Logan doesn’t stop until we reach the door to my first period, and he’s a little out of breath when he asks softly, “Okay?”
I nod but he doesn’t move, even when the bell shrills overhead, electrifying the goosebumps still gripping my skin. I nod again, firmer this time. Dylan isn’t a threat. Not to me anyway. He’s just a stupid teenager who drank a little too much at a party. I know that. I know that.
“Okay,” he says, and squeezes my hand once before setting off with his usual lack of hurry down the hall.
I slip into the classroom, get barely a sideways glance from my teacher – perks of being the school freak – and easily find my desk in the back row. When I pull my notebook from my bag there is a thin trickle of blood on my wrist, I must’ve broken the skin back there, and I wipe it off on the inside of my shirt, wondering whether or not Logan had noticed.
He’s surprisingly early to health class, arriving at the door at the same time I do, and we walk together to the back of the room. As I slip into my seat I see him glance at my wrist before I shove it under the table and my stomach drops sickeningly.
He’d noticed. Of course he’d noticed.
I drop my head, not sure whether I should be ashamed but feeling only a deep and reaching cold. I jump when he stretches a long leg across the aisle and nudges my foot with his boot.
“Bree?” he mouths when I look up at him, his brows raised. He doesn’t have to ask. I know what he means.
I nod.
Yes, I’m okay. I’m always okay, aren’t I? Forever okay.
Because I can never tell him how ferociously not okay I really am. I can never tell him about the screams that want to slash their way out of my throat every time I open my mouth. I can never tell him about the nightmares that suck me under, how I awake nauseous and sweating to the sound of my own hideous shrieking, only in my head. I can never tell him how every day, every hour, every minute is a gut-wrenching struggle to keep standing, keep smiling at Trish so she doesn’t have to worry, keep my mouth shut over the sounds that swell up and gag me.
I can never tell him anything.
Logan looks concerned but Mr. Apligian is there, rocking a new sweater vest in pale peach and saying something about CPR. He directs us to grab same-gender partners and suddenly the room is in motion, chairs scraping back and everyone talking at once. I glance with longing over at Logan but he’s staring straight ahead blankly, and I notice no one going anywhere near him as they pair themselves off. Or me, for that matter. Eventually Mr. Apligian steps in and Logan is assigned to work with Erik, who looks less than thrilled as he grabs his stuff and heads back to us, and I’m partnered with a girl named Emma that I don’t remember ever noticing in class before, not that that really means anything.
Mr. Apligian fires up a power point, holding a severed plastic torso up as a demonstration. The sightless thing stares back at us, grayish white bald head, eyes closed, mouth hanging slack and open, waiting for someone to save it. Mr. Apligian slaps it down on the front table and I jump at the noise, watching the plastic head jiggling slightly as it settles, and somehow I can’t look at it anymore. I feel slightly sick as I look away, searching and finding Logan. He’s mostly obscured by Erik, but I can see one black boot propped on the support leg of the table, one hand resting on the tabletop before him. That’s enough.
As Apligian fires up the slideshow and we’re treated to more faceless dummies like in those emergency procedure leaflets they use on airplanes, I see Erik leaning over the aisle, trying to get my attention.
“Bree,” he whispers loudly. Unnecessary, as I’m already staring at him. “Hey, who did you go home with that night, anyway?”
I stare at him, unsure of his phrasing. Did he think . . ?
Erik pauses then asks, a little too eagerly, “Was it Dylan Tanner?”
Ah. So the rumors have already swung around full force. I was seen kissing Dylan at the party, if you could call it that, and now what had just happened out in the hall was most likely being sugared into a coy lovers’ spat. In between the who-knows-what I’m purportedly doing with Logan in return for his jacket, of course.
I’m still staring at him.
“‘Cause I heard -”
“Me,” Logan says over him, leaning forward across the table and barely making the effort to whisper. Apligian keeps plugging away at those slides, totally oblivious. “She went home with me.”
Erik snaps around, stunned, which is good, because he misses the matching expression on my face. Logan doesn’t blink though, and Erik looks away, leaving it at that, his previous enthusiasm deflated. But he crosses his arms and slouches back in his chair, effectively positioning himself as far from Logan as possible.
Despite the now unobstructed view, Logan doesn’t look at me.
As the intention of this exercise becomes clear, I find myself growing more and more uneasy. Under the teacher’s guidance people are wrapping their arms around each other to practice the positioning of the Heimlich maneuver and Emma gives me a we-might-as-well-do-this smile as she gives me her back. My heart is hammering as I quickly snake my arms around her, focusing on my breathing. She says something I don’t hear and then laughs lightheartedly, taking my hands and placing them where they need to go. It’s over quickly but then it’s my turn and I force myself to turn, force my mind to blank as her arms come around me and squeeze tight.
Not the same. My arms are free. She’s not trapping me. She’s just playing at saving my life. I’m not in any danger. It’s not the same.
But my heart is pounding and I can feel myself sweating and then she lets go and I take a shaky breath, catching the questioning look she sends me out of the corner of her eye. I raise my sight and see Logan watching me as well, his dark brown eyes taking everything in.
