None of the Regular Rules (3 page)

“Ooh,” Grace cooed. “He’s a
m
an of
m
ystery.”

I cleared my throat and said, “A
b
oy of
m
ystery. Remember, ‘man’ makes it sound like he’s a baldy.”

Ella snorted. “Maybe he is a baldy. Maybe he has a
beard
.”

“I doubt it,” I said, knowing my aunt would never have gone for a guy with a beard. She always got on my dad’s case for his fugly mustache, and she hated my grandpa’s goatee.

“So what do you think this is?” Ella asked. “Some kind of bucket list? A list of goals? Dares?”

I swallowed, my throat suddenly thick with tears that were suddenly just
there
. “Maybe.”

“Or secrets. Maybe they’re someone’s secrets? Things they’ve done, and they wrote them down?” Grace drummed the tips of her fingers together, excited about the prospect of being privy to secrets without having to pry. She wasn’t a big gossip herself, but
loved
when gossip accidentally fell in her lap.

“It’s Suzy’s list,” I said numbly. I stared at the list without seeing the details. “My aunt’s. She died in 2002.”

“Oh my God,” Grace said. “Of course it is.” Grace and Ella knew about Suzy. We were already friends when she’d died, and they’d come to the funeral, sitting quietly at the back of the church while I squeezed into the front with my extended family. They’d played a big part in me getting over the loss, but Suzy hadn’t been someone we talked about much since. I pretended I’d gotten over it—I thought I
had
gotten over it—but I suddenly wasn’t so sure.

“You okay?” Ella asked, her hand touching my knee.

“Yeah,” I said casually. “It’s just a little weird, you know?”

Ella nodded. I scanned the rest of the list, realizing a lot of the things on it sounded a little too familiar. Many of the things on the list were things I’d always wanted to do—things it seemed everyone else at our high school did—but that I hadn’t ever bothered to actually
do
. I was always disappointed that nothing ever changed in my life, but I never actually went to the effort to do anything about it.

“Let me see it,” Ella said, pulling the list onto her lap. She looked at me when she said, “It’s really sad, actually.”

I nodded. She’d hit on exactly what I’d been thinking. It seemed like these were all things Suzy had wanted to do in her senior year. But she hadn’t been able to finish. And the list had been lost and forgotten for all these years.

Ella and I looked at each other. “Nothing is crossed out,” I noted. “Do you think she just forgot about it, or do you think she didn’t get a chance to finish before the accident?” I was relieved when neither of my friends answered. I didn’t really want to think about the answer. And I was still pointedly ignoring the last thing on the list, since I knew she’d at least attempted it. I folded the list in half. “Anyway,” I continued, after a pause. “The important thing is that it’s Suzy’s list. She had a list of goals or dares or whatever, and this is it.” I held the folded paper in my lap.

“Do you guys have a list?” Ella finally asked, to break the silence. She looked from me to Grace. “Everyone has one, right?”

“You have a bunch of secret dares stored up inside?” Grace asked, crinkling her forehead. “Like what?”

“Like kissing Peter Martinson again,” I offered up, on Ella’s behalf.

“Yeah, I guess Peter counts. Other than that…I don’t know,” Ella said slowly. “There’s just stuff, pushed away in the back of my mind that I sort of always hope I’ll have the nerve to do. Like, I’ve always wished I could turn myself into a prep to see what it felt like to blend in, for once.”

Grace and I both laughed. “You should!” Grace giggled. “You’d be a cute prep. You can borrow my pearls.”

Ella took the list out of my hand, and then looked at Grace and me. “Don’t you guys have some stuff, too? Things you wish you could do?”

Of course there were things, but I’d never let myself dwell on them. If I did, it would be depressing. I didn’t need to write up a list of reasons I should be disappointed in myself. My mom probably had a hearty list of my failures already jotted down and notarized—we were good at judgment in my family—and I bet she would happily provide me with a copy if I asked for it. There was a reason I never went after all that much…it was too easy to fail and let my parents and everyone else down.

Grace bit her thumbnail nervously. She’d been a nail
-
biter since I met her in first grade, but had managed to confine the chewing to just her left thumb
by the time
we hit high school. That thumb looked like beavers had attacked it, though the rest of her hand was pristine. It was all about control, and Grace had plenty of it. “I know I’ve never wanted to do this first thing on the list—jump off Hanging Rock,” Grace said finally. “My mom would kill me.”

