The Six Rules of Maybe

gas of his Volkswagen, listened to the screech and scream of his tires as they rounded the corner of our street.
    I could tell the night would bring bad things the moment I heard Juliet’s voice. I had never known a world without Juliet in it, and so when she was angry I could tell before she even said a word. When she was happy or guilty or planning something terrible, I could read it in her gestures and the spaces between her breath, and in the way she held her shoulders. When we gathered in the kitchen that early evening for our own various reasons, and when her voice sounded like bells—sweet and unreal—there was no question in my mind that whatever commitment she had promised Hayden the night before was about to be snatched back and destroyed. She was holding the bomb in one hand and the matches in the other, I knew.
    And, I knew, too, because I had seen Hayden’s latest note. It held the kind of relief and certainty Juliet was destined to crush, was crushing right then as we stood there.
    Juliet—
    Commitment.
    When you said the word to me last night, I became sure of one thing: I’m the luckiest man alive.
    Juliet’s hair was up from the heat. She wore the lightest dress, white, as thin as a curtain. She smelled like perfume. “I’ll be so glad to see Melissa again. She’s only here for two days… .”
    “I don’t remember Melissa,” Mom said. “Melissa who?” But she was distracted. She was looking for something in her purse. You’d have thought she would have heard the bells in Juliet’s voice too, but she didn’t. She never heard those things. She always seemed to listen with hope instead, the hope that everything was just fine.
    “Melissa Beene?”
    “You were never really friends with her,” I said. “You didn’t even like her. You shared a locker one year, that was all .”
    Juliet ignored me. I noticed that she had painted her toenails, too. They had gone from a chipped pale state to a shiny pink, some statement of intention that shouted more loudly to me, even, than her own voice. “She came over that time when we were working on our senior project, remember?” she said to Mom. “Went on to college in California? Brown hair? We used to go over before school to that bakery that went under.”
    “Once!” I said. “If that.” I felt anxiety building inside, felt it pacing somewhere in the area of my chest. You feel joy in your heart and fear in your stomach, but your chest is the place you feel things going wrong.
    “Right,” Mom said. “Right. You don’t try to compete with Honey B’s. You just don’t. Ahh, I can’t believe this heat.” Shelooked up as if there were a cool breeze to be found high up somewhere.
    “Anyway, she said she’d buy me dinner, and God knows, I eat like a horse lately.” Juliet smiled. Hayden was getting a beer out of the fridge. He twisted off the top and took a long swallow.
    “Okay, so where is this Honey B’s? I love a good cinnamon roll,” he said. Hayden was always game when it came to food or talk of food. His shirt was loose, and he was barefoot.
    “Oh, they’re huge ,” Juliet said. “Even you couldn’t finish one.”
    “I take that as a challenge,” Hayden said. He didn’t hear the bells in Juliet’s voice either. He and Mom both listened with hope. He was at ease, just holding that cool beer, and he didn’t know he shouldn’t have been. It was unfair to let him think everything was fine, to not even warn him. That seemed particularly cruel of Juliet. I wanted to say something, something that would stop all this right here, but nothing came. I could think only about Juliet and Buddy and Juliet and Buddy and Juliet and Buddy, and something I’d been trying not to think about at all. That day I’d asked Juliet about Buddy and Jitter. How she’d never actually given me an answer.
    “You’re on your own for dinner, then,” Mom said to me. “I’m going out myself.” She finally found what she was looking for in her purse—a wad of bills, which she handed to me over the table where I sat.
    I didn’t want those bills. I didn’t want anything from Mom then, because she sounded guilty too. Both of them were guilty, already guilty, and they hadn’t even left our kitchen. I knew exactly where Juliet was going—that skanky apartment Buddy Wilkes lived in above the Friedmans’ garage, less than a mile away. And I knew where Mom was going—toward some future involving that black velvet box. I understood something