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The Regret List
Jessica Billings
Published by Jessica Billings at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Jessica Billings
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Chapter 1
I think the worst emotions in the world are the ones without opposites. I mean, sure, worry is bad, but eventually it’s alleviated with relief. Same thing with sadness or anger. Eventually you can be cheered up again. No, the bad ones are things like guilt and embarrassment. Those are the ones without opposites, the ones that stick with you. I still cringe when I think back to my most embarrassing moments. Doesn’t everyone? But guilt, I think that’s the worst. Because once you regret something, you dwell on it. And once you dwell on something, there’s no reprieve. At least, that’s the way it is for me.
My Top 5 Regrets:
Having no good memories of my dad
Agreeing to go out with Jason
Ignoring all the signs that something was really, really wrong
Destroying the most important thing I ever created
Pretty much the entirety of my ninth grade year
I’ll start with number 1. It’s as good a place to start as any. Now, it’s not that my dad was a bad guy. I’m not saying he was a good guy, but he wasn’t all bad. From the little I’ve heard from my grandparents, he had his good moments and loved me like crazy. I don’t know why I can’t remember any of that. I do have early memories. I even have memories where my dad should be, like when we packed up one morning and moved across the country with barely an hour’s notice. I can see us putting boxes in the car, I remember climbing up on a pile of left-behind chairs to scribble my name on the ceiling of my suddenly empty room, and I can still hear the massive crash of the chairs as they toppled and sent me flailing to the floor.
I know my dad was there and the one time I brought up the incident, my mom swore he was the first one to find me sobbing on the floor with a pencil still clutched in my hand, but I can’t picture him. I can’t even remember a human-shaped blob where he would have been, like how I sometimes remember people in my dreams. It’s as if all my memories have carefully snipped him out, leaving jagged gaps of time that I just can’t fill in. Well, I guess that’s not totally true. The ones I really want to forget, the most recent ones, are locked in my mind with an intense clarity. These memories start in second grade and are filled with sadness - the kind of sadness that grips at your throat and forces you to your knees if you think about it too long.
So, I’ll start in second grade. That’s where my story really begins. I was seven years old and living in the suburbs of Chicago. This was the day my family really started to unravel, although I didn’t know it yet. One Saturday morning I was lying in bed, wearing my headphones and slowly turning the volume up louder and louder. My parents were upset again. The commotion had woken me up that morning, with my mom pounding on the bathroom door, threatening to call 911 if my dad didn’t come out. I heard her dialing the phone, but it was longer than three numbers, so I slipped my headphones over my ears and closed my eyes to ride out the storm.
Halfway through the second track, the headphones were suddenly ripped off my head and I glared up at my mom. She was standing there, wordlessly holding out my backpack and for a moment, I almost laughed, ready to tell her that it was the weekend, not a school day. But then I saw her expression and knew it wasn’t a day for laughing. “Pack up. We’re leaving,” she said.
This is where my memories start to get cut short. I don’t remember the realization that we weren’t coming back, that this wasn’t just a little day trip. We were moving to my grandparents’ house in the high desert of Oregon: a remote little town that was incredibly dry, dusty, and boring. We had vacationed there before and I hated it. I remember my mom talking in a fake-happy voice though, saying that she was so excited to live closer to her parents, that she needed their support with all that we were going through.
I didn’t really understand what we were going through, though. I just knew my room was suddenly empty and I had to make a mark somehow, to let people know that this was my room. That’s why I climbed up to the ceiling and wrote my name in tiny letters, before the chairs slipped and I came tumbling down. I know we had a long car trip after that with our most important possessions packed in the car with us and barely enough room for me to squeeze into the back seat.
I’ve seen pictures of some of the towns we passed through, but I don’t remember any of it. I will say this, though – in all the pictures of that trip, the scenery changes, but my family looks exactly the same. My dad has these creepy, dead eyes and no expression on his face, while my mom is wearing a ridiculous, cheesy smile. I can’t see my expression in the pictures. In every picture, I’m facing away from the camera, looking back at where we came from.
My next memory is my first day of school in a weird town, where none of the trees had leaves, only needles, and there was an inescapable layer of dirt on absolutely everything. The first few weeks, I took two or three showers every day, until I gave up and realized I was fighting a losing battle. Only when I accepted defeat did I begin to see the beauty of that strange desert.
On my first day of second grade in a new school, I was painfully desperate not to make any mistakes. I think that was even more important than making friends. I just didn’t want to stand out as a weirdo. That’s why, when we formed two lines to go to the library, I quietly took my place near the back, hoping no one would notice me. I stood behind one of the boys, a small brown-haired, fierce looking kid who stood squarely in a way that made up for his little height. I prayed no one would look at me or pay me any attention, so my heart sank when he turned around and gave me a withering look when I stepped in behind him.
“You’re in the boat’s line,” he said, his words slurring together in a strange way that made him hard to understand. I stared at him in confusion, looking around at the other kids for help. But they all turned their backs, unwilling to help the strange, angry boy and me, a skinny new girl in overalls with red hair that stuck out at funny angles. “You’re in the boat’s line!” he said again, gesturing around us.
