𝓋𝑒𝓁𝓋𝑒𝓉 𝒔𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒔.

“I could use like, six,” Maddie admitted, sitting atop a questionably clean tabletop in the dining section of the bowling alley. She’d tried to enjoy the movie but it wasn’t enough to pre-occupy her whirlwind of a mind, not after the week she’d had. Between the scuffle with the Southsiders and finding a Lux’s abandoned in the depths of the redwood forest, Maddie could barely keep her head straight. She felt like she was losing her mind. Then there was Lux’s memorial. Not even a day away now, mere hours. She wished that if she just closed her eyes tight enough she could will it away but it simply wasn’t so.

She brightened at the thought of bowling however and the silly little competition that would come with it after Sav’s suggestion. “I’m in,” she confirmed, hopping off of the table and brushing what she believed to be pizza crumbs off of her ass as she did so. “You’re not like- secretly a bowling champion, are  you? Cos that’s a total slimeball move if you’re about to roll me,” she’d never considered Sav, nor any of the Logans for that matter, to be a slimeball but she could imagine any one of them being secretly awesome at something as ten pin bowling and just not mentioning it to anybody. The secrets the Logan girls held between them could sink ships, Madeline was sure of that much.

‍💫

“No kidding.” She’s actively working to avoid the looming, dark cloud of Lux’s memorial lingering in the peripherals of her skies, that the mess she’s in merely has a pin stuck in it to delay the inevitable explosion. Beer’s hardly enough to serve as a decent salve. Preoccupation it is. "Fuck no,” Sav laughs, rising from her seat. “Only way I’d roll you is if they’d let me walk my happy ass down the lane and knock the pins over by hand. Besides, there’s no fun if it’s not an actual competition.” She skips down to the lanes, searching for a few bowling balls that don’t have dents worthy of their own zip code and won’t permanently throw out their shoulders. 

She spots one, sadly lingering in the corner of the racks that she plunges her fingers into as she rolls it off the rack. She turns on her heel, offering it up to Maddie. “Ladies first,” she insists dramatically, a low bow accompanying. In one fluid, jerked motion, she steals the ball back only for a second of hesitation as she grins, wicked in the spirit of competition. “Unless, of course, you’re planning to steamroll my ass.” 

who: open! what: trying to just be a normal teen where: getting some movie snacks!

Despite it all, Zev was in a pretty good mood. Sure, the fast approaching anniversary of Lux’s death felt like a lead brick in his stomach, and he still didn’t feel quite certain that people weren’t still scrutinizing him, but he was also at a drive in movie plus arcade! Like, his favorite things ever? It was hard to feel that bad when you were surrounded by (almost) everything you loved. 

“Oh, you can cut ahead of me,” he spoke to the person behind him in line at the Food Shack. “I know there’s not that many options, but I’m still not totally sure what I’m getting…” He wasn’t even sure what he was doing! Was he going to go get a ticket for a Junker and watch the movie with some snacks? Maybe. He’d already seen it though, so maybe his money was better spent on some arcade games and beer? Or bowling? Too many choices!

“Actually, what are you doing right now? I have like, no idea what I’m gonna do. So maybe I’ll just tag along with you? If that’s cool?” Just like the good old days. Man, he wished Lux was here too…

‍💫

The tension curled in her shoulders is able to relax a little when Zev turns around, and it almost makes her laugh, the way he’s indecisive over one in four menu items at the Food Shack. “Close your eyes and point to something,” she suggests with a lilting tease in her voice, squeezing his shoulders reassuringly as they trade places in line. “Live on the edge a little, surprise yourself.”

For a moment, she eyes Zev carefully, a case study behind her own eyes as she tries to unpack and pinpoint where he seems to be at. The last couple of days have been a headache, and he’s had his own role to play amidst it all, but her suspicions have never been with him. She has vague, hazy recollections of what it was when Lux was around. When Lux was someone worth remembering, someone worth lying for and covering your ass. 

If anything, she’s just glad Zev’s in the trenches with her, even if they’d both rather be anywhere else. She loops one of her arms around his and tucks him in a little closer to her side. “’Course you can,” she says brightly. “So far, the plan is to fuck around and do literally anything to burn community service from my brain. I’m thinking we rent a Junker, gorge ourselves on the good stuff and act out the scenes infinitely better than the actors did.”

