The Six Rules of Maybe

knew.
    “Scarlet!” Hayden was there in the doorway. He was still in his shorts, without his shirt. His hands were on either side of the doorframe, as if the frame itself had just stopped him before he fell in.
    “I don’t know what happened,” I said.
    “There was a blast across the street,” Hayden said.
    This didn’t make sense to me, not yet. Glass was in my hair.
    “Your window again,” he said. “Are you okay?”
    He lifted me up. He set me on my feet. He looked me over. “You’re okay,” he said.
    He saw my shock. He put his arms around me. I felt the skin of his chest against my cheek. “It’s okay, sweetie,” he said. I could feel his care. Real and true care. I wanted to stay there, with him holding me. I was scared. It felt safe with his arms around me.
    “What happened?” I said.
    “Something exploded across the street,” he said again. He gestured toward the window. “I’m going to go see, okay? If everyone’s all right? Maybe there was some kind of gas explosion. God, we need to see if everyone’s all right.”
    I felt dizzy and confused, like I was waking from a dream or maybe was still in one. Maybe this was another dream that had a deeper meaning, a blast, my life as I knew it exploding anddestroyed. But it seemed to be the present moment after all. I could feel Hayden’s fingers grasping mine. I saw my clock, still ticking; saw that nothing that most immediately needed changing—Mom coming home, Juliet, too—had changed. This disaster had happened and they were still gone and we were still waiting even as we ran down the stairs together to the front door.
    Zeus was turning circles of excitement and anxiety. Trotting with wild eyes around the coffee table, muscles tensed in fear for what had already gone wrong.
    “You stay here, boy,” Hayden said. He tried to make his voice calm, but if I could hear the alarm there then Zeus heard it a hundredfold. Hayden was putting a T-shirt over his head, and I was following him in my bathrobe, although I don’t remember ever putting it on.
    He opened the door, and Zeus was there, and I saw him put one hand on Zeus’s forehead to keep him back, but the front door was always a barrier Zeus wanted to get past, always, even when there was nothing urgent beyond it. The beyond was urgent enough for him, but that night even more so, and he pushed with all his force and broke free.
    “Goddamnit, Zeus! Not now! Scarlet …”
    “I’ve got him,” I said, even as Zeus’s large butterscotch self raced across the street where I could now see a fire burning in some gaping hole where the Saint Georges’ garage had once been. The walls looked frail and papery and blackened, and you could see Mr. Saint George’s few tools on a pegboard just beyond the fire, and a lawn mower, too, ready to be swallowed by flames. I knew what had happened then, knew that Kevin Frink had found a way to what he most wanted, a way that he was most familiar with, matches and detonators and explosions, the destructive reordering of his own andour own universe.
    It hit me, the same as the force that had thrown me across my room, what I had done, what I had contributed to, how this was in good part my fault. Good intentions didn’t even make this forgivable. I had gone where I didn’t belong and set the wrong things in motion. I had tried to give what wasn’t wanted. And I had done it all to make myself feel better, not them. Myself—because it felt better to have a little control over a situation, to feel some power, to move things around for a better outcome. To have fate in your hands instead of the other way around.
    Hayden was running and shouting and Clive Weaver was on the lawn in his underwear holding Corky in his protective arms, and Mrs. Saint George was out on her lawn sobbing with Mr. Saint George’s arms around her, as Buster looked worried at their feet. Fiona and Kevin Frink were nowhere in sight. Ally Pete-Robbins held her boys around their shoulders, their eyes wide and blinking as they stood barefoot in their spaceship pajamas, as their father, too, ran across the street to see if he could help. Mrs. Martinelli was in her bathrobe in the driveway, her arm against her eyes from the brightness and growing heat of the flames, and Mr. Martinelli was saying, “ Get back, get back; I used to be a firefighter! ” People were shielding their loved ones, and my loved ones were missing, except for Hayden, running, and Zeus, running across the street