Regret List Read Online Free

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