Sav snaps her piece of gum between her teeth, the elasticity still rigid and the flavor of raspberry rapidly dying on her tongue as she lounges in a chair overlooking the lanes. She’s not necessarily a free woman — what’s free anymore? — but she’s not still trapped in the confines of that godawful, neon orange vest out on the beach stabbing litter, so if she squints really hard and stares into a dark corner, maybe she can convince herself she’s here to celebrate. 

Except, there’s nothing to celebrate, really, but she doesn’t have to write that on her forehead in permanent marker for someone else to figure out.

“Fuck,” she groans, feet kicked back into an empty chair as she surveys the scene. “I’d kill for French fries right now. Or a beer.” Her head turns slightly, eyes twinkling as the corners of her lips elevate in a smirk. She may as well have fun, even if her mind has a dull ache to it every time she tries to so much as think about, well, anything that’s happened since she got off the goddamn bus in this town. If fun’s going to be far and few in between, might better take the opportunity while it’s still around to grab. “Wanna grab a lane? Loser buys the good stuff.”

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 -” 

Tears? God.

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.” 

🏝️

“First one,” Maddie said almost uncomfortably promptly, nearly cutting Savannah off in the process. The truth was, Maddie sort of was nursing a broken heart, in large part due to Sav’s twin sister, thus it wasn’t the sort of thing that she was eager to bring up in the middle of a record store on one of her first days back in town in over a year. Even if it hadn’t been anything to do with Libby, it was worth noting, Madeline had made somewhat of a promise to herself to renew that old Cherry feeling despite everything that had happened since her last visit. She wanted to have fun, be free, feel like the phrase ‘best Summer ever’ was constantly just on the tip of her tongue. She couldn’t do that if she was willing to acknowledge just how hurt she had been by being so suddenly abandoned by some of her closest friends.

She nodded her head to reiterate her own words, as much to convince herself that they were true as to convince Savannah, “No bummers allowed, I want the soundtrack to my Summer to make me feel like a Sandlot kid or something,” she explained as she flicked through a section of CDs. 

‍💫

"Excellent,” Sav grins in response. She strolls closer to Maddie, fingers idly running across the tops of CD cases along the way. “That and the reference. If you’re not living life like a Sandlot kid, what’s the point?” 

She pauses for a moment in front of one of the sections, sifting through names and titles and tracks that she can hear playing in her head while she hunts, before pulling out the very thing that scratches the itch. A smile curls over her lips as she holds it up, index finger flicking the very edge of the plastic. “It’s new pop, so it may be a bit of a deviation from the norm, but this Britney record? It’s got the potential to be legendary.” She lets it leave her hands, tossing it in Maddie’s direction. “Tracks 1, 2, and 11. Uber summer vibes. Bono wrote on 11, too.”

WHERE: Blossom Records WHAT: Maddie’s Uncle has threatened to throw her CD player in the ocean if she plays Butterfly by Crazy Town one more time. TIME: Day WHO: Maddie + OPEN

Though she had This is Your Night by Amber and Steal my Sunshine by LEN on repeat all Summer, it wasn’t as if Maddie was against the idea of having some new tunes to play at the shop, much to her Uncle’s chagrin. So, in the spirit of new discoveries, Madeline was at Blossom Records, picking out some new CDs to add to the Surf’s Up collection…with money from her uncle’s cash register of course.

She placed one hand over her eyes and used the other to feel the edges of the various CDs as she blindly hoped that one of them would reach deep into her soul and call out to her. When she finally felt as if the moment was upon her, she plucked it out and lifting her palm from her nose, only to reveal that it was…the Stuart Little original motion picture soundtrack. Disappointing.

“Okay, so apparently groove is not in the heart, so I’m not following my  heart anymore,” she decided promptly, “Want to help me make my own Summer soundtrack? I can do tape or CD,” the shop had the luxury of both, like the high tech entity it was.

💫

If anyone asks, she’s here by total happenstance, just on the hunt for something new to bring an audiophile a little more joy within the confines of her day — really, she’s striking out yet again on confronting Libby, because her twin’s more slippery than an eel slathered in Vaseline. She huffs under her breath, leaning up against one of the tables while she tries to figure out her next move. Looking for a record, probably, since exiting the joint two point five seconds following her entrance is a bit suspicious.

Her eyebrows furrow together when she sees the girl a few bins down, hand over her eyes and plucking a CD from obscurity only to frown at what she pulled. Her acknowledgement of Sav is enlightening at most. “Oh,” she grins in delight, unfolding her arms and taking a few steps closer. “You’ve certainly come to the right person for that. Step into my office.” She made a wide gesture towards the selection behind her. “What kind of summer soundtrack are you looking for? Drunk on the beach or I’m definitely not nursing a broken heart while I chainsmoke?”

