Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  “Are you?” Lucas’s face was washed with concern, and Cleo saw him as he used to be, before all the hormones overtook him and hair sprouted from his chin and an occasional crater of a zit planted roots on his forehead. Maybe he’d have been better off with a dad in his life; Cleo didn’t know.

  “I am. I’m more worried about you.” Cleo sat on his bed, just on the edge, because he didn’t really like her in his space. “Is there anything else you want to talk about, with . . . that article this morning?” Cleo hoped the answer was no, but she acknowledged that it might be yes, and she’d have to deal with that too. That all this may have reopened questions, wounds about his dad. Obviously Lucas had asked about him from time to time. And she never felt good about her answers: vague, noncommittal, that she hadn’t known him well. What else was there to say? She had tried her best, she’d tried to be all things for him, she’d tried to love him from all sides and perspectives. She had tried to be enough.

  “I’m OK,” he said. “Seemed like typical political bullshit.”

  Cleo started to chastise him, but what was the point? Bullshit was well incorporated into his vocabulary now. She leaned over and kissed the top of his head, and he didn’t recoil, which was truly something. She did notice that he needed to wash his hair, but because they were having such an unusual moment of bonding, she let it go.

  “Homework?” she asked.

  “Already done.”

  “Superstar,” she replied, just like her parents used to say to her.

  Lucas gave her the finger, but she could tell he didn’t really mean it.

  She kept the list, handwritten, in her top desk drawer, which she also locked. She didn’t know why. Lucas wasn’t the type to snoop (if anything, she should be poking around his room), and there wasn’t anyone else in the condo. Maybe it was the symbolism—that it needed to be protected, that it was for her eyes only. That, in senatorial terms, it required clearance. And now Gaby wanted to open it to the world. Ten? Gaby wanted her to pick ten?

  Cleo popped the lock and tugged the drawer toward her. She hadn’t reread the list in ages. Her last entry simply read: brownies, but Cleo couldn’t remember if she’d intended to mean that she should eat more brownies (whimsy!) or fewer (gluttony). Cleo remembered her dad encouraging her to use the list as a way to reflect and reset, and she came to think of it more like confession, if she were Catholic (which she was not) and if she went to church (didn’t do that either). She’d convinced herself that if she purged her misdeed on paper, recognized it for what it was—anything from an innocent mistake to an intentional obfuscation—she could pick it up and leave it behind her on the side of the metaphorical road, drive away with a clean conscience.

  And to a certain extent, this was true. There were small misgivings on there; she flipped through the top page onto the second, then the third—no high heels (whoever decided that women had to perilously teeter on three-inch pins to make their calves look slimmer while nearly castrating their pinkie toes?) and blinker lights, goddammit, which Cleo remembered she’d jotted down after failing to signal on a turn when she was new to DC and unaccustomed to driving and nearly collided with an oncoming car and instead steered smack into a stop sign.

  The notepaper was worn the more she went backward, her handwriting different too. Bouncier when she first started, maybe because she didn’t yet realize how exhausting and difficult adulthood would be. Tougher for her than many because of her parents and her loneliness and probably her ambition too, first nurtured out of love by those parents, then left unwieldy and rambling when Cleo was on her own. So Cleo sank into that drive, gave it space, simply let it take her when it wanted, but it was also true that it made her a little more ruthless, a little less empathetic, a little more likely to sneak onto MaryAnne Newman’s laptop in the computer lab to read her notes while she went to the bathroom to touch up her makeup before they debated in front of their peers to decide who should be elected head of the paper. (Everything in her school in Seattle was a democracy. They really believed the children were the future.) Cleo had always told herself that none of this made her a terrible person; it made her a cunning one, and in fact, it armed her for all that came next: her parents, the pregnancy, Congress. So it was a funny thing to have a list of 233 regrets when Cleo also couldn’t deny that so many of them led her here, today, to everything that had happened since. How could you define regret if it also put you on top? By your motivation? By your failures? By your successes? Cleo didn’t know. Could she see now, from MaryAnne’s perspective, how she hadn’t been so kind in high school? Well, sure. Did that merit MaryAnne’s scorched-earth strategy? Cleo thought not. Firmly not.

