Regret List (3 page)

“How’s school?” I mouthed silently.

He gave a dismissive shake of his hand.
Boring
, it said.
Not worth talking about.

I wanted to show him I hadn’t forgotten what he had
taught me.
Good food
, I signed.

He laughed out loud and shook his head, sticking out
his tongue in mock disgust. Okay, so maybe bland pasta salad and
too-salty chips didn’t quite qualify as good, but I wasn’t picky.
The woman next to him waved a hand to attract his attention and
said something, glancing in my direction. I wasn’t nearly good
enough at lip-reading to understand their conversation, but he
finally waved his hand at her in a
fine, whatever
kind of
way and she rose and walked to our table.

“Hi, I’m Melinda,” she greeted my mom, smiling. I
liked her immediately. Her eyes crinkled when she smiled and her
long brown hair fell far past her shoulders. She was warm and sweet
and reminded me of baking cookies. You know when you mix the eggs
and brown sugar and you get that mushy, thick, brown goo that’s too
sweet to eat? That’s what she reminded me of.

“Hi. Susan,” my mom introduced herself.

“Sorry, but I couldn’t help noticing you signing with
my son, Asher.” She turned to me and I suddenly felt shy, snuggling
in closer to my own mom. “Where did you learn?”

“He taught me,” I said softly, glancing past her to
Asher. But he had turned away and was studiously examining his own
food.

“It’s just,” she paused for a moment, looking to my
mom for support, “I don’t think Asher has a lot of friends. It’s
hard for him at school, especially with all the noise. He’s getting
better at lip-reading, but he can’t follow conversations the same
way the other kids can and he gets frustrated. I want to help him
out, but it’s hard…” she trailed off for a moment before
continuing. “Is there any way we could arrange some sort of play
date with them?”

“Of course!” my mom said a little too quickly,
cutting off the end of the other woman’s sentence. “We would love
to have Asher over sometime. I had no idea Paige had been taught
any of this.” I caught the edge of guilt in her voice. Ever since
the accident, she had been distracted, only half-listening to the
stories of my day. Even back then, I knew it. Although to be fair,
I don’t know if I had mentioned Asher much. I thought of our little
language as secret, something the other kids couldn’t understand. I
liked the mysteriousness of it all.

And so, even as the new school year progressed and we
were no longer in the same class, we spent countless hours together
after school and on the weekends – playing soccer in the dirt,
looking under rocks for scorpions, and covering up ant hills when
we were younger, then biking across the desert, hiking up the
buttes, and sitting on top of the world, reading books when we were
older. Those days were my favorite, when we sat in the warm sun
with no one around, leaning back-to-back as we flew through books,
sharing the best parts with each other.

As Asher got better at lip-reading and I filled my
head with other knowledge, I forgot most of the basic signs he
taught me in second grade. But I never forgot the alphabet and
found myself subtly using it when spelling words out loud. One time
I even forgot who I was talking to in middle school. It was during
lunch and one of my friends asked who was assigned as my lab
partner.
J-O-E,
I signed, my mouth full of food.

She stared at me for a second, bewildered. “What was
that
?” she laughed.

I felt my cheeks flush red for some reason. “Oh, I
tried to spell out his name,” I laughed back, weakly. “Joe. I got
Joe assigned to me.”

But now we’re coming up on Regret #5 – the entirety
of my ninth grade year. The summers belonged to Asher and me. There
were no classes, no snow, no big holidays to get in our way and we
grew tan and freckled from our time out in the sun, up on our
favorite butte where we could see the entire town spread out
beneath us. One summer day before ninth grade, Asher set aside the
book he had been reading with a sigh.

“Something wrong?” I looked over and raised an
eyebrow.

“This book,” he said. “It’s terrible.”

I held my hand out and he tossed it over. It was an
old paperback from the library, the cover full of explosions and
spaceships. “It looks like just your type of book,” I replied with
just a hint of derision.

