Here We Go Again, page 3
“You accidentally didn’t look behind you when you were backing up?”
“Look, it takes two to fender-bender,” Logan retorts, “and you clearly weren’t paying attention either.”
Rosemary presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth and tries not to scream. She’s not about to admit that she was distracted by the phone call with Joe and the destruction of her life plan and all of the fury barely suppressing her anxiety. Especially not to Logan. “Except you backed into me. So you’re the one at fault.”
“Fault?” Logan puffs out an infuriating breath of air. “I did you a favor, honestly. A gray Corolla? Could you have chosen a more boring car?”
“We can’t all drive quirky Volkswagens like some manic pixie dream girl in a movie written by a man.”
Logan makes her classic I-Hate-Rosemary face. It involves scrunching up her long, beak-like nose and twisting her mouth into a repulsed snarl, as if she smells something foul. Rosemary looks away from that face and her eyes fall on the back seat of the Passat. Through the window covered in dog-nose smudges, she can see the chaos tornado-fire of Logan’s life. Food wrappers, stacks of student papers (some graded, some not), and so many books. An entire mobile library’s worth of paperbacks with bent covers and dog-eared pages.
“Oh, well, now I understand why you hit me. You were trying to see through this Jenga tower of emotionally abused literature.”
“You are,” Logan starts, exhaling theatrically, “the worst.”
Rosemary holds her posture perfectly straight. Dignity, dammit! “Can we please just exchange insurance information so we don’t have to talk to each other for the next ten weeks?”
Logan stands there with one hip cocked to the side and says nothing.
“You do have insurance, don’t you?”
When Logan still doesn’t reply or reach for her wallet, Rosemary feels the anxiety break through her rage barrier and all of her worries come spilling out like pieces of paper from an overturned file cabinet. What if Logan doesn’t have insurance? What is her deductible for an uninsured driver? What if her car is totaled? How will she be able to afford a new car now that she’s lost her job?
She lost her job. Holy shit. She has another paycheck coming in July, but then what?
What if she doesn’t get rehired?
What if she can’t find another teaching job?
What if she can no longer do the only thing she’s any good at?
What if right now, ten minutes across town, Joe is dying in Evergreen Pines from the gangrene on his foot, and she’s not there with him because she’s here, bickering with Logan over something as foolish as a dent in her car? What if—
“Hale!” Logan’s voice cuts through the mental noise, and Rosemary looks up to find Logan standing close to her, her smirk replaced by a worried frown. Her left hand is reaching out toward Rosemary’s arm, like she might try to comfort her the way she used to do, when they were kids. When Rosemary’s anxiety got out of control like this.
The past slams into her again.
Rosemary is eleven years old, seized by loss and grief, moving across the country for a fresh start with her mom, terrified of not knowing anyone in school. But there is Logan, standing at the bus stop on the first day of sixth grade: a skinny girl with bushy brown hair and bruised knees who flashes a bucktoothed smile when she sees Rosemary for the first time.
She’s twelve, lying on the summer grass with a friend who feels like the missing half of her soul, staring up at the stars and sharing their dreams; the sound of Logan’s laugh like a song she can’t stop listening to on repeat.
She’s thirteen, always reaching for Logan’s hand, always holding on too tight, struggling to understand how any friendship could feel so enormous inside her.
She’s fourteen, in a garden at a pool party, making an epic mistake and losing that friendship forever.
She’s eighteen, packing up her mother’s Subaru so she could leave this town; leave Logan and the memory of her behind.
She’s twenty-eight, coming home again to realize she can never truly escape Logan Maletis.
She is thirty-two, crashing into Logan. Always crashing into her. Three years of friendship, four years of hating each other, ten years of not talking, and then this. Arguing in department meetings and glaring at each other in the hallways and fighting in an Applebee’s parking lot.
