Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Still, in adulthood, Georgie tried. She really did.

  Georgie: R U in Seattle?? Saw the video. I shld come help.

  After all the years of teenage and young adult turmoil, after dropping out of the UW and relocating to LA and enrolling in UCLA (and clearing her five-year probation from her weed arrest), Georgie had made a name for herself as a guru / life coach / therapist to the stars. She sold crystals and essential oils and, last Cleo had heard, was in talks to launch a tunic clothing line. (Georgie was always in tunics.) From time to time, she’d text Cleo with advice on how to de-stress with deep breathing or why she couldn’t and shouldn’t burn the figurative wick at both ends. Cleo always found it at least a little amusing that her sister was famous for doling out wisdom, but maybe Georgie had learned a thing or two on her rockier path to adulthood, and for that, Georgie had earned Cleo’s respect, even if the younger sister would never, ever believe in the healing power of crystals.

  Cleo typed a reply.

  Cleo: It’s ok. Leaving tomorrow. Gaby is on top of it.

  Georgie wrote back immediately. She’d be awake this early on a Sunday because her twins, like Lucas, played club soccer—were being recruited for college scholarships—and Cleo was certain Georgie had them up juicing or stretching with her personal trainer or in their private home gym. (Cleo wasn’t being critical. No one got anywhere in this world without greasing their elbows and leaning in to the work.)

  Georgie: Not ok. It’s a mess online. Have u not seen? Are u taking care of urself?

  Actually, Cleo hadn’t seen. Because she really didn’t want to look. But she also really didn’t want to admit that to Georgie, who would take it for weakness, because, well, it was.

  Cleo: Gotta run, Lucas wants to hit the gym. Will circle back. Promise.

  Cleo watched as the ominous three dots appeared on her screen, then disappeared.

  They both likely knew that Cleo would not circle back, nor did she really promise. Were unkept promises better or worse between sisters? Cleo didn’t know. She knew only that her family now was Lucas and, to a certain extent, Gaby. And it probably wasn’t what she always wanted for herself, but she was adult enough to know that almost no one got exactly what she wanted for herself. You got what you got, and you could work hard, really, really hard, and hopefully shift the tides or change your circumstances, but that usually didn’t reframe your foundation. If it did, you were one of the lucky ones—the exception, not the rule.

  Plenty of people had it far worse than she did.

  Unlike Georgie, Gaby was pleased with the overnight results from the YouTube upload.

  “Look.” She thrust her phone in Cleo’s face while they were in the back seat of an Uber, on the way to Cleo’s old neighborhood.

  Cleo didn’t know what she was looking at and frowned.

  “The tide has shifted. At least half of these comments—” Gaby paused and scrolled lower. “At least sixty percent of these comments think MaryAnne was in the wrong.”

  “Yeah,” Lucas said. “But I’m looking at her Facebook page, and no offense, Mom, but the people who actually know you do not seem on board.” He paused. “Wow, like, I actually had to go on Facebook. Don’t tell anyone.”

  “Fuck those people you know,” Gaby said. Then: “Sorry, Lucas. Pretend you didn’t hear that.”

  “I’m fourteen, Gaby; we all say ‘fuck.’”

  Cleo groaned. “Please, God, is it too much to ask for you not to swear . . . like that . . . in front of me?”

  They both swiveled their necks toward her, unsure to whom she was speaking.

  “You, Lucas, you. Gaby is my chief of staff, so it’s OK if she says . . . ‘the f word’ to me.”

  “Mom, just say ‘fuck.’”

  “Oh my God!” Cleo actually slapped her palm against her forehead.

  “Oh, by the way, I think I’m gonna get a coffee with Esme later.”

  This time both Gaby and Cleo swung their faces toward him.

  “You’re what?” Cleo said. “And since when do you drink coffee?”

  “I don’t.” He shrugged. “But everyone in Seattle does. I think. I mean, I don’t know. Would you rather I said I was going to meet her for a beer?”

  Cleo groaned again, this time louder, and the Uber driver, perhaps thinking she was ill, said, “You OK? Should I pull over?”

  “Sorry, sir, I’m fine. Just having a bit of a midlife crisis.”

  “You’re that senator, right?” His eyes moved to Cleo in his rearview mirror.

  Cleo swallowed. She didn’t realize that she was recognizable outside the Beltway. Hell, even there, half the time she was mistaken for someone’s secretary, someone’s mother (she was someone’s mother, obviously, but as, like, anyone’s mother, since she had breasts and a uterus), or someone else ancillary who hadn’t earned her keep or hadn’t merited the respect male senators received. (It would be untrue to say the respect that older female senators received, since they still didn’t receive as much respect as the men, even when the men were idiots or introduced far less legislation than the women.) Which, even if she were merely someone’s mother or secretary or bookkeeper or just restocked the tampon machine in the lower-level bathroom of the Capitol, did it really matter? Was it too much to ask for a little respect regardless?

  “It was the YouTube video, wasn’t it?” Gaby interrupted, leaning forward to glean the opinion of a man who was not one of Cleo’s constituents.

