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Competency is the perfect antidote to anxiety. She doesn’t know who she is if she’s not a teacher.
Still, she listens to “Bitch” whenever she feels the intense need to rage, because raging is so much safer than the alternative: the untethered spiral of anxiety that spools out whenever she loses control.
“Nothing ever comes easily to me,” Rosemary confesses, and the smirk vanishes from Logan’s face. “I had perfect grades because I thought I had to be perfect to be worthy. I obsessed over every assignment, stayed up all night studying, took too many AP classes and forced myself to be the best in all of them. I wasn’t eating, wasn’t sleeping… sophomore year, my hair started to fall out from the stress. And it felt like none of my teachers cared how sick I was making myself. They all held me up as this model student. Except Joe.”
Logan feels rammed through with unexpected guilt. It’s her fault Hale is crying half-naked in this hotel room. She knows how Hale’s anxiety works, yet she’s done nothing to accommodate it and everything to make it worse. She drove them five hundred miles in the wrong direction,
“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.”
“Life is the prickly pear. It’s always going to be a combination of beauty and hurt, no matter how hard you try to protect yourself from the hard parts. There is no way to avoid pain.”
She thought Rosemary would kiss like they’re in a Jane Austen novel, but she kisses her like they’re in a Jane Austen movie adaptation.
Yesterday, kissing Logan in the rain felt like writing when the words were good. It felt like everything inside her was clicking together, instinct and art melding in her fingertips, like that was the thing she was put on this earth to do. Write stories and kiss Logan Maletis.
“You girls want some Tuesdays with Morrie advice?” Joe says when they’re all back in the car. “Here it is. Take more nudes while you’re young.”
She didn’t know anti-teacher billboards were a thing, but apparently everything is bigger in Texas, including hatred.
“You’re allowed to be a flawed person, Rosemary. You’re allowed to take risks and make mistakes.”
“I don’t want to celebrate the Fourth of July.” Logan shudders. “America is being a shady bitch, and I’m not going to her birthday party.”
“Your big feelings are one of the most beautiful things about you.”
“Is this hell?” he eventually asks. “No, this is Connecticut.”
Life was always going to be beautiful and painful in equal measure.
This is love. Love is seeing perfection in every flaw. Seeing every flaw as a miracle because it belongs to the person you care about most. Love is saying, yes, still. Even after all these years.
“I lived my life trying to avoid hurt and pain, and I ended up with pancreatic cancer at sixty. You could both guard your hearts for another thirty years, and you will still experience all the same hardship. We’re never truly safe. That’s life.”
Love is finding someone who helps you rewrite the story of yourself.”