And how absurd is it that after everything, Rosemary wishes Logan would reach out and touch her arm. She still grieves their lost friendship, still sometimes imagines finding a way to stitch them back together again. But Logan made it clear as soon as Rosemary returned to Vista Summit that she was picking up their relationship exactly where they left it in that dark garden at fourteen. It is a bruised and bloody mess of a relationship, a gaping wound they can’t stop poking.
So, no, Logan doesn’t comfort her. Her hand never makes it to Rosemary’s arm. It flies into one of the many pockets of her overalls and pulls out a wallet held together with duct tape. “Don’t shit a brick, Hale.” Logan snorts. “Of course I have insurance.”
Rosemary shakes off the images of the past and shoves all those thoughts and feelings back into their file folders. She snatches the insurance card from Logan’s grubby hand. “I can’t help it if every time I see you, Maletis, I fear for my life.”
LOGAN
“You hit Rosemary with your car?” Joe asks as soon as she rounds the corner into his room at Evergreen Pines Rehab Facility.
She throws herself down on the plastic chair beside his hospital bed with a harrumph. “How did you hear about that already?”
“My nurse is Kelsey Tanner, and she heard about it from her hairdresser’s boyfriend, who saw the whole thing in the Applebee’s parking lot.”
“I hate this town.”
“Yet you refuse to leave.” Joe raises a grizzled eyebrow at her. “Please tell me you weren’t aiming for Rosemary. Attempted vehicular manslaughter is taking your little feud a step too far.”
“I didn’t hit her. I hit her car. And it was really more of a tap. And if that tap happened to injure Hale’s brittle bones, well… that’s just an unexpected perk.”
“Thirty-two is a little old for a mortal enemy.”
“Not if that enemy is Rosemary Hale.” She folds her arms across her chest. “Remember how she used to correct all our teachers back in school, except for you? Well, she still does that, but with our coworkers in reply-all emails. And she’s always bringing essays to staff meetings so she can grade them in her lap. Like, we get it. You teach AP. You’re very important.”
Joe opens his mouth, but Logan plows on. “And remember that time junior year when she made Ivy Tsu cry after the regional debate competition because Ivy used the wrong color pen? I think she made everyone on the Speech and Debate team cry at least once. She was a little despot in Mary Janes.”
Joe smirks up at her from his bed. “Did she ever make you cry?”
So, so many times.
“No, because I don’t care what Hale thinks of me.”
Joe scrunches his face in an exaggerated expression of skepticism, and Logan thinks about Hale in that parking lot, snarled into knots with anxiety. She thinks about her overwhelming urge to comfort her, like she used to. “Look, enough about Satan’s stepdaughter. Let’s talk about you. You look like shit, by the way.”
He does a mock bow in his bed. “Thank you, darling. I call this chemo chic.” He flourishes his hands. “Also, you seem to have a sock inside your bra, so let’s not cast aspersions.”
She pulls out the sock and waves it dismissively. “You broke your foot? Did you try to poop without your walker again?”
“No, I broke it while salsa dancing with Antonio Banderas.”
“Don’t strain your groin trying to be funny, old man.”
He holds up one wrinkled middle finger and shoves it in her face. “I’m not old.”
Technically, he’s right. Joe Delgado is only sixty-four, but a long battle with pancreatic cancer has aged him like a time-lapse video. The Mr. Delgado of her memories had been larger than life in every way. Tall, with broad shoulders and a booming voice, his thick black hair was always too long and too messy, but in a way that just made sense for his personality, like he was too brilliant to waste time on something as commonplace as hygiene. A mad scientist, but his science was syntax and diction. He always spoke in animated gestures with hands the size of baseball mitts; his dark brown eyes sparkled whenever he talked about Toni Morrison or iambic pentameter, coordinating conjunctions or Gabriel García Márquez. “El gran poder existe en la fuerza irresistible del amor.”
For almost thirty years, he taught ninth grade English and AP Literature and coached the Speech and Debate team at Vista Summit High School. He’d raised two generations of kids in this town. He’d definitely raised her.