I began to wonder what was taking the teacher so long, why we hadn’t started moving. I stood on my tiptoes looking for her, but saw she was chatting with one of the other teachers in the hallway. I turned my attention back to the boy. “The boat’s line?” I asked nervously.
His eyes narrowed and he turned away. “Never mind,” he grumbled. It was then that I noticed the hearing aid nestled behind his ear, partially hidden in his tousled hair. I recognized it immediately; my grandpa wore one as well.
“Just ignore it,” my mom told me the first time I asked what it was. “Your papa’s getting old and his ears don’t work so well anymore. That little machine makes sounds louder so he can hear them. It’s just like how you have to wear glasses to make your eyes see better.” She tapped my glasses, pushing them back up on my nose. Now that I could understand. I can still remember the disbelief the first time I put on my glasses and could see my mom’s face from ten feet away, her features no longer mashed up into a blurry pale blob.
I wanted to understand this boy more than ever, because I understood his embarrassment. I was so proud and excited the first time I wore my glasses out in public. I could see, I could read letters off the signs as we drove around, I could see the expressions on people’s faces as they walked past. It wasn’t until my mom took me to a church picnic that I realized my glasses were not the desire of every small child who saw them. It was after my mom left me with a group of other kids my age that it happened. There was some caretaker there, being paid to look after us, but she was probably only in her early teens and paying more attention to a boy than us.
One of the bigger girls giggle
d when I walked up. “Hey nerd,” she said. I didn’t get it and pushed my glasses up on my nose, smiling at her in confusion. This only made her laugh harder and gained her the attention of a couple other kids. She reached out and snatched my glasses off my face. I had one of those dorky bands around the back to keep me from losing them, which caught on the back of my head and whipped my head forward, knocking me off balance for a second.
“Hey!” I protested, grabbing for them. But she must have been a couple years older, or absolutely enormous for her age, because she held them out of reach. The other kids roared with laughter as I leapt for them, tears building up in my eyes.
There were no clever insults, no blows exchanged, no witty retorts. There was just me and a girl. Me, realizing that my glasses were not such a precious gift – that it wasn’t a gift to be different. And it wasn’t some sort of life-changing moment or haunting reality, just a shift in my perception. The rest of the story isn’t horrifying. The girl eventually tired of the game, threw my glasses in the grass, and turned her attention to someone else. I cleaned off my glasses and stuck them in my pocket and started giving my mom a hard time every morning when she tried to get me to put them on. Eventually, I stopped fighting her, stopped taking them off when she wasn’t looking, and learned to accept it. But that desire to be special, to be different, was gone. And that’s why I wanted so badly to understand this boy, to relieve the tension. Of course, back then I didn’t think of it in those words. I just knew I wanted to be his friend.
I looked at the two lines as our teacher still chatted in the hallway. A girl stood next to me, pointedly ignoring my questioning look. I turned around. A boy stood behind me, making faces at another girl in the line beside us. The boat’s line. The boy’s line. I was in the boy’s line.
I tapped the irritated boy on the shoulder and waited for him to turn around, still glaring. “Thanks,” I said, sidestepping into the girl’s line. “I was in the boy’s line.” The glare on his face faded instantly and he nodded. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Asher,” he said, looking irritated again. Except it wasn’t irritation, I realize now. It was nervousness: the fear of not being understood.
“Asher,” I replied. “I’m Paige.”
He gave me a funny look and formed his hands to look like a book, then mimed turning a page. I giggled and nodded. Close enough. As we finally started into the hallway, our teacher turned to face us and held up two fingers in the shape of a V. I turned to Asher again and gave him a quizzical look. He turned his hand into a mouth. Blah blah blah, it yacked away, then he flashed it a V with his other hand and it shut its mouth. I got it instantly and mouthed a “thank you” to him. He brushed it away with a flip of the hand.
But even all that – his willingness to help and my determination to understand him – that was not how we became friends. Trusted classmates maybe, but not friends. Or maybe we were friends and I just didn’t realize it. Sure, I gave a silent kick under the desk to the ones who giggled when he was called on to answer a question, or a subtle shove to the ones who stuck their tongues out at him when he was called away to speech therapy every morning. But I would have done the same for any kid who was being picked on and he never acknowledged my silent support, nor did I expect him to. No, I don’t think we would have become real friends if the accident hadn’t happened.
Can you call it an accident? It wasn’t a fall down the stairs, a house fire, a mugging, nothing like that. But that simple word that conjures up fear and an anxiety that tightens the muscles of your stomach, it seems fitting in a way. No long explanation needed, no wondering which words to choose, no awkwardness. But I’m going to make you a promise now, one that I’m going to keep the entire time I tell you this story. I promise to tell you the truth of what happened, even if it’s harder, even if it makes me look bad (which it will sometimes), even if I don’t want to. So, this is what really happened:
We had been in Oregon for a couple months by then and had finally moved out of my grandparents’ house into our own apartment. One day at school, mid-November, the first snow began to fall from the skies. It went unnoticed at first until one of the fifth graders ran past our room, screaming that it had started snowing. Instantly, we were all up out of our seats, staring out the windows, ignoring our teacher’s pleas to regain our attention. We began checking to see if it was sticking to the dusty ground and if the clouds looked thick enough to keep dropping down the fluffy flakes.
