Regret List Read online

I know there was more to it than that, because I remember that day at our old house when he locked himself in the bathroom and my mom was so desperate for him to come out, so desperate that she moved us all to her parents’ house 2000 miles away. I’m pretty sure he must have been depressed and threatening suicide even back then, but no one has ever mentioned that bit of it. I’m not even sure if he would have gone through with it, if the accident hadn’t happened.

  No one who told me this story said so, but I think he must have been taking more pain pills than he should have. I know he lost his job shortly before I started kindergarten and it had something to do with his injury. The day he died, he had been at the bar, trying out his newest form of dulling the pain – alcohol. Of the few people who would let me in on some of the details, everyone made sure to tell me that he was not over the legal limit to drive, but what about the pills? Even I know you’re not supposed to mix stuff like that. And what was he even doing at the bar so early in the day, instead of out trying to find a job?

  Regardless, as he drove home just after noon, his car found its way onto the sidewalk, hitting a woman taking her eight-year-old son for a walk. The kid was fine (physically), the woman was dead. Without even waiting for the police to show up, he raced home, downing pills as he went. When he got home, he picked up the phone and called my mom’s work number while she was on her lunch break. He left her a message on the answering machine and I have no idea what he could have said, how he could have apologized for what happened. He finished off the bottle of pills, washed them down with a few final swallows of vodka, and collapsed without even hanging up the phone, waiting for the end to take him.

  I often wonder what my mom found when she came home. She returned from her lunch break and received his message. She tried to call home and her only reply was the busy signal. She must have known what she was going to find as she drove home, but what runs through your head on a drive like that, or comes from your mouth when you find your husband, dead on the kitchen floor? I imagine it sometimes as I’m trying to fall asleep.

  After he died, when all those people filled the house, it took them a few days to realize there was something wrong with me. At first, they just thought I was in mourning, then maybe that I was sick. Ever since I saw that dead body on the bed, I realized I had nothing to say. Then, later, when I wanted to talk, I found I couldn’t. I’d open my mouth and no sound would come out. It was like I had forgotten how to speak. My mom even got the doctors to stick a tube down my throat as I thrashed on the exam room bed, choking and gagging. They found nothing wrong with me and suggested taking me to a therapist.

  The therapist tried in vain to talk to me and after a while, she was able to get me to draw and (mostly illegibly) write down my thoughts, but I still couldn’t talk. They gave my mom all sorts of explanations: I was in shock, I was traumatized, I just didn’t have anything to say. None of it was true, though. The problem was I had something invisible stuck in my throat that had to come out before any words could.

  I went back to school after a couple weeks, still unable to speak. I often wonder what the teacher told everyone before I returned. She must have said something, because my classmates were unusually interested in me. They all tried to get me to talk by poking at me, making funny faces, taking my things away, or jumping out at me. Eventually, they got tired of it and left me alone. None of them really wanted a friend who wouldn’t laugh at their jokes or commiserate with the unfairness of the teachers and their parents.

  Well, everyone except Asher. He stood silently to the side until they all got tired of me, then sat next to me during free time one day. “I need to teach you something,” he said to me, slowly, so that I would understand. I glared at him. At that point, I hated school and the last thing I wanted was more to learn. And then, he made his hand into a loose fist and held it up to me. “A,” he said. I mirrored the way he formed his hand and he nodded.

  He taught me how to speak again.

  We started with the alphabet, which we used loosely to spell out names or to sound out a word that I couldn’t understand him say. I was too young, too slow at spelling to write anyone lengthy notes of what I needed to say, but this, speaking with my hands was a way to reach at least one person. After the alphabet, we moved onto people: teacher, grandma, grandpa, mom…dad. Then feelings, and things, and actions.

  At first, our only free time for this was during our two short recesses, but our teacher soon caught on to what we were doing and turned a blind eye to us during class. We were free to sit in the back and silently sign to each other, Asher jotting down words occasionally to teach me something new, sometimes adjusting my hand or gestures.

  That is how Asher became my best friend.

  After two months of silence, I woke myself up in the night. The thing that had gotten stuck in my throat finally emerged as a grief-stricken howl of pain. My mom was in my room instantly, holding me close as I let out the noise, the remorse of having my dad disappear so suddenly. My words were back after that and Asher stopped teaching me new signs, but our friendship was cemented. You can’t break something like that – at least, that’s what I thought at the time.

  As for my family, my dad’s name became forbidden. Not that my mom actually said anything like that, but she never brought him up and whenever I did, the pain on her face was unbearable. Soon, I stopped mentioning him and froze whenever anyone else did. I forced his memory from my mind and now I rely on others to tell me about him. The only thing I remember about him is how he looked as he lay on that bed – gray, stiff, and broken. When I think of him, I remember the sorrow of his funeral, the sobbing of my mom. What he was like before that, all our happy memories are gone. And that is my first regret.

  Chapter 2

  After second grade, things changed. Literally. They opened up a new elementary school in the district and the boundaries changed. Most of my class stayed at the same school, but the ones closest to the new school were separated from the others. They pulled kids from two other elementary schools to fill up the new one, which meant everyone was placed into a class where the majority of their classmates were strangers. Asher stayed at the old school. I got pulled into the new one.

  Fortunately, we weren’t apart for long. The church my mom and I had started attending had a back-to-school picnic and my mom dragged me along. Back then, I was kind of scared of strangers, so I stuck close to my mom. It was while we were eating that I spotted him. I had never noticed him at any of the church functions before, but then again, he was easy to overlook. Slouched down at one of the tables with a sour look on his face, Asher was surrounded by his much more social older brothers. It was easy to see they were related – they all had the same unruly brown hair and wide eyes. I waved my hand at him until he glanced over. A, I signed. The first letter he had ever taught me and the first letter of his name. My usual greeting.

  His face brightened. Page, he flipped an imaginary page back at me. My mom noticed and looked at me strangely. In all the months since he had taught me a few basic signs, I had never shown my mom. There was no need to. The woman sitting next to him was giving me a curious look as well.

  “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.