Here We Go Again, page 12
As soon as they’re back at the hotel, Hale locks herself in the bathroom, and Odie collapses in front of the blasting air conditioner. Logan fills him a huge bowl of water, then shifts to focusing on Joe. Inside Hale’s medical bag are a dozen pouches of electrolyte powder. She pours some into a bottle of water and hands him some pills.
“I don’t need to take that,” he argues. “I’m not in pain.”
“Joe.” Her pit-stains have pit-stains, and she has no patience for his proud bullshit. “Your entire body is being eaten alive by cancer and you just spent all day traipsing around in the desert when it’s 104 degrees outside. Don’t make me shove these drugs down your stubborn-ass throat.”
Joe takes the meds, drinks all the electrolyte water, and gets into bed like she demands. “I need to run to the market down the street to get some supplies for Hale. Are you going to be okay here by yourself for a bit?” Even as she asks, she’s already reaching for the car keys.
“See?” Joe says before she’s out the door. “I told you that you care too much about everything.”
* * *
Joe and Odie are both passed out when she gets back from the store. The bathroom door is still closed, any sound coming from inside muffled by a gentle fan.
Logan bangs on the door. “Hale, open up.”
“Go use the bathroom in the hotel lobby,” Hale grunts back.
“Let me in.”
“No!” Hale shouts. It’s all for naught, because she forgot to lock the door, so Logan just opens it anyway. There are further screams of protest, and thankfully, for both parties involved, Hale isn’t actively going to the bathroom as Logan pushes her way inside. She’s sitting on the floor between the toilet and the rim of the tub, and she looks… human. Like she did last night when she cried.
Which is to say, she looks absolutely disgusting. Gone are the airs of perfect Hale, emotionless Hale, in-control Hale. Her hair is falling out of her braid in greasy chunks, and her skin is both horribly sunburned and somehow peaked at the same time. Her ridiculous wedges are tossed aside in the opposite corner of the bathroom.
“You can’t be in here!” Hale croaks.
“Trust me, this isn’t my ideal scenario either, Princess. The smell in this bathroom is truly something. But—” She pulls a Vitaminwater out of a reusable grocery bag. “You’ve got to try to get some liquids down.”
“No,” Hale says again, her head lolling to the side pathetically.
“Come on. I can only handle one stubborn invalid at a time, and Joe’s already claimed that title.”
“I can’t drink liquids. I just can’t.”
“Of course you can. You’re Rosemary Hale. You bend the universe to your will all the time. You’re not going to let a little thing like vomit stop you.”
At the use of the V word, Hale gags again. Logan steps deeper into the bathroom, until she’s hovering over the piteous form of her teen frenemy. “You have to drink something. You’re extremely dehydrated, and you’re going to end up in the hospital if you don’t.”
“I’ll just throw it up.” Hale whines hopelessly. “I feel awful. I’ve never felt this awful before.”
“Please,” Logan begs. “Please drink.”
Tears form in the corners of her eyes. “I-I just can’t.”
This is clearly about more than her heat exhaustion. Hale’s anxiety is doing the talking again, which means pleading won’t work. Logan thinks about Hale’s brain, about that scared little girl, about how she used to help when it got like this. Then she puts down the grocery bag, pulls out her phone, opens Spotify, and presses play on an old favorite. The opening electronics fill the bathroom and Hale looks up at her with watery eyes and a confused mouth. “What—?” she starts, but the opening hey, hey clarifies all questions, and then Logan is doing the hand-mouth to the first “Bye Bye Bye.”
“What’s happening?” Hale asks, seemingly horrified by the pelvic thrusting. Logan is horrified too, both by the fact that she’s not as limber as she used to be and by the fact that she’s degrading herself to make Rosemary fucking Hale feel better.
They spent the entire summer after sixth grade watching MTV and memorizing the full routine to this song, filming their own music video on a camcorder in Logan’s backyard, a boy band consisting of two girls. And for the rest of their friendship, without fail, nothing got Hale out of her head faster than watching Logan break out the old moves.