  “No, ma’am.” He paused, easing the sedan to a stop at a light. “Well, I did see that this morning, but I read that article. By your friend. Saw it on my Facebook three times.”

  “What did you think?” Gaby pressed. “You can tell us. This is a perfect random poll of an unbiased person.”

  “You don’t know if he’s unbiased,” Lucas said. “Maybe he thinks all women belong in the kitchen. Maybe he hates his mom. Maybe he chops up women and leaves them in a freezer.”

  Cleo wasn’t sure whether she was raising a feminist or a serial killer.

  “What?” Lucas said upon seeing her face. “If you were to, like, actually poll him, you’d find out where he stands before you ran his answers.”

  Gaby smiled widely. “I think I’d like to hire you.”

  “Hard pass.” Lucas sank back into his seat and resumed looking bored.

  From the front, the driver said, “No, I like women, and I think they’re a hell of a lot smarter than men, that’s for sure. But to answer your question, I thought your friend was pretty petty for writing that article. But then I thought you were pretty petty for being a bad friend in the first place.”

  Cleo glanced at Lucas. She didn’t want him thinking she was a bad friend, even if it were years ago, even if it were true. He met her eyes, offered a little shake of his head. They understood each other, the two of them. He was OK. He knew who she was now, and he was letting her off the hook for MaryAnne Newman. Cleo reached over, squeezed his arm.

  It was nice that someone was, even if it were just a small kindness between the two of them, not on display for the world to see.

  Cleo’s old house had been repainted, and the new owners had added on a floor to only the right side, along with new shingles. So basically it looked nothing like her old house and more like a house that had undergone extensive plastic surgery. This made Cleo think again of her sister, who had not had extensive plastic surgery but many of her clients had. Cleo took a step back from the curb and surveyed the remodel. They probably should have just knocked it down and started over. Her mother would have found its asymmetry displeasing to her eye, and her father would have called it a structural disaster. It felt strange that both she and Georgie had grown up here, with such wildly different childhoods, with such wildly different experiences. She hadn’t been the type of kid who wished she had another sibling—Cleo’s parents were company enough for her, though it occurred to her now, standing on the sidewalk with her head cocked, that maybe if she’d had someone closer to her age within her house, she wou
ldn’t have felt so lonely, that she wouldn’t have craved her parents’ approval and attention and praise. Cleo’s loneliness, especially once she moved in with her grandmother, fed her, to be sure—to be better, to stand taller, to pull more attention and eyes toward her. But success could never be a permanent plug for emptiness.

  “Do you want to ring the bell?” Gaby asked.

  Cleo shook her head. “I just . . .”

  She trailed off. She didn’t know exactly what she thought. She couldn’t impart to Lucas the whole of her childhood by visiting her old home. That it was happy because her mother was warm and wore paint-speckled clothing most days, and her father was pretty brilliant and passed on his love of all things brainy, and yet it was also isolating because she was too smart for a lot of the other kids and also not always friendly, as if her mother’s kindness never penetrated and her father’s intelligence overcorrected. But MaryAnne got her; they, like she and Lucas, were peas in a pod for a long time—swapping books that were probably too grown-up for them, like Carrie and 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, but in those days, parents didn’t care about age-appropriateness like they did now, and listening to music that Cleo liked because MaryAnne liked it, not because she had developed any musical tastes of her own. (MaryAnne’s older brother was just obsessed with Pearl Jam and Nirvana, so basically that.)

  It wasn’t just the two of them either; that wouldn’t be fair. Cleo couldn’t go on the campaign trail and say, like, “I had no friends, which drove me to where I am today.” She did. She and MaryAnne both had friends beyond each other. They had the debate team and the kids on the school paper and in all the other clubs that they joined (though none of those kids had leaped to her defense in MaryAnne’s Facebook post). And Cleo played tennis, and her senior year was elected captain, though this was after her parents had died and she never knew if it was that people liked her or pitied her. She put it on her college applications regardless, so that was good. But all these people, all her friends, well, they weren’t much different from Georgie. They occupied a space in her life, but they didn’t take up space, which were two very different things.

  She had a boyfriend her junior year, Matty Adderly. He’d also applied for the internship at the mayor’s office, but Cleo hadn’t sabotaged him. She knew he wouldn’t get it anyway. He was sweet and just the right amount of geeky to be completely devoted to her, but not smart enough to make her want to push it into a forever thing or that she worried he’d beat her out for the job. He also didn’t come from connected parents (his dad was an accountant; his mom stayed at home), unlike MaryAnne’s blue-blood stock who could call in favors and give her a leg up above the rest of them.

  After Cleo’s parents’ accident, Matty tried to be there for her at every turn. Now Cleo could stand on the curb of her old street and stare at her old house and consider this kindness, how he wanted to bring her tea and help her move to her grandmother’s and offered to take notes in her classes when she had to miss school, but back then she felt like he was smothering her. She was used to the unadorned, naked affection of her parents, but she hadn’t adjusted—maybe still hadn’t really—to that from anyone else. Or perhaps it was that she didn’t want it from anyone else. If it couldn’t be her parents, maybe it should have been no one.