“It doesn’t make sense!” he complained. “So there’s
this guy whose girlfriend gets kidnapped by space pirates, right?
And while he’s looking for her, he finds a portal to an alternate
reality and totally gets sidetracked on exploring this other
universe and fighting against this evil overlord who’s trying to
take over. What happened to the girlfriend?”

I laughed. Talking (especially ranting) about books
was the only time I could get him to speak at length, but it was
instantly clear he thought I was laughing at him. He turned away.
“It’s not like you’re reading some kind of high-class literature
either.”

It’s true. I wasn’t. That year was my fantasy kick
and I was currently reading the third book in a series about a girl
who could transform into other animals. But at least I was enjoying
my book.

I huffed and turned away, but Asher wasn’t done yet.
“I say we write our own book. You and me, this year. We’ll take
turns working on it. We could write something way better than
this.” He held up his tattered paperback.

“What would we write about?” I wasn’t entirely sold
on the idea yet.

He shrugged. “Whatever we want, Paige. It’ll be our
book.”

I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t want to write some
sci-fi story where everyone’s blowing stuff up and speeding around
in spaceships all day.”

“Fine, fine,” he waved his hand. “What about fantasy?
You like that, right? A fantasy adventure.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

This was a good enough answer for him and he nodded.
“I’ll bring a notebook to school tomorrow for us to get
started.”

I blinked. School. I knew school started tomorrow of
course, but I had shoved it to the back of my mind as something I
didn’t want to think about just yet. “What do you mean, school?” I
grumbled. “Are you going to start writing without me?”

He laughed, an unusual sound to hear, even when it
was just the two of us. “I knew it, I knew you hadn’t realized it
yet! I almost wanted to wait until tomorrow, to see your reaction
when I walked into class.”

I still didn’t get it and was beginning to feel
embarrassed that I was so lost. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s high school, Paige. How many high schools do
you really think we have here in this tiny town?”

“One,” I mumbled, realizing my oversight. “You’ll be
there tomorrow?”

“Yup.” He rose stiffly, tucking the book into his
back pocket. “I’ve got to get home for dinner. I’ll see you
tomorrow.”

I sat for a while longer, long enough that a deer
came crashing into the clearing, saw me, then disappeared back into
the brush. Asher at school with me. What would that be like? Our
school lives had been separate for so long. I had never even
mentioned him to my friends. He was easier to understand and more
outgoing than in second grade, sure. But still, he was different.
What would they think? I wasn’t that worried about popularity (how
could I, with my unkempt red hair, thick glasses, and no fashion
sense?), but still. I was fourteen. The people you hang out with
reflect back on you tenfold at that age.

That next day, the first day of my high school life,
my fears were realized. It started off alright – a screaming gaggle
of girls greeted me at the entrance of school, where we sat on the
thigh-high wall outside and watched everyone arrive. I should take
a moment to introduce you to my other friends. Sitting to my right
was Sammy: boy-crazy, the loudmouth of the class, a girl with a
tendency to say all the wrong things. Today was no exception. While
I sat apprehensively watching for Asher, she was talking across me
to Grace: quiet, needy, a girl with the tendency to
do
all
the wrong things.

“You look a-ma-zing, Grace. What did you do all
summer, work out?”

I glanced over. It was true. Grace looked skinnier,
but not healthy-skinnier. She looked pale and shaky and vaguely
sickly. I winced at the conversation. Everyone knew not to mention
Grace’s weight. She was
never
happy about it and it
constantly buoyed up and down. Even I could tell this was one of
her lowest weights, though.

“Oh, thanks,” she mumbled, looking down at herself.
“I don’t think I really lost anything, though. Everything just
feels so tight on me.” She picked unhappily at her shirt, looking
downcast.

“Kandice,” I said quickly, “what’d you do this
summer?”

She sighed and looked up at the clear sky. That was
Kandice: always overdramatic, dressed in dark colors, with too much
make-up plastered on her face. “I fought with my parents,” she said
in a breathy voice. Oh right, and she never got along with her
parents. “They took away my cell phone for the summer because they
caught me texting pictures of myself to someone I met online.”

We all gasped. “Kandice!” I said, in shock.