  For a brief hiccup of a moment, she wondered how long her father’s own list had been. If it had brought him peace, if it had helped guide him. She’d never read it, never asked to read it, and until now had never been curious to do so. People should be allowed their secrets. People should be allowed their scars. Today there was no room for that—there were glaring headlines at every little misstep (case in point: MaryAnne Newman’s now-viral op-ed) or social media frenzies tasting of schadenfreude, but in years past, people like her dad could really step in the figurative horseshit and no one could smell their stink. That would be nice, she thought. Whatever happened to that?

  Cleo located her mouse, which was under a pile of confidential files on New York State white-collar crimes, and woke her desktop. She’d never been on Facebook officially, or not personally anyway. Gaby had their comms team handle the social media accounts, which Cleo glanced at once in a while, but she mostly thought her energy was better served elsewhere. She had Twitter because she had to keep up with the news, but Facebook struck her as a little juvenile and also, she didn’t have a huge desire to keep in touch with her high school classmates and see the photos of their grinning family units of four on the beach or their July Fourth parties or, in MaryAnne Newman’s case, her posing with a championship trophy from the round-robin at the country club.

  She grabbed her phone. Texted Lucas, who was only down the hall but generally responded best to digital requests.

  Cleo: Can u come help me for a sec? She added a smiley-face emoji.

  Lucas: No emojis, Mom.

  Cleo: Fine. Can u come help for a sec, no emoji?

  She heard a rumbling from his room, then the padding of his footsteps down the hall. Her office door swung open.

  “What?”

  “Remember that time you signed me up for Facebook? Do you remember the login?”

  Lucas sighed, exasperated. “You’re not eighty. You should know how to do this.”

  “I know,” Cleo conceded. “But I’m busy trying to save the world, so please just log me in.”

  Lucas’s eyes rolled so far back that Cleo wondered if they would ever return, but they did, and he leaned over her desk, pounded her keyboard, and voilà!

  “Do you want me to add a profile picture? Right now, you look like an anonymous troll. No one can tell it’s you. You made me sign up as Cee Mac. It’s like a bad rap-star name.”

  “No!” Cleo pushed his hand off the keyboard. “That’s exactly how I want it.”

  “God, you have issues,” Lucas said, but she could tell he was only partially serious, and frankly, to get her teen to rib her was possibly the highlight of her day (though her day admittedly was terrible), so she laughed and replied, “Aren’t you lucky that I’m your mom then.”

  He walked out without answering.

  MaryAnne Newman’s Facebook page was public, so Cleo had no problem finding not just her profile but her posts and photos and, of course, the op-ed.

  I JUST WANTED TO SHARE THIS. IT TOOK A LOT FOR ME TO SPEAK MY TRUTH, BUT A LOT OF US REMEMBER CLEO MCDOUGAL, AND I DO. NOT. THINK. SHE. SHOULD. BE. PRESIDENT.

  Cleo nearly giggled because twenty years later, MaryAnne hadn’t changed one bit. True, Cleo had been a type-A perfectionist, tap-dancing not just because it made her parents so happy but because Cleo got off on being the b
est at everything too, but MaryAnne had been her mirror image—all charged up without quite the dexterity or acumen that Cleo possessed, and so while they were perfect best friends (for a while), this was also the reason they were so combustible. Now Cleo could see that it had never been an equal relationship, unlike Cleo and Gabrielle, who were true sparring partners. There were petty jealousies between MaryAnne and her, and an uneasy sense of competition lurked just under the surface (competition that went both ways, Cleo knew, even if she usually triumphed), but as teens, neither one of them was adept enough to recognize this dynamic. They loved each other, they really did, even when they didn’t. And maybe Cleo should have just let things take their natural course. She probably would have bested MaryAnne in debate and on the school paper; she didn’t have to cheat, to take shortcuts. But part of her—the regretful part—wanted to win more than she wanted to protect her friendship.

