The Six Rules of Maybe

I was yelled at en masse by my team whenever the ball would splat right at my feet.
    She answered the phone. I told her I’d been thinking about her, which was a lie. I never thought about her. She told me about a tournament they’d just come back from in Bellevue. There was an awkward empty pause that I finally filled by asking how her mother was. Her mother had given me a ride home once when I felt sick during the sixth grade Valentine’s Day party. She said we ought to get together sometime, which made me immediately regret calling.
    I stayed in my room most of the night. I usually liked being in my room—I liked the cave comfort of being tucked away, knowing that Mom’s knock or the phone ringing were the only possible intrusions. But that night, my room felt too much like me, and it was me I needed an escape from. I sat in the living room, and then in the backyard in the cool night, and then went back to my room. No matter where I went, there I was. I was lonely but didn’t want company. Everyone was out, anyway. Hayden and Juliet had gone to Long Time No See, a small movie theater downtown with creaky rubbed-bare red velvet seats. They showed only old movies— Kramer vs. Kramer had been showing for almost a month and before that, Zorro .
    I wasn’t even in the mood for Zeus’s companionship—he would have been too kind and warm and soft, loving me when I didn’t feel deserving of it. Instead, he slept right up against my door, as closeas he could to the only other creature in the house. I could hear his elbows and knees banging against the wood as he shifted around and his sighs through his nose, which sounded world-weary. He couldn’t have the actual me, so he took what he could and tried to be satisfied.
    I heard Juliet and Hayden come in. Or rather, I heard Zeus’s toenails scrambling and scurrying like crazy against the wall—sometimes he had trouble getting all of his parts going in the right direction. Finally, he was up and barking even when he wasn’t supposed to and there was the sound of the front door and coats coming off and then silence except for a little stern crooning to Zeus from Hayden. Juliet said something sharp, I can get it! and I knew they were fighting again. The tension came right up the stairs. It was clear to me that when Buddy Wilkes was in her thoughts, they fought, and when he wasn’t, they didn’t. He was a wall between them, and Juliet didn’t always mind walls.
    The hollow hum of voices downstairs went on and on and finally stopped. At 12:00 a.m., my mother arrived home, the exact time she always did when she went out with Dean Neuhaus. Maybe she set her own curfew and she’d be in big trouble if she broke it. I heard her car, and then the engine turn off, and the key in the door. I heard her clink down her purse on the counter, her steps sounding tired on the way to her room, the click of her door as it shut.
    I had a hard time sleeping that night. My feelings seemed hard to grasp and name, except for some sort of guilt and grief, which curled inside like ignited paper. It wasn’t that I actually felt I had done something bad to Nicole. I wasn’t even really sorry for what I did. But her going away had left me with this aloneness, an alarming aloneness, an abrupt, scary empty-something, like the time when I was four and I lost my mother’s hand in the crowd at the Parrish Island Fourth of July parade. I’d been so scared. It was alone-forever-and-ever scared.
    This time it was me who got up and put on a sweatshirt over my tank top and pajama shorts. Maybe I was hoping that if I went outside and stood with my confusion out by Hayden’s truck that he would also come, the same as I had when he stood there with his. Kevin Frink’s Volkswagen was parked down the street, sitting cold and dark, and I wondered if he had sneaked into Fiona Saint George’s room. The streetlights made the Martinellis’ FOR SALE sign look as bright and white as the moon. By then I was honestly and completely hoping for Hayden’s appearance, his toe kicking the ground, his eyes looking up to the sky, his cigarette, even. There were no maybes about that hope, except for one: Maybe it would be for the best if he didn’t appear right then. I wasn’t sure I could be trusted.
    I was hoping so hard that I was shocked when it was actually Juliet who appeared. She came out through the side fence and started heading down the driveway without seeing me. She wore one of Hayden’s