Regret

One of the wonders of the mind is how it can wander off while the body stays put. This can end up growing as a necesity if there is a lack of liberty for the body. You can be stuck in a room, but your mind can go anywhere imaginable. This helps Brent during his stay at the hospital since there isn't that much to describe and think about in a hospital room. He runs out of ways to connect himself to his surroundings and decides to let his mind free. Brent chooses to do this in a way that is strictly towards the past. While in his hospital bed, Brent remember past events and reacts upon them in order to keep himself occupied. Brent remembers many things such as dreams and cruises, but he does something interesting after some time.

Three months after his accident, Brent finally brings the topic up again and shows his reaction to it. Brent has finally decided to delve into the memories of his attempted suicide and tried to make sense of it. This shows a drastic change from his previous approaches involving quick distractions or the act of completely ignoring.

As Brent recalls the accident, he shows the first signs of something else: regret. For the first time, Brent regrets the actions that he has made. Brent remembers when had the gas can and the matches as he sat on the toilet and thinks, "That's when I should've realized how stupid I was being. That's when I should've stopped it." (105) Brent has seen how naive he has been, and, in order to realize naiveness, one has to have matured. Brent has grown and is able to see his previous predicament with new eyes. He sees how things would have changed had he not set himself on fire and how it wouldn't have been terribly bad. Brent thinks of how if he hadn't done it and told Craig instead, "He would've gotten me help and made sure Mom and Dad weren't mad at me." (105) This is drastically different from his initial approach where he saw the expulsion as the end of the world and reacted accordingly.

Brent even thinks of ways he could've gone through with the burning in a different way. An alternative that he thinks of is burning part of himself as a test of whether he should burn his entire body or not. He would've realized that it was a terrible idea, still met all the people in the hospital, and gone back to school in just a week. This proves to be a much more mature approach compared to the emotional teenager who decided to burn himself whole without any second thoughts. These second thoughts would appear later though, as Brent now looks back on the event thinking, "I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish. I wish I'd stopped. But I didn't."(106) Runyon uses repetition to show just how strong Brent's regret is and how much he's grown to hate his previous, younger self.