She gave me a withering look. “I wasn’t
naked
or anything. Don’t overreact.”

I wondered for a brief moment why the four of us
never got together during the summer. Well, that wasn’t quite true.
We would sometimes meet up to go swimming, or watch a movie at one
of our houses, but occasionally I got the feeling that we weren’t
really as great of friends as we acted in school. There were no
late-night conversations, sleepovers that lasted days, or summer
parties that we planned for weeks ahead of time. Those were the
sorts of things I overheard some of the other girls talking
about.

The one time I brought it up, we all agreed that it
was because we weren’t old enough to drive yet, and all our parents
worked. Or maybe it was that we all led such busy lives and were
too independent for all those silly social events. I can’t remember
now because it wasn’t really important or true. The real problem
was that we banded together because that’s the only way to survive
in school. If you don’t have a group of friends, you were a loner.
And if you were a loner, you got picked on, never had a group for
projects, and had to eat lunch alone. It was easier this way, even
if I didn’t really know anything real or important about these
other girls.

The bell rang before I could spot Asher, and my
friends and I parted ways, heading off to our individual classes.
First up for me was biology and to my discomfort, we had a seating
chart posted on the door. Am I the only one that has trouble
transferring a picture of the seats to the classroom itself?
Something in my head (probably the same part that made me struggle
in geometry) just can’t twist and turn the overhead view and apply
it to the class in front of me.

After finally figuring it out (I thought) and getting
shuffled out of my seat several times when it turned out I was on
the completely wrong side of the class, I finally took my real
seat, cheeks burning. Our teacher stood up from her desk, where she
had silently been observing our jumbled up stampede to find our
seats. She glanced around at the empty seats, making a few notes on
her clipboard, then nodded. “Asher? Asher Pierce? Are you here?” My
stomach clenched slightly at the name, then tightened further as
she continued.

“Good. This gives me an opportunity to talk to you
all.”

Oh no, no, no,
I thought to myself.
She’s
not going to talk about him, is she?

“There will be another student in our class, Asher,
who has a hearing disability and wears a hearing aid.”

What are you doing?
I screamed in my head.
Half these kids know him already and you’re alienating him from
the other half.

“This means you need to speak loudly and clearly in
his direction to make it easier for him to understand you.” She
glanced back down at her notes, probably reading from his
disability sheet. “If you face him while speaking, he will be able
to lip-read. I expect everyone to be courteous and respectful of
his condition-“

Oh my God, you did not just call it a
condition.

“-and if I hear of any problems regarding him, you
will be reported to the vice principal’s office.”

By this point, there were a few scattered whispers
and titters in the classroom and I desperately wished we were back
in second grade, where I could simply kick and shove them into
submission. Is this what it was like for him every year? The
teachers making a big deal out of him, making sure
everyone
knew he was different?

The classroom door opened and Asher entered, looking
harried. Everyone turned to see who it was and he seemed to
instantly feel the tension in the room. I watched as his shoulders
hunched over slightly and he shifted his backpack straps nervously.
“Sorry, early doctor’s appointment,” he mumbled.

“Sorry, what?” our teacher looked confused when she
didn’t understand him and glanced back down at her notes. What did
she expect, a translation guide? In response, Asher held out a
tardy excuse and she gratefully accepted it. “Great, great, okay,
just set your stuff down over here, sweetie.” She led him, yes
physically led him over to his seat. The whispers had gotten louder
and I heard one boy give a snort of laughter. I gave that
particular boy a hard look, trying to catch his gaze, but he was
already whispering to the others next to him.

That boy, yes that awful laughing one, was Jason. The
Jason of my regret list, the one I regret going out with. But we’re
still a ways off from that. At that moment in the classroom, I
hated him and wanted to bring him down a peg or two. “Did anyone
hear a pig snort?” I asked loudly and the entire classroom
dissolved into laughter. Yeah, it probably wasn’t the wittiest
comeback ever, but it got the job done. I watched in triumph as his
face went red and the guy sitting next to him elbowed his side.