Chapter Twenty-eight | You Can Only Go in Pieces
♫ You Can Only Go in Pieces by Shua

I wasn't doing great around the time I met Logan.

At the time I didn't realize it. It's one of those things that dawns on you after a few months, or a few years even. That life felt like something you were pulling yourself through, rather than something you were willingly and actively living.

Being a teenager and discovering who you are is a struggle in itself. Having a disability and no friends (or social skills) on top of that made me feel even more isolated from everyone else. Mom always said I was lucky to have two older siblings who went through everything before I did, but I never experienced it that way. If anything, it made me feel even more alone, seeing them hit all these milestones and failing when I tried to do the same.

It wasn't just them. It was my classmates getting their drivers licenses, but school telling me they didn't want to teach me for safety reasons. And it was wanting to get Lasik surgery, but the clinic turning me away for the same reason. And it was failing at physical education, needing help with small, thin matches in the lab during biology, having my mom tie my hair each morning because my hands wouldn't allow me to, dropping drinks in the cafeteria because those same hands shook too much to carry a tray (and then just skipping lunch because I had nobody to carry it for me).

I felt like I was being rejected everywhere I went. If not by another person, it was by my own body. The embarrassment just made it worse. I don't think my life ever felt heavier than it did, then, I don't think I've ever felt like more of a mistake.

When I sank into that feeling of rejection and humiliation, I started to wonder what the point of anything was. The homework I was doing, the food I'd eat (or refused to eat), the conversations I wasn't having. Why would I go to school if it was obvious I'd never amount to the same things as my peers? Why would I get out of bed if the day would feel so heavy, if I'd once again force my parents to help me all the time, if nobody would notice if I just lied there and held my breath?

It didn't take long before my grades tanked. My parents, who thought I'd just been burned out, made up all sorts of excuses for me. They'd say that I was physically and mentally exhausted and that I'd worked so hard for so many years, I needed rest for a few days. But days turned into weeks. Weeks melted into months.

It was something physical inside of me, I decided. Everything did have a tendency of circling back to my body. It was a heaviness that chained me to my bed. If I tried to stand, it would sink to my legs and if I tried to swallow the food Dad brought to my bedside, it would rise to my throat and pinch it shut. Ironically, it was also the first time in my entire life that my spasms subsided. They didn't even pull at the corner of my mouth, sit in my hollowed cheek. Maybe this being underneath my skin felt bad for me. Or maybe it felt like its work was done, now that I'd given up on trying to fight it.

As I lost the weight and the grades, my family felt like an intervention was necessary. My siblings came home for a random weekend in late November and Sofia started telling me about the struggles she'd had in high school. I recognized the point she was trying to make as a 'you are not alone'.

I knew she was trying to comfort me in the only way she knew how. She compared my disability to the insecurities she'd had about her body and her friend's severe anxiety, not in the sense that it was somehow the same, but that the feelings we experienced were comparable because we all forgot that other people struggled with the exact same things.

I never even felt anything remotely close to that. Body issues, I knew, were something you could see when someone refused to take off their shirt at the beach. Social anxiety was something you could see in a classmate who wouldn't turn in their test until someone else did, or who'd stutter when ordering at a restaurant.

But I'd never gone outside and seen a single person mirror my anxiety and my shock and my humiliation, who sat next to me waiting on the sidelines during physical education, who was taunted and mocked by strangers, who trembled while speaking, bended their knees backwards so much that it looked like they could snap any minute, their muscles tightening when they did something as simple as hold a piece of paper. It was not a solution or a comfort to me that everyone had something, that I supposedly wasn't alone in this, because I couldn't see it. And it didn't feel like it. And I was extremely lonely, even with Sofia's words ringing in my ears.

I was proud of her for overcoming all those things. But to me, it just felt like another one of those milestones I'd miss. Which, at this point, I liked to believe I made peace with.

There came a point where my parents didn't want to let me stay home from school anymore, as they felt it was feeding into what they referred to as 'the rut'. I didn't have the energy to protest, so I went. All my clothes were too big on me and I exclusively wore messy buns and my old glasses every day. School became a distraction again. I couldn't sleep in class or during breaks and free periods, so I worked and worked and worked. After school hours I'd stay in the library and work more.

