The Rules of Regret

by Megan Squires

  “An attempt?” a boy in the row behind me said, cocking his head. His hair was fire-red and skin was so pale he could have been an albino. I’d never seen anyone look the way he did, but I could say the same for the girl with the intricate arm drawings, too. Pretty much everyone I grew up with had been preparatory school material with their crisp polos and pressed, pleated skirts. No one in here was wearing anything that required any kind of ironing at all. Though it should have been a relief—an excuse to relax and for once, just be comfortable—it felt more constricting than the blue and khaki uniforms we’d been required to wear back at our private high school.

  “An attempt. A suicide attempt,” Curtis clarified, his body bowing toward us slightly. “These aren’t your typical happy-go-lucky campers. They’re not here because mom and dad wanted a week of quiet away from the kids. They’re here because this is the last straw—the last resort.” He paced the length of the stage, his gaze deliberately meeting each counselor in attendance as he swept across the floor. “They won’t like being here, they won’t like the food, they won’t like you. Be prepared for that. If you are, it will make your job that much easier.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and clenched my eyes shut, attempting to draw in a cleansing breath, but the headache that pulsed just behind my eyes disallowed my focus to fall anywhere but on the rhythmic beating that vibrated my skull. What had I gotten myself into? The open position at Burger Bills sounded like a dream job right about now.

  “Hey. You okay?” I snapped my head up and fold my hands quickly into my lap. The dirty-blond haired boy sitting immediately to my left tilted his upper half closer, so close that he was almost touching me. “You alright, Darby?” His shoulder pressed against mine.

  It concerned me that everyone knew my name when the rest of the counselors still maintained their anonymity. I guessed that’s what I got for being late and for being so transparent and all. And I was sure it wouldn’t be the last time I forced myself to stand out. Nothing about this experience felt natural to me. I’d already achieved sore thumb status by sticking out so blatantly and I was only one hour in.

  I didn’t look directly at him, but centered my vision on Curtis’s shoes as they scraped across the wooden stage. He continued the pacing and I studied his strides like there would be some test on it in the very near future. “I’m fine, but thank you.” It was a nice gesture, I supposed, and I didn’t want him to think it went unnoticed.

  Blond-boy hugged his arms tighter to his chest and slunk down into his seat, clearly comfortable not only in his chair, but with everything Curtis was saying about the counselor experience as well. This couldn’t be his first time at camp. Maybe we could be friends. I could definitely use someone to show me the ropes.

  “Like I mentioned earlier,” Curtis continued, “Saturdays are your days. Your Sabbath, your day of rest. Spend it wisely because the remaining six belong to us. Are there any more questions?” He steepled his index fingers in front of his mouth and surveyed the room with a sweeping gaze. “Oh, and one more thing. You’ll be paired off. This will be your buddy, your right hand man. As you’ve probably already figured out, cell reception is not one of the luxuries we have here. Instead, you’ll be using these.” Curtis yanked on the clip of a walkie-talkie and released it from his belt. He waved it in the air like he was ringing a bell. “This is your line of communication, your lifeline. Don’t lose it—especially during your survival overnighter. Now, do you have any questions?”

  “Do we get to pick partners?” a girl with tight, ringlet-like corkscrews that could rival Shirley Temple’s asked hopefully. I couldn’t help but notice her eyes fall on the boy to my left. Maybe she had a thing for ratty looking guys with horrendous posture and weird close-sitting tendencies. To each his own.

  “You’ll be partnered with the person sitting next to you,” Curtis explained as he refastened the walkie-talkie to his Levi’s belt loop. “Maggie and Ran,” he continued, looking down at a couple in the front row, “since you are only with us for the first three weeks of camp, you’ll partner together.” They both nodded, though I was pretty sure they had some type of partnership already. I couldn’t help but notice the smiles and quiet laughter they’d exchanged throughout the orientation. Watching them interact made me homesick or withdrawl-y or whatever it actually was, and I longed for Lance, or maybe just the familiarity of our daily routine. I was grateful this new couple would only be here a portion of the time, because I didn’t think I could survive six weeks without insane amounts of jealousy turning me green and distracting my focus and my attention.