Except now, in this hotel bathroom, she just looks scared. And annoyed. “I have heat exhaustion! Why are you making things worse?”
Logan stomps her foot and punches her arm and does a body roll. “You know you love this.”
The smallest smile cracks across Hale’s chapped lips. “I really hate it.”
But she clearly doesn’t, and Logan commits to a full lip-sync for the second verse. Hale almost laughs. It turns into a belch, but Logan will take it.
“Okay, stop, stop!” Hale throws her hands up over her eyes when Logan goes for the crotch-grab and releases something that’s distinctly chuckle-like in nature. “Fine, fine! I’ll drink the Vitaminwater.”
Logan is embarrassingly winded as she tosses Hale the drink. Hale lifts it to her dried lips and takes a cautious sip. Then, when she’s certain it’s not going to cause her stomach to explode again, she takes a full drink. “I can’t believe you remember that dance.”
Logan presses her back against the wall and slides down to the floor. “Don’t lie. You totally still have the choreo memorized, too.”
Her mouth curls into another smile, which she hides by taking a drink.
“Here. You need this.” Logan hands her two Dramamine from a package she bought for thirty bucks, because national-park prices are criminal enterprises.
Hale obligingly takes the meds. “Why are you being so nice to me?” There’s something about the sheer disbelief in Hale’s tone that makes Logan feel sick to her stomach, too. “Last night, and… and now?”
“I have to be nice to you. You’re absolutely wretched-looking.”
“You know you love this.” Hale attempts a little flourishing gesture at the dribble of puke down the front of her dress, and it’s ridiculously charming.
Logan’s stomach twists again. “And, well, because… I sort of feel like this is my fault.”
“You gave me nausea from heat exhaustion?”
“I drove us to Arizona in June.”
Hale takes another long drink. “Despite… all of this—” She gives another half-hearted flourish. “I don’t regret coming here.”
Logan stretches her legs out in front of her so her feet almost reach Hale’s bare calves. “Wow. Your GI tract for the Grand Canyon.”
Hale clicks her tongue in annoyance, but there’s more life in her eyes now.
“Still. I’m sorry you got sick.”
The bathroom goes quiet except for the hum of the fan. Hale is staring at her, motionless.
“What?”
“I-I don’t think you have ever apologized to me before.”
Logan snorts. “What would I need to apologize for?”
Even as she says it, she sees the long list of crimes against Rosemary Hale scroll through her mind. Those years in high school when she hurt Hale any chance she got, because it was easier than admitting how much she was hurting. Pranks on travel tournaments for Speech and Debate. The Fun-Noodle Incident that one summer they both took jobs as counselors at the same camp, before Logan drove Hale out of town for ten years.
And everything that’s happened since she came back to Vista Summit: rude emails and tense department meetings and almost punching her in the face last winter when Joe convinced both of them to volunteer as Christmas elves at Evergreen Pines.
Rear-ending Hale’s car.
Pushing her away because that is better than letting herself get close again.
Logan sighs. “I’m actually sorry for a lot of things,” she confesses. Hale’s expression softens and Logan holds up a preemptive finger. “Not for all the things. Some of them you deserved, but…”
Hale glances down at the half-empty plastic bottle in her hands and says nothing. Not thank you. Not I’m sorry for the mean things I did too or I’m sorry I kissed you and then pretended like it never happened when we were fourteen.
Finally, Hale opens her mouth. “Thank you for the… the Vitaminwater. I think it’s helping.”
Logan shakes off the disappointment. “Are you ready to try some saltines?”
Hale accepts the sleeve of crackers and nibbles at a single saltine like an adorably obnoxious squirrel.
“I do, you know,” Hale says after she’s gummed her way through three crackers. “Remember all the choreography.”
Logan can’t help but smile. “I know you, Hale.”
Another saltine. Then: “Why do you hate me so much?” Hale asks in a small voice.
“Do you really want to go there?” Logan asks, sounding more tired than anything else. “Do you honestly want to rehash what happened at that pool party?”
