The Six Rules of Maybe

turned around.
    “Kevin,” I said. I had a moment of fear-panic, looked at his hands. I saw with relief that they did not hold some round cartoon bomb with a sparkling, lit fuse, nor a Wile E. Coyote crate labeled Dynamite! Actually, he was smiling. I had to think a minute. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen Kevin Frink smile. He smirked, yes, but that only involved one corner of the mouth, not both.
    “I don’t want you making anything of this,” he said.
    “Okay.”
    “She called me. Fiona Saint George.”
    “She did?”
    “She told me she may as well go to the prom with me since no one else was ever going to ask her.”
    I looked at his big face and wondered if her words had bothered him, but I guessed not. He seemed pleased. He even had a newT-shirt on. I could see the thin plastic T still attached to his sleeve, the one that had once held the price tag. I pointed it out to him and he lifted his sleeve to his mouth and ripped it off with his teeth.
    “I said, ‘Maybe you ought to wait for Dracula. He’d take you to the prom. And she said, ‘Fuck you’ and I said, ‘Fuck you back’ and then she said I’d better get her a corsage and I told her I wasn’t stupid and she asked me to come over today after school.”
    “Wow, Kevin!” I wanted to hug him, but Kevin Frink wasn’t one you actually hugged. Even if you touched him, he seemed to flinch, pulling tight back inside his coat. His coat—wait. He wasn’t wearing his coat.
    “Where’s your coat?” I asked.
    “It’s hot,” he said. “What do I know about corsages? What do you do? Do I have to call that place? STD?”
    “FTD? Nah. Even the grocery store has corsages.”
    “What do I get?”
    I thought of the pink dress drawn on the sidewalk drawn in chalk. “Pink roses. For her wrist.”
    “All right. I got that. Pink roses.”
    “You’re going to do great!” I beamed. I felt so happy, my insides beamed too. It was beautiful, this plan. Everyone could get just what they needed. I felt like a proud parent.
    “Fucking prom,” Kevin Frink said, but when he went back down the hall, his usual big head slump had turned into something like a big head bob.
    And then, the salad bar again. Jesse’s knuckles accidentally grazed mine as we both reached for the sunflower seeds.
    “I don’t understand the kidney beans,” he said.
    I knew what he meant. “Every day they put them out here andno one touches them,” I said.
    “It’s like the cafeteria ladies keep hoping.”
    “Hopeless kidney bean hope,” I said.
    “Pathetic,” he said. “To give your hope to a kidney bean.” He smiled. Raised his eyes to meet mine.
    “If you take him away from me, I’ll be devastated,” Nicole said, back at the table.
    I had a feeling she meant it. I wouldn’t do that to her, though. Nicole had enough problems already. I had a responsibility to her. My heart seemed too full with other things anyway. Other people. Person , even.
    “We’re honeymooning in Cancun,” I said.
    She socked my arm, put her head for a second on my shoulder. “I know you’d never hurt me,” she said.
    I leaned against the streetlight by Derek’s car, feeling the sun-warmed metal against my back. I even closed my eyes for one perfect and satisfied moment, but that’s only how long the perfect moment lasted. Perfect is a frail thing, though, maybe one of the most frail. I heard laughter coming from the cemetery across the street then. I knew that laughter. That laughter had been part of my personal sound track from the day I was born.
    I looked over. I saw a flash of yellow. Disappointment and panic immediately rushed in to take the place of what had felt so right. A flash of yellow and that laughter and a memory: three years ago, walking home from middle school past that very same cemetery. Juliet and Buddy Wilkes were there, their bodies leaning against a tall granite obelisk, both of his hands up her shirt, his thin hip bones pressed hard against hers.
    I started walking that way. Fast. I was compelled, the same asyou might be if there had been a sudden accident. And that’s what this was, I knew. A sudden catastrophic collision, an imminent one anyway.
    I saw the yellow again. Juliet, in that yellow dress, all summer invitation. Of course it was her. There was Buddy Wilkes, too, in the cemetery. He wore ripped jeans and a tank top. She was laughing. He was laughing. He gestured to himself in some sort of joke. And then he grabbed her. Pulled her close. She