The Six Rules of Maybe

right kind of advice. All of the psychology books I read said that too much information was bad for kids, but if you wanted too much information, they were a great place to start.
    Personally, I loved information. The more, the better. Knowledge was a personal life preserver you could always count on when you were swimming in the deep end. I ran my finger down the glossaries. Teen pregnancy wasn’t exactly accurate—Juliet was twenty. I didn’t know how to define the problem. I couldn’t exactly find Nonmaternal Sisters Suspected of Getting Pregnant on Purpose. Or even, Nice Guys About to Be Destroyed.
    I gave up on the books for the moment. I ignored a call from Nicole, who was likely only going to tell me about her father’s recent legal maneuver, or her mother’s, or a sighting of Jesse Waters from our American Government class whom we nicknamed Shy,because that’s what he was. Jesse was cute and quiet and never said a word to anyone, and Nicole loved him madly and was convinced he loved her back only he couldn’t express it. She’d use her camera phone to sneak-take pictures of him, or even better, herself with him in the background. She could study those pictures for hours. She’d give his elbow or ear or jacket sleeve fine qualities, like sensitivity or generosity.
    I was at a loss about what to do with myself and my thoughts. I tried to do my biology homework for a while, but the pictures of the swimming organisms in a marine biome only made me think of one thing. Right then at that moment, a creature was growing inside my sister— creature was the word I thought of first. Cells dividing and forming. Baby . I tried to make this more than a word. More than science or a Fisher-Price commercial, with chubby-cheeked toddlers and sturdy dump trucks; more than the pink, soft smell in the baby aisle at the grocery store. This would be a real person, with real toes and real lips and real things it needed from us. But no matter what I did, baby just seemed like an idea, an unreachable concept like Paris or Mardi Gras or husband .
    After a while, the smell of lasagna came up the stairs—warm cheese and tomato sauce, a dinner’s ready smell that would have ordinarily meant I’d be called to set the table. But I heard Mom down there, opening drawers and cupboards and doing it herself, and when she finally called us to eat, the daffodils had been set in a vase in the middle of the table.
    “Your sister is having a baby,” she said, as we sat around the table and she edged out a fat piece of lasagna and slid it toward Hayden’s plate which he’d held up at her request. Most people could manage only a single tone in their voice—disappointment, or sarcasm, or joy. But my mother could play an orchestra of emotion inhers. In six words, she conveyed that she had been disappointed, gotten through it, and was now trying to view things in a positive light.
    Juliet shouldn’t be trusted with a baby, I imagined myself saying. But I didn’t want to say what I was really thinking in front of Hayden, who might get the wrong idea of me or, rather, the right idea of me. Instead, I ran the words through the nice and polite filter and out they came in their revised form, sort of like a doughnut going through the icing machine. “So I heard,” I said. “That’s great.”
    “You’re going to be an auntie ,” Juliet said.
    There was something about this that made me feel suddenly sick. Maybe because she made the word cute, and Juliet never made words cute. Juliet was a lot of things—beautiful and aloof and strong, feminine enough that men seemed to want to rescue her. But she was never artificially adorable. Maybe being pregnant had done it—something about hormones and maternal instinct. Maybe after the baby, she’d turn into Ally Pete-Robbins, our neighbor with the rotten twin boys, who hung those holiday banners up in her yard, in case we might forget it was Christmas.
    “Wow,” I said. I remembered suddenly the time Juliet was supposed to watch Ginger, the Martinellis’ dog, when they took their new RV, the Pleasure Way, out for its maiden voyage to Montana. She’d forgotten to feed the little dog for a full day and a half until I had reminded her. Maybe it was a good idea that she’d come home to have the baby after all. Maybe it would have to stay in my room so that I could keep an eye on it.
    “You going out to the game or something tonight?” Juliet asked me. And just like that, we were