Interim(10)

“Hello?”

Regan shook her head. “Sorry. Thinking.”

“About?”

“How amazing you are,” Regan replied.

“Damn right.”

Regan glimpsed a photo on her nightstand and smiled. “Hey, remember when we had our moms sew those matching outfits for us? Now that was amazing.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me,” Casey groaned. “And get rid of that picture already!”

“Are you insane? I will never get rid of it,” she replied, fingering the worn frame, and then added softly, “We were the coolest.”

“No, we weren’t,” Casey countered. “And I’m so glad I’m not that girl anymore.”

Regan shrugged. “I don’t know. I liked her.”

Casey was quiet.

“Remember our club?” Regan asked.

The picture instantly transported her to seventh grade, and suddenly she craved the memories.

“Remember? You had to be a straight A student?”

“Oh, God.”

“You and Chelsea wanted to be president. You actually went to the office to fight it out over your GPAs. We didn’t even have GPAs in middle school.” Regan laughed. “I still don’t understand how you two—”

“I don’t wanna talk about this,” Casey said abruptly.

“Hmm, I wonder whatever happened to that girl.”

“I said I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Oh.”

Awkward silence.

“I . . . I think she moved to Wyoming or something,” Casey said finally.

“Oh.”

More awkward silence.

“So, do you and Brandon have big plans for your birthday?”

“Um, it’s not for, like, six weeks,” Regan said. She was loathe to move on to this topic and considered lying about needing to help with dinner to get off the phone.

“Yeah, and I would have been planning months ago. It’s your eighteenth birthday!” Casey squealed.

Regan listened as Casey rattled off party suggestions. She couldn’t care less, and was distracted thinking back to Ethan’s cheating episode. Brandon had an opinion on it.

“Dudes do stuff like that,” he said to her, then seeing her face fall, followed up with an exception. “Not that I ever would. I mean, I’m totally committed to you, Regan. You know that.”

She didn’t think Brandon had ever cheated. She would know. But she didn’t think he was committed to her. She thought he was committed to changing her. She recognized it last year. And it altered her perspective. It forced her to take notice of her gilded personality—the one she wore on her heart and face and in the words she spoke. It was pretty and shiny on the outside, but it lacked all substance underneath.

***

He sat on his bed after school and opened the notebook—a journal he kept diligently for the past three years. It was his only confidant. The spiral notebook was one of those really thick ones—the kind used for multiple subjects. He tore out the dividers so the pages flowed seamlessly. There was no need to categorize his life stages with dividers because he had none. Every day was the same since sixth grade. Well, most of them.

This journal entry was an exception—a day remarkably different from all the rest. The vision of Regan at her locker this morning compelled him to revisit it. She looked like sixth grade Regan, and he wanted to remember her.

He took a breath. And read.

The divorce happened in fifth grade. My dad’s accident followed soon after. In sixth grade I went to school with the ugliest gash on my face. My father had punched me, split my eye wide open—that flimsy, thin skin that hugs the outside edge of the eyeball. He got me good—a blood-red crescent that started under my brow, curved around my outer eye, and stopped right on top of my cheekbone. It was a nasty wound that needed stitches. But he didn’t take me to the doctor. He did help me bandage it, though—a mess of gauze and tape that looked like the work of two five-year-olds. He told me to lie. That was the first time. I’d lie for my father throughout the next five years.

It was a baseball injury. And I thought it would impress the kids at school. Well, at first it did. But as the weeks and months passed, the wound healed into a Halloween-costume scar: thick and purple. Ghastly. Like a small alien creature suctioned onto my face and decided to stay permanently. I looked like a little monster, and when something upset me, the scar would pulse against the side of my face—my heart pounding in that silvery, purple lump—reminding me of my weakness and ugliness.