Maybe

I was at my girlfriend’s when she got a call from a friend whose car had run out of gas, and this friend wanted Katie—that’s my girlfriend—to—and because her friend was pretty much shouting through the phone, I quote—“Grab a gas can and get your butt over here and take me to a gas station so I can fill the gas can with gas and then bring me back to my car so I can pour the gas into the gas tank so my car will run again, okay?” Katie said, “Okay,” and then she asked me if I wanted to tag along—“You can carry the can if it gets too heavy”—and I said, “Sure,” but when she said to her younger sister, “C’mon, get your shoes on, you’re coming, too,” Beth—that’s the younger sister—said, “No, I don’t want to.”

            “You have to,” Katie said.

            “No, I don’t.”

            “Yes, you do. I’m not supposed to leave you here alone.”

            “Can’t Logan stay with me?”

            “No.”

            “Why not?”

            “Because he doesn’t want to.”

            “Is that true?”

            “I can stay,” I shrugged, thinking I was doing a good deed, resolving a conflict between sisters, but Katie gave me a look like she’d just caught me kissing another girl, and before I could rescind my ill-advised offer Beth was off the couch and holding my hand, saying, “See, we’re good without you. So run along. Have fun. Bye-bye.”

            Beth was eleven, so age wasn’t the issue. I mean, my parents began leaving me home alone when I was four, which was way too young, but they never wanted kids, so to make sure that I didn’t get in the way of their plans they decided I needed to get my crap together early and figure out how to deal with things on my own. It was sort of like leaving a dog home alone to see if it would pee on the carpet. But I didn’t, I didn’t pee on the carpet, though I may have broken a lamp or two. Mostly I just played with my toys or my father’s old keyboard, trying to recreate one of the tunes he was always playing for my mother.

No, the issue wasn’t Beth’s age. It was that six months ago she’d started a fire in the house. I wasn’t dating Katie yet, so I only heard about it later, but basically Beth wanted to practice using a fire extinguisher, and in order to do that she threw a match into the garbage can in the kitchen. She put it out as quick as she could—the extinguisher did its job—but there was still the smell of smoke in the house when her parents got home, and when they saw the burnt mess in the receptacle they knew there were questions that needed to be asked. Beth confessed and that was that, no more being left alone by herself.

            “You want to play foosball?” she asked me.

            “Sure.”

            “You can only use one hand though to make it fair.”

            “I can beat you with my teeth.”

            “Yeah, right.”

            She won the first game, but once I got my technique down I ticked off three victories in a row. That’s when she started asking me all these ridiculous questions in order to distract me, questions like “If you were an animal what animal would you be?”, “What’s your favorite finger?”, “Do you think it’s okay to eat the skin of a banana like it is with other fruit?”, and “Are you and my sister making sex?”, the first three of which I answered with ease—chameleon, the middle, and you probably wouldn’t die but I doubt it would taste very good—but the fourth caused me to choke and lose a point.

            “I don’t think that’s any of your business,” I said.

            “Why not? Her last boyfriend was making sex with her. I used to bang on the wall and yell at him to try harder. It was funny. So if I knew about them making sex why can’t I know if you two are?”

            “Okay, well first of all it’s ‘having sex,’ not ‘making sex,’ so please stop using that phrase like right now. And just so we can stop talking about it, the answer is no, we aren’t ‘making sex.’”

            “Why not?”

            “I don’t know. We’re just not there yet. We haven’t been going out all that long.”

            “Well what do you do then? You know, when you’re alone together and no one’s looking.”

            “I don’t know. We kiss.”

            “Boring. What else?”

            “No thanks, I’m done.”

            “C’mon, I just want to know these things so I’ll know what to do when I get to be as old as you.”

            “As ‘old’ as me?”

            “You know what I mean. It’s just so hard to know what to do.”

            “No kidding.”

            “No, I mean it. Like how do you know what’s right and wrong, and not just in sex but in anything. How can you tell if what you’re doing is wrong or not?”

            “Well, I think if the fire brigade has to come, that’s one indication.”

            She laughed. “But that’s after. How do you know before? Like a lot of times I do something I thought would be okay, but then I get in trouble for it afterward, and even then I’m not really sure why it was wrong.             You know what I mean?”

            “Yeah, I do. It reminds me of this old Taoist story—”

            “What-ist story?”