“Do you want to go first this time?” Emma asks lightly, and I blink at her. I have no idea what she’s talking about. She gestures inanely at the table and I glance around, seeing kids hiking themselves up onto the long tables and laying back, little bursts of uncomfortable laughter fraying apart from the general din.
My chest freezes.
No. No no no. Nonononono.
But I’m supposed to be fine, I have to be fine, I can’t have a panic attack in the middle of health class and keep up the façade for Trish, I can’t shatter in the middle of a CPR tutorial when I’m supposed to be fine.
Emma’s waiting, that probing look quickly becoming something else, so I take a deep breath and slide my butt back onto the cold table and lay down in one quick motion, pretending the nausea I feel sliding up my throat is from lying down too fast. The table is hard beneath my shoulder blades and when she touches me, positioning both hands on top of one another for the chest compressions, my eyes fly open. All I see are the school’s neon overhead lights. So bright my eyes water.
Colored lights, red and yellow and green spinning around sickeningly, around and around above my head. Raindrops dropping on my skin, one after another, measuring time in excruciating slow motion.
I can’t breathe. I lurch up, gasping, distantly aware of a wide-eyed Emma stumbling back from me in alarm. I throw myself off the table, clutching my chest as I try to stop screaming – why can’t I stop screaming? But I’m not screaming, it’s in my head, filling my ears until I can’t hear anything else, and I don’t think, I just run.
Out of the classroom, down the hall, slamming through the restroom door and I’m gripping the edge of the sink, my head hanging, clawing for air. I feel like I’m suffocating, dizzy from those lights. My head is spinning.
I don’t even make it into a stall before I sink onto my knees on the checkerboard patterned tile, seizing my wrist in my other hand and slashing my thumb across it, again and again, waiting for her to stop screaming. God, I just want her to stop screaming.
But she won’t stop because the screams aren’t someone else’s, they’re mine. They’re always mine.
A big hand grips each of my wrists, prying them apart. I almost cry out a
t the loss, my arm stinging but not nearly enough, and then my hands are flattened against a warm chest and Logan’s face floats before mine. He breathes for me, in and out, inhale, exhale, coaxing me with his eyes.
My shaky, rattling breaths are nothing like his, and I clench my eyes shut. I can’t hear anything else. Rain dribbles down my face.
Logan lets his head fall forward against mine and our foreheads are touching, huddled there on our knees on the bathroom floor, his hands pressing mine against his heart. I try to focus on his body, his breathing, his heartbeat, the steady pressure of his hands over mine.
At some point, the screaming fades.
I pull back carefully. Logan straightens, and his eyes are red, as if it were he who’d been crying and not me.
Tears. It’s only tears that he reaches up to brush from my cheeks, not rain. He watches me closely as he pulls my hands from his chest into his lap.
That’s when I notice the blood.
I must’ve scraped the scab loose on my wrist because there are spots of blood on his shirt, and – I look down – small splotches on his jeans as well. It’s still seeping from my wrist, and my opposite thumb is red, in the creases of my skin and caked under the nail.
Logan notices it too, of course, pulling my wrist up for closer inspection. His expression gives nothing away but I feel the nausea return anyway. He doesn’t do anything but stand and pull me easily to my feet, though, ushering me over to the sinks where he runs cool water over my hands and wrist, rinsing the blood away and tearing off a strip of paper towel, blotting it gently.
“I called your name. You didn’t hear me.” He looks up at me. “Even when I was right in front of you, you didn’t hear me.”
No, of course not. I couldn’t hear him over the screaming.
Logan studies me for a second. “Do you want to go back to class?”
My fierce headshake almost prompts a chuckle from him. Almost.
“Okay.”
That’s it. Just okay. Okay, let’s hide out in the girls’ bathroom. Okay, let’s hold hands with a girl who cuts herself with her own thumbnail just so she can hear something other than the horror show in her head. Okay.
“Bree?”
I look up at him, not sure what to expect.
“Can you – will you do me a favor?”
Waiting, watching him.
“Text me. Or call me, okay? You don’t have to say anything, just dial the number. I’ll know it’s you.” I look at him quizzically and he nods his head toward the wrist he’s still holding a towel to. “Next time you feel like – like this. Just call me, okay?”
I wish it was that easy. Like it was a choice, like tying your shoes or getting your mail. But I’m not always aware I’m doing it, not at first. It’s just a reaction, a way to deal with the world falling out from under me. It’s automatic. Survival.
The bell signaling the end of class makes me flinch violently, my nerves still raw, and Logan squeezes my hands, steadying them.
He’s smart enough not to wait for an answer he knows he won’t receive, and tosses the soiled towel into the trash, bending to pick something up – my backpack – and hand it to me. I thank him with my eyes and he takes my hand.
“You’re welcome,” he says, unfazed as a girl I don’t know comes around the corner and actually gasps, staring in abject horror at seeing Logan Brenner in the girls’ bathroom with blood on his clothes.
I smile at his back as he leads me back into the world.
I want him to keep going, just lead me right out of the school and back to his car where it’s just me and him, where I can breathe, but there’s still almost a half of a day of school left so instead he walks me to my next class, sending me a quick apology before releasing my hand at the door. He pauses just a second, presumably to be sure I won’t melt into a trembling, psychotic puddle right there in the hall, and then he’s gone.