“If you didn’t die in the process,” I muttered. They both shot me looks. “I’ve sort of
always
wanted to jump off Hanging Rock,” I admitted. “But it scares the crap out of me.”

“You
have
?” Grace asked, sitting up. “I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I wish I could.” I wished I was the kind of person who did that sort of thing, but the idea of actually jumping off Hanging Rock made me want to hurl. I was deathly afraid of heights, and even more afraid of general danger. Some might call me a coward. Those some might be right.

I lay back on the hood of my busted-up car again and stared up into the sky. I could have lai
n
there for hours, watching the sky in its captivating stillness, but that wasn’t going to get my car out of the ditch and back on the road again. Neither, I worried, was I. “I guess now I wish I could figure out how to change a tire?”

Grace and Ella both laughed. Then Grace whooped, grabbing the list from me and waving it around in the air. “Number
t
wo! Learn how to change a tire. It’s fate.”

“You guys?” I said suddenly, sitting up so my elbows were resting on the hood of the car. I tilted my chin up so my ponytail swung in the air behind me. I squinted into the darkening sky and said, “What if we used her list?”

“Like, as a tool for changing the tire?” Grace asked. “How is it going to help? It’s just a regular old piece of paper.”

Ella laughed out loud before saying, “I think Sophie’s suggesting that we use the
things
on Suzy’s list. Take this list of dares or dreams or whatever they are, and do them.”

I nodded. “Yeah. We could fulfill Suzy’s destiny—live out her last wishes, sort of. We would need to revise the list a little bit—change up names, fiddle with things to fit our own lives.” I got jazzed as I carried on. “We can introduce some modifications, but keep the spirit of the list and finish it with her. For her. To live the life she would have, if she’d lived.” Maybe figuring my own life out would be easier if I was pretending to live out a part of someone else’s.

As I looked at my friends, I started to get really excited. Suzy’s dares and dreams could kick-start senior year with some fresh ideas, a little new excitement, a bit of the
something
I needed to get my life in motion. My aunt’s car was like a genie, granting me wishes I didn’t even know I’d asked for.

“Something’s got to change, you guys.” I said quickly. “I just feel like nothing ever happens, you know? It’s not that there’s anything
wrong
with my life, exactly, but it’s like—I don’t know—I haven’t evolved or something.”

“So fix it. The world is your oyster,” Grace chirped enthusiastically. I groaned. She patted her hand nervously on the hood of my car. “No, really!”

“That phrase is on the poster in Mrs. Sims’
s
office,” Ella said. “You can’t believe everything you read on the guidance counselor’s wall.” When Ella said it, I could suddenly see the poster, hanging on the wall behind Mrs. Sims’
s
desk. There was a picture of a person inside an oyster shell that was painted to look like the earth.

“So what if it’s on Mrs. Sims’
s
wall?” Grace demanded. “The sentiment is true. Life is what you make of it.”

“Yeah, and I’ve made nothing of mine,” I grumbled. I stared down at the paper that represented my aunt’s unfinished life. Fate had dropped a chance to change into my lap.

“So do this, then,” Ella said with a smile.

Grace nodded reluctantly. “It could be fun.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling optimistic, even as the last thing on the list stared me down and scared the hell out of me. I started to say something, but Ella cut in.

“A few of these are a little out there,” she said, studying the list. “
 
‘Borrow a motorcycle’…that means steal, right? ‘Dine and
d
ash.’ And this one—” She pointed. “
 
‘Make them envy me, for once.’ Was Suzy a little bitter?”

“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug. “Never with me. But she
was
always more of a rebel than anyone else in the family. Though that isn’t saying much.”

“What about that last one?” Grace asked, peering over Ella’s shoulder at the list. “
 
‘Number
s
ixteen: Eat dessert on top of the water tower.’ Is that even something that’s possible?” she asked, wide
eyed.

I nodded and took the list. “People do it all the time—climb up the water tower, I mean. Still. Even though that’s how Suzy died.”

Grace gasped. “Oh my god, Sophie, I didn’t even think about that!”

I bit my lip. “It’s okay.” I stared into my lap, watching the words on the list swirl as tears spr
a
ng into my eyes. “It was an accident, not your fault. And it’s not like we’ve talked about it much since then.” I didn’t have a lot of details about that night. But from the little my family had told me, and the little I’d since learned on my own, Suzy had been climbing up the water tower on the night a big storm had rolled in. Apparently bad weather had come in fast and ultimately turned into an ice storm. She slipped from the top of the tower and plummeted to her death.

