The Six Rules of Maybe

was red. His eyes were squinched. He looked like he might cry.
    “Jeez, Kevin. What?” Kevin Frink had rung our doorbell again and again. It was lucky I was the only one home. Zeus would have gone nuts.
    “They want her to go to Yale. Those freaky parents of hers. She doesn’t even want to go to Yale. She wants to go to art school. Here.”
    “She got into Yale?” I didn’t even think Fiona Saint George ever went to class.
    “She’s brilliant, you hear me? Brill -iant. Smart enough to fucking know what she fucking wants to do with her life.” It was a hot day, the kind of steamy hot that made it hard to breathe and he was sweating. Big dark rings under the arms of his T-shirt, drops gathering on his forehead.
    “God, I’m sorry,” I said. “She’s not going to go, is she?”
    He let out a sound. An exhale of protest that might have been the start of a sob. “Does she have a choice? Do you know what those people said? They won’t help with her education at all unless she goes there. They used the biggest lie of all time. For your own good . WHOSE good? THEIR good. Not HER good. What kind of parents do that, huh? Tell me that.” I’d always had the idea that Kevin’s mother ignored him altogether. Certainly, she wasn’t the parental role model who was part of his activities and interests, supporting his goals of blowing things up. Kevin hit the door frame with his palm. I should have invited him in, but something told me that was a bad idea. I didn’t think we had enough room for that much anger in our house.
    “Kevin,” I said. “It’s okay.”
    “There’s nothing okay about this. Nothing.”
    “She’ll work it out with them.” I’m not sure if I believed that, but it seemed like the right thing to say.
    “You know she can’t do that on her own. You know how alone she is. She needs me to help her.”
    I remembered the dark hair over Fiona Saint George’s eyes, the chalk paintings of vampire parents. Maybe he had a point. I had thought she needed that help too; it was dark in vampire land. “Yale,” I said. I still couldn’t believe she got in.
    “ Would you stop going on about fucking Yale! ” he hissed.
    It was the kind of anger that makes you shut up, fast. I felt an eerie, electric shiver go through me. I switched over to some voice I imagined that FBI agents used with kidnappers.
    “It’s okay, Kevin. Everything’s going to be okay.”
    He looked at me, and right then as he stood sweating on our front porch, I saw the real him down in there. I saw way, way pastthat big head and angry eyes and tight fists. He seemed very small and scared. The small and scared that you are when you finally decide to hand your love over only to find out exactly how unsafe that leaves you.
    “You’re okay,” I said.
    I wasn’t so sure about that at all.
    I saw the letter because the mailbox was left open. When I saw it there and saw whom it was addressed to, I felt it was my duty to look further. Call it a fateful intervention by me, caught before the mailman arrived to pick it up and send it on its wrong way.
    I ripped it open on the spot.
    Buddy—
    Why are you ignoring me? Why did you change your e-mail address? I thought we promised never to do that, no matter what.
    Buddy, why?
    Anger lit in me as quickly as fire on dry wood. I let it fill me, maybe because I also felt something else, some sort of sadness I didn’t want to feel. Some sense of her desperation, when she wasn’t a person whom I truly thought could feel that. It wasn’t just her bad behavior that was letting me down. She was being too human, and there are some people we don’t want to see this in—mothers and older sisters, fathers, people we rely on for some sense of firm ground, because there aren’t many places to go for that. Juliet always had everything, and shouldn’t that mean you sat somewhere beyond despair? I brought the note inside, but she wasn’t there. I wasn’t going to let her off the hook this time.
    “Scarlet, is that you?” Hayden called from the living room.
    “Yep, it’s me,” I called back.
    “Can you give me a hand?”
    Hayden’s voice was muffled, and when I went to him, he was hunched behind the TV cabinet; his butt clad in those cargo shorts was the only real visible part of him. I didn’t mind this.
    “What’s going on?” I said.
    “Behind the cabinet. Can you see this cord I’m wiggling?”
    I looked. “Uh-huh.”
    “Grab it for me, would you?”
    I reached back and