“Superstar,” she replied, just like her parents used to say to her.
Lucas gave her the finger, but she could tell he didn’t really mean it.
She kept the list, handwritten, in her top desk drawer, which she also locked. She didn’t know why. Lucas wasn’t the type to snoop (if anything, she should be poking around his room), and there wasn’t anyone else in the condo. Maybe it was the symbolism—that it needed to be protected, that it was for her eyes only. That, in senatorial terms, it required clearance. And now Gaby wanted to open it to the world. Ten? Gaby wanted her to pick ten?
Cleo popped the lock and tugged the drawer toward her. She hadn’t reread the list in ages. Her last entry simply read: brownies, but Cleo couldn’t remember if she’d intended to mean that she should eat more brownies (whimsy!) or fewer (gluttony). Cleo remembered her dad encouraging her to use the list as a way to reflect and reset, and she came to think of it more like confession, if she were Catholic (which she was not) and if she went to church (didn’t do that either). She’d convinced herself that if she purged her misdeed on paper, recognized it for what it was—anything from an innocent mistake to an intentional obfuscation—she could pick it up and leave it behind her on the side of the metaphorical road, drive away with a clean conscience.
And to a certain extent, this was true. There were small misgivings on there; she flipped through the top page onto the second, then the third—no high heels (whoever decided that women had to perilously teeter on three-inch pins to make their calves look slimmer while nearly castrating their pinkie toes?) and blinker lights, goddammit, which Cleo remembered she’d jotted down after failing to signal on a turn when she was new to DC and unaccustomed to driving and nearly collided with an oncoming car and instead steered smack into a stop sign.
The notepaper was worn the more she went backward, her handwriting different too. Bouncier when she first started, maybe because she didn’t yet realize how exhausting and difficult adulthood would be. Tougher for her than many because of her parents and her loneliness and probably her ambition too, first nurtured out of love by those parents, then left unwieldy and rambling when Cleo was on her own. So Cleo sank into that drive, gave it space, simply let it take her when it wanted, but it was also true that it made her a little more ruthless, a little less empathetic, a little more likely to sneak onto MaryAnne Newman’s laptop in the computer lab to read her notes while she went to the bathroom to touch up her makeup before they debated in front of their peers to decide who should be elected head of the paper. (Everything in her school in Seattle was a democracy. They really believed the children were the future.) Cleo had always told herself that none of this made her a terrible person; it made her a cunning one, and in fact, it armed her for all that came next: her parents, the pregnancy, Congress. So it was a funny thing to have a list of 233 regrets when Cleo also couldn’t deny that so many of them led her here, today, to everything that had happened since. How could you define regret if it also put you on top? By your motivation? By your failures? By your successes? Cleo didn’t know. Could she see now, from MaryAnne’s perspective, how she hadn’t been so kind in high school? Well, sure. Did that merit MaryAnne’s scorched-earth strategy? Cleo thought not. Firmly not.
For a brief hiccup of a moment, she wondered how long her father’s own list had been. If it had brought him peace, if it had helped guide him. She’d never read it, never asked to read it, and until now had never been curious to do so. People should be allowed their secrets. People should be allowed their scars. Today there was no room for that—there were glaring headlines at every little misstep (case in point: MaryAnne Newman’s now-viral op-ed) or social media frenzies tasting of schadenfreude, but in years past, people like her dad could really step in the figurative horseshit and no one could smell their stink. That would be nice, she thought. Whatever happened to that?