Hale shakes her head. “I’m not asking why you hated me when we were fourteen. I’m asking why you hate me now.”
A sarcastic answer gathers on her tongue, but for once, she holds it back. “Because—because you’re so damn perfect.”
Hale truly laughs then. “Perfect? You spend every minute of every day pointing out my flaws.”
Logan adjusts herself against the wall. “That’s because I’m insecure. Duh. You’re so put together all the time, with your pantyhose and your heels and your tight skirts. Most of my clothes have bleach stains because I’m a thirty-two-year-old who doesn’t know how to do her own laundry!”
Hale sits across the bathroom completely motionless, but Logan forces herself to keep going. Hale has been honest and earnest with her. She owes her this. “And you’re so freaking brilliant, and your brain is like a flawlessly organized bullet journal, and you can just do executive functioning like a proper adult. Everything about you reminds me that I’m a total mess.”
The fan hums in the tense silence that spreads between them until Hale finally speaks. “You’re not a mess,” she says quietly. “And I’m not all that put together. Hence the vomit.” Hale flourishes again. “And you’re not the only neurodivergent person in this bathroom. I also have ADHD, not that you’ve ever cared to notice.”
Logan opens her mouth to argue, but she censors that impulse, too. She was wrong about Hale being straight. She’s been wrong about a lot of things. “You have ADHD?”
Hale puckers her mouth indignantly. It’s sort of cute. “I didn’t get my diagnosis until a few years ago because I’m a woman, and because my ADHD doesn’t look like restlessness or disorganization or blurting out. It looks like intense hyperfixations and overcompensating with perfectionism and poor emotional regulation.”
“Oh” is all Logan manages to say.
“I’m medicated now, and in therapy, but before…” She stares down at the crackers in her lap. “It got sort of bad before.”
Logan wants to push on this. She wants to force Hale to tell her everything, the way she used to do without prompting when they were kids. But she doesn’t have that right, and Hale doesn’t owe her anything.
“Do you want to talk about it…?” she offers gently instead.
Hale shakes her head even as the words start coming out of her mouth. “Did I ever tell you my dad was an alcoholic?”
Logan’s throat goes bone dry. “No. You didn’t.”
“Well, he was, at least for my whole life. It was how he self-medicated for his mental illness.” Hale doesn’t pause long enough for that revelation to fully sink in before she drops another bomb. “And I’m an alcoholic too.”
Logan’s brain spins its way through a catalogue of appropriate responses but gets stuck on slack-jawed silence.
Hale doesn’t wait for her platitudes. “I started teaching English at an elite Manhattan prep school after I graduated from Columbia. The hours were grueling, the expectations were impossibly high, and the parents were vicious. But I was good at it. And my ADHD brain loves being good at things.”
Hale smiles to herself, but there’s something incredibly sad about it. “My brain likes to home in on one single thing to the detriment of everything else. Teaching became a hyperfixation for me. For three years I made it my whole life. I stopped going to therapy because I didn’t have enough time, and I stopped feeding myself, stopped taking care of myself…”
She pauses for a moment. Logan can’t stop staring at the clean soles of Hale’s bare feet stretched in front of her. She thinks about those bare feet in the grass, running through sprinklers, kicked up on the front porch railing, burning on hot concrete as they walked home from getting ice cream at Rochelle’s.
“And then I started drinking to cope with the impending burnout. I told myself that it didn’t make me like my dad, that our situations were different, but I was lying to myself. I ended up losing too much weight for my body, and I had a nervous breakdown that landed me in the hospital,” Hale finishes matter-of-factly. She crosses her legs at the ankle.
Those feet, in a twin bed next to Logan’s.
“My mom paid for me to go to an in-patient clinic in central Oregon. That’s where I got my ADHD diagnosis.”
Logan briefly considers the way she sometimes dulls her own ADHD brain with alcohol.
“When I was healthy again, I learned about Joe’s cancer and the job opening at Vista Summit, and I decided to just move back home. It seemed like the safest solution while I worked on staying sober and taking care of my mental health.”