  Cleo stared at MaryAnne’s Facebook profile picture and remembered how, for that internship their junior-year summer, just before her parents died, she gave MaryAnne bad advice on her essay, knowing full well that writing about the day her dog died was trite and clichéd and would never win her a spot in the mayor’s office. Just prior, MaryAnne had casually bragged that her parents were golfing partners with the mayor’s personal lawyer and that he was going to put in a good word for her. Cleo, feeling undermined and yes, a little less than, could not let that stand. She herself wrote about her relationship with her sister, how she felt like two people—one an only child and one a much younger sibling of a troubled sibling who had dropped out of college—she did not mention her arrest for weed possession—and the expectations this placed on Cleo, the good one, the best daughter they could have asked for. Cleo got the internship. MaryAnne did not.

  Cleo inhaled and steeled her nerves as she scrolled down MaryAnne’s Facebook page. She was used to criticism. Any politician was. But these were people she knew, who knew her, and that made it different because that made it personal. She didn’t really want to know what they all thought of her in high school, not because she didn’t care but because she suspected that she actually might.

  There were twenty-one comments below the op-ed (and MaryAnne’s commentary). Cleo didn’t recognize all the names at first until she realized that some of her classmates now went by their married names. She leaned forward, squinted at the photos. Their faces, though older, rang bells, loud bells, bells that Cleo didn’t really want to hear, to be honest. It wasn’t that high school had been traumatic, at least not until her parents’ accident, and obviously that wasn’t her classmates’ fault, but even Gaby had proposed that her campaign motto be “Only Forward” because Cleo wasn’t the type who took much delight in looking back or basking in nostalgia. She had repressed nearly all memories of Alexander Nobells; she had moved well past her one-nighter with Lucas’s father; hell, she’d made her peace with her strained relationship with Georgie.

  The past was the past was the past. Which was at least half the reason that Gaby’s suggestion, to revisit her list, to right some of her wrongs, was so irritating. Who really was the better for logging hours on Facebook, posting photos for their former friends from two decades ago? Not Cleo McDougal, that’s for sure.

  The messages were nearly all words of support for MaryAnne, which immediately raised the hairs on the back of Cleo’s competitive neck.

  Susan Harris: I didn’t know Cleo well, but I remember once in biology, she just HAD to be the first one to dissect the earthworm, and I knew she was nasty then!

  Maureen Allen: Word.

  Beth Shin: I don’t want to dump on her for being smart and doing well in biology, but yeah, wasn’t she a bit of a bitch about it? Like, rubbing it in our faces how much better she was? I never liked her. I’d never vote for her either.

  Christopher Preston: THANK YOU FOR SPEAKING UP! She always had such a sour look on her face. Never smiled. Amen.

  Cleo didn’t remember rushing the dissection tray in biology, though it sounded like something she would do, and she didn’t even remember Maureen Allen at all! She knew she could drag out her yearbook and reacquaint herself with all those faces, all those names, but really, did it matter? Christopher Preston wasn’t wrong about one thing: people see what they want. Her face naturally pointed downward and generally did indeed appear sour, even if she were thinking delightful thoughts. Like, winning the White House or even just envisioning a glass of wine and a massage, which she hadn’t had time for in more than a year.

  Instinctively, Cleo moved her hand to her shoulder, began digging into the knot that she’d assumed was more or less permanent. She kept reading.

  Finally, a word of defense.

  Oliver Patel: It seems to me that this is two decades’ worth of old history, MaryAnne, and maybe none of us was at our best at seventeen. Did you really need to air this on SeattleToday!? I mean, is it even a legitimate news outlet? I remember Cleo as determined and really, really smart and sure, maybe a little better than us, but so what?

  Oliver’s post had five likes, which made Cleo’s heart leap a little more than she’d anticipated.

  Below it, he added his own reply:

  Oliver Patel: I should offer the caveat of . . . it’s not like I knew her well.

  MaryAnne Newman: Well, that was my point, Oliver. Maybe none of us did. Even when we were supposed to be best friends.

