Libby can’t help the way her gaze twitches toward her sister - caught red handed. But it’s not like she had ever been very good at hiding things; she’d never been the bravest, or the best liar out of the pack of Logan’s. Couldn’t Savannah just have assumed Libby Lou would do everything in her power to avoid an ounce of hurt? An ounce of feeling?
Libby doesn’t know if she’s ashamed or not, and she’s not sure if she should say that she’s sorry. Maybe she should; maybe she needs to throw herself into the line of fire for the sake of their everything. Maybe she didn’t know how.
“I’m…” The question feels absurd as it bounced around in every avenue of her brain. ‘How are you? What’s new?’ She knows it is. The truth is, though, that she isn’t sure what she wants her long, lost sister to say to her - she isn’t sure that she ever pictured this moment, as awful as it made her feel now.
But had Libby ever thought herself worthy of coming back to? Glenda had never let her believe it. Glenda had so readily erased Savannah, and punished Libby for even thinking of her other half. She couldn’t cry. She couldn’t get angry. She avoided questions of Savannah’s disappearance at school, and simply shoved on through life. ( The walls she built around herself, all the while? Some Bob the Builder shit. ) She wondered now if she was brainwashed, or if she had just been so scared of facing the reality that existed around her, Post-Savannah.
‘Who the fuck is Libby Logan?’ She found herself wondering. Why did it feel like she was opening her eyes for the first time in years, and why did it make her feel like she wanted throw up?
“I want you to say that you’re sorry.” Libby spit the words out faster than she could process them. What did she want an apology for? The fact that Savannah left, or the fact that her return was shaking the earth beneath her feet? The fact that the ache in Libby’s chest felt like it might break her with so much force that Blossom Records could come crashing down all around them? “I want -”
They came so quickly that Libby couldn’t seem to wipe them away. Her bottom lip quivered, and the way she pouted made her look five years old again, but she was just as frustrated as she might have been back then. Confused. Hurt. So lost on how to put anything into words.
“I don’t know what I want, okay? I don’t think I know anything anymore, so if… If I’m supposed to know what to do here, then I’m sorry to break it to you, Sav, but I -” Libby shook her head. She struggled to take a breath through her panic so audibly it scared her.
Was she pissed at Savannah, or terrified? Was she angry, or wounded beyond recognition? Could her broken, Logan brain even begin to wrap around how devastating being apart had been?
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what you want me to say either. I’m not good. Everything is wrong. What’s new with you?”
If Libby’s face is a mirror, then Savannah imagines she’s splotchy faced, a creeping red starting to sprawl up her neck as the bottling of emotions comes fizzing and bubbling over. “You want me to say sorry?!” Sav splutters before she can rein her tongue in, whip sharp and leaving a lash over her mouth that stings when she retracts another breath from the air. She’s just finding it hard to believe — or maybe she isn’t, maybe she’s not surprised at all that somehow, Libby’s got a hand extended waiting on an apology that Sav’s never going to lay in offering at her feet that she’s wounded over thinking that maybe things would somehow be different than the dozens of conversations she’s watched flash across the film screen behind her eyes. Her imagination’s good at what it conjures up. “Sorry for what, Lib? Sorry that I did exactly what I told you I was going to do and didn’t go back on it? Sorry that you couldn’t for one second —”
Tears spring into Libby’s eyes, and Sav’s sights immediately cast down, mouth gluing shut. If she watches Libby cry, she’s going to crack and cave, and she likes to think her resolve has strengthened over the thousands of cars that have driven over her spine, suspended like the Golden Gate Bridge Odessa showed her on the first real week of feeling like she was actually free, no longer burdened by the shock or surprise or adjustment or the bone-deep betrayal in Libby’s seeming forgetfulness of how it was supposed to be them against the world, not them with the world between them. All those trucks and bicycles and automobiles made it across the road with cracks in it, and a conversation should sail over it just as easy, but the way Libby’s face glistens when it’s tear stained seeps into the foundation and they may as well be little kids again. Sav can’t handle it. She knows she can’t. So she talks to the ground.
“Maybe,” she breathes out, her voice hardly above a whisper in its deflatedness. “Maybe we’re not going to get anywhere like this. For like, five seconds, could we just... I don’t fuckin’ know, put it on pause? It’s like you said. Nothing’s right. You’re not good, I’m not good, nothing’s fucking good. Sabrina’s coming unglued. I don’t even know why the fuck I’m here — ” Which is a lie, but Libby doesn’t need to have that kind of insight into what’s going on. “ — and you...”
Sav’s fingers knot at the root of her hair, tugging slightly as if it will shake loose a solution from her head to her lips. “I just wanted to talk to you,” she finally concludes, a half shrug rolling from her shoulders. “About everything going on. Everyone else...” Isn’t you. “Well, everyone else doesn’t see things the way we do. Thinks the same way as us. I just thought maybe we could try to make sense of everything? And even if we couldn’t, at least we’d be fuckin’ confused as all get out together.”