Logically, there shouldn't have been a reason for Logan to have any kind of interest in me. I looked bad, I didn't do anything other than schoolwork and sleeping and I didn't talk to anyone. Even my teachers forgot who I was from time to time.

I'd seen his face in algebra before. He joined the wrestling team mere days after he transferred to our high school in our sophomore year and as our school was small and nothing ever happened, the entire event had shaken the student body. But during English class, fourth period, I was the one he sat with.

He was more doe-eyed than he is now. There was an eternal optimism about him, something that I felt clashed with the heaviness I was bearing. That wasn't the reason I tried to discourage him from seeking me out, though: I thought he was joking, or that him approaching me at all was a dare from his new friend group, consisting of the entire wrestling team and a few sport fans.

But he wasn't invasive at all. He smiled at me during algebra. And when he sat in the seat next to mine during English class he didn't speak to me unless he had to. I can't even remember how I warmed up to him at all, considering my mental state at the time and my lack of interest. All I know is that neither scared him off.

The first time he talked to me was when we had to pair up for some worksheet. He was sitting next to me again and as the teacher handed out the sheets, turned to me and asked, "Do you want to pair up with me?"

He didn't emphasize the want to make me feel bad about potentionally saying no. The question was casual, phrased in the same way I imagined he would ask anyone else, airy and light with absolutely nothing hidden behind it as far as I could tell, so I nodded.

That day, he was still talking to me about the assignment when lunchtime rolled around. He managed to lure me into the cafeteria and into the line, filled his tray with two of everything without me noticing, then placed one of each before me as we sat down. He didn't ask me for the money or give me one of those sad smiles. He didn't stop talking, either. I wondered if he knew it was the first time I sat in the cafeteria, that I ate at school at all, since my sister graduated. My appetite wasn't back and I feared it never would be, but I still ate the food he got me.

It wasn't really a turning point, I wouldn't say. I still wasn't convinced. But then, one day, I saw him on the beach. Dad had forced me to go on a walk on my own and sent me down there, and he was sitting in the sand in his shorts and a sweatshirt, staring out to the water. I'd gotten to know him as someone calm and serene, but I'd never seen him this still and quiet, partly due to the popularity he was met with.

Regardless of how motionless (and harmless) he sat there, I made an immediate U-turn when I saw him.

But he'd noticed me. "Nova!" He called, as if he said my name constantly. It startled me so much that I stopped walking and turned back.

He offered me a small smile and waved me over. I felt like I had no choice but to sit next to him in the sand. I wouldn't admit it, but I was glad to be able to rest my legs for a bit.

We sat there staring at the sea for a while. I thought that if he'd say anything at all, it would be about school again. But then he said, "My family moves around a lot." He even turned and pointed at a white home at the far end of the beach. "That's our house. They say they want to stay until I'm off to college, at least."

I sat still for a while, then nodded.

He continued. "There's never any real permanence when you move as much as we do, so I've never really grown attached to anything. But I might grow attached to this sight. This is the first time I've felt this comforted since I was a kid." He referred to it as being comforted, rather than comfortable, I noticed.

But I had no idea why he was telling me any of it. Maybe he figured that since I didn't talk much, I didn't take much in, either. Maybe, to him, it was like whispering into a broken recorder. Knowing nobody would ever rewind the tape or confront him with what was on it.

We kept quiet for a long time after that, too. I'd found that people usually had the urge to fill the silence, meaning that if I waited long enough I wouldn't have to say anything at all, but Logan didn't detect the awkwardness in the quiet. He knocked his head back, tipped his chin to the sky and sat like that.

After what seemed like forever, I said, "I think I can't feel that anymore." I was talking about the comfort he felt. When he glanced at me, I wondered if it had come out the wrong way, if it had hinted at my depression without me wanting it to.

But he just said, "Guess you're used to it."

A ghost of a smile passed over my face at the unexpected response. He guessed I was used to it. I probably was.

"Sitting here like this reminds me of something I've always wondered," he continued. "Imagine it turns out that all of it is fake. The cosmos are just thoughts, everything we think we know is just our imagination and life is an illusion. This beach doesn't exist. It's just us and nothing else. What would that make us? Would it make us everything? Or would it make us nothing?"