  Curtis stepped down from the low platform and began weaving through the three rows of rickety aluminum chairs, pairing off counselors as he went. He stopped in front of me and then looked to the boy at my side. “Tor and Darby, you’ll be a team.”

  Tor. Why did that sound familiar?

  The boy dipped his right shoulder and angled his head back. “Howdy partner,” he said, extending a hand toward me. It was gloved in shabby gray yarn and the tops of all the fingers had been haphazardly cut off so they unraveled at the edges. I took hold of his hand, squinting to recollect where I’d heard that name before.

  “Tor?” I asked, lifting my brow. “Torin Westbrook?”

  “In the flesh,” he smiled, two dimples piercing his unusually pink cheeks that looked as though he’d been out skiing on a sunny day without the protection of sunscreen. His lips matched their rosy color, like if he were a girl, he would have intentionally done his makeup in a way to make them like this. Aside from that, nothing about him was feminine at all. No, he was quite literally a rugged bundle of tattered clothing, broad shoulders, and long, shaggy hair.

  “Nice to put a face to the emails, Darby.” He smiled and revealed a sliver of a gap between his upper teeth. If mine had been that small and moderately charming like his, I probably would have opted out of that embarrassing year of braces as a seventeen-year-old. It was funny how what might be considered an imperfection to some people, could look absolutely perfect when it was on the right person. “You’ll be happy to know we have an abundance of Lucky Charms on hand at the dining hall with your name on them.”

  “Oh.” I smiled, chuckling slightly. I tugged my hand from his grip, but Torin’s still hovered in the space between us. I thought about swatting it away because having it suspended there made me nervous, but just laced my own fingers together instead. “Just because I’m Irish doesn’t mean I like Lucky Charms.”

  His green eyes grew into silver dollars like I just admitted to committing some egregious crime. “But they’re magically delicious!” He laughed again and tugged on the drawstrings to his worn sweatshirt, pulling it back and forth through the hood. His jeans had holes at the knees and he wore shoes identical to his mom’s, which would be endearing if he were four, but he wasn’t four, so it just seemed a little silly. “Do you have any questions about anything my dad covered?” Torin lifted his chin toward the stage as if to recall the past hours’ worth of instructions in one swift motion.

  “I have a lot of questions. The first one being: what on earth am I doing here?”

  “Well,” Torin said, looking down at his nails rather than at me. He had the aloof, indifferent act down pat. “My first guess is you needed the money. Judging from your email, I bet you have plans to spend that money on the flight to visit your boyfriend.” He ran the pad of his thumb over his nail bed. “The second guess is that you subconsciously want a challenge. And you’ll definitely find that here.”

  “One out of two isn’t so bad,” I said, shrugging. “Unless you count it percentage-wise, and then in that case you get 50%. Which is an F. Which is honestly as bad as it gets. So it’s actually pretty bad.” The rest of the paired-up counselors started to filter out the door, but Torin didn’t look like he had plans to go anywhere the way he was slouched down into his seat. He looked quite at home.

  “I’ve never been too good in school,” he laughed, suddenly bolting upright with h
is palms pressed to his thighs. “So. Want a tour?”

  “You know this place pretty well, I gather?” I shadowed Torin as he stood and walked out through the Rec Hall doors, his gloved hand catching the handle to hold it open for me. The sun beat down overhead, but there was still an unexpected chill in the mountain air, which seemed odd for June.

  “You could say that, considering I was born here.” He kicked a rock across the parking lot and it hopped like it was skimming the surface of a pond before it wedged against the base of a truck’s tire tread. Boys like Torin didn’t exist back at home and I didn’t quite know what to make of him, or how to even act around him. I tried to envision him decked out in the Ralph Lauren styled threads of the guys I usually hung around with, and the thought made me giggle silently to myself.

  “You were born here?” I said, hoping my words would mask the fact that I was laughing at him. “As in, this is your home?”

