Regret List (4 page)

One point for the Asher and Paige team.

The rest of the class passed by uneventfully and I
was almost beginning to think that we could do this, pull this off
without causing too big a ripple in the school popularity scheme,
but then we got to lunch. I sat with my friends as usual, our backs
against our lockers and our lunch spread out in front of us. We
were chatting about our classes so far and Sammy was gushing about
some new boy from Australia with “just the cuuutest accent,” when a
shadow blocked out the glare of the fluorescent lights above. I
glanced up and grinned.

“Hey Asher.” I felt the confused glances of my
friends, but chose to ignore them. “Sit.” I patted the floor beside
me and he sat down silently, sliding his backpack off his
shoulders.

“Here.” He slid a notebook out of his backpack and
handed it to me. “I started a little already. Tell me what you
think.” He started to stand and I cocked my head.

“You can sit with us, you know,” I said.

He gave me a glance that I knew all too well. The one
that said,
Seriously
,
Paige?
and was thick with
sarcasm. “I have my own friends to sit with,” he said. But then he
gave me a little grin that let me know that while he wasn’t pleased
with the day so far, I was still on his good side.

“Right, okay,” I said. Of course he had his own
friends to sit with. Did I really think that since I left him in
second grade that no one would be able to befriend him like I had?
Then again, no one else had befriended me like he had, yet I still
felt obligated to sit with them.

His friends were already on the other side of the
hall, laughing good-naturedly at him. “Don’t you choose a bunch of
girls over us!” one of them shouted over.

Asher rolled his eyes. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he
replied, rolling his eyes. “She’s got cooties.”

I stuck my tongue out at him as he walked away, then
turned back to my own friends, giggling. All three of them stared
at me with wide eyes. “You’re friends with
him
, Paige?”
Kandice squeaked.

“Uh, yes?” I stopped laughing.

Sammy sighed. “You’re not like, going out with him or
anything, are you?”

“No, of course not!” I replied quickly. “We’re just
friends.”

“Good.” She nodded in approval. “Because I’ve got big
plans for our group this year.”

Unfortunately, her plans led to Regret #2: Agreeing
to go out with Jason. If I could go back in time, I would have
walked away right then, never even listened to her “big plans.”
But, well, I didn’t. And since I promised to tell you everything,
this is how it happened.

As it turned out, Sammy’s big plan for the group was
to match us up with one of the male groups of four. We had all
talked about this back in middle school, of course. According to
Sammy’s older sister, it was the thing to do in high school. Then
you could go on group dates with your friends, no one was left out
of the dating scene, etc. Of course, what she
didn’t
tell us
was that someone had to settle. You couldn’t all have the cutest
guy of the group, after all. Really, it sounded more like an
arranged marriage than a real relationship, but what did I know? I
had never even kissed a boy before, much less dated one.

As they began to discuss possible groups to match up
with, my mind wandered and I stopped paying attention. Instead, I
opened Asher’s notebook. He had filled out the first page with plot
ideas and possible characters, even including quick sketches of
them. I was immersed in the outline of a story about a girl whose
sister goes missing in a mysterious world controlled by the Night
Mare, an evil queen who controls everyone through their dreams,
when I realized Grace was trying to talk to me. “Mm?” I tore myself
away from the page.

“Are you seriously doing homework already?” she asked
incredulously. “You don’t always have to be the brains of the
class, you know. Take a break.” I wondered for a second if that’s
how they all thought of me: the nerdy one, just like I had given
all of them titles and roles to play.

“It’s not homework,” I said, trying not to act
defensive. Then, realizing how nerdy it would sound if I tried to
explain, I slid the notebook into my own book bag. “It’s nothing.
Just some notes.”

“Whatever. Well, what do
you
think of Jason
Stromsen?” Sammy asked.

“Who?” I was still only half-paying attention and
trying to remember what class I had after lunch.

“He’s part of the group Sammy’s thinking about
hooking us up with,” Kandice yawned, texting on her phone.

“You’re not texting that guy you got in trouble over,
are you?” Grace asked.

