Chapter 1: Regret

Bang.

Mom’s funeral was so hard. The flowers weren’t even the kinds she liked; mom hated roses. The scent of her embalmed body was too much to take along with the black and white pictures of her as a child which were curled at the edges. Coffee-stained diplomas hung around her lifeless body, showing that she had lived her legacy. Third cousins, dentists, paper-delivery boys of hers from the last 82 years filled the room---------

Then there was that girl. Stacy. The most interesting thing in 5th grade, slightly beating out bugs that stink when you squish them. Her long hair that you knew her mom brushed every morning, her glasses that were slightly crooked so you could tell she didn’t take too long to look at herself in the mirror, and that one-dollar lip gloss she bought just to attract the boys from the basketball team. Yep, to this day, I knew she was the one. But I passed her up. All of my friends told me to date Jenna, the girl with the “big boobies” as we called them in elementary school. I never noticed them.

I felt the pain start in my back.

Who could forget driving through that intersection on July 8th? I kept going. After I heard the thud. After I saw the red goo slide down my windshield and saw the pounds of flesh roll down my hood and onto the ground. What did I do? I drove. I was going 65 in a 20, and I kept that speed right on through. I just didn’t know what to do with an elderly man, his limbs jumbled atop him like a contortionist, lying in the middle of a four-way intersection. And I just drove.

The cold blood begins to run down my spine.

And now I realize, those days of regret are over.