🦋

Sabrina knew her sisters always viewed her as being the lucky one out of the three, and maybe she was, but it had never felt like it. Glenda’s anger wasn’t blatant, but rather projected, forcing Sabrina to become everything she’d once wanted for herself. Glenda might not have been screaming, but she was putting insecurities into Sabrina’s head, ones that she now repeated to herself. There had always been an air of confidence around her, but it was as fake as the Logan family’s Christmas Cards, turmoil just underneath the surface threatening to escape. 

Then the first blow hits her. “Libby knew?” Of course she had, why had Sabrina ever thought differently? The two of them always had a bond that Sabrina couldn’t infiltrate, now only reinforcing that she never had really belonged. It was Savannah and Libby’s secret club, it always had been, hadn’t it? “I would never pick her over you, you should have known that.” As much as Sabrina had wanted her sister back with them, she understood why she’d ran, she never would have ratted her out. She only wished she had half as much courage. It wasn’t worth it. Sabrina wasn’t worth it. “She never told me.” 

And then there’s the second blow, and this time it leaves her speechless. She can barely breath as she looks at her sister, the realization that the two missing pieces of her had been together all along. Savannah had been with Odessa. Savannah knew where she was. “You… were with Odessa? In San Francisco?” Now the anger has left her, replaced only with shock and longing and desperation, “Did she ever say anything about me… being her daughter? Do you have her number?” 

💫

Savannah wants to roll her eyes at Sabrina’s apparent shock over such a revelation — of course Libby had known, when was there anything that one of the twins did that the other didn’t know about beforehand? It’s the hurt in her sister’s face that keeps her from displaying what’s probably a bratty display of behavior, because whether the answers are as obvious as the sun’s presence in the sky or much more tangled and convoluted that it takes more than just a crowbar to crack, Sav doesn’t deal well with pain. It’s the reason she ran away, for fuck’s sake. She’d willingly let herself get hurt in the place of one of her sisters seven days out of the week and twice on Sundays, but she couldn’t keep watching the punches roll in regardless of her interferences. “Yeah,” Sav says with a sigh. “Libby knew. Libby was supposed to come with me. Guess you can figure out how that went over.”  

“It’s not you I didn’t trust, it was Momma,” she explains, even though she’s not sure it matters what she does or doesn’t say. “Every...” Sav has to swallow the lump that’s suddenly entangled itself around her vocal cords before she speaks again, a low whisper to field off any of her rising emotion. “Every day I hoped you two would show up. After awhile, I just... well, gave up on hoping. Breeds misery, or whatever. Besides, I figured if Libby wasn’t coming, neither were you. Out of sight, out of mind.”

Sav watches what she hardly expects to be a bombshell land on her sister’s shoulders and seemingly explode, her eyebrows furrowing. It isn’t until Sabrina says the words Odessa and daughter tied together with me being her that Sav feels the slow unfurling of what feels like a balled up weight, a discomfort that’s been with her all those years in San Francisco. Puzzle pieces are locking together and finally, finally forming a picture. “Wait,” she breathes out slowly, one of her hands raising to stop Sabrina. “What do you mean you’re Odessa’s daughter? When the fuck did this happen?” 

At this point, I think Libby would willingly jump under the bus just to save herself from the task of having to look at me.

@runvway​

It had been a long time since Libby felt the energy of someone else deep within her bones; a long time since her heart squeezed in her chest, the way it always did when her twin was in close enough proximity… But the air pulled out of her lungs like Savannah was a vacuum, and without even moving her gaze from the counter, Libby knew it was her twin staring her down from the doorway of Blossom Records. She knew it in her fucking soul. 

“I guess it was only a matter of time until we ran into each other, right?” Libby kept her voice as steady as she could - shaky as an earthquake, but not to be focused on - while she worked up the courage to flicker green eyes toward the other Logan. Savannah had been in town for a couple of weeks now, and Libby had focused every ounce of energy on vehemently avoiding her. After her and Sabrina’s altercation  conversation on the beach, she didn’t think she could handle disappointing another Logan. She didn’t think she could look Sav in the face without hating her for leaving, and hating herself for being cowardly enough not to follow along in her footsteps. 

…But it had been better for Sav, anyway, hadn’t it? She had left lonely, and sad, and just as broken as the other two Logan siblings… But she had come back herself. She had come back so beautiful that it made Libby’s heart swell with pride - made her want to reach out and map the differences in her twin’s face, like they used to do when they were children. She wondered if Savannah would flinch away; Libby wondered if she’d be able to touch her without breaking down into something she didn’t recognize. 

