The Six Rules of Maybe

thought. “I’d be acting more out of fear than love, wouldn’t I? Fear would make me a liar. I shouldn’t have to be a liar to make someone love me. I shouldn’t be so afraid of losing someone that I’ll do anything to make them stay.”
    He was looking right into my eyes, and all at once my throatclosed up. All at once, I felt the hot press of tears. They came out of nowhere, and I swallowed hard. I didn’t feel ashamed about what I’d said. I didn’t feel like I’d been stupid to give him such unwanted advice. No, instead, I saw his compassion, and the way he understood things about himself and about me, too. He’d seen it in me, or just felt it himself, the way you try to do certain things and be certain things and give and give more and change and fix and hold back and not hold back all in order to keep people close. A million little lies to get that one thing.
    I felt a clear truth, and that truth hit some deep part of me, the deepest, most secretive part. The part of who I most am and why I am that way. You can hold a secret, hold it so far in that it drives nearly every thought and every move you make, your very heartbeat, almost. And then someone can come along and name it, gently name it, call it forward in kindness, and when that happens, all you can do is stand there in the night doing everything you can not to cry.
    “I know, Scarlet Ellis,” Hayden whispered. “I know exactly.”

Chapter Sixteen
    M aybe Mom was right, maybe Juliet just needed to work out things on her own, because for the next few weeks before the end of the school year, Buddy Wilkes seemed mostly gone. There was no yellow dress in the cemetery after school, no laughter filtering through leafy trees. Maybe Juliet had just needed to see him to get him out of her system the way you need to eat a little chocolate to get over your craving.
    Jitter was growing—Juliet’s form was becoming blocky, and, according to my book, at over five months, Jitter had eyes and eyelashes. I would find Juliet with her hand at her back from her growing weight, and she said she could feel flutters like a butterfly let loose inside. I had heard her once on the phone, muffled voice through her bedroom wall, angry words that were not directed at Hayden, who had come through our front door not a moment later, whistling. Juliet had greeted him with a long kiss, and he had put one hand in the back pocket of her shorts. She seemed so happywith him sometimes, the real and true kind, not the Buddy Wilkes anxious and uneasy kind. The butterfly candleholder by her bed had gone missing, too. There one day. Then, not.
    I saw Buddy Wilkes during that time, not at school in his El Camino, not driving down our street but, oddly, at the library. The library was one of the most beautiful buildings on Parrish Island, and I liked that about it, it seemed fitting. The library should be the best building. It was a tall white structure with a long set of steps and a pair of elaborate columns; inside, the floor was shiny and wide, and the stairwell curved toward a domed ceiling painted like the sky. It was a place for book reverence, reverence for ideas and words and thoughts, not a place for boys with narrow hips and thin, sallow cheeks—manipulative boys whose only special talents were unhooking bra straps with one hand and talking middle-age grocery clerks into selling them beer.
    But there he was. Sitting at one of the dark, solid tables, right there where I wanted to be, in fiction. Creeps didn’t belong near fiction. I could smell already-smoked cigarettes coming off his jacket. He might as well have been a rank-smelling animal in an art museum. He had a book open in front of him, but he wasn’t reading. It was a big book, with glossy pictures of Victorian furniture—red velvet sofas and heavy chiseled chairs, nothing he’d be interested in. I looked around for the real reason he must be there. One of his friends was in the stacks, maybe, Jason Dale or Kale Kramer, preparing to pull some kind of practical joke on the respectful people there; or maybe some girl, some Alicia Worthen, trying to graduate in a hurry before it was too late. I’d know her when I saw her—she’d be wearing a tiny tank top and the shortest shorts possible, clothes somehow not fitting for the religious place that was the library.
    But I didn’t see anyone who might be with Buddy Wilkes. NoJason Dale or Wendy Williams. Only Elizabeth Everly with her cart, shelving books. Sweet