  FOUR

  It was a Saturday, so Cleo had no idea why her buzzer kept ringing at . . . eight fifteen in the morning. As a rule, Cleo didn’t sleep late, but she’d forgotten to set her alarm last night, and there was no chance that Lucas would rouse her. He’d sleep until noon if he could. (Which he rarely could because of weekend soccer practice.)

  She pulled on a robe that was discarded by the side of the bed. Her building had security, so it wasn’t like the media could be literally beating down her door. Besides, despite the now twenty thousand retweets of the op-ed (at least as of last night when she checked), Cleo didn’t think the story would stay front of mind for all that long. Political scandals tended to come and go, and granted, this was her first, but she trusted that someone else, likely a man if the odds proved correct, would step in it soon enough. Insider trading. Groping a breast. Affair with a housekeeper. Who knew? That list could be long.

  The buzzer blared, this time unrelenting, as if someone’s finger had been surgically attached to the button. Such aggressiveness could be only one person.

  Gaby was in her running gear, naturally, because Saturday mornings meant long runs for her marathon training.

  “Did I wake you?” This was a valid question because it was also so surprising.

  “I lost track of time last night. On . . . Facebook.” Cleo was embarrassed to even admit it.

  Gaby welcomed herself inside. There was no posturing between them; they knew each other too well. Gaby didn’t care that she’d just run fifteen miles and reeked of sweat, and frankly, Cleo didn’t either. They’d seen each other much worse.

  “So I’ve made a decision.” Gabrielle reached for a Keurig pod and a mug in one simultaneous motion, her arms swinging in opposite directions, her brain working on both sides. “And you need to pack.”

  “What? We already discussed this. I’m not going back to New York this weekend. Lucas has a soccer tournament, and I’m on snack duty. In fact, shit, I’d better wake him.”

  Gaby couldn’t have looked less interested or less convinced. Children were not for her. Not that she couldn’t pinch cheeks and buy birthday presents, but priority-wise? She’d made that decision years ago. And she wouldn’t apologize for it either. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” she’d say whenever the subject arose about her marital status (single) or motherhood status (party of one, thank you). “If you don’t want to be a mother, you shouldn’t be.” Cleo would always stand beside her nodding (and often grinning) because who the fuck was anyone to tell anyone else what they should do with their life? Or their uterus? Or their DNA? Gaby’s decision wasn’t borne f
rom a terrible childhood or mother issues. She simply didn’t want children. She didn’t feel the tug. She didn’t want to vacuum Goldfish crumbs and drive carpools and yell about washing hands after using the bathroom, and Cleo thought that was terrific. Not because Cleo didn’t love being Lucas’s mom—she did—but because Cleo thought that every woman should do exactly whatever the hell she wanted. (Which, she realized, should make her reconsider how judgy she was about MaryAnne’s country club presidency aspirations.)

  “Text Emily Godwin. She’ll cut up oranges,” Gaby said.

  “I like Emily; don’t shit on her. She’s saved me a million times.”

  Gaby nodded, a small concession that she was being petty. “You’re right. Sorry.” She plopped a sugar cube into her mug. Cleo’s house was Gaby’s house. “I’ve booked us on noon flights to Seattle.” She checked the time on the microwave. “So we need to leave here in about an hour. Give or take.”

  “You’ve what?”

  “I checked the weather, and it’s beautiful in Seattle this weekend, and we’re gonna knock on MaryAnne Newman’s door and rattle the shit out of her, and by the time we leave, this turd is going to turn into a diamond.” She blew on the top of her coffee, as if what she was announcing were perfectly innocuous, like, Let’s go to the grocery store this afternoon and pick up some Cheerios.

  “I . . . I can’t just . . . I’m not going to Seattle today!” Cleo tugged her robe around her neck.

  “Au contraire. You can and you are. This story spun even bigger overnight. While you were catching up on your beauty rest, CNN led with it last hour.”

  “So it will go away! Like every other stupid story. I think Malcolm Johannsson is about to leave his wife for their nanny! That will bump it out of the cycle. He’s supposed to be a churchgoing, God-fearing devout Christian and is the minority whip! That should stay in the news for at least three days.”

  Gaby shook her head. “Do you want to have a shot at the nomination?”