  Torin swiveled to face me, but continued walking, just backwards with long, intentional strides. I figured he really knew this place like the back of his hand if he was able to blindly guide his way around. “Yessiree. Mom and Dad started this camp back before I was born. Used to just be an adventure camp, but we changed the focus seven years ago after my older brother committed suicide.”

  I blanched. Any other comments that were waiting to fall out of my mouth hung back in my throat. I swallowed them down quickly, tasting the bitterness of each syllable. That was a lot of disclosure from someone I’d only known five minutes. All he knew about me was that I might like Lucky Charms, which I actually didn’t, so he really didn’t know anything at all. But I suddenly knew he had a dead brother. I thought about opening up to him a bit, but decided against it, still too stunned to really speak.

  Torin picked up on my hesitation and smiled cautiously.

  “Don’t feel bad,” he said, continuing his backward movement. “Reinventing the camp was a huge part in their healing process. I can’t even begin to tell you how many lives it’s probably helped.” He ran his gloved fingers through the length of his blond hair. It was that awkward stage where it looked like he was due for a haircut by the way it curled around his ears and hung on his neck, but judging from the rest of his overly-casual look, I guessed this was the way he liked it. I actually kind of liked it, too. “We get dozens of letters every year from campers and parents that say Quarry Summit saved them. Feels like we’re using Randy’s death for good, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I said, my breathing still unsteady. Maybe it was the altitude. Or the withdrawals. “I’m so sorry, Torin. I honestly had no idea.”

  He winked, which caught me completely off-guard. Not necessarily the winking part, but the part where it made my stomach flip-flop. I hadn’t been ready for that type of visceral reaction. “You should have done your research, fancy pants Ivy Leaguer. It’s in our mission statement.”

  “The term Ivy League refers to an athletic conference, not academics. Stanford’s a Pac-12 school.”

  “Gotcha. I thought it meant something else,” he said, thumbing his chin in the slight little divot that made it a little like a butt chin, but much cuter than the ones I’d seen before. “I do not think it means what you think it means,” Torin recited in a strange, foreign accent. I gave him a puzzled look and he lifted his hands in the air as he shook his head dubiously. “Princess Bride?” He tilted toward me, awaiting my reply. I offered him a blank stare as my only response because that was all I had. “Inigo Montoya? You killed my father? Prepare to die?” I shook my head, totally clueless, and you would have thought I’d just admitted to not knowing the Pledge of Allegiance. Apparently this Inigo fella ranked pretty high in the necessary repertoire of common knowledge.

  Torin smirked wryly. “So I’m the one that grew up on a secluded mountaintop, but you’re the one that sounds like you were completely robbed of your childhood.”

  “In more ways than you know.” Wow. That was totally cryptic, so I added, “I was only robbed because we had eight childhoods going on at once. Mine just got thrown into the mix. Kinda like trying to watch eight TV shows on eight different TVs at once—each story blends with the other and it all just becomes a cacophony of chaos.”

  Torin held back to wait for me to walk the few feet to catch up with him and then he resumed his pace at my side, facing forward this time. I wasn’t sure where we were going, but I followed. “You’re one of eight? That’s crazy.” His eyes were wide. “And you seem a little crazy, too, you know that? Attending such a prestigious school, but not knowing the entire script of Princess Bride? Total crazy status.”

  We rounded a turn and headed down the incline past the cabins that dotted the hillside. A thick line of trees skirted the structures, and I could see wires that hooked between each of them like tightropes in the sky. “It’s only seven now.” I kept my eyes held to the ground. “Only seven kids in my family, I mean.”

  He halted for a moment, then continued once he realized I was still moving forward. “That something you want to talk about?” The sensitivity in his tone was alarmingly comforting, and though he’d just admitted to losing a sibling, I didn’t want to talk, so I just said, “Nope,” and then he said, “Okay,” without even missing a beat, like he could completely read my social cues. “But it does sound like fun,” he added, “having all those siblings around.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Trust me, it’s more fun in theory than in reality.”

  “Okay,” Torin said, nodding. His endearingly disheveled hair bounced along his ears. “I can do that.”