Ella narrowed her eyes at me and said, “So she died doing something on this list.”

I looked at her and lied. “We don’t know that.”

Ella squinted. “We kind of do. It’s right here. Number
s
ixteen. Is it just me, or does it seem a little stupid to talk about trying to do the stuff on this list when your aunt
died
doing one of these things?”

I shrugged. It was a fair point. But suddenly the list felt essential, somehow. Like the missing piece I’d been waiting for. “Maybe it is stupid. But I still want to try to do the other things on her list. It feels like something I have to do. For her.”
For me
, I added silently.

“What if we act like
n
umber
s
ixteen isn’t there?” Ella suggested. “Keep it from feeling morbid?”

“Sure,” I agreed, even though I really couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there. It was. But that didn’t mean the whole list was worthless.

We all sat, processing, for a few minutes. I wanted to feel the pressure of trying something new—of risking
something
before we were thrown out into the world with a bunch of strangers and all of the security of home stripped away. By fulfilling Suzy’s dares, my friends and I could practice stepping out of our comfort zon
es
with each other to fall back on. I was intimidated by the list, sure, but I knew there had to be some reason I’d found it. “Will you do it with me?”

My friends glanced at each other. Ella leaned up against me. “We’re with you,
Soph.” Her eyes sparkled. “But you know, there are obviously some things that can’t or shouldn’t actually be done by all of us, like…”
S
he scanned the list. “Like
n
umber
n
ine: Confess a crush and kiss X.” She smiled sheepishly. “We can’t
all
kiss X. That’s just sort of skanky.”

“I’m not kissing anyone but Ian!” Grace said, knocking her fist on the hood of the car. The minitantrum made Ella and
me
burst out laughing.

“Calm down, Grace.” Ella rubbed her head. “Obviously,
I’m
kissing X, where X equals Peter Martinson. Fair?”

“Fair,” I grinned.

“Maybe…” Ella added sheepishly.

I folded the list up and stuck it in my back pocket. Then I scooted off the hood and faced my friends expectantly. “Okay. Let’s start with
n
umber
t
wo and go from there.” I clapped my hands, my body bubbling up tiny bits of excitement at the challenge that lay before us. “So who’s pumped about learning how to change a tire?”

CHAPTER
THREE

“I’m proud of you,” my dad said at dinner the next night. He stabbed a piece of pork and stuffed it into his mouth before charging on. “You could just as easily have called
Triple
A, but my girl changed a tire all on her own. That’s what I call initiative!” Dad laughed, his huge, embarrassing guffaw of a laugh that made me cringe when we were at home and made me want to melt into a puddle of invisibility in public.

I didn’t realize we
had
Triple
A, or I probably
would
have called someone. Then I remembered the list in my pocket, and comforted myself with the knowledge that we’d already completed one of the things on it. Calling
Triple
A to bail you out was not on Suzy’s list—figuring out how to change a tire
was
. After nearly an hour, my friends and I had managed to find and assemble the jack. It was rusty and there was something sticky and black that covered most of it. There were no instructions on
how
it worked, so we’d fussed and fiddled for far too long, playing with all the parts and trying to figure out where, exactly, it was supposed to connect to the car. Luckily, the spare tire was clean, but also small looking—so small, in fact, that I wondered if it was just a toy tire put inside the trunk as a joke. I felt ridiculous driving home, but we’d made it.

“Are you ready for your first day of school?” My mom rushed past the table. She didn’t stop to hear my answer, just bustled along, gathering up papers she’d scattered around the house for the past week as she prepped for her night class. “I have to get my butt in gear,” she said, still not realizing I hadn’t answered. “Class starts in twenty minutes, and I need to make copies of the syllabus.”

“You could just post it online,” I suggested. “Save a tree.”

She stopped for a nanosecond and pointed at me. “You’re right. Sophie, you’re a lifesaver.” She lifted her hands in the air and wiggled her arms. “Digital age!” she sang. She stopped singing and whooping long enough to hover over the table and stab a large slice of pork tenderloin, taking bites off it like a child might eat cotton candy. “Will people actually look at it if it’s only online?”

I shrugged. “How motivated are your students this semester?”