Then we went quiet again. I held the answer on my tongue, nothing. We'd be nothing. But for some reason I thought that if I said it out loud, it would confirm something. I could imagine every normal, positive person saying 'everything'. Coming to a glass-half-full-conclusion, if you're alive and have the ability to think, even if you're the only real thing in existence, you're everything.

But I knew how it really was. I knew how it felt living in a body that was rejecting me, like everyone and everything else in my life seemed to do. You had to be acknowledged to be real. You had to be heard to have a voice.

He couldn't hide his optimism. I could see him turn his head to me, a lopsided grin pulling at the corner of his mouth. "I think it makes us everything. This town is so small it feels like it's barely even here. It makes me feel more alive. Like I'm bigger. Like what I do has more of an effect."

It was something I thought I would've understood if I was more like him, new in town and forever seeing the good in the bad, or just a normal, positive, glass-half-full-person. But the words he said fell flat. They felt like they were meant for someone else.

Logan went on to tell me about his past. He was born in California and had lived in Detroit for some time, before his family moved to Washington DC and finally settled in Addenfield, Massachussetts. His father was a business consultant, which meant he went wherever he was needed, and his mother worked as a photographer. Logan said she loved not staying in one place and that she'd always been like that.

But he seemed different. I noticed it as he sat there in the sand, heavy and unmoving like an anchor. I wondered how someone so still could move so frequently. And I also wondered if he was always able to assimilate as well as he did at our high school. Maybe it was something he had no choice but to learn, a survival instinct.

"What do your parents do?" He'd asked, after he'd wrapped up his life story. It surprised me that he remembered I was sitting alongside him. I'd unknowingly been holding my breath as he spoke.

"My Dad's a computer engineer," I said. "And my Mom's a paralegal."

"And which one's your house? Or do you live closer to the town square?"

Addenfield was so small, it was one or the other: you either lived by the beach and its surrounding area, or somewhere around the square. I pointed to the blue, two-story house behind us and its swirly pathway I'd just came from. I didn't tell him my room was the one right over the patio, with the sea shells on the windowsill, even though the thought did pop up in my head. I thought that if I said too much, I'd be reminding him that he didn't actually want to sit here, talking to me.

"Did you grow up there?" He asked, to my surprise. When I told him yes, he asked how that had been, considering the size of the town, if I still enjoyed the beach, if I'd ever felt a pull towards a busier city life.

The longer we sat there, the easier it became to let myself talk. My mouth did the thing again, where the muscles around my lips pulled them to the side, and there were a few times where Logan leaned in and had to ask me to repeat myself, but that's what usually happened when I spoke to people outside of my family.

Logan got a phone call after that, telling him to come home for dinner. He jumped to his feet and helped me up to mine. Then he said, "See you tomorrow?"

I nodded again. All I ever did back then was nod. I watched him crack a smile, then turn and walk down the beach. He wasn't hurried. His steps were slow and easy, sinking into the sand, then lifting, then sinking again.

I abandoned the walk I was supposed to be on and went home, too, and the next morning he was waiting for me at the end of our street to walk to the bus-stop with me. Our friendship grew from there. I went to therapy, with Claire, and he carried a single lunch tray with both our food on it.

We never had a conversation like that again, but we had plenty of silences. I think that's part of why I liked and trusted Logan. He appreciated my silences, but he was also happy to hear me talk— even if it wasn't about fake cosmos but school assignments and volunteer work, instead, and even if I was so tired that my speech impediment got worse and the words grew distorted in my mouth.

Claire was a huge help. She was one of the reasons, or the reason, that I got out of the rut. Therapy became less of a terrifying thing that confronted me with my disability and the anxiety that came with it, and more of an assistance. Claire and I talked about everything. Things not even my parents knew, she helped me work through.

And she knew that Logan was special to me. His effort was special. The manner in which he treated me, like I was a normal person, someone worth befriending and someone to walk to the bus-stop with, was all unfamiliar. But somehow, it pulled me through. He showed up when I needed him and since then, he's always been there.

I've never told him how much he means to me, truly. And with the way I've abandoned him at college, I wouldn't be surprised if he thought I was using him back then, because I didn't have anyone else.

As he's lying on the floor of the home theater with Owen on top of him, landing punch after punch to his face, I get the overwhelming urge to say it.