“Shit.” Logan swallows around an unexpected lump of guilt and tries to think of something more meaningful to say.
Hale attempts a joke. “My brain does nothing in moderation.”
Logan knows this. She always loved that about Hale’s brain.
“See?” Hale smiles wanly. “I told you I’m not perfect.”
Hale looks even more perfect to Logan in this moment, because for once she looks like a flawed human being. An uncontrollable deluge of emotions clog Logan’s throat. It feels like heartburn but worse, because Tums can’t cure her from caring about Hale. “I had no idea that’s why you don’t drink. That you… that you went through that right before moving home. And I—” Logan squeezes her eyes shut for a second. “I’ve been such an asshole to you.”
“Aren’t you always an asshole? Isn’t that sort of… your thing now?”
“Ouch.” She feels that one like a stab to the chest. A little over a week ago, Rhiannon Schaffer dumped her in an Applebee’s and called her an apathetic asshole, and she refused to let it hurt her. But hearing it from Hale—from the girl who once knew her heart better than anyone—hits different. And it hits hard. Maybe because it feels more true. Even if Hale didn’t have a mental health crisis and end up in rehab before starting at Vista Summit High School—even if Hale was the sanctimonious shithead Logan thought she was—she still didn’t deserve the way Logan treated her. “True,” Logan admits, “but rude.”
“Sorry,” Hale mumbles.
“No, it’s—” she starts, before realizing she doesn’t know what it is. “I don’t really want to be an asshole anymore.”
Hale lifts her head slowly so she’s peering up at Logan through those ridiculously pale lashes. “You don’t?”
Logan slides across the bathroom floor, and Hale quickly scrambles to pull her knees up to her chest before their bodies touch. “How about a friendship truce?” Logan sticks out her hand.
Hale eyes it warily. “A friendship truce?”
“Until Maine. I promise to try my hardest to be less of an asshole, if you promise to—”
“Be less rigid?” Hale rushes to fill in. “Less uptight? Less controlling? Less shrill?”
“You’re not shrill, Hale. You’re… passionate.”
Her mouth puckers into a cat’s butthole, and Logan can’t help but laugh.
“And I was going to say, if you promise to be patient with me. And maybe call me out for my more rectally inclined behavior.”
That almost makes Hale laugh. It sounds like just an indignant puff of air, but Logan knows. Her hand is still dangling in the space between them. Hale’s frosty-blue eyes fix on that hand for a few seconds before she finally slips her small hand into Logan’s. Her hand is clammy and gross, but they shake on it anyway. And Logan feels like maybe they managed to bridge something at the Grand Canyon.
The Grand Canyon to Somewhere East
Chapter Fourteen
ROSEMARY
“Come on, Hale! You can do it!”
“I-I can’t.”
“You can!” Joe cheers. “We believe in you! Throw it into the Grand Canyon!”
Odie barks three times in encouragement.
“What if… what if I’ve changed my mind?” Rosemary clutches the binder closer to her chest and glances out at the sun rising over the Desert View watchtower. “We… we can’t abandon the itinerary!”
“Sure we can,” Logan says breezily. “We’re already two days and five hundred miles off course.”
“And I would drive five hundred miles and I would drive five hundred more,” Joe sings in a Scottish brogue.
“And you said you wanted more detours,” Logan reminds her.
A cool morning breeze ripples along Rosemary’s bare arms, causing her skin to break out in goose bumps. Logan isn’t wrong. She did, foolishly, say that. The surprise detour to Arizona was bad for their itinerary, but good in almost every other way. Except for the heat exhaustion.
The Vitaminwater and saltines helped a lot, but she still woke up the next morning feeling too nauseated to get back in the car. Logan insisted they take a rest day, which mostly consisted of lying around in the hotel room eating vending machine snacks and reading. Logan powered through multiple paperbacks. Joe slept a lot. Rosemary took several cold baths to help with the heat exhaustion and tried not to obsess over the feeling of Logan’s hand in hers as they shook on their friendship truce.
