The Six Rules of Maybe

and Quentin York wrestled each other in the water and Caroline Dale sat on Renny Williams’s lap on a deck chair and Melissa DeWhitt was putting lotion on Casey Chow’s back as she held up her long hair with one hand. High school reunion, mixed with little kids in droopy bathing suits holding their mothers’ hands and the slapping sounds of bare feet on wet cement. We found a spot to lay out our towels on a grassy slope near the shallow end, and I looked up at the lifeguard chair. No Jesse, only a senior girl who was in band whose name I didn’t remember. She looked bored in her red bathing suit.
    “He starts work at noon on Wednesdays,” Nicole said. She’d been watching my eyes. Her words were sure and proprietary. She might as well have been some wife ordering for her husband in a restaurant. We watched two little girls on the pool steps play with their Barbies in miniature bathing suits and we had one of those conversations when no one was really listening to anyone else. Jasmine kept checking her phone for Christine Fhara (cello, second chair) to call, and Nicole kept watching that lifeguard chair, and I realized Jasmine and I were just props—we’d be the reason Nicole laughed loudly and shook her hair around and gestured dramatically. I guess it was just too hard to get someone to notice you when you were quiet and sitting alone and not performing in your own personal play.
    Twelve o’clock came and went and Nicole “went to the bathroom” and came back too soon, meaning she’d just taken a lap to look for Jesse. I was feeling irritated, and things didn’t improve when, a few moments later, Reilly Ogden showed up. He came over and stood in front of us while we sat, and this provided us with a clear and terrifying view of his mostly naked body. White, soft babyflesh; tight bathing suit with tropical flowers stretched over the cheerless triangle that was his pelvis. Just above eye level was the knuckle of flesh that was his outie belly button.
    “I knew I’d find you here,” he said. He had his glasses off, which gave his face an unfamiliar and empty look.
    “You forgot your glasses,” Jasmine said. She’d noticed too.
    “Contacts,” he said. This was not the movies, though, where Reilly would have gone through some transformation now that he was minus his eyewear. Get contacts, add some new hairstyle, and he’s a stud in disguise—nope. Like most people, Reilly would always and forever be mostly just himself. In fact, the absence of glasses made things worse. There was less between him and you. His eyes made a direct hit, and it was somehow unsettling.
    “Hello, Reilly,” I said. Once again, I hoped my tone would say all it needed to. It was a disappointed hello. An oh-there-you-are-again-too-bad hello.
    “I assume you’ve been thinking about my proposal?” He scratched the back of his calf, where there was the red lump of a mosquito bite.
    “Proposal?” I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
    “Three months? Trial period? Never mind.” He sighed, and then looked around and back to us again. “I’ve taken up photography.”
    “That’s great, Reilly.”
    “I thought we could go out on a shoot together.”
    “I’ve given up photography,” I said.
    “I’ve just spent three hundred dollars on photographic equipment,” he said.
    “Good for you. Wow, look at the time,” Nicole said. “Twelve thirty, time for you to move on.”
    “It’s a free country. This is a public place.”
    “Personal conversation,” Nicole said. “Vamoose.”
    “Summer becomes you,” he said to me, and then walked off, his towel under his arm. He arranged himself on a stretch of bare cement at the other end of the pool not far from the diving board, a sure place to get continually splashed by anyone jumping in or kicked by fast-passing legs excited from the awesome dive they’d just made.
    “We’ll see him on the news someday. Fucking psycho,” Jasmine said.
    She was likely right, but watching him made me feel bad inside, as if I were somehow responsible for his bad luck in life, or at least responsible for changing it. We ate lunch, although the bad feeling stayed with me. Nicole lost her buzz of energy as the afternoon went on with no Jesse in sight. I wondered why we were still there, and I guess so did she.
    “He must be sick or something,” she said.
    “I’ve got to meet Christine in an hour,” Jasmine said.
    We gathered up our towels and our lunch garbage and headed