Here We Go Again, page 11
Which is how she finds herself standing naked in the bathroom with a dog staring up at her ten minutes later.
“Okay, dog.” She points to the bathtub-shower combo. “In.”
The dog cocks his head to the side like he doesn’t understand her command. Does he understand? She knows fuck-all about dogs.
She turns on the hot water and tries again. “Dog. In. Get in the shower.”
He still doesn’t move, but his giant tongue slides out the front of his open mouth. It makes him look like Logan. She tries getting in first. “Come, dog. Come.”
“You might have to pick him up!” Logan shouts from the other side of the bathroom door.
Odysseus looks like a single-headed Cerberus. There is no way she can lift him.
“Odysseus, please.”
She’s not sure if it’s the use of his name or the magic word, but the dog suddenly, calmly obeys.
But as soon as the shower water hits his fur, Odysseus begins thrashing around, trying to make his escape. “No! No!” She closes the shower curtain and hopes he’ll think the flimsy vinyl is impenetrable.
“Stay. Stay. Good boy.”
She stands under the lukewarm water and tries to wet her hair as quickly as she can. Every few seconds, the dog paws at the shower curtain, and she shouts, “No! Stay!”
When the shouting loses its effect, she switches to gentle coaxing while trying to lather her hydrating shampoo into her hair. “Come on, sweet baby boy. Don’t do that! Don’t go anywhere. Isn’t this fun? Aren’t we having fun together?”
Then she switches to washing him, and the brown water that drips off his fur, and the black hair that comes off on her hands, make her gag.
“Stay, stay, stay,” she chants like a prayer. Or a Taylor Swift song. And it works for a bit.
But then she accidentally gets a splash of water in his floppy ears, and he absolutely loses his shit. He bucks around like a mechanical bull and bursts through the shower curtain like the fucking Kool-Aid man.
Rosemary screams. Odysseus barks as he runs agitated circles around the bathroom. She shuts off the water and launches herself out of the shower.
“Odysseus, no! Stop!” She nearly slips when she tries to tackle the dog with a towel. “Come here! Come here! Help me!”
She’s not sure what possesses her to cry out for help, but one minute, she’s catapulting her naked ass after a dog, and the next, the bathroom door is opening, and Logan is standing there, staring at that naked ass with her mouth wide open.
Chapter Twelve
LOGAN
Hale is naked.
There are other things happening—a maniacal dog covered in soap is thrashing around a hotel bathroom while a dying man zonked out on oxycodone is snoring—but Logan’s brain is stuck on the naked part. For approximately three seconds.
Then Hale manages to cover herself with a towel just as Odysseus bursts out of the bathroom. He leaps over suitcases and jumps onto their queen bed, rolling around so there’s soapy water on the pillows and blankets.
But again, Logan has tunnel vision, and that tunnel is homed in on Hale’s dripping wet legs beneath the hem of the towel, her exposed collarbone, and her birdlike neck. Ropes of wet hair falling over her pale, smooth shoulders, delicate like the petals of a white rose. Logan can’t remember the last time she saw Hale’s hair out of its braid, the way it frames her pretty face.
Demi fucking Lovato, she’s so, so pretty.
Hale steps out of the bathroom in a cloud of vanilla-scented steam, and Logan feels fourteen again, on uneven ground as her feelings for her best friend began dangerously shifting. Holding her breath while Hale changed into pajamas at sleepovers; the way something as innocent as brushing Hale’s hair—an act she’d done a hundred times—suddenly felt wrong. Watching the way her blond tendrils pooled in the delicate dip between her shoulder blades when they went swimming at the lake.
The way a simple touch that had always meant nothing suddenly meant everything. Confusion and shame and an inexplicable flutter in her rib cage every time she made Hale laugh. You weren’t supposed to feel that way about your best friend. You weren’t supposed to fall asleep counting the pale lashes against her cheeks.
You weren’t supposed to kiss your friend at a pool party and screw up the only perfect thing you’d ever had.
And Janelle fucking Monáe, after all these years, it turns out Hale is gay too. What is she supposed to do with that information?