“What are you doing here, Sav?” Libby asked the question, but part of her thought she knew as the night her twin left rushed through her head. Sav should tell her how disappointed she was; tell her what a bad sister she was. Sav should hate her, just like Libby threatened to do to her. Sav should just say it all out loud - every thought and feeling that had been haunting Libby since the day she was fucking abandoned by the one person who actually knew her.

 “I’m -” Libby looked around the counter she was watching after for Leo. He was going to back soon, and let her run back off into the fair - she wasn’t on the payroll. Had no obligation past the fact that Leo Walsh was housing her, rent-free, and all. But Sav didn’t need to know that. “I’m working.” 

She can’t do this anymore.

In theory, she could — there’s a lot that the human psyche, the physical vessel of a body can withstand. People can go days without water, weeks without food. She’s gone years without running her fingers over a raw, bumpy tear in her soul that was born from leaving her twin, ripping out the braid of them that had existed since their creation. She could go a little longer, too, if she wanted.

But she’s slowly dipping into insanity, the longer that she and Libby keep up this game of acting as though a small town is a continental divide. She hasn’t purposefully kept herself out of Libby’s way, because she knows it’s an inevitable thing: being a twin means her magnetic north will always be Libby, and that’s where her feet will always take her whenever she’s lost and doesn’t know where else to go. But she knows her sister. Sav knows that it’s going to be a fucking dance until one of them says when.

When.

Sav dips from her shift at Frost-ee’s once she clocks out, lingering outside wondering if what she’s about to do will end up being a shit idea. Probably will be. But she makes her way down to Blossom Records, where she knows Libby’s at, and once she’s in the doorway and sees her, she just... stops. Because the small void inside of her that’s been growing since age fourteen is suddenly closed. It’s filled. 

Libby’s her home. She’s home. And she hates it.

Both hands slip into her pockets. “Running into each other would imply that neither of us knew where the other was,” she points out. It’s the way that Libby seems so eager to dismiss her that Savannah begins to feel the needle-pricks of annoyance underneath her skin, and she forces a breath in her lungs. She’d known this wouldn’t be easy. “What am I doing here?” she echoes incredulously. “I’m... I’m here for you. This is why I came back, it’s...” She inhales sharply. “Look, I know you’re pissed at me for leaving, I’ve got it. But this family’s apparently gone to even more shit since I’ve left, and I... I’m...” Sav cards a hand back through her hair, growing more frustrated with herself and the inability to put everything into words. She spits out shortly, “How are you? What’s new? I really don’t know what I’m supposed to fucking say to you. I don’t know what you want me to say to you.”

Okay, look: half the town burning down out of nowhere and the other half seemingly ending up dead is a lot. Lotta red flags. But scared? To be back here? That's a stretch. What's there to be scared of? Scared I won't ever be able to leave, maybe. That's about it. 

Sitting outside to soak up the sun, smoking something and listening to music while people watching or trying to figure out how the shapes in the clouds are gonna morph into their final cloud form. Riding around trying to find trouble to get into. Late night swims that don’t result in freezing my ass off.

I didn't ask Sabrina because she was always the golden one out of all us Logan girls — sure, Mom Glenda was a piece of work regardless of which blonde head she was tossing insults at, but she had a very different relationship with each of us. She was invested in Sabrina, if that makes sense? Probably too much so, seeing as how she fuckin' dictated every second of her life and hammered out all the rough edges she didn't like, but if there was anyone's existence to acknowledge, it would have been hers. When you're running away at fourteen, you try to make it an airtight thing. There was always a risk in asking Sabrina, the risk that Glenda would find out.

As for Libby, what makes you think I didn't ask her? If anything, the real question should be why the fuck didn't she come along with me, and to that, you'd have to ask her.

Once upon a time, they were both my favorites. Nowadays, can't say that I do. 

Fuck yeah, this is what I'm talkin' about. Best CD I’ve burned was for a friend in San Francisco, we swapped current favorites (at the time) and I daresay I understood the assignment. I'll give 'ya a sampling — Thank U, Alanis / The Freshmen, The Verve Pipe / Salvation, The Cranberries / Billie Jean, Michael Jackson / Bitter Sweet Symphony / The Verve / Bitch, Meredith Brooks.

What makes you think I'm excited to run into any of 'em, shades? I didn't exactly come back to Cherry to roast marshmallows, hold hands, and sing Kumbaya with all my middle school besties.