Amy & Roger's Epic Detour by Morgan Matson

hopeful expression, and my smile faded. He hadn’t learned yet that things didn’t work out just because you wanted them to.
    “Right,” I said, reaching over and turning up the music, a song about a fake empire that, on the second listen, I’d found I really liked.
    “But I’m serious,” he said. “Tell me something about you. What is your … biggest regret?”
    I hadn’t been expecting that question, but I knew immediately what the answer was, and I closed my eyes against it. The morning in March, carrying my flip-flops, my feet covered in grass clippings. The one thing I really, really didn’t want to think about.
    I opened my eyes and looked at him. “No idea.”

Yesterday, when you were young …
—The Weepies
    M ARCH 8— THREE MONTHS EARLIER
    “So then what happened?” Julia asked breathlessly.
    “Stop it,” I said, laughing into the phone. I was sitting on the front steps of the house, talking to her while my father mowed the lawn. My mother and I were always teasing him about the lawn. He tended to be kind of a slob with everything else, but about the lawn, he was beyond fastidious. It never looked like it needed mowing, mostly because he spent every Saturday morning doing just that. “There’s an art to it,” he always insisted. “I’d like to see you try!”
    As I watched, he pivoted the mower at a sharp 90-degree angle to get the corner of the lawn. “There’s really nothing to tell,” I said, turning my attention back to Julia.
    “Yeah, right,” she said, and I could hear she was laughing too, which always made me happy, as Julia was usually a little too composed, always considering her words before she said them. “I need details, Amy.”
    I could feel myself smile. I’d had a date—and a pretty epic make-out session—with Michael the night before. And Julia was always the first person I told about these things. Somehow, if I didn’t talk to her about it, it didn’t seem real. “It was good,” I said, and could hear her sigh loudly over the phone, all the way from Florida.
    “Details!” she said again.
    “My dad is out here,” I said into the phone, lowering my volume. “I can’t talk about this now.”
    “Tell Julia I say hi,” my father called, as he pivoted the mower again.
    “Put your back into it!” I called to him, and he smiled as he headed in the other direction, for an overgrown patch invisible to everyone but him.
    “Come on,” Julia said. “Give me the scoop. Things are going well with you and the college boy?”
    I looked over to check that my father was out of earshot. “Yes,” I said, settling back against the step, preparing for one of our marathon conversations. “Okay. So last night he picked me up at eight.”
    “And what did you wear?” she prompted.
    “Amy,” my mother said, in the doorway behind me. I lowered the phone and looked at her. She seemed stressed, and usually Saturday was the one day she took off from that.
    “Yeah?” I asked.
    “Have you seen your brother?”
    I could feel my pulse begin to race a little bit at that, as I tried in an instant to figure out what the right answer would be. Charlie hadn’t sent me an alibi text, so I was in the dark as to what he’d told Mom and Dad he was doing, and what he’d actually ended up doing. “No,” I said, finally.
    “He’s not upstairs,” my mother said. She frowned, staring out at the cul-de-sac. “I’m going to check again,” she said, heading back inside.
    “Sorry,” I said to Julia. “Charlie drama.”
    “How is he?” Julia asked. Julia had had a huge crush on Charlie back in middle school, but it has faded out during high school, when he headed down a very different path than we did.
    “About the same,” I said. This was to say, not very well. I knew Julia would understand what I meant. I looked back to the house and realized I should probably do some recon, to try and get in front of this before it got worse. “I should go.”
    “Okay,” Julia said.