Page 45 of Here We Go Again
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 wasgoodat 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 evenmoreperfect 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 butworse, 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 throughthatright 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 hitshard. 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 whatitis. “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—”