“Haven’t met them, but I can safely say:
p
robably not very,” she laughed bitterly. “This class is always full of morons.” Mom was always quick to judge. “Let’s keep that between ourselves, shall we?” She popped the last bit of pork in her mouth, shoved her things into an old diaper bag that she still used as a purse, and planted
kisses
on the top of my head and my dad’s head.

“Good luck,” Dad boomed. “You look sharp, Sylvia.”

“Thanks, Matt.” Mom smiled. “Can you see the
P
opsicle stain on my blouse?”

Neither Dad nor I actually looked (we knew you
could
see it—whatever she’d spilled, you always could see it), but we both answered without hesitation. “Nope.”

“Not at all.”

“Excellent. Can one of you clear my plate? I’ll just make some toast later. God, I hate Tuesdays.”

“And Thursdays, and Saturday mornings,” I muttered.

She flew out the door. Dad and I sat silently for a while, chewing the overcooked pork. I could hear the fridge motor in the kitchen, switching on and off, and noticed that my dad’s jaw clicked on every fifth or sixth chew. I looked at him, trying to figure out something to say about something, but could come up with nothing.

My dad and I had very little in common. He’d always preferred my brother, and my mom had always been mine—especially after Suzy died, my mom had felt this pressing need to protect me. And when Shane went off to college,
D
ad had sort of stepped back and disappeared (as much as someone that loud
can
disappear). What
had
been infrequent family outings became even more infrequent mother-daughter dates. I’m fairly sure my dad would have loved to just move into the dorm with Shane, if that sort of thing wasn’t frowned upon.

My mom had picked up a second job right after my brother left, to help pay for college and fulfill some unfulfilled something, blah blah. She worked in
h
uman
r
esources at the energy company, but that wasn’t enough to challenge her, she said. So she’d found a gig teaching management classes at our local community college. She had gotten her MBA online when I was in middle school, and the teaching gig had come out of that. So now she worked full time, plus two nights and a weekend day.

“Do you want to take a look at the tire tonight?” I asked finally, standing up to dump my dishes in the dishwasher. “Help me get a real tire back on? I don’t really want the spare to come flying off while I’m driving to school tomorrow.”

Dad laughed again, and I wished—not for the first time—that he had a volume knob. “Of course. You’re a smart girl—successful at everything you do. I know how careful you are, so I’m sure it’s on there nice and snug.” He could have easily given me a thumbs-up when he said that and it wouldn’t have been out of place. “But sure, dear, I’ll get a real tire back on there in a jiff.”

“Thanks.” I drifted off. Dad didn’t ask where I was going, and I didn’t tell him. There wasn’t really any reason to worry with me, since I never got into any kind of trouble.

I decided to head down to the lake to sit by the water and relax. I still really missed my old neighborhood, which was within easier walking and biking distance of just about everything, but this house had the benefit of being on the lake. I loved that I could just wander through the backyard and stumble down the steep, dirt-crusted hill that led to the water.

I kicked at the grass as I walked through my backyard. It had gotten long and was lush and green, because of all the end-of-summer rain. My bare feet would be stained green, that color that only exists in summer, a color I’d long ago decided was the most perfect shade on earth and it was a shame they hadn’t named a crayon for it.

Just before the lawn fell away, ending suddenly where erosion had ripped away the edge of the grass, there was a small garden that had been left by our house’s previous owners. None of my family were big gardeners, so we’d left the plot untended. Weeds had grown up, choking the asparagus that had just appeared—
ta da!—
the first summer we lived in the house.

Nothing good had come up since that year, but I’d only recently noticed that a pumpkin vine had appeared this year where none had been before. I crouched down to check on the five fruits that had been growing for the past few weeks. Every time I pushed the leaves aside, I was delighted to find the orange treasures hidden underneath, secretly growing and thriving despite my family’s complete negligence. The plant had picked our garden to move into, and had somehow made it, in the worst possible conditions.

“They’re getting big. Dibs on that one.”

I jumped up. I hadn’t realized anyone was behind me, and the sound of a familiar voice startled me. “What?”

My neighbor, Johnny Rush, thrust his hands in his pockets and gestured with his chin. “That wrinkled one. I want it.”

“Okay,” I said, and started to walk away. Frankly, Johnny Rush seriously intimidated me up close. Before he graduated, Johnny was the most charming guy at East
Central. And he was dating Mackenzie Gardner, who was as gorgeous as she was powerful. I wasn’t sure why he and I were suddenly having a random conversation about pumpkins in my backyard.