  She dumped him in a study hall about three and a half weeks after the funeral. He was just too much. She didn’t want to be rescued. She was wise enough to see this in herself even at seventeen.

  From the sidewalk in front of her old home, she stuffed her hands into her pockets and turned to Lucas.

  “Do me a favor—look up Matty Adderly on Facebook. See if he’s said anything about me.” Cleo was surprised to feel something crest inside her, the notion that she might care if he had.

  Lucas tapped away on his phone.

  “Oh, by the way, I’m logged in as you.” He glanced up. “I don’t have an account, obviously. I don’t think anyone under thirty is on Facebook.” He said thirty as if it were a dirtier word than fuck, and Cleo felt very, very old.

  “You shouldn’t be on Facebook in the first place,” Gaby said to Cleo. “They’ll mine everything you ever post, every page you ever search.”

  “I’m not really on there. It’s a dummy account. For things like this.”

  “Huh,” Lucas said. “I found him. Who is he?”

  “I . . .” Cleo slid her sunglasses on. The sun had cut through the clouds, and in an instant Seattle was the crystal-clear version of a postcard you’d mail to relatives back east. “He was my boyfriend for a while. Here.”

  Lucas looked up, surprised, eyebrows raised.

  “What? You think your mom wasn’t hot enough to have a boyfriend?” Gaby said.

  “Gaby . . . ,” Cleo interjected.

  “I’ve been told repeatedly by both the media and my teachers that I wasn’t allowed to judge girls on their looks,” Lucas said. “‘Hot’ hadn’t entered my brain.”

  “Hmm,” Gaby said.

  “Fine, ‘hot’ does enter my brain because I’m fourteen and not blind. What do you want from me?” He paused. “But he wasn’t . . . ?” He trailed off, the words forming a question.

  Cleo understood his implication. He wasn’t his dad. She knew she could give him his name, that with the internet, Lucas could probably track him down before she was done spelling it (though it was not a complicated name that required spelling), but she wasn’t up for that kind of trauma, and she didn’t want her son to be up for it either. Single parenthood was already so complicated. Dragging her past into it would only make it messier. She supposed that she had MaryAnne Newman to thank for Lucas’s curiosity. Curiosity that felt like it would lead only to heartbreak. Couldn’t Cleo want to protect him from that? She didn’t know if she was doing it right, handling it right, but she just wanted to try to protect him. That didn’t seem like it was the wrong thing.

  “No, love, not him. I haven’t seen Matty since graduation.”

  Lucas nodded, tapped on something on his phone. “Whatever. I just . . . I can’t imagine you with a boyfriend.”

  “Why not?” Cleo yelped. She didn’t want to remain single forever. Or maybe she did. She didn’t necessarily want to get married, but a little companionship and a steady date to the movies and perhaps the hot new Italian joint might be nice. If Gaby could make eyes at Oliver Patel and get a text an hour later, why shouldn’t Cleo?

  Lucas looked at her plainly, with no judgment. “Because for fourteen years, you never have.”

  “Well, you didn’t get here by immaculate conception,” Gaby said, just before Cleo could explain the difficulties of dating as a single parent and senator.

  “You’re disgusting,” Lucas retorted, then pulled up Matty’s profile.

  It turned out that Matty Adderly was a mad programmer for Microsoft and had figured out Cleo’s thinly disguised alias on Facebook and already sent her a friend request and a message. In fact, he’d done it months ago, long before MaryAnne Newman ever blew this shit up.

  Cleo, Lucas, and Gaby began their long ascent up the hill to Pagliacci’s, which, in Cleo’s memory, served the best slice of pizza she ever had. It was only eleven, but no one had eaten much of a breakfast, so a pizza brunch on a Sunday it was. Lucas read Matty’s note aloud.

  Cleo-

  I hope you don’t mind my reaching out. It has been twenty years, but I see you in the news all the time—and this morning I went down the rabbit hole of finding you on socials.

  (Cleo interrupted Lucas here and said, “‘Socials’? Who says that?”

  To which Lucas replied, “Everyone, Mom, everyone says that.”

  And Gaby added, “Clee, I think you’re already doing it.”

  And Cleo said, “Doing what?”

  And Gaby replied, “That thing you do where you don’t give people a chance before they’ve had any chances in the first place.”

  So Cleo stopped talking.)

  Anyway, I’m still living in Seattle, which can be a little claustropho
bic, but I don’t really see anyone from school much, so it’s less horrible than you’d think. (I don’t actually think it’s horrible, but I’m sure you do.) ☺

  (Cleo couldn’t help herself and interjected again. “Did he actually use an emoji?”

  “Yes, the smiley face with blushing cheeks,” Lucas said.

  “Yikes,” Cleo replied.

  “Give me a break—you sent me that one last week about scoring a goal in my game,” Lucas said. And then Cleo really did shut up because maybe she was judging Matty Adderly by standards to which she wouldn’t want to be judged either.)