Read The Six Rules of Maybe for Free Online Page B

to Zeus, to the tune of “It’s a Small World.” Dogs are patient about those things. Finally, when Hayden was ready, I wasn’t. I forgot my camera and had to go back upstairs to get it. Not taking my camera was the same as going shopping when you don’t have money. You go shopping without money and you see a ton of things you can’t live without. You have money, and … nothing. Going somewhere without my camera meant I was sure to see a hundred things I wanted to capture but that would be forever lost.
    “Anyplace we can get Zeus’s nails clipped?” Hayden asked as we finally headed out. “He’s looking like Howard Hughes.”
    “Sure,” I said, but I didn’t really know where. We’d never had a dog ourselves, or any pet for that matter, except the class guinea pigs I used to bring home on school vacations. Harold, for example. Juliet had put a tiny cowboy hat on him that had belonged to her Ken doll. I’d gotten mad at her and made her take it off. Probably guinea pigs didn’t get humiliated, but he looked like it anyway.
    “Sidewalk artist?” Hayden gestured one thumb across the street, where Fiona Saint George was already sitting cross-legged on the cement, filling in a new disciple with yellow chalk. For the last few days, she’d been making a vampire version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper . All the characters around the table had fangs and white faces—some bald, some with wild, flowing snakelike hair. Fiona’s own long hair was black and shiny as the crows that watched herdraw from the branches of nearby evergreen trees. When I saw her at school, I would smile at her, even though she’d only look back with her face as still as stone. Both of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Saint George, had gone to Yale. They had Yale window stickers in both of their cars so that you would be sure to know it when they drove off to work at the Marine Science Center. Fiona’s brother, Robert, had left home to go to Yale two years ago. Probably their dog, Buster, had gone to Yale too.
    “Goth Girl,” I said when we got into his truck. “That’s what they call her at school. She’s depressed.”
    “She’s also really good,” he said.
    It pleased me that he could see beyond Fiona Saint George’s white face and black eyeliner, to who she really was. I’d seen her eyes up close once or twice. And even though Fiona Saint George never said much, her eyes wanted things badly.
    Hayden backed out of the driveway. “Watch out, azalea,” he said, looking over one shoulder.
    “You get run over enough, you’re immune to all pain,” I said.
    “Same way I went this morning?” he asked. “Turn right at the sign that says WHISTLING FIRS ?”
    I nodded. “They don’t exactly whistle,” I said. We started down the street, drove past the Martinellis’ house with their big RV parked by the curb ( The Pleasure Way was written in green script across its broad side) and continued past Ally Pete-Robbins, who was already in gardening shorts and a sun hat, kneeling on one of those cushy weeding mats you didn’t think anyone actually used. Jeffrey and Jacob, her twins, ran around on the lawn with squirt guns. They held them low, below their waists, and pulled the triggers to look like they were peeing. They screamed with laughter, raising the guns again the minute Ally Pete-Robbins turned her head to see what wasso funny.
    “Huh,” I said.
    “What?” Hayden said. He looked in his rearview mirror to check on Zeus, who sat straight in the truck’s back bed, prim as an old lady waiting for her bus.
    Huh was Shy, the boy Nicole was so crazy about, on his bike on our street. He was riding really slowly and looking at what I guessed were house numbers. He turned a long full circle in front of the house on the corner to get a better look, then cruised by Ally Pete-Robbins.
    “Someone from school,” I said to Hayden. “I didn’t know he lived around here.” We drove right past him then, and I caught his eye. He looked