“What are you up to?” he asked, trailing along behind me.

“Nothing?” I answered, not quite sure why I sounded defensive. It was my yard. He’d crept up on me. But I felt like I was on the spot. I got like this a lot when I was in unfamiliar situations. At school, in classes I was fine—school was something I could study for and I always knew that if I was volunteering to speak, I knew the answer. I was comfortable around the people closest to me, but everyone else was iffy. “Looking for the Great Pumpkin, I guess.”

“It’s not here. What you’ve got here is a pumpkin patch full of stowaways.”

I gave him a funny look.

“Did you plant those big guys?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Then they’re stowaways. Crept into your garden from who knows where and made a home for themselves. Squatters.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Why would you?” he said, grinning. “They’re pretty cool.”

He stood there, looking at me like he was expecting me to say something more.
I wasn’t
sure what.

The only thing I could think of to say was, “Haven’t you left for school yet?”

His eyes flickered down to the ground, just for a moment, and then he said, “No, not yet.”

“I guess most of your friends are gone by now?”

“A bunch of people left, yeah. Just about everyone takes off sometime in the next few weeks. I have time for one more party, probably.”

“Excellent,” I said. Then I thought about Suzy’s list, and remembered that I was supposed to go to this one. I looked away, then slowly began the slide down toward the lake. Johnny followed after me, and the pebbles that his feet dislodged shot into the backs of my legs. “What are you doing?” I turned and looked up at him, sliding down the embankment behind me.

“Are you sneaking down to the lake to pee or something?”

“No!”

“So why all the privacy?” He lifted his eyebrows. “Let’s hang out.”

I turned and continued down the steep path. He was following me. I guess he was bored.

Johnny hopped off the path when he was still about three feet above the beach, and his shoes made a loud crunching sound when they landed on the rocks.

I waited for him to say something more. But he just plunked down, grabbed a few rocks, and began skipping them. We sat in companionable silence for a while. I perched on my favorite rock, a big striped one that jutted out into the water. I loved the way this specific rock changed colors when it got wet. I got up and picked a piece of long grass, the kind with a little tuft on the top, and dipped it in the water. I began to draw lines and shapes on my rock, watching as the rock morphed from dull
gray
to black and red with sparkly bluish tones slicing through it in places.

A few times, I opened my mouth to say something, but was at a loss for words. Eventually, Johnny said, “How’s your brother?”

“Shane?”

“No, the other brother.”

It was a stupid thing to say, but I laughed anyway. “He’s fine.”

“Does he get home much?”

“He did,” I said, thinking about how much I missed having my brother at home. When Shane had been around, we’d done things as a family. When we were still a foursome, everything was more relaxed. But since he’d gone to college and eventually stopped coming home for summers, I was anxious more often. I spent too much time worrying about where I was going to go next, what would happen to me after high school. I tried not to obsess, but it was getting increasingly hard not to wonder.

When my brother had been around (and Suzy before him), none of the future stuff had seemed to matter as much. My dad always approached conversations about my future with this annoying optimism that made me freak out just a little more every time he patted me on the back and expressed his confidence in what would become of me. I didn’t even have answers for myself, and that was what worried me. “Not enough anymore.”

“You’re not loving the only-child life?”

“Not so much,” I said, continuing to trace patterns on the rock until every free space around me was wet and filled with shimmering colors. Then I stretched my feet out in front of me and wiggled my grass-green toes. When I looked up, Johnny was watching me and I immediately grew self-conscious.

He knew it. I could tell. The silly grin gave him away. “Don’t you like your parents doting on you, giving you gifts and special time?”

“It doesn’t exactly work like that,” I said, trying to shift focus. “Is that how things work at your house? You have sisters, right?” I was pretty sure Johnny had two sisters
who
were a few years older than
he was
—maybe a year or two younger than Shane, but I couldn’t really remember. I seemed to remember them being around when we first moved into the house, but then they were gone.

“Twin sisters. They’re high
achievers.”

“That’s nice.”

“Not really,” he said. “I don’t exactly measure
up. One’s finishing up at Yale, the other one’s at Columbia. I applied for Madison, and that’s it.”

“Madison is a good school,” I said. In fact, the University of Wisconsin was one of the schools I was considering for next year. I liked the idea of getting lost in the grandness of a giant school, being able to duck and weave into the fabric of people around me with no one keeping a close eye on my every move.