Page 8 of Here We Go Again
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. “Exceptyoubacked intome. 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), andso 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.
“Youdohave insurance, don’t you?”
When Loganstilldoesn’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 istotaled? 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 withhim 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 thenthis. 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 aftereverything, 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 aharrumph. “How did you hear about that already?”