It’s just after French that it happens again.
It doesn’t take much. A few words, really. But then it never does take much to get down to blood, does it?
“Hey, Bree. Nice jacket.”
I look over from my locker at the beautiful blonde girl and realize, absurdly, that I don’t even know her. Obviously. I don’t know anyone. Except for Logan. And Erik, of course. But after that little revelation in health he’d found me in the hall later and had asked if I was all right, real concern in his blue eyes, and I hadn’t been able to answer, I’d just tugged the leather sleeve down over my wrist. And then his girlfriend had come up and wrapped her arm through his and he’d just left, awkwardly melting back into the crowd, which meant he almost certainly thought me insane.
Why is this chick talking to me like we’re friends?
“Are you actually with Logan Brenner?” Her voice isn’t malicious, just curious. Just two girls having a friendly conversation. “What’s it like dating a murderer, anyway?”
I stop cold for a second, just a second, but it’s long enough that she and her gathered friends notice.
“Wait. Ohmygosh. Don’t tell me you don’t know.”
I’m shoving books into my bag without even noticing their subjects now; I just keep cramming them in angrily, one after another, waiting for the little sharks to draw their blood and be gone.
This time it’s a new girl. Just as blonde – no way is that a natural shade - just as beautiful. She leans up against the lockers directly in my way, twirling a lock of that bleached mop around one pink, manicured finger. “Poor thing,” she says with an exaggerated little pout. “I forgot. You can’t tell us. You can’t talk.”
She bats her I’m-pretty-fucking-sure-those-aren’t-real eyelashes at me and I want to punch her in the throat for talking like that about Logan. For knowing something about him that I don’t, holding that small piece of him.
Out of nowhere, he pushes through the gaggle of them, grasping my wrist none too gently and dragging me from the center to the sound of their dramatic gasping. We walk for some time after their shocked whispers die out, my footsteps hurried and uneven to keep up with his longer stride. He marches me completely to the opposite side of the school.
When he stops abruptly he looks angry, pulling my arm to spin me around and unzip the front pocket of my bag in one fierce jerk, turning me back around to slap my phone into the palm of my hand so hard it stings.
“Call. Me.”
He practically growls it and I blink at him, trying to understand why he’s suddenly so furious, those girls’ words echoing in my head. And then I do. I understand. With a glance at my wrist I see a fresh ooze of blood. I’d been scraping it again and hadn’t even noticed.
He sighs. Carefully wraps each of my fingers around the phone, one at a time. “Please. Call me. Just . . . try.”
I nod. I can agree to trying.
“I’m sorry. For telling Erik you came home with me. I wanted to end the rumors floating around about you and Dylan but,” he shakes his head. “I shouldn’t have put you with me.”
He’s holding my hands around that phone and he’s watching me and I’m watching him, wondering about the things people say about him, wondering what he’s hearing people say about me, and then, out of nowhere, his face breaks into a grin.
“Can I ask you a question?”
I shrug.
“Why is every single one of your books in your bag?”
Oh, hell.
But I can’t help but smile back at him - a real smile – and he seems to take that in, absorbing it.
“Give me that.” He reaches around me, pulling the absurdly heavy, bulky bag off my shoulder and onto his. There’s a small, rusty stain at the bottom of his shirt from my blood. He takes my hand and right then I know it doesn’t matter – what people say about him, the way people hate him or fear him or both. It’s not a decision, I don’t have to think about it, it just is. It doesn’t matter.
Chapter 6
I awake that night with terror hot in my throat and Logan’s voice in my head. I push up in b
ed, my shirt stuck to the sheen of sweat on my chest. My arms are shaky as I sit, raking my hair back from my face and trying to quiet the sounds in my head.
I glance at the clock. Five-thirty.
Pushing to my feet, I pad out of my room and down the hall to the kitchen, pouring myself a glass of water and taking a sip. The house is quiet. Trish is asleep in her room, but I feel restless and uneasy, haunted by the dream. The air feels thick and sticky so I head back to my room only long enough to kick my legs into the same jeans I’d worn to school and shove my arms into Logan’s coat. Then I’m slipping outside, shivering when the cooler night air hits me, but it feels good.
My skin is hot so I sink down into the damp grass, squishing the palms of my hands against the blades, absently combing them one way and then the other.
My eyes find Logan’s house easily as a light burns through two of the back windows, spilling out in distorted rectangles over the lawn. And I have to admit to myself that that’s the real reason for coming out here. The dreams were pulling at me and he keeps me from going under. I’d hoped the closeness to him, just that far away, would help calm me but it doesn’t, and my chest feels achy and tight and the trembles just won’t go away.
I’d heard his voice in my sleep and I couldn’t escape the urge to hear it again. Now.
When I find myself gripping my wrist in desperation I shove both hands into my pockets, glaring at those two boxes of yellow light.
The fingers of my right hand stab into something small and hard and I withdraw my phone. Without over-thinking it I turn it on and bring up the last incoming message.
A More Deserving Blackness Page 7