“Why are you staring at me like that?” Hale asks in a quiet voice.
The innocent confusion in her voice ends Logan’s nudity-induced stupor. “I’m not.”
“Could you please just get the dog?”
Logan pivots, and with one sharp command, Odie lays down on the floor with his head bowed shamefully. She grabs an extra towel from the bathroom and starts drying him off, a peace offering for Hale.
But when she looks over at Hale again, she isn’t appeased. She’s sobbing.
“Oh shit.” She scrambles away from Odie. “What did I do?”
“Nothing.” Hale snivels. “And also, everything. All I want is to repay Joe for everything he’s done for me, but I have you here. And you mock me relentlessly, and you conspire with Joe behind my back to take us five hundred miles in the wrong direction, and you make me shower with a dog, and you don’t respect the binder.”
“I mean, it’s a three-ring binder from Target….”
Hale cries harder, and her pale face reddens like the Southwest rocks. Logan stands awkwardly close, once again paralyzed by her need to reach out for this person.
“I’m already so tired! I can’t make spontaneous detours and impulsive changes in the plans! I need a schedule! I need a routine! Or else I… I spiral into what-ifs and the uncertainty just…”
Hale doesn’t have to finish that sentence. Logan knows what happens when Hale’s anxiety doesn’t have routine and consistency and control. Deep down, Hale is still that scared little girl who lost her dad and abruptly moved across the country and always needed to know what was coming next. Hale’s done a good job hiding that girl behind pencil skirts and high-collared shirts—behind her perfect work ethic and her perfect Pinterest classroom and her perfect face—all of which give off the illusion of a woman who is always in control.
But in this moment, Hale is stripped of the illusion. No braid and no heels and nothing to hide behind. Just… vulnerability.
And Logan can’t help but reach out for her this time. Just the gentle pressure of fingers on forearm.
“I know you need routine,” Logan says. “But I want the same thing you do. To give back to Joe what he’s given to me. I’m not trying to piss you off.”
Hale chokes on a sob.
“Okay, I’m not trying to piss you off most of the time. I’m just trying to make Joe happy.”
Hale glances up at her through tearstained lashes, and then cuts her gaze over to Joe, sleeping soundly in his bed. She looks back at Logan, down at those fingers resting against Hale’s pale white skin. Logan feels rammed through with unexpected guilt. It’s her fault Hale is crying half-naked in this hotel room. She knows how Hale’s anxiety works, yet she’s done nothing to accommodate it and everything to make it worse. She drove them five hundred miles in the wrong direction, for Shay Mitchell’s sake. Logan let herself get fooled by the perfect veneer, assuming the little girl was gone.
“I know you are,” Hale finally says, “I think maybe we’re just too different.”
Logan isn’t sure why those words hurt so damn badly, but they do. Hale reaches for a hotel tissue and wipes her face. Logan lets her fingers fall away. “Do you mind… turning around? I need to change.”
Logan turns around and she tries not to hold her breath while Hale slips into her sleep dress.
ROSEMARY
“Moondance” is playing, and when Rosemary opens her eyes, she sees the moon is still shining through the window in the pitch-black of the room.
She sits up in bed and tries to orient herself. She’s in an unfamiliar hotel room, and there’s a dog curled up at her feet and a person curled up against her side. She has no idea where Van Morrison is coming from.
“Hale, I swear on Shay Mitchell’s legs, if you don’t turn off that alarm right now—” rasps a voice across the room.
“Rise and shine, girlies!” says the voice in bed next to her, and she remembers now, climbing into Joe’s bed and sleeping on the edge of the mattress all night because it seemed safer than sleeping beside Logan.
“Fuck you, Joseph Delgado!” Logan grunts. She attempts to throw a pillow in the dark, and it lands on the dog’s head. “It’s three thirty in the morning, you dick!”
“I know,” Joe singsongs cheerfully. “We better get going or we’re going to be late.”
After fifteen more minutes of yelling and cursing and throwing things, they’re in the hotel parking lot, groggy as hell, trying to load into the Gay Mobile without any reason as to why. They each have a cup of horrible hotel coffee Rosemary fetched from the lobby. She was shocked to see so many other tourists up and moving.