Kandice glared at her. “None of your business. Hey,
are you gonna eat that?” It looked like Grace had barely touched
her lunch and she wordlessly handed it over to Kandice.

“Jason’s pretty cute,” Sammy continued. “He’s in our
grade, dark hair, glasses. I have English with him and he seemed
pretty nerdy, like you.” I winced, but what could I say? Maybe he
was a good match for me. Not once did I think that this mysterious
Jason could be the same boy from biology. “Oh, and Robert told me
one of his parents died too.” Oh, God. What did I tell you? She
says all the worst things.

A rush of emotions soared through me, starting in my
stomach. I didn’t know whether I was going to burst into tears or
slap her. In the end, I did neither. I laughed it off like it was
no big deal. Only someone with two healthy, living parents can
think it’s perfectly rational to match two people up based on their
dead-parent status. But I don’t know, maybe it was rational. Maybe
I’m the strange one.

I had only ever told one person how I felt about my
dad: Asher. We were climbing around on a fallen log that was nearly
as tall as me and had been lying there for as long as I could
remember. I hauled myself up on the branches and knelt down,
yanking off chunks of the bark. Asher sat nearby, doing the same. I
saw lightning out of the corner of my eye and sat back against one
of the branches, watching the sky for a few minutes. I saw it flash
again, forking down in the distance. It was too far off to hear the
thunder and the rain hadn’t yet reached us, so I continued ripping
off the bark.

“My dad’s going to transfer to a job in Portland,
four hours away,” Asher growled, crunching the bark up in his hands
and letting it fall to the ground in pieces.

“You’re moving away?” I asked. I could feel his dark
mood however and knew it was more complicated than that. He had
been uncharacteristically angry all day, but it wasn’t until the
afternoon started to fade away that he finally explained.

He shook his head and held up a wood louse. “Found
one.” He handed it to me and I let the little bug crawl across my
palm. We liked tearing up the poor bugs’ home to see what we could
find. Occasionally it meant finding a tick or two attached to our
arms and legs, but that was interesting in and of itself.

“Why not?” I asked, watching the bug as it crawled up
my arm.

“Not invited,” he replied.

I looked up at him in surprise. “What do you mean,
you’re not invited? He’s your dad!”

He glowered at me. “Don’t you think I know that? He’s
moving in with some skank. He doesn’t want us kids around.”

“Wait, he’s leaving your mom?” I couldn’t believe it.
His mom was still the precursor to cookie dough in my mind. Why
would anyone abandon that?

He nodded, his fists clenched in rage.

“Do you, like, know this for sure? How’d you find
out?” I was still in shock, certain that Asher had misunderstood
somehow. It wasn’t like him to jump to conclusions, but his family
acted so happy all the time, whenever I saw them all together.
Well, everyone except Asher, who seemed to spend half his life in a
bad mood.

“My mom made him tell us,” he mumbled, making it
harder for me to understand him. “He hooked up with some girl at
the Portland branch during a business trip and now he’s going to
transfer there, to get away from us.”

I blinked. “So, are they getting a divorce then?”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. He could die for all I
care.” I stiffened and his eyes widened a little.
Sorry
, he
signed, a circle on his chest. That’s how I knew he really meant
it, wasn’t just saying sorry because it was the proper social
convention. Signs were what brought us together and the language we
never lied in.

I flicked the wood louse from my arm and turned away.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” I said, sliding off the log and
feeling the bark scrape my bare legs.

I heard him slide off next to me and we stood
silently for a moment, watching the lightning still flickering in
the distance. “Why don’t you talk about him?” he asked.

“There’s nothing to say,” I replied truthfully. What
could I say about a man I didn’t even remember? I had never
explained to Asher exactly what had happened – that he had killed
some lady and then run from all his problems in the only way he
knew how. All he knew was that my dad had a pill problem and ended
up committing suicide over them.

“Do you miss him?”

I thought about it for a moment. “I miss the idea of
a dad,” I explained finally. “I don’t know if I can miss a man who
couldn’t even bother to get help for the sake of his family.”

