Let's play a game, he says. She smiles into his shoulder and nods her head. She's good at playing games.
If Logan and Veronica were a day, they would be a Sunday.
Sundays are unassuming. Sunday is a day of rest, a day when the world stops moving frantically and takes a moment to collect its thoughts; it's the day before everyone starts bitching about another week of work. Sunday is holy, he says complete with dramatic hand gestures. She laughs and reminds him that neither of them are Christian nor do they believe in God and thus, they cannot be Sunday. No, but Sundays are unassuming and so are they. They could be any small, blonde eighteen year old and her pretty-boy boyfriend. She loves her dad and he loves to drink. They could be excellent two-dimensional examples of normal freshmen. Unless of course, one day you had flicked on to the seven o'clock news to see her face accompanying a 'The Truth Behind Lilly Kane's Murder Revealed' spiel. Unless you were waiting at the checkouts at the supermarket and saw his face splashed across the front cover of some trash magazine with the headline 'Aaron Echolls: Teen Murderer. Like Father, Like Son?'
Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on a Sunday, tragically marking the beginning of the First World War. On a Sunday, Japanese troupes attacked Pearl Harbour leaving thousands dead and injured in the water. It was a Sunday when a 9.2 magnitude earthquake caused a tsunami that struck the coasts of the Indian Ocean killing three hundred thousand people.
Any month that starts with a Sunday will have a Friday the 13th.
They could be Sunday.
If Logan and Veronica were a fruit, they would be an orange.
Because Logan likes oranges, their heavy weight in his hands as he learnt to juggle them for a party trick. He remembers the first time he had to peel an orange for himself. He was seventeen years of age and he had seen them in a box in a cart on the sidewalk and in that moment, dropping oranges from his balcony and watching them closely miss pedestrians seemed liked a hilarious idea. It was her that reminded him that he probably didn't need to spend any more time in a cell. Instead he sat on his couch and peeled off tiny thumbnail sized bits at a time until she took pity on him and did it herself. He remembers the way the juice had stung as it pooled in the ridges of his cracked lips. He remembers the way she had sucked the stream from his wrists as it escaped his fingers and how he could taste the sweetness on her tongue when he kissed her. He likes that memory.
Logan doesn't like himself a lot of the time, but he likes Logan with Veronica. And Logan likes oranges.
If Logan and Veronica were a play, they would be Romeo and Juliet.
She throws her jacket at him when he suggests that and he pulls out his wallet, crawls over to her and tucks a dollar bill into her bra with a wink. But he says, they are epic and Romeo and Juliet are about as epic as you can get. Also, Leonardo DiCaprio is just dreamy, with an appropriate batting of eyelashes.
They can be epic without being a cliché. Every couple thinks that they're Romeo and Juliet and she can do without the "story of woe" and I'd-Die-For-You bullshit, thankyou. If they're going to be Shakespeare, might as well be something like MacBeth.
Morally questionable MacBeth and his manipulation bitch of wife? You paint such flattering images of us, he says.
Lady MacBeth; fixated with the blood on her hands that only she can see and tied to her husband by the death they have witnessed.
She smiles up at him, quietly. How appropriate, is what she thinks.
They may not be Romeo and Juliet but they will always be tragedy.
If Logan and Veronica were a colour, they would be white.
It is his turn to be offended. White is so pure and innocent, he says as he murmurs his way down her neck, his fingers brushing high along the pale skin of her inner thigh, eliciting a groan from her pretty pink lips. And what we did last night, well I have to tell you babe, that wasn't very innocent at all. Maybe I'm doing it wrong? He looks up at her with sparkling eyes and she's forced to look away from his intensity, to prevent his lust from being seared into her retinas.
When Veronica thinks of white she sees a white dress and white underwear and white hot tears burning paths down her cheeks. The way the two of them are undeniably tied by those memories. If white was once innocent, it isn't anymore. And that makes her want to throw up, to purge herself clean. She pushes him away and the look that he throws her says that maybe he understands, just a little, and that perhaps what she thought was lust was something a slight bit more.
She doesn't explain herself so he fills their silence. He's good like that sometimes. But really, of all the colours that fill all the hardware stores in all the world, you pick white? You pick white when you could have minted glory or ruby fountain. Such a fickle girl.
White is complex and multi-layered, like that experiment they did in physics where you shine a beam of light into a glass prism. At first it's just white light but then you fiddle with the angle and it splits open, revealing its darkest secrets, spilling them out over the dirty bench top. Like the mornings she wakes up, breathless and shining with sweat and thinks about telling her father about Beaver and Duncan, just so she'd have someone to hold her in moments like these. The times she hears his voice, softly chanting, "my name is Cassidy" and she wants to turn to Logan and tell him she wishes he'd let her pull that fucking trigger and blow his fucking brains out, have his death be on her terms. Some times she wants to call up Wallace and tell him the truth, tell him that she doesn't deserve him at all. But she's too much of a selfish bitch to do that, and she knows it. But maybe one day, the angle will be just right, someone will say exactly the wrong thing and she'll burst open at the seams, her secrets out for the whole world to judge.
Logan must be like that too, she thinks. She can't be the only one.
If Logan and Veronica were a word, they would be glass.
She says glass and thinks dangerous and smooth. She sees glass falling around like crystal rain with the sun hitting the beads as they slice the air, dispersing into a million tiny rainbows with a million little pots of gold. She thinks of illusion versus reality. She thinks of little shards that get caught up in your skin, becoming part of who you are.
She says glass and he thinks of twelve stiches on his chest. He thinks of a seven year old with blood blooming through his white t-shirt, wondering if this time his father realises that a line has been crossed. He hears the familiar clink of ice cubes against tumbler. He thinks of a spider webbed windscreen and blood snaking down the bonnet, of shattered back windows and dirty glass ashtrays. He thinks of dreams of glass boxes and the walls closing in quickly and wondering if he'll die of suffocation from the dense, syrupy air or if his bones will shatter into a million pieces first.
He says no. Maybe, nuclear warfare.
She laughs at that, her smiles hiding just how close he may have hit. Nuclear warfare is about leaving behind the most damage for the longest time and not letting your enemy get close enough to do the same. Gives him one of her real life poker faces.
That's two words, smartass.
Wow, no wonder they let you into Stanford.
History, he says finally. History, because sometimes it's hard to imagine that there could be a single other person in the world who could understand the things they've done and seen and still find a way to look them in the eyes without flinching. People who've made them what they are that cease to exist, mothers and fathers and best friends who marked them and when they died, small pieces of the two of them died as well. Logan and Veronica are the only ones who understand where those little pieces went and why they aren't quite whole anymore because of it.