“Where are we going and why are we going there at this ungodly hour?” Logan bemoans as they get Joe into the back seat.
“Faith, Logan. Have faith in me.”
Logan makes a half-asleep sound of dissent. Rosemary has no faith to speak of.
The weather app says it’s going to be 104 today, but predawn, it’s a cool 70, and Rosemary feels more awake with the desert breeze on her bare skin, so she drives as Logan complains in the passenger seat with Odysseus sitting in her lap like a horse who thinks he’s a cat.
In the back, Joe is the most excited she’s seen him in four years—the most alive—so she doesn’t question his directions when he tells her to take Highway 64 toward the national park.
As they near the entrance, the traffic thickens, throngs of other tourists making the same inexplicable pilgrimage. The sky is a muted predawn blue by the time they pull into a handicapped parking stop near Mather Point along with hundreds of other people.
Logan takes Odysseus’s leash, and Rosemary helps Joe toward a paved path.
They weave through the crowds, follow the path through a curve, and oh. There’s the Grand Canyon. Just right there.
Families have gathered around in unruly clusters, but Logan elbows her way up to the railing, carving out a spot for the three of them.
It’s just right there. A huge hole in the earth, endless rock highlighted and blurred by shadow and the rising sun.
“Oh,” Logan says in hushed awe.
“Oh is right,” Joe whispers, as if this moment is too sacred for his full volume.
Rosemary didn’t expect it to be quite so… grand. She’s seen pictures. She thought she knew. But pictures don’t capture the sweep of it, the feel of it, like being on top of the world and on a different planet at the same time. On the other side of the canyon, the North Rim burns bright orange and neon yellow as the caverns below remain an unsolved mystery in the dark.
Joe points to the right, where the sun edges over the rocks, lighting up the canyon piece by piece. Golden spotlights reveal the grays and browns, yellows and reds of the rock below, layers stacked on layers. It’s like nothing she’s ever seen before.
The fire fades and the sky turns light blue, pale purple, shocking pink. The sun reaches new crevices one at a time, and there’s green sagebrush, deep orange and gold, white clouds streaked over a blue sky.
It’s sublime—there is no better word for it—and it stirs something she can’t quite name. Surrender, maybe, to a force she could never control.
No one speaks for a long time. Even Odysseus seems to know this morning is holy.
Rosemary watches the sunrise reflected on Joe’s face for a minute. The golden glow warms his brown eyes and catches the glisten of tears streaming down his cheeks. His mouth is open around a quiet gasp of wonder. It’s just as magical as watching the sunrise itself.
He looks the way Rosemary remembers from the first day of high school, so overwhelmed by the raw potential of the students in front of him.
“This,” Joe exhales. “I needed to see this before I die.”
Rosemary shifts her gaze to Logan and is startled to discover she’s crying, too.
“Shut up!” Logan grumbles, caught in the act. She tries, and fails, to brush away the tears with the back of her hand, and then hides her eyes behind her sunglasses instead. “I’m only human.”
“You know what we need…,” Joe starts, but Logan already has her phone out. Van Morrison starts playing “Into the Mystic.”
“Apt,” Joe croaks around a sob.
“Very apt,” Rosemary agrees. There are tears gathering in the back of her throat, but she holds them back. She tries to file these too-big feelings away so she can look at them later, when she’s alone. She already let Logan see her cry once on this trip.
But no matter how hard she tries, the feelings keep popping back up, like trying to hold a beach ball under the surface of a pool.
“I-I was wrong,” she says when the song ends. “About this detour. We… we had to come here.” The sun is a little higher now, and the dried-out path of the Colorado River becomes visible in the depths of the canyon. “This… this was worth going five hundred miles in the wrong direction.”
Chapter Thirteen
LOGAN
The Grand Canyon is cool shit.
She’d expected it to be one of those things that’s overhyped and overrated and ultimately disappointing, like the Mona Lisa or the Colosseum or the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Not that Logan has ever seen those things herself, but she’s heard they don’t live up to the image in your head.
