Page 56 of Here We Go Again
“Writing isn’t exactly a safe, stable career path.”
“But you wereso goodat it!” she says with a little too much enthusiasm.
Hale used to conjure fantastical stories out of thin air like a magic trick. She’d pick up a pencil and words would pour out of her—stories about adventures and quests and romance. Stories they would sometimes write together, a single pencil they passed back and forth; stories Hale would read aloud by flashlight late at night in excited whispers. It always felt like she was building a secret world just for the two of them.
She shakes her head. “Being good at it doesn’t matter. Plenty of talented fiction writers never get published. And many writers whodoget published still have to work a day job. So, I switched mymajor to education so I would always have a secure day job. And don’t get me wrong”—she holds out a defensive hand and there’s a smudge of chocolate on the pad of her index finger—“I love being a teacher. I love my students, I love creating an inclusive curriculum, and I love that I’m always learning. I don’t regret teaching. But…”
“But teaching requires all of you,” Logan fills in. “And it doesn’t leave much time or energy to write an entire novel.”
Especially not the way Hale approaches teaching. Hale cares too damn much. She strops around in her high heels and argues at staff meetings because she cares. She gets to work before everyone else and carries around papers to grade because she caresso damn much. Some of it is perfectionism, sure, but most of it is just Hale never learning how not to care. And unlike Logan, she never hides it, never fakes indifference or disguises her passions. She’s impossibly brave. Always has been.
“No,” Hale sighs. “It doesn’t.”
Logan thinks it’s probably more than that. Hale always loved the self-contained desks and the bells and the rigidity of school. School was the place where she felt the most confident, the most comfortable with herself. Teaching seems like a perfect way to live in that safe routine bubble for as long as possible.
But writing… writing is chaos. It’s creative and it’s messy and it’s uncertain. All things Hale hates.
“Though I guess now I have nothing but time….” Hale says darkly down to her snack foods.
“What do you mean?”
“I—I got laid off.”
“Wait, youwhat?”
Hale sits very still beside her as she factually recounts the story: “They’re hoping to rehire me in the fall, but you know Vista Summit has never approved an education levy, so I don’t know where the budget would come from, which means I’m currently unemployed.”
Logan tries to think of an appropriate response, but draws ablank. Hale gotlaid off. No wonder she showed up at Logan’s house with a giant binder, and no wonder her anxiety has been running amok all trip.
Logan tries to imagine school in the fall: no Hale sulking in the hallways, no Hale to torment at staff meetings, no Hale in the teacher’s lounge or at the photocopier, her car always the last one in the parking lot each afternoon. Hale cut off from the thing she cares about most.
“Technically speaking, you already did it,” Hale says, and Logan has no idea what she’s talking about.
“I already did what?”
The sky burns for another minute before the sun vanishes completely, muting the palate to pretty pastels. The pastels project themselves onto Hale’s pale hair. She looks like a living rainbow. “You already left Vista Summit,” she says. “You left to go on this trip. You’re away from your dad right now.”
Logan snorts dismissively. “Yeah, but I call him every night while you’re in the shower.”
Hale cocks her head to the side like she’s studying an inscrutable work of art in one of the galleries. “You do?”
“Yeah, just to check in and make sure he’s okay.”
Hale’s neck looks like it’s about to snap in half. She stares at Logan, and stares and stares. Then, she straightens and says, “I haven’t called my mom once since we left.”
That doesn’t surprise Logan. She remembers all the nights Hale ate dinner at her house in middle school because her mom was always at work.
Hale shakes her head a few more times. “And you could never be like your mom, by the way.” She says this like it’s a plain, objective statement of fact, an incontrovertible truth. There’s something about the quiet confidence of those words that takes root inside Logan’s heart, like a gentle voice telling her it’s not too late. She’s not dying, and there’s still time to live without regret.
Hale shivers and rubs her hands up and down her bare arms. “It’s cold in the desert when the sun goes down.”
“Here.” Logan reaches for one of the blankets and attempts to drape it over Hale’s exposed shoulders.
“Gross! I don’t want some stranger’s blanket touching my body!” she shrieks in protest, but she still allows Logan to wrap her up like a burrito in a southwest-patterned blanket that smells of weed. Logan wraps herself in it, too. A burrito made for two.
“Live dangerously, Rosemary. You’re on an adventure.”
“Ha!” Hale’s hand bursts out of the blanket burrito so she can point a finger right in Logan’s face. “You called me Rosemary.”
