The Six Rules of Maybe

transported to some sort of normal life. Or we were using my normal life to pretend everything else was normal. Juliet was inhaling her lasagna like one of those superpowerful vacuums you see on TV, the ones that can suck up nails.
    “It’s May. Football season was over a long time ago.” This was a stupidity of hers I was comfortable pointing out.
    Hayden laughed, covered Juliet’s hand with his. It was a sweet laugh. The sort of laugh that meant he thought everything she did was fabulous. She probably could have robbed a bank teller at gunpoint and he would have thought it charming.
    “Game. Any game. Not just football,” she said. “I didn’t just mean football .”
    “Football games are a singles bar with an ASB card,” I said. Hayden grinned at me across the table and I grinned back.
    “Scarlet would never go to a singles bar,” Juliet said to Hayden. “She’s the good one in the family. She’s never done a wrong thing in her life.”
    “No,” I said. “That’s not true.” She was right, though.
    “Okay, she cut her own hair when she was three,” Juliet said.
    “It was a lot of hair,” Mom said.
    “After that, her days of wild living were over.”
    “Ah, you don’t know. You don’t know that at all. Everyone has their secrets,” Hayden said.
    He looked at me and grinned and I had one of those flashes of irrational thoughts you get sometimes, like when you’re sure a song on the radio has been played as a message to you, or when you think a certain star can bring you particular luck. When he said that, I felt like he might know things about me. Things I didn’t even know about myself yet. Things that might happen or would happen. “I’ll never tell,” I said.
    “Okay, there’s no football. There are still spring sports to go to,” Mom said.
    “Track meet … The student production of The Music Man . Whatever.” Juliet had gone to all those things when she was atParrish High. Some people are high school people and some people are not high school people, and that’s just a fact of life. Juliet was one, and I wasn’t. She could do high school because she didn’t care about it in the least, whereas I couldn’t because I cared too much.
    “ Oklahoma ,” I said.
    “Again?” Juliet said.
    “Mrs. Phipps, the drama teacher, lacks imagination,” I said to Hayden.
    “Well, it is Friday night,” Mom said.
    Sometimes you’ve been lectured on a topic so often that all a person has to do is say a few words and all of their former lectures come pouring out of your brain like people from a crowded elevator. It’s a good time-saving trick for the person doing the lecturing. My mom, Annabeth Ellis, assistant manager of Quill Stationers, was under the impression that my life was lacking things—things like more friends, places to go, stuff to do, a passion , a boyfriend, maybe. I had held back from pointing out that these were precisely the things her own life was lacking—she had her job, sure, and her oldest friend, Allison Bond, and the women in Allison’s scrapbook club. She had her boyfriend, Dean Neuhaus, too. But when she came home from work, she’d flop on her bed, claiming exhaustion, and she complained often that she had nothing in common with the women in that club, who actually went on all the trips they were so decoratively remembering. And Dean—sure, he had a great job and a fancy car, but he was always pointing out how she could do things better. He had once taken out our own silverware tray from our own drawer and reorganized it so that only spoons were with spoons and knives with knives and he had cleaned it so that not a single bread crumb remained. Dean was more a promise of rejection than a boyfriend.
    “Friday night. Why does everyone make such a big deal about Friday night,” I said.
    “And New Year’s Eve, too,” Hayden pointed out. “Hate that.”
    I smiled. “If you don’t have plans, you’re a loser.”
    “If you don’t want to get drunk and wear those stupid hats,” he said.
    “Those hats show disrespect for eons of evolution. We came out of the sea for that ?”
    He chuckled and stared back down at his lasagna because he knew, the same as me, that Mom’s level of irritation was rising. You could feel the silence being turned up as sure as if it were sound. I felt a surge of something. Happiness. It was that joy you feel when someone’s suddenly on your team when you were used to playing alone.
    Mom’s lips were thin and tight. For