            “Taoist. T-a-o-i-s-t. And don’t ask me why the T is pronounced like a D because I have no idea. It’s got something to do with it being Chinese or something.”

            “I have a friend who’s Chinese. Her name’s Danni Wong and her favorite tree is the sycamore.”

            “Did she ever tell you the story about the Chinese farmer?”

            “No, but if she did she would have just called him a farmer.”

            I laughed. “Anyway, there’s this farmer, and one day he loses his horse, and all his neighbors come over to tell him how terrible that is, and he says to them, ‘Maybe.’ And then the next day the horse comes back with ten or something wild horses, so now he’s got a bunch of horses, and all his neighbors come over and congratulate him, saying how lucky he is, and he says, ‘Maybe.’ I forget what happens next, but basically it goes on like that, where something most people think is bad happens, and the farmer says, ‘Maybe,’ and then something most people think is good happens, and the farmer says—”

            “‘Maybe.’”

            “Exactly. Anyway, the moral of the story is just what you’re talking about, that there’s no way of knowing in advance whether something is good or bad because the universe is just too complex for that.”

            “But people still judge you either way.”

            “Yes, unfortunately they do.”

            She paused, like she was putting some real thought into what I’d said, and then she said, “You know what? I’m gonna make my diorama about that.”

            “You’re what?”

            “Here, I’ll show you,” and she came around the foosball table and gave me a shove. She led me into her bedroom and had me sit on her bed and then she opened up her backpack and pulled out a folder. From the folder she took out a blue sheet of paper and handed it to me. I thought she wanted me to read it, but before I had a chance she began telling me what was on it. “In art class we have to build a three-dimensional scene that expresses who we are. My teacher, Mrs. Kinski, calls it Dioramania! See,” and she pointed to the top of the page where in fact it read Dioramania! “So what’s the rest of the story?”

            “I told you, I don’t remember. There’s a cool video that someone did of it though if you want to watch it.”

            She frowned. “I’m not allowed on the internet anymore without parental supervision.”

            “Because of the fire?”

            “No, because I was looking at pictures of body parts.”

            “Body parts?”

            “You know, like internal organs. I wanted to see what they actually looked like instead of the way they look in drawings, but after that I started looking at dismembered arms and legs and that’s when my dad came in and saw me. He said I shouldn’t be looking at stuff like that because it’s gross, and it was kind of gross.” She smiled.

            “Okay, well, I guess I can look it up for you,” and I took out my phone and loaded up the video. We were about halfway through it when she got this odd look on her face and said, “I’ll be right back.”

            I watched the video to the end, and after setting it up again for when she came back, I began looking around her room. I was surprised. She was such an odd character I thought her room would have been filled with things you wouldn’t expect to see in a young girl’s bedroom, and though on her bookshelf she had a lot of books about outer space, and all these green army action figures scattered everywhere, the main attraction was unicorns. There were posters of unicorns on the walls, and stickers on the furniture, and when I looked down I saw that I was sitting on unicorn bedsheets. And that’s when I realized I was in an eleven-year-old’s bedroom and I probably shouldn’t be. I got up to leave but she came running back in.

            “You have to take me to the hospital,” she said.

            “Why? What’s wrong?”

            She grabbed my arm. “Please, let’s just go, okay?”

            I held my ground. “You have to tell me what’s wrong first.”

            “I’m bleeding.”

            Nervous, I looked at her. I spun her around, looking for cuts. “I don’t see anything.”

            “It’s on the inside.”

            “On—how can you tell?”

            “Because it’s coming out of my lady part.”

            “Your—shit. No, wait, that’s okay.”

            “No, it’s not.”

            “Yes, it is. You’re not…you’re okay.”

            “But I bled a lot. It’s still in the toilet, I can show you.”

            “No, I know, you’re just…you’re having your period.”

            “My what?”

            “Your, your period. Didn’t anyone tell you about that?”

            She shook her head. “No!”

            “Come with me,” and I took her out to the living room and sat her down on the couch. I gave her my phone and told her to look it up, and then I backed away, far away, to the other side of the room, so I wouldn’t be near her when she did. She found a site pretty quick, and after reading a bit she seemed to calm down, although she wasn’t too keen about the frequency of it.

            “This is going to happen every month!” she shouted.