Angry
, he signed and I giggled a little. Even
if I didn’t remember the exact sign, I could understand it from his
expression.

“Yeah. Angry. Is that bad?”

He shrugged. “It’s okay. We can be angry together.”
And so we were. His was a hot rage that boiled over unexpectedly
and mine was a dark, throbbing anger that refused to forgive. But
we understood each other and it was one more tie that bound us
together. His dad really did move out, ended up getting cheated on
by the Portland floozy, and lost his job when she accused him of
sexual harassment after he wouldn’t stop pestering her to get back
together with him. He eventually got his own apartment and invited
Asher and his brothers over a few times, but none of them ended up
visiting. Betrayal is an ugly thing to get over.

Back then, I thought I would never do anything to
make Asher that angry at me, make him feel that betrayed. I wish I
had been right.

But, we’re still at the beginning of ninth grade,
before everything fell apart. That evening after the first day of
high school, I got a text from Asher on my phone.
Come up to the
butte
, he wrote and so I grabbed the notebook and headed out,
leaving a note for my mom on the counter. She had been going out a
lot back then – dates, I assumed, although she never said so. We
didn’t have a bad relationship exactly, just an absent-minded one.
She was gone most of the time and I didn’t ask her about her
absence. In return, she ignored most of my life.

It was only mid-September, but the temperature was
already dropping outside and by the time I got to the top of the
butte, I was sorry I hadn’t brought a jacket. Asher was already up
there, lying on top of one of the boulders, soaking up the last
rays of sunlight. I clambered up next to him, pulling open the
notebook as I went. “I like the wizard’s bodyguard,” I said, lying
down next to him and pointing at the girl lurking in the shadows
that he had drawn, “but she shouldn’t start out as good.”

He looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded. “Go
on.”

“Like, I get the fact that a hero is supposed to
fight for good and all, but she looks too angry to be on the right
side. It’s not that she’s evil, exactly, just too angry to see
straight. I want her to be fighting for the wrong side.”

He screwed up his face in thought. “I see what you’re
saying,” he said slowly. “But villains aren’t very likeable.”

“I think she could be, if we explained why she did
the things that she did.”

He sat up. “Let me think on it.” I started to get up,
to go back home where it was warm, but he caught my arm. “Hey, are
you going to homecoming?”

I sighed, remembering the conversation at lunch. “I’m
not sure. My friends are trying to fix us up with some group of
guys. It’s weird. Why, are you going?”

He laughed. “No way. My friends and I will be hanging
out and playing video games all night.”

I wasn’t sure if I was being invited or not, but felt
a surge of confusion when he talked about his other friends. It was
stupid, but I had hoped he was like me and his school friends
stayed at school and that we were something different. Best
friends, I guess. I wondered if he had always hung out with them
outside of school and how I never heard about them before. I had
only been a high school student for one day, but already my life
felt completely upside down.

He snatched up the notebook and dashed off before I
had a chance to sort out anything to say and I was left shivering
alone in the quickly fading sunlight. Over the next week, we traded
the notebook back and forth. We exchanged locker combinations so I
would sometimes open my locker and find the notebook perched on top
of my textbooks. On the nights I took it home, it consumed my
evening as I sketched out plot ideas and new characters. When she
was around, my mom kept insisting that she couldn’t believe how
much work the teachers were already loading on top of us. I didn’t
bother to correct her. It was weird, but I had long ago stopped
telling my mom anything about what Asher and I did.

It was back when we first started hanging out
together unattended. We must have been eleven or twelve and it was
before his parents split up. They would let us wander around the
desert when I came to visit. Sometimes we would tag along with his
older brothers and sometimes we would just go off on our own. It
was a delicious taste of freedom for me – my mom had switched from
totally distracted to unreasonably present. She never left me alone
back then when I was home. She was always checking in on me, making
sure I didn’t die on her, I guess. Like if she watched over me
closely enough, I wouldn’t be able to destroy my life.