But now she’s here, standing on the edge of something so far beyond what she could imagine, and it’s the best kind of dopamine rush. The striations of rock look like the layers on a birthday cake. There’s beauty and majesty and newness. It feels so far from Vista Summit, from her daily drive from her dad’s house to the school, from her trees and her river and her sky. It feels like everything she used to dream about exploring as a kid.
It’s dope as fuck.
When the sun is done exposing the colorful depths of the canyon, they all agree to walk along the paved South Rim Trail, even Hale in her three-inch wedges and ridiculous midi-dress. Logan insists on stopping every few minutes to take selfies of the four of them, and Hale doesn’t even fight her on it. Joe is so content, he sings to himself as Hale pushes his wheelchair along. Odie tries to fight two elks in a field and has the best time of his life. It’s the first time that everyone on the trip truly seems at peace.
The sun heats up quickly, and they’re all drenched in sweat before 10 a.m. They have heat-protective booties for Odie, and Hale has enough sunscreen for everyone, but they still end up backtracking to the Yavapai Geological Museum just to get out of the heat for a bit. Joe reads all the informational posters aloud in his teacher voice, and Logan has never been so interested in rocks.
But once they’re outside again in the excruciating heat, Joe turns red and the bad kind of sweaty. For once, Logan decides to be the responsible one. “We should go back to the hotel,” Logan suggests as they attempt to huddle together in the shade.
“I agree with Logan,” Hale says. “It’s not safe out here for you. Or for this ridiculous dog.”
Joe sits up in his chair and lifts his chin. “I don’t need to go back to the hotel. I’m fine. Let’s take the bus out to Hopi Point.”
“I don’t think—” Hale tries, but Joe cuts her off with a sharp glare.
“We came all this way. We’re going to see as much of the Grand Canyon as we can.”
They board a bus that’s stuffed with other tourists, and thankfully, the driver doesn’t question Odie’s nonexistent service dog credentials. Joe is secured into a handicap spot, but Logan and Hale have to stand, Midwesterners in Zion National Park T-shirts crowding in on all sides. Logan reaches up for the handlebar, but there is nothing Hale-height to grab on to. So, without asking, Hale grabs on to Logan’s arm with both hands.
The shuttle bus runs the length of the South Rim, taking them along bumpy and windy roads that make Hale squeeze her eyes shut. It stops at scenic points along the way, and Joe insists they get off the bus at Maricopa Point and again at Powell, each entrance and exit from the bus grueling for everyone involved. They spend most of the time standing in the direct sun waiting for the next bus to pick them up again, and by the time they reach Hopi Point, the sense of contentment has shriveled as badly as Hale’s new sunburn.
They buy soggy sandwiches and eight bottles of water from the gift shop at Hopi Point, then let Odie shotgun two whole bottles before he collapses in some shade. Hale takes one bite of her questionable tuna fish and gags.
She puts a hand over her mouth. “I don’t feel very well. I think I got motion sickness from the bus.”
Her fair skin is currently as red as the canyon rocks. “I think you might have heat stroke, actually,” Logan says, reaching over to press the back of her hand to Hale’s forehead.
Hale clicks her tongue in disagreement, but before she can say anything else, she drops her sandwich in the dirt, grips her stomach with both hands, and takes off in the direction of the public restrooms.
“I’m so sorry,” Joe says thirty minutes later when they’re back on the bus. Logan manages to get Hale a seat this time, and she hunches over with her head between her knees. “I was stubborn,” Joe continues. “I get so tired of being treated like I can’t do anything, that I didn’t consider what might be healthiest for everyone else.”
“It’s okay,” Hale says to the floor.
But it’s not okay. Hale throws up into the paper bag that held their bottles of water and has to get off the bus twice to use the bathroom. It takes almost two hours just to get back to the Gay Mobile, and by then Hale can barely walk.
Logan forces her to drink water, but it’s useless. She can’t keep anything down. Rosemary Hale—valedictorian, Teacher of the Year runner-up, Logan’s lifelong arch nemesis—is experiencing humiliating gastrointestinal failure, and Logan can’t even make fun of her for it because she looks so damn pitiful.