Both of us have changed since our first real conversation on the beach, sitting side by side engulfed by mist, but I've learned that changing isn't always the same as growing. He's turned inwards. His shoulders are broader now, but they're slumped, and the slope of his jaw has turned sharper and scruffier, but the curve of his lips has disappeared.

Most importantly, that optimism I both despised and loved has faded. It's no longer pulling at the corner of his mouth. It's no longer glistening in his eyes. It's not fainter and it's not merely hidden, it's just gone.

Next to me, Milo jumps to his feet and rushes over, taking Owen by the collar of his shirt with both hands and using blunt force to pull him away.

I help Logan stand. He winces as I do, his hand shooting to his busted lip, and sways for a moment. Before he has a chance to recollect himself, Owen stifles a laugh from where Milo is pushing him against the wall and wipes at his mouth before pointing a finger at Logan. "Do better, bitch boy," he grins.

A few scattered laughs float in through the doorway. The movie playing on the big screen has been paused and people are curiously watching, eager to see some action and pouting when they realize there isn't any.

Logan pulls away from me and stumbles out of the room. My heart pounds as I follow him up the spiral staircase, to the second floor of the apartment. I know there's much to see in an apartment like this one, classic paintings and art carved into doors and chandeliers suspended from the ceiling, but all I can focus on is his back and the way his muscles flex beneath the thin shirt he's wearing. Why he's even wearing a shirt like that in November is beyond me.

He pushes against a door that leads to a bathroom, where a startled couple scurries out after they catch sight of his bloody lip and bruised eye. He cups his hands beneath the faucet and tosses a handful of cold water into his face.

I close the door behind us. The only noise in the room is the thumping of the music, its bass trembling beneath our feet, and the running water. He doesn't say anything, and I don't know what I want to ask him first.

"Are you okay?"

He ignores the question, shuts off the water and leans against the counter with his hands. I glance at their backs and knuckles. There's not a single bruise or cut. Instead of red, a pale white color blooms underneath his skin.

He didn't fight back. And from what I saw just now, he wasn't going to.

I take a step closer to him. "What happened?"

"Nothing happened."

"Yes, it did. Look at you."

"No," he bristles, turning to me abruptly. "Nothing happened, Nova. Don't you get it? Nothing happened. I didn't do anything." His voice cracks on the last word, as if he took a step onto the wrong floorboard and his stomach is dropping, waiting for the earth to give away beneath him. I imagine it's a similar feeling to what he must be experiencing now, standing here with the sink red and his hands clean.

His face wavers, but before it can fall, he swallows heavily and turns back to the sink, going back to wetting his face, again and again and again.

I pass him to open a cabinet. A small tube of antibiotics lays all the way in the back, and I find a pack of cotton swabs, too. He takes a seat on the edge of the bathtub, allowing me to reach his face.

My hands usually shake. But they shake for a different reason today, trying to take care of him.

"I'll do it," he ends up muttering.

I want to apologize, but doing so would make this about me, so I don't. His hands remain steady as he pours the right amount of antibiotics on the cotton, then dabs it onto his wounds.

I sit on the bathtub next to him. "Have they been like this since the start?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"At least let me help you treat the-"

"Nova." He says my name sternly, a warning lining his voice. "Just stop. Okay? You don't owe me anything. You can't help. Just let it go."

His shoulders are rigid and his chest is heaving. There's even a slight tremble in his hands that mimicks my own, only he does a better job at suppressing it.

We sit there, side by side on the edge of the bathtub, in the same way we did all those years ago on the beach. He continues cleaning his wounds, wincing at every accidental touch in the wrong spot. Finally, he stands up and heads for the door.

"You can go."

"Go where?" I ask.

"Home." His hand lingers on the doorknob, but he doesn't push the door open.

I stand up. "We can go together."

But Logan shakes his head. "I'm staying," he tells me, as if it makes any sense. He's still avoiding my eye. Before I can say anything to object, he adds, "I promised I'd help and clean up."

I barely push back a snort. "What does that matter now?"

"It matters," he emphasizes, defensively. He releases the doorknob, and with that the apparent tension in his arm, as he turns to me and looks me in the eye. It makes me think that he's relieved I didn't just accept it and left, though that's merely an assumption I'm making.

