The Six Rules of Maybe

up and take out the fluff so all that’s left is stuffed-animal road kill,” Hayden said. “He loves fuzz.”
    “Oh, this used to be our favorite.” Juliet held up our old over-sized Richard Scarry book, Busy, Busy Town . She opened it to the drawing of the inside of a house, where little kittens were waking up in one room, and a father cat was putting on a tie in another, looking into his dresser mirror. Outside, a pig mailman delivered letters and a pig milkman in a white hat drove a milk truck. If someone made the real Richard Scarry book, I thought, you’d look inside the split-open house and see fighting sisters and single moms. Outside there’d be depressed mailmen wandering around naked on the lawn, and the ice-cream truck would be driven by a glowering psychopath.
    “Ohhh,” Juliet said. “The little cats.” The book was open on her knees. She turned the page of the book to study the construction scene of small pigs in hard hats. The reason people said, Can I have a word with you privately only on television was that it just didn’t work in real life. It would tell Hayden all the things he shouldn’t know. Instead, I dripped sarcasm, gave her a full lecture with my tone alone. “What did you do today, Juliet?”
    “Haircut, can’t you tell?” she said. She still didn’t look up, only flipped the ends of her hair with one hand. “What is it about hairdressers? You tell them ‘not too short’ and some part of their hairdresser brain hears this as ‘whack the shit out of it.’ If you never say, ‘not too short,’ everything is fine . You say it, and it’s a guarantee you’ll come out ready for the military.”
    “I think you’re supposed to say stylist now,” Hayden said.
    “And it’s hardly short,” I said.
    “What’s wrong with you ,” she said.
    I looked straight into her eyes. Buddy Wilkes is what’s wrong, I told her. If she couldn’t read that message, she was more of an idiot than I thought.
    “Wow, I feel a sudden chill,” she said. She reached over and closed the sliding glass door with her palm. A second later there was a bam! as Zeus smacked right into the glass. I could see him there on the other side, looking momentarily stunned.
    “Aw, Zeus!” Hayden said. He opened the door and let Zeus back in. “Poor kid. Come here, you okay? That was funny but not funny.”
    “Oh, I’m sorry Zeus,” Juliet said. But she was looking at me. Figuring me out. Like maybe she got my message loud and clear, after all.
    “Big dumb kid. That was sort of humiliating,” Hayden said. He was patting Zeus and looking him over but you could tell Zeus had already moved on from the sudden shock of something gone awry. Hayden opened the door again, and out Zeus trotted once more. Running into a wall of glass at full speed couldn’t begin to touch his general sense of optimism.
    “Honey, I’m sorry about Jared and the prom. You must be so disappointed,” Mom said after dinner. She rubbed my back in a sympathetic circle. We sat on the couch together, watching but not watching some Hollywood entertainment show that neither one of us caredabout. We weren’t the type of people who connected to other worlds involving floor-length gowns, but it helped us pretend not to hear the raised voices coming from downstairs.
    “Well, Nicole told me he was the type, but I didn’t believe her.” I was “getting over the breakup” with Jared, the senior who was leaving soon to become a pastry chef.
    “Oh, I know. I know,” Mom said.
    “I’m just glad I didn’t buy that dress, is all.”
    “Things have a way of working out for the best,” she said. We flinched right then.
    We both heard Juliet: “ You act like everything is my fault! ”
    And Hayden: “ I’m doing everything I know how to do! ”
    “I saw Juliet today,” I told Mom. I think I needed her help. It felt like things were growing too big for me to handle on my own. “At the cemetery.” She looked puzzled. “With Buddy Wilkes.”
    “No,” she said. She shook her head. I thought she was shaking her head in disbelief, at the tragedy Juliet was playing out. Some small form of outrage. But then I realized it was something worse. She held both hands up as if she wanted to hear no more. The no was for me. “This isn’t our business, Scarlet.”
    “You’re kidding me,” I said.
    “She’s a grown woman.”
    I knew it had nothing to do with being a grown woman. This was how it always went. When Juliet was caught