            “Yeah, pretty much.”

            “And it only happens to girls? Not boys?”

            “We got our own problems, nothing like that though. Anyway, you done looking? You want to play some more foosball?”

            Beth had done other peculiar things besides setting the house on fire and looking up body parts on the internet. For example, when she was little she got fed up with walking and went back to crawling for a while—and by a while, I mean like four months. She was also known to spit out her food if she didn’t like the taste of it—not onto her plate, mind you, but just out, and whoever was in front of her got the brunt of it. All the meals in their house were geared towards her taste buds. Oh, and last year she got in trouble at school because she was singing a Patti Smith song on the playground and some of her classmates got offended by the lyrics. Her parents had taken her to a psychiatrist but he couldn’t find anything specific wrong with her—no autism, no ADHD, nothing that had made it into the DSM yet—so he just labelled her an unusual child. Still, he tried to medicate her, but she’d just spit the pills out like she did with food. Katie told me about all these things before she introduced me to Beth, as if to warn me ahead of time about what was to come, and I sort of wanted to do the same when she got back from helping her friend out—I wanted her to hear it from me what had happened while she was gone. But Beth got the jump on me, and said as soon as Katie walked in the door, “How come you didn’t tell me about periods?”

            “What?”

            “I had my period and bled all over my favorite pair of unicorn panties and I thought I was going to die. What good is it having an older sister if she never tells you things?” and she ran off to her room and slammed the door.

            “What happened?” Katie asked me.

            “Just like she said, only I didn’t know about the pant—the underwear part. She must have just taken them off. At least I hope she took them off. Anyway, how come you didn’t tell her?”

            “That’s none of your business.”

            “It kind of became my business a half an hour ago.”

            “We didn’t tell her because we were afraid of what she might do, alright? We thought maybe she’d get scared and try to stop it from happening somehow.”

            “Can you do that?”

            “No. But you can imagine her trying, can’t you?”

            “I think it’s more likely she would’ve collected the blood in a jar and taken it to show and tell.”

            Katie wrinkled her nose. “I’d like you to go now.”

            “What? I was joking.”

            “I said I want you to go.”

            “Why? Did I do something wrong?”

            “I see the way you look at her.”

            “What are you talking about?”

            “You like her. You think she’s more fun than I am. That’s why you don’t care that you have to come over here instead of going somewhere to make out. And that’s why you wanted to stay here, so you could be with her instead of me. You wanted a chance to be alone with her, just the two of you, without me getting in the way.”

            “Whoa. Just so we’re clear, nothing happened between us.”

            “I know that. I would have never left you alone with her if I thought you were actually going to do something to her. It’s about what you think.”

            “I don’t think anything. Not everything has to be phallic, okay?”

            “What?”

            “Sometimes a horn is just a horn.”

            “Horns? Who’s talking about horns? You’re not making any sense.”

            I shook my head out. “Look, just—you’re the one who’s talking crazy. I don’t have feelings for your sister. I mean, she’s cool and all, but that’s it. And I’m not the one who’s having sex in the room right next to hers.”

            “Just go, okay?”

            “All right, I’ll go.” I went for the door.

            “And don’t call me anymore, or talk to me in school either.”

            “Are you saying we’re breaking up?”

            “No, I’m saying we just did,” and she shut the door in my face.

A few weeks later, there was a knock at the front door, the front door of my house, and when I went to answer it there was Beth, all by herself, wearing a backpack around her shoulders and carrying something with a cloth over it in her arms. It was a hot day, really hot, and her forehead was sweating.

            “Hey, Logan,” she said.

            “Hey.”

            “Happy birthday.”

            “Thanks.”

            “Are your friends here?”

            “No.”

            “How come?”

            “Because it’s ten a.m. We’re not doing anything till later. Did you walk here?”

            “Uh-huh, and I brought you a present. It’s getting heavy though, so will you let me in so I can put it down?”

            “S-s-s-sure,” I said uneasily, and stepped aside.

            She went straight for the coffee table and set the present down, then dumped her backpack on the couch. She’d never been in my house before, so she took a quick look around the room and smiled approvingly; then she turned back to the coffee table, removed the cloth like a magician, and said, “Ta-da!”