"Why?" I ask.

"Because if I just leave now, what do you think will happen when I go to practice next week?"

Logan nears me, his voice low in a way that's cautious instead of angry, spread thinly instead of thick with emotion. Something in his eyes is flickering, as if he's only letting flards leave his mouth, but there's still things he's hiding away. "You know about all of it, Nova. Don't you?"

I keep quiet.

"You know about the pills they're forcing down my throat." He swallows heavily. "You know about these." He points to the purples and reds in his face, his left eye swollen and his lip cut. "You know they've been to my dorm. You know they don't leave me the fuck alone. So what in the hell makes you so naïve as to think I can just walk away? What makes you so naïve as to think I haven't wanted to?"

His anger is growing like the swell underneath his fresh bruises. I know the core of it isn't directed at me, but I feel it anyway. He's right to call me naïve. He's right to feel mad at me for suggesting to leave like this and then giving him such a reaction when he said he couldn't. Most of all, I recognize the words he isn't uttering: how I've abandoned him, ignored him, barely reached out to him, knowing what was at play. How that fact makes everything else so much worse.

I swallow my apology.

Logan buries his hands in his blonde hair. "You can go," he says again, restraint tugging at the words and distorting his pronounciation this time. "You can continue pretending you don't know any of it. I won't blame you, it isn't your problem. Just let it be mine. Okay?"

He moves out of the way so I can go, but I don't even consider it for a second. "I'm sorry," I apologize, anyway. "I didn't know what to do. I wasn't sure if it was serious or if I... it's ridiculous, saying it now, but I truly—"

"No," he cuts me off. "You know what's ridiculous?"

I hold my breath and avert my eyes, training them onto the tiled bathroom floor as I brace for impact.

"It's that I thought... it's that I hoped it would be you."

I'm still grappling with the meaning of his words by the time he accepts them as his own.

He takes hold of the edge of the bathtub with one hand before he lowers himself onto it. "The first permanent thing I've ever known wasn't the beach, Nova," he admits. "It was us. Half of your appeal, to me, was that I didn't have to compete with anyone to be your friend. I could just be whoever, show some interest, and you'd have me."

His eyes dart around the room. I remain standing, instead of sitting down next to him again.

"I was actually happy you had no friends. I was happy that no matter what, when it came down to it and I moved again or we had a fight or whatever, you'd be the one taking the hit. I could have all the friends in the world and you'd cling onto me. It comforted me when all of this—" he gestures to himself— "started during the introduction week. I thought, they can beat me up, they can call me names, they can make me their bitch boy, but everything will fall into place again. Nova will be at NYU, vulnerable and upset because nobody wants her and nobody takes her seriously, and I'll be fine, like I always am."

He lifts his head. "And then, that day I returned, you said someone else would take you to Brooklyn. You went to lunch at this expensive place in Upper Manhattan where you met with all these rich kids who followed you on Instagram and commented that you were pretty on your pictures, and you went shopping on fifth avenue with a bunch of people I've never even seen in the flesh, and then you were in some magazine because you went to a gala in the Chrysler building."

Logan takes a breath, a bitter smile flashing over his flushed face. "Maybe I wouldn't foster this ridiculous jealousy or anger towards you if I could just pin it on you forgetting about Addenfield, but that wasn't the case at all. You slept over at Elle's. You gave her those photos and fucked up everything for me by doing so, and then you forgot all about me again. And when it's convenient for you, when you have an empty slot in your busy agenda, you decide to show up. You pretend to give a shit because it makes you feel better. But honestly, Nova? You being here, it just makes everything worse. So, I'm telling you, you can go. I want you to leave."

His glossy eyes are reddened, as are his cheeks and the tips of his ears and nose. Before, I correctly assumed that he was angry, but I didn't believe it was at me.

It's obvious, now. Half of the things he said, I deserve to be mad about, but it doesn't feel important in the moment. Not in the same way the truth of what he said last weighs heavily, how alone he felt even though he won't say it like that, how out of everything that has hurt him these past few months, I've hurt him most.

It's another one of those things I've been lying to myself about. It feels selfish to blame it on the way I've been struggling, myself.

Logan stands up. This time, he pushes the door open and walks out.

What would have been a lousy apology dies at my lips.

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