  “Do what?” I followed at his side, and when the trees opened up into a small clearing, I lifted my gaze to meet his.

  “Trust you.” He pointed a finger above us toward the rope ladders, zip lines, and netting strung in the canopy of trees. “Because that’s the theme of our first exercise.” Torin bent down to snatch two helmets off the forest floor. He passed one to me, and then gathered the black harnesses that rested on a nearby tree stump, their straps and buckles tangled together. “You ready to put all your trust in me, those ropes, and this carabineer, Darby?”

  My face went white, not that I could see it, but I could feel it. I could feel all of the blood literally rush away from my head, leaving behind a ghostly pallor of pale flesh like Albino Boy’s back in the Rec Hall. What had I signed up for? I choked down the bile that crept up my throat.

  “I’ll take your lack of an appropriate response as a yes,” Torin said as he fitted the helmet onto my head.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Please don’t do that again.” Torin scrunched up his face, entirely disgusted. He shuddered like he just witnessed something truly revolting and a shiver ran through him head-to-toe.

  I stared down the length of the tree at my vomit that puddled at its base.

  “I’ll try not to,” I groaned, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “But no promises. I think I have an unusually responsive gag reflex.”

  The trees swayed at my periphery and I clutched on tighter to the bark, splinters wedging under my nails. I’d always considered myself environmentally conscious, but the term tree hugger was much more fitting in this moment. I didn’t think the Jaws of Life would be able to pry my grip from this thousand-year-old redwood. I was pretty sure the tree might have just gotten to second base with me.

  “You’re not going to fall,” Torin assured from his perch on a two-foot by two-foot platform nailed to the tree opposite me. Two thick wires connected us, one about six feet above the other. “See?”

  He leapt off the wooden base and a scream burst out of me, burning my already raw throat. My blood-curdling wail bounced off the surrounding trees like a game of pinball. Torin chuckled as he dangled by his harness, swinging back and forth as though he was on a child’s playground equipment rather than suspended one hundred feet in the air.

  “See?” he said again. “This will catch you. You can trust that.”

  Though he was by no means a body builder—I was certain L
ance could bench press double what Torin could—he surprised me with his upper body strength as he pulled himself back up to the platform with just the use of his arms as he glided up the wire hand-over-hand.

  “Plus,” he continued on, ignoring the fact that I wasn’t looking at him and had now pinched my eyes completely shut. “You need to be able to do this if you expect our campers to do it.”

  “I don’t think I actually expect them to do it. This is pretty terrifying, you know,” I called out to him.

  “Well that’s just great, Darby.” I could hear the sarcastic quality in his voice and assumed he was rolling his eyes, because that’s what you did when you took that tone with someone. “If that’s the case, then you’ll be just like everyone else in their lives. Way to be the change.”

  “What’s that mean?” I questioned, peering out of just my right eye like a pirate, which was fitting since he was sort of asking me to walk the plank. I almost wanted to tack on an ‘Arrggg,’ at the end of my question, but that would make me a dork. Torin already thought I was crazy. I wasn’t sure I wanted dork status to make the cut as well.

  “I mean if you don’t expect anything from your campers, then that’s what you’ll get—nothing. And that’s what they’re used to giving, so you’ll make their job very easy.”

  “I told you I wasn’t cut out for this,” I retaliated, both frustrated with myself and Torin, but mostly with Lance who left me to fend for myself for six weeks. Being tethered to a tree in the Trinity Alps Wilderness was not my idea of the perfect start to summer. I could almost taste the Cheetos on the tip of my tongue and longed for the boring, uneventful routine Sonja and I had originally planned for our break. I even missed the beige SW7036 hue that coated our walls.

  “It’s about overcoming,” Torin said, his hand still gloved and outstretched my direction. If he thought I was going to grab ahold of it, he was crazy and I’d already claimed that title. Though it did seem like it took a fair amount of crazy to work here. Why couldn’t I have signed up for a program that involved logic and reason? I was good at those things. I would even settle for science camp over this. Nerd goggles and test tubes were much more my speed.