            It was just like we’d talked about. There was a field and a little farmhouse off to the side, and in the middle of the field was the farmer. Horses—what looked to be unicorns with their horns busted off—were running around the perimeter, and the farmer’s son, who later in the story falls off one of the wild horses and breaks his leg, was walking around with a cast and crutches, while the conscription officers—a couple of her army men—who’d come to sign him up for the war (but couldn’t because he’d broken his leg) were walking off to the next farm. And way off to one side were the farmer’s neighbors, who were leaning on a fence, just waiting for the next opportunity to come over and tell the farmer whether something was good or bad.

            “What do you think?” she asked.

            “I think it’s awesome.”

            “Good, because my mom was getting ready to throw it out.”

            “Why?”

            “Because it got me suspended from school.”

            “What? How?”

            “They said it was culturally insensitive because I’m not Chinese. They might have let it go but because of the Patti Smith song I sang before they said it’s become a pattern with me.”

            “Maybe you shouldn’t have painted the farmer’s face.”

            “I didn’t. Danni did that. She said if the story’s Chinese then he should be Chinese. But you’re right, they didn’t like that. They said I was appropriating. But isn’t that good? Isn’t something that’s appropriate good?”

            “No, it, ‘appropriating’ means something else.”

            “What?”

            I was about to explain when something else came to mind, something that seemed far more important than a language lesson.

            “Why are you here, Beth?”

            “To give you the diorama on your birthday.”

            I glanced at the backpack. “Okay, but why are you really here?”

            She looked at her feet a while, then back at me. “They want to send me away.”

            “Who? Your parents? Where?”

            She plopped down on the couch and tried to get comfortable but didn’t seem to be able to. “To some kind of school for troubled kids, because they’re fed up with me. Everyone is. Even Katie. But I don’t want to go.”

            “So you’re what…running away?”

            She nodded.

            “And you came here?”

            She leaned forward now, looking like she did when she wanted me to take her to the hospital, but with an enthusiasm around her eyes that was trying to mask her fears. “I was thinking I could hide here, you know, like Anne Frank. Katie told me your parents travel a lot, so it would just be you and me, and when they’re here I’ll hide in your room, or wherever, and they won’t even know I’m here. It’ll be fun. So what do you think?”

            “I think I need a drink.”

            “Oo, I’ll take some lemonade, please.”

            “Not that kind of drink. Wait here,” and I went into the kitchen and grabbed some water and drank like I’d just come out of the desert. My first thought was to call Katie and let her deal with this, but then it occurred to me that with the way things had ended between us it might be better to talk to her parents, so I thought about calling them instead. And then I thought about calling my parents and asking them what I should do, but I pretty much already knew what they would say: they’d tell me to get her the hell off the property before the police showed up. Which made me think about calling the police, or maybe a social worker, but I couldn’t see how that would do any good either. No one who didn’t know Beth was going to see things from her perspective, especially after she’d already been labelled a troublemaker. But what really stopped me from calling anybody was the realization that I didn’t want to. I wanted Beth to stay. I wanted what she wanted, for her to stay here and hide out in my bedroom, and when the two of us were the only ones around we could hang out together and have fun. Of course, I knew that was never going to happen, that sooner or later someone was going to call or come to the door or bash it in and take her away. But they sure as shit weren’t going to get any help from me.

            “Here,” I said when I got back to the living room, but she was over by my father’s keyboard trying to tap out her favorite song, so I set her glass on the table and sat down on the couch. And as I listened to her play, I stared at the diorama, mostly at the farmer, who I suddenly noticed wasn’t directly in the middle as I’d thought before, but more like just off to the side, far enough though that you could tell that he wasn’t there by accident. No, though he was close to it, he wasn’t the center of his own universe, he was just amongst it all, going about his business, doing what needed to be done. And if you listened really close, you could almost hear him whistling.

            After a while Beth stopped playing and turned to me. “Is everything okay?” she asked.

            I looked up from the farmer and after a moment, I said, “Maybe.”

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Wolfgang Wright is the author of the comic novel Me and Gepe and the forthcoming science fiction novel Being. His short work has appeared in over forty literary magazines, including Dark Yonder, Oyster River Pages, and Paris Lit Up. He doesn’t tolerate gluten so well, quite enjoys watching British panel shows, and devotes a little time each day to contemplating the Tao. He lives in North Dakota.