The Six Rules of Maybe

marriage.
    “I just want to have my baby at home,” Juliet said.
    There was the weight of silence, the clasped hands. The chopstick finally slid free from Mom’s hair and clinked to the floor. She bent down and picked it up, stabbed it back decisively in her hair. Zeus, maybe sensing that his beloved Man was outnumbered, came over and set his chin on Hayden’s lap.
    “Of course you do,” Mom said. The words were a whisper. Gentle as falling snow. As quiet and powerful, too. “Of course.”

Chapter Three
    I ’ve been told a million times that when I was only three years old, I gave my beloved blankie to my mother because she was crying. It was when my father left, I’m sure, though that isn’t the part of the story that gets told. I covered her knees with it. I still have that blanket, though I won’t go around admitting it.
    From that moment on, being kind and caring was what I was known for, same as some people are known for being smart or beautiful or for playing the piano, a quality as much a part of me as the scar on my hand from when I picked up broken glass when I was two. In the first grade, I was the one who invited Sylvia Unger to my birthday party (nine years before her first suicide attempt), and from the second grade on, the weird and friendless sat with me at lunch. You ate your tuna and Fritos and tried not to stare at their misguided clothing choices or the way they’d chopped their bangs or the red scratches on their wrists.
    The truth was, though, I had never really had a golden heart; that’s not why I did any of those things. Not really. It sounds awful, but, honestly, I didn’t even really want to be friends with those people. Gillian Tooley, for example, was weird to the point of obnoxiousness, Kevin Frink was almost scary, and Sarah Volley had a disturbing tendency to grasp my arm with both hands while we walked, as if she were Helen Keller and I was Anne Sullivan. When Renee Wilters started hanging around Jackie Tilsdey instead of me, I felt the giddy relief you feel when you pass off the joker to someone else when you’re playing Go Fish.
    The real reason I was so supposedly “kind”—well, it was just less painful to put up with a weird person’s company than to feel the horrible weight of their loneliness. I had a low tolerance for other people’s pain; that’s what it was. And a low tolerance for other people’s pain guarantees that you win the booby prize of hangers-on and clinging, irritating oddballs. You’re probably destined to grow up to be the sort of person who’s nice to telemarketers and who gives money to starving children in Africa while everyone else buys some great new pair of shoes instead. You’re definitely the one the dog stares at during dinner.
    But on the other hand, Gillian Tooley had alcoholic parents, and Kevin Frink’s mom drove a hearse, and Renee Wilters lived in that creepy house with all the cats, and you could see they were hurting inside. I guess I also had the old-fashioned beliefs that if everyone turned their back on hurting people, the world would not be a very nice place. And that nice was a great word, even if it was a stepped-on and shoved-aside word, and even if nice people were stepped on and shoved aside too. That’s what I told myself anyway, every time I felt hollowed out by someone’s need, the kind of hollow that makes your insides feel like the wind is rushing through and thatsends in the loneliest of lonely thoughts: How did I get HERE ? You tell yourself that what you’re doing is good, because nice is sort of the reward for your efforts. A limp reward, a forever bronze medal, but still a reward. Helping people becomes who you are and what you do. It’s your job in the universe, and no one likes their job all the time. Still, you do it.
    When I went to my room later that day, then, the day Juliet and Hayden came home married and pregnant, I shut the door and pulled out the boxes of books under my bed. It was clear that something should be done, although I had no idea what or for whom, which was probably a lie I was already telling myself. I saw those eyes, his eyes, again in my mind and the helplessness in those shoulders and I felt a true want, the urge to help maybe for the first time out of actual desire and not out of a painful sort of pity. I hunted through a few of the books— Principles of Psychology, Behavior Understood, Casebook of Abnormal Psychology, Personality Disorders of Our Age —looking for the