind me,” I said.
“You okay?”
“Yep.”
“Did you lose something?”
I stopped and looked up at him. His face was stubbly with the day’s beard. The porch light gave him a soft glow. “I’m just doing something for a friend. A depressed friend.”
“Oh,” he said. I thought this would send him on his way, but instead of going back in, he opened the screen door and came outside. He sat just outside the door in the old wicker chair that Mom had had forever, the one that needed repainting, the collector of jackets and tossed-off things, where we’d sit to take off our muddy shoes before coming in.
“That’s too bad, about your friend.”
“I don’t know. Somewhere along the line, life seems to give yousomething to be depressed about. Seems like it’s just a predictable season in the human condition.” He didn’t answer. I was still looking through the old mail, but I glanced up at him. He was spinning that bottle on its end in his palm, thinking.
“I suppose you don’t stand much of a chance if you think that happiness is the absence of unhappiness,” he said. “Good luck ever being happy, then.”
“Yeah, the odds just aren’t in favor it, of things being perfect your whole life long. I don’t know. I think it’s a basically acceptable fact. Like Halloween candy. You’re always going to at least get some disgusting Good & Plenty.”
“Oh God,” he groaned at the thought. “Or those Root Beer Barrels. That single Root Beer Barrel in cellophane. I can’t believe they still make those.”
“They don’t. People have had them in their cupboards for thirty years.”
“That explains it,” he said.
I stopped hunting through the bin and watched him. He tilted the bottle back to get some last drop, and I looked at his long neck, arched. “Maybe we’d all be happier if we expected to be sometimes miserable,” I said. I guess I was trying to tell him something about Juliet.
“But not always miserable. Not when miserable becomes a way of life.” He tossed the bottle into the bin for glass, and it clanged against the bottom. I didn’t want him to go in that direction. Not at all. His words opened a door of possibilities I hadn’t considered—his not sticking around. Not putting up with her crap. Juliet going too far with that barbed wire that was Buddy Wilkes. But Hayden had to. He had
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