The Six Rules of Maybe

and quiet Elizabeth Everly, who’d graduated with my sister, with her whispered voice and teacup-fragile wrists—not exactly Buddy Wilkes’s type. Most likely we’d be reading in the morning about some crime that had been committed at the Parrish Library, and I’d know who did it.
    I walked by Buddy’s table, but he didn’t look at me. I don’t know why I did it, but I knocked my hip into the chair across from him so he’d notice me. Maybe it was some useless attempt at warning on my part; I needed him to know that I was aware of things, and that he couldn’t always do as he pleased simply because he wanted to. The wood chair bumped hard against the table and Buddy Wilkes looked up. He saw me and I stared back at him, but it was as if he didn’t even recognize me. He did not hand me some note for Juliet, or speak to me, or even give me a look that said we knew each other. I’d seen him countless times—in my driveway, my kitchen, hopping around half-naked trying to get his pants back on in a hurry, but his gaze right then was as blank as if we’d never met. It made me wonder if he only saw you when he wanted something. Some people are like that. You don’t exist, unless you are of use.
    I didn’t tell Juliet about seeing Buddy Wilkes at the Parrish Island Library. I had learned my lesson about opening closed doors that snakes and thieves stood behind. Anyway, Hayden seemed to be managing Juliet on his own, and full-time managing of Juliet was part of life with her; I knew that. Hayden seemed to have taken two pieces of my advice, and it appeared to be working. He was giving her both compliments and presents—flowers and soft words and little books of poetry and elegant slices of desserts from Alice’s Bakery. She opened them with delight as her stomach grew, the smallest mound forming into a more distinct rounded hillside. I hadto go downstairs to find the letters now, into their basement “apartment.” The letters were usually left on the nightstand, which was made out of the old crate that used to hold Mom’s college textbooks, and before that, according to the label, Valencia Oranges. I would hold the letters and try to breathe and let my secret be its own, full self for a while. I’d let my feelings out into the room, the way you might let out an animal who’d been traveling too long in a cage so that he could be free and remember how good that was.
    Juliet—
    Some decisions are a struggle, a thrashing effort of back and forth, the tormented wakefulness and night sweats and tangled sheets of a bad night’s sleep. But other decisions—there’s a purity. There is a simplicity and rightness about the decision. It’s the simplicity and rightness of air, of snow, of apples. Marrying you, Juliet, was that kind of decision for me. I made it with the straightforward ease of taking a drink of water, closing one’s eyes to rest.
    I wondered about Hayden’s words. Straightforward ease . He didn’t seem to be feeling very easy. He seemed to be working hard, and what I was learning, beginning to learn, since he had come was that there were relationships that were hard work and relationships that weren’t. Most often, you worked hard like that when you were really worried you weren’t going to get what you needed back. Maybe he thought that working hard was honorable somehow, an honorable thing, but I saw something different. I saw him making himself small for her. Making himself less than and lower than and below. He said he didn’t want to be a liar to make someone lovehim, but he was being a liar by doing those things, by trying so hard to get her to love him. Working hard with someone else—it was a sign of serious trouble ahead, bumps and heartache and things going unexpected directions; doom, even.
    It was coming. We should have known that.
    “Oh my God,” I said out loud when I saw my locker.
    “It is dripping ,” Nicole said. “This reminds me of people who write in blood in those awful horror movies.”
    We stared at the metal door, with I love you 4-ever written in shaving cream, now sliding toward the floor. It looked less like blood and more like the time I made a milkshake in the blender with the lid loose. “This is so humiliating,” I said.
    “I’ll get some paper towels,” Nicole said and hurried off. I think she just didn’t want to stand there any longer than she had to.
    “You’re the one for me,” Reilly Ogden said.
    “God, Reilly!” I hated how he appeared