Page 4 of Here We Go Again
She begins to back out of her parking spot as Colin Firth’s tragic bleating is cut off by the robotic voice of a Siri notification. “New message from JoJo DelGoGo rainbow emoji,” the default male Siri voice informs her, changing tone slightly as it reads the text from Joe: “Happy last day of school,” the message begins. “I don’t want to spoil this most sacred of days, but it would seem I’ve had a bit of a fall. I’ve tried to reassure my nurses that I’m fine, but they’ve insisted on bringing me back to Evergreen Pines because I might have, perhaps, broken my foot? You know how I feel about this godforsaken place. Could you please come by this evening?”
A bit of a fall.
Back to Evergreen Pines.
Broken my foot.
Joe.
Her hands clench around the steering wheel. Smirking skeletons and carnage and a blood-red background. She wishes she could be more apathetic about this, but her entire body feels like it has turned to stone. She’s thinking about Joe and the Death card and endings, and not about the fact that she’s still backing out of her parking spotwhen there’s a screech of metal on metal as she whips toward the steering wheel. She slams on the brakes, but it’s too late.
She hit something.
Specifically, she hit another car.
Morespecifically—she looks in her rearview mirror—she hit a gray Toyota Corolla.
Shit on a fucking biscuit. Logan watches in horror as the driver of the Toyota flies out of the car like a bat out of Ann Taylor Loft. In the name of Shay Mitchell’s Instagram,no. Not her.Anyonebut her.
Three-inch heels and black nylons, a gray pencil skirt and a cardigan with polka dots buttoned all the way up to her throat, all of it drenched in the brown liquid of an iced latte.
Who the hell teaches in three-inch heels?
Rosemary Hale, that’s who.
Of all the people she could’ve rear-ended, it had to be Hale. No one in this town keeps receipts better than her.
In the rearview mirror, Hale touches her pale pink fingernails to the wet splotch on her stomach like a soldier in a movie groping at a fatal bullet hole. Hale hasn’t updated her hairstyle since the sixth grade, so her pale blond hair is scraped back in its usual severe French braid, which swings like a pendulum as she shakes her head in horror. Her pasty-white skin has gone a splotchy red and purple. “You hit my car!” Hale shrieks.
And Ruby fucking Rose. She had. She’d been publicly ridiculed and dumped, Joe was injured, and she’d rear-ended the shit out of her childhood best friend turned nemesis’s car.
Colin Firth still warbles from the speakers.Our last summer.
Logan glances at Hale in the rearview mirror again, and for a moment, she sees a flash of the young girl she once cared about more than anything. That earnest, imaginative, brave girl. Then Hale stamps her foot, and all Logan sees is the woman that girl became and the destruction she herself has created.
This is probably Death’s fault, too.
Chapter Two
ROSEMARY
Rosemary Hale doesn’t want to stab a man with a Pilot V5 pen, but she will, if it comes to that.
Her fingers grip tighter around the purple grading pen as she chokes out the words: “I don’t understand… are youfiring me? In an Applebee’s?”
“Not firing.” Principal Miller holds up both hands defensively, as if he’s the victim in this ambush over chicken wings. He’s got BBQ sauce on his fingers. It almost looks like blood. “We’re laying you off with the hopes of rehiring you in the fall once the district has more accurate enrollment numbers.”
“How is that any different thanfiring me?”
Before anyone ends up impaled by fine point, Rosemary tries to take a four-count breath like Erin taught her. Inhale for four. Hold for four. Exhale for four. But the restaurant is blaring yacht-rock and gauche wall to gauche wall is stuffed with people, and she’s overwhelmed by the smell of deep-fried food and the feeling of the vinyl barstool against her legs and the sound of “Rosanna” by Toto, and the encroaching realization that she’s unemployed, so she only gets to three on the inhale before she screeches, “But I wentto Yale! And Columbia!” Because her panic has eclipsed all rational thought.
Stop panicking. She tries to take another deep breath. Panic is for the unprepared, and she’s always prepared for everything.
Except, well, this.
When she got the email from her boss in the middle of sixth period asking for a last-minute meeting after school, Rosemary hadn’t thought much of it. Miller often insisted on meetings that could’ve been emails, and this particular email—rife with typos, random ellipses, and bright blue Comic Sans—asked if the meeting could take place at Applebee’s, because the principal didn’t want to miss any of the traditional staff happy hour that takes place every year as soon as the final bell rings on the last day of school.
Rosemary never goes to the staff happy hours, but she also never ignores orders from her boss, even if he does sometimes wear flip-flops to work. So, she drove to Applebee’s against her better judgment. She thought maybe he wanted to congratulate her on her 98 percent testing rate on the Advanced Placement exams, or commend her impeccable zero-failures rate, or celebrate her students who placed at the National Speech & Debate Tournament. Or maybe Principal Miller wanted to pick her brain about the curriculum she created and piloted for the English Department this year, so they could get a jump-start on next year’s rollout.