She started ninth grade as a social pariah. Outed at the end of the summer, she went into high school as the lesbian with no friends and a mom who left her for another family. She thought she’d never belong, but there he was. Joseph Delgado, a beloved openly gay teacher at an aggressively conservative high school. He had a pride flag above the projector screen and a decorative scarf around his neck, and he never apologized for being exactly who he was: a gay son of Mexican immigrants who loved teaching young people how to empower themselves through reading and writing.
Mr. Delgado was the first adult who ever truly made Logan feel okay. Okay for being gay. Okay for having ADHD and a brain that worked a little differently. He helped her harness the creative chaos of her mind. He got her to join the Speech and Debate team.
He nurtured her love of books.
He helped her get into college.
She became an English teacher because of him. When she first started working at Vista Summit High School, they’d meet at Rochelle’s for milkshakes on Fridays after work, to debrief the week, and he would give her advice on how to connect with the students she couldn’t reach and on the department politics she could never understand. They’d grade papers together at Java Jump on Saturday mornings. They’d talk pedagogy in the living room of his old Victorian house off Main Street while Van Morrison spun on the record player.
He was her teacher, her role model, her surrogate parent. Her mentor, her coworker, her best friend.
And then, two days before his sixtieth birthday, he got the diagnosis. The doctors said they caught it early enough; they’d attack it aggressively. Surgery to remove the tumors. A year of rewatching Gilmore Girls during chemo, vomiting for days after each round. Watching that mad scientist hair fall out strand by strand. Adopting him a cancer dog because Logan didn’t know how else to help.
Remission and relapse. A clinical trial that took forty pounds and his ability to sleep. Surgery to remove the whole pancreas. Insulin injections that made him sick. More chemo.
The first fall, which broke his ankle and put him in rehab for three months. So much physical therapy. Selling his house because he couldn’t get up the stairs anymore.
The cancer coming back. In his liver this time.
After all that, the man in this hospital bed under the unflattering fluorescent lighting of Evergreen Pines isn’t larger than life. He’s too small, almost hollow-looking. His brown skin and his handsome face sags with new wrinkles. Clutching his beige blanket, his hands look like shrunken husks. She hates seeing him here, in this sterile room with vomit-colored walls, without his books or his vinyls or his dog. Evergreen Pines has a strict pet policy, and Odysseus has to go stay with some nice lesbians who own a farm a few towns over whenever Joe’s in rehab.
“Stop looking at me like that,” Joe barks.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m Colin Craven from The Secret Garden.”
She huffs. “I never read The Secret Garden. I don’t fuck with hetero books.”
“No, you just fuck with every queer woman in a thirty-mile radius.”
“Ouch.” She clutches her chest in mock-hurt, even as the words actually leave a sting.
“I heard about what happened with Rhiannon, too.”
“Wait. Is that her name?”
“There’s a video, you know.” Joe grabs his ancient Android phone off the bedstand and hands it to her. “At least ten teachers sent it to me….”
“Fucking Sanderson, that masochistic dick.” Logan opens the video, but the quality is terrible on Joe’s phone, and quite frankly, she doesn’t need to relive it.
“So, you heard her call me an apathetic asshole who doesn’t care about anyone or anything?” she asks, fiddling with the buckle on her overalls.
Joe fixes those insightful eyes on her. “I think we both know you care far too much about everything.”
She shifts uncomfortably, feeling too seen. The plastic chair groans beneath her.
“I didn’t know you were dating anyone,” Joe says, mercifully changing the topic.
“Neither did I.”
“Oh, Logan.” Joe heaves a sigh, which quickly turns into a cough. “Not again.”
“What do you mean again?”
Joe reaches for the handkerchief in the pocket of the wool cardigan he’s wearing over his hospital gown. Through it all, he’s never compromised on his professorial fashion sense. “I mean, this isn’t the first time you’ve found yourself in a relationship without realizing it. The same thing happened with what’s-her-name? The barista in Portland?”
“Ari. But that wasn’t my fault!”