It was at that moment, in all the commotion, that our principal stepped into the classroom. Asher, standing silently beside me, noticed him first and nudged my shoulder, gesturing with his head to get me to turn and look. He was speaking quietly to my teacher, their heads bowed close together. My heart leapt in fear as they glanced over and I realized they were talking about me. What had I done wrong? Did they find out about the pen I nicked from the kid who sat next to me? Was it the spelling test we had earlier that week? Then, when the two adults parted and our teacher walked in my direction, I realized with dread that it was none of those things. It was something my little seven-year-old mind couldn’t even imagine. I looked back over at Asher, but his attention had already returned to the snow, his back to my plight.
I felt my lower lip quiver before I had even been led out into the hall to be talked to in private. The principal stayed in the room to watch over the other kids. Once outside the door, I could hear the excitement in all the other classrooms, the teachers trying to continue the lessons while every head was turned toward the windows. My teacher knelt before me, taking my little hands in her own.
“Paige,” she said quietly, her own eyes full of tears, “Paige, you have to go home now. There’s been an accident.” See, I’m not the only one who prefers that word. From the sorrow in her eyes to the length of time she had spoken to the principal, I’m sure she knew more than that. But how do you tell a little kid what had really happened?
I was shaking by that point, but too scared to cry. “Who’s hurt?” I asked.
“Your dad,” she said softly. “Your mom will pick you up soon and she will tell you what happened, okay?” I nodded. “Remember you always have us at school, okay? Be brave, Paige.”
Brave. I heard that word so much in the next few days. “Oh Paige, you’re being so brave.” “Such a brave little girl.” Just because someone isn’t crying doesn’t mean they’re brave. Sometimes it means they’re too scared to cry, to do anything but brace themselves against the flurry of mourning. When my mom picked me up from school that day, she was already a mess. She couldn’t drive because she was crying so hard. Her mom, my grandma, was in the front seat, her fingers tightly gripping the steering wheel as she stiffly drove us to the hospital.
“Oh honey, oh Paige,” my mom gripped me tightly as I slid into the backseat next to her, “your daddy’s made a mistake. He’s all gone now, sweetie.” I remember staring out the window, watching the snow fluttering down around us. It seemed so dark to only be early afternoon. “We’re going to go say goodbye to him now, but you’ll have to be brave. He’s sleeping, but he can still hear you.”
She was talking so fast and yeah, I was only a little kid, but I knew she wasn’t telling me everything. And when I saw him, lying so still in a hospital bed, his chest unmoving, I knew he wasn’t “sleeping.” Why do parents use that word, anyway? Do they think it will make the sight of a dead body less frightening? Because trust me, it doesn’t. Dead is dead and using a different word doesn’t make it any less unnerving. Soon, I found out my mom was lying in another way: my dad knew exactly what he was doing. But I guess there are several definitions of the word “mistake.”
It was my grandpa who let that one slip. We stood there, in front of his dead body, not saying anything. My grandparents, my mom and I all stood there, just looking. The only sound was my mom’s sobbing. Finally, she stepped forward, slumping over him. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, just meaningless words of grief.
My grandma urged me forward.
“Go on now, Paige. Say your goodbyes.” I stepped forward and opened my mouth, but found I had nothing to say. I inspected his face closely, unsure if this really was my dad. It didn’t look like him. Maybe they were all confused.
My grandpa’s reaction confused me even further. “It’s for the best,” he turned away, his face angry. “At least it’s the last life he’ll take.” He stalked out of the room, but I heard him slump against the wall in the hallway, breathing hard.
My grandma put her hand on my mom’s shoulder. “Don’t blame yourself,” she whispered, although I heard every word. “You know you couldn’t have stopped this.”
In the next few days, I heard more. Family and friends filled our house, talking softly and offering gifts of food to my mom. My dad’s parents flew in from Chicago for the funeral, but didn’t say a word to my mom or me. It was the last time I ever saw them. Can you really blame them? From their view, my mom stole their only child away with absolutely no notice, no goodbyes, and a couple months later, they were on a flight to go to his funeral. I don’t think my mom had a good relationship with them, even before we moved.
The words “suicide” and “pills” echoed off our walls, a ceaseless whisper that I heard everywhere, although they always stopped talking when they saw me near. Instead, they offered me unwelcome hugs and kisses, telling me how very sorry they were. I absorbed everything I heard, not understanding most of it. Over the next few years, I worked out what had happened.
When I was only a couple years old, my dad was in a car accident. It wasn’t terrible and no one else was involved, but he hurt his back and was prescribed some kind of hardcore pain pills. However, the pain didn’t get better and there was nothing the doctors could do, except relieve it temporarily with chiropractors and pills.
Regret List Page 1