“It’s never your fault.”
“She U-Hauled! We were in a casual, open relationship, and then she was shopping for trips for two to Tulum for spring break!”
“And then there was that tattoo artist who didn’t renew their lease because they thought you were moving in together.”
“An innocent miscommunication.”
“And the fifth-grade teacher—”
“Okay, that’s enough examples. I see what you’re doing. Focusing on my love life instead of dealing with whatever new health thing you’ve got going on.” She waves her hand in a circle in front of his face. “I invented that kind of emotional avoidance.”
Joe coughs twice into his handkerchief. “Face it, Logan. You’re a fuckboy.”
“Tegan and fucking Sara, who taught you the term fuckboy?”
“I’m not that old,” he manages before dissolving into a full-on hacking fit. She reaches for the water bottle on the bed tray and extends the bendy straw toward his mouth. “Oh, stop!” He swats at her. “I can still drink water without assistance.”
“You never settled down with one person, and no one called you a fuckboy.”
A grimace of pain appears in the corner of Joe’s mouth, the new wrinkles in his forehead deepening. “Maybe I want to prevent you from making my mistakes.” He pulls out his handkerchief and blows his nose. “Which brings me back to Rosemary…”
There isn’t an eyeroll big enough for that sloppy segue, but Logan tries anyway. “Why would we ever need to talk about Rosemary Hale?”
“I always thought you girls would bury the hatchet.”
“Hale definitely keeps maps of where she put them.”
He shifts against his pillows. “But you used to be best friends. Why do you hate her so much?”
“Because of her entire personality,” Logan answers. She doesn’t want to go into the rest. The past: the pool party, the game of spin the bottle, the dark garden, Jake McCandie. Now: Hale showing her up at staff meetings, making everything look so easy, reminding Logan of all the ways she falls short.
But Joe keeps staring at her with the full weight of his old-man insightfulness. “But you have so much in common.”
“Hale and I have nothing in common!”
“You are both high school English teachers at your alma mater….”
“Yes, but I became a teacher because I genuinely care about helping reluctant learners develop confidence and a passion for school! Hale became a teacher because she gets off on bossing people around. She never once struggled with school, so of course she chose to do it forever.”
Logan has a theory. There are two types of high school teachers: the teachers who had such a great time in high school that they never wanted to leave, and teachers who were so miserable in high school they came back to try to make things a little better for the next generation. Hale is the first kind; Joseph Delgado was the second.
“I know you’ve always had a soft spot for her because you can’t resist taking in strays, but Hale is a rigid, controlling, sanctimonious little shit.”
Joe clears his throat as his gaze settles on something over Logan’s right shoulder.
Behind her, someone clicks their tongue. Logan doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t have to. There’s only one person in Vista Summit who uses condescending tongue-clicks as her weapon of choice. “I said her name three times, didn’t I?”
The tap-tap of pointy heels, and then Hale is standing at the end of Joe’s bed. Hale smells like vanilla body lotion, the same scent she’s worn since middle school. As a consequence, Logan has experienced not one but two panic attacks inside a Bath and Body Works.
“What is she doing here?” Hale asks in that condescending voice that always makes Logan feel like a student again, like she forgot to do the homework and the teacher is making an example out of her for the rest of the class.
“Rosemary,” Joe says affectionately. “I asked both of you girls to come here, actually.”
Hale huffs, and Logan gets a whiff of her mouthwash. Artificial spearmint and neuroses. She’s changed into clean clothes, but it’s just another skirt and cardigan that fits her like a straitjacket.
Joe takes another labored breath. “There’s something I need to tell you….”
“You’re back in diapers, aren’t you?” Logan grimaces. “I sure as shit won’t be the one to change them.”
Joe grimaces, then speaks. “I’m dying, girls.”
Chapter Four
ROSEMARY
Dying.
Rosemary takes a sharp breath and steadies herself against the hospital bed frame. She tries to stanch the anxiety already building in her chest, but it’s useless. Dying.
