Logan finds himself holding his breath for the next couple days of class. He actually has to make an effort not to snap at the kids, something he hasn't needed to do since he was student teaching. He keeps an eye out more than usual for suspicious behavior, but the only different thing is an addition to Mrs. Krazny's insanity repertoire. Currently, it's perpetual forgetfulness bordering on dementia. She spends half of her third period on Thursday searching for the glasses she wears on a chain around her neck (her class is not inclined to remind her of their whereabouts), and approaches him three times to call him a poor boy and pinch his cheek and ask him what grade he'll be in next year. The rumor has always been that Mrs. Krazny lied about her birthday on her paperwork so she could keep teaching, and it's times like these that he tends to believe it because she is just so old.
He almost writes these occurrences down as a first, sarcastic entry in a spy journal for Veronica, but then realizes that it's not the kind of gesture he wants to put forward. He's not angry at Veronica for working this case, or even for wanting his help. He's not entirely sure what he'll do if he comes in to school or turns on the news in the morning and hears the name of the fifth dead child. And he knows that Veronica will do everything in her considerable power to ensure that he won't have to react to that.
But he doesn't want to befriend Veronica again. He is still simmering over the way they left things ten years ago and he's not sure what will happen when his mind decides to stop simmering and start reacting. More immediately, though, he is nervous and annoyed about Veronica's seemingly enduring presence in his life. He's worked to keep her out of his thoughts until it isn't an effort anymore, just an unconscious block. It isn't like there's a lot that he wants to remember from their glory days anyway. In fact, he pretty much ran through those good memories in the minute between first seeing Veronica and when she began to speak. The other stuff isn't constantly festering anymore- he's talked it out, and is fairly certain that the coming weeks, or hopefully days, won't find him in whatever dirty bar is closest- but the longer she stays, the more he is reminded of the things he would like to forget. Just a few days after seeing her face again and already he feels less comfortable and settled in DC. Also, despite his best efforts to the contrary, he can't help but wonder what it will be like once she's gone on to the next case. He can't quite force himself to be relieved at the prospect.
With all this swirling in his head, it takes him after hours to fall asleep. Thankfully, it's Saturday, so he's planning on a late morning followed by a soothingly boring day of laundry and grading papers, with a little pickup basketball if enough of the neighborhood guys are around. This plan is derailed quickly, however, by a quiet knocking noise on his front door around six AM. It doesn't jolt him awake but apparently his sleeping brain deems it noteworthy because he stirs, pausing to listen as the knocking becomes a soft scraping. At this, he climbs out of bed and goes to check the peephole. On four hours of sleep, it takes a moment to focus through it, but after a second, he can see out in the hall. At first he still doesn't see anything, but then notices a small fluffy fringe of blonde hair at the bottom of the view and he understands. Releasing his grip on the bat that he keeps by the door, he unlocks and swings it open.
"Creepiness factor successfully raised," he says wryly, leaning against the frame. "Congrats, Mars, you are now a level fifty stalker. Should I hide my pots and bunnies?"
"Fifty is amateur. You need to be removing any copies of Catcher in the Rye from the vicinity," Veronica says, standing and brushing off the knees of her jeans before she steps past him into his apartment.
Logan picks up his school copy from the end table by the sofa. "Well, that'll be a little hard. Think you can hold any murderous urges for two weeks until we're done? Although it might be closer to three if the discussion goes like I think it will." The look she's giving him is so uncomfortably probing that he sets the book down and turns toward the kitchen. He tosses a vague glance across the space at her, not even making true eye contact as he makes a lame quip about all secret plotting meetings, but especially the early morning ones, needing coffee.
And so she sits at his kitchen table and they drink coffee and Veronica tells him about her stakeout last night.
She starts off with background, informing him that the police told her about a man named Danny Caldwell who has had several moving violations in the area of the school.
"I looked into him," she says, wrapping her hands around her mug. "Almost forty, no kids in the school, not a past student. Cops have him down as "belligerent," because he refused to explain what he was doing there. Nothing odd at his place last night- guy lives with his mom- but I'll keep watching."
Even Logan can tell that strange things are afoot with this guy, so he smiles and nods and congratulates her on her excellent sleuthing. There's a bit of residual nervousness about her watching potential child murderers alone at night, but this guy sounds like he's not all there and Veronica has probably mastered six kinds of martial arts in the decade since college, so she can handle it, and it's not his job to worry about her, if it ever was. Still, he has a question about all of this and as she gets up and starts to roam around his apartment, he can't help but ask it aloud.
"Top notch work on the case, Agent M, but why are you here at six AM? My position in the operation doesn't make me the fountain of information about the creepy characters you dig up. A text four hours from now would have been the same."
"Couldn't sleep," she says briskly, rifling through magazines as he watches, a little dumbfounded at the way she seems to think nothing of asserting herself into his life. "And I figured I would give you a heads up about this guy so you can ask around, see if there are any connections between Caldwell and the school that aren't in official record. Who's this?" She has a picture of him and Jack at a Senators game.
"That's Jack. I met him when I first moved to DC." And then, because he's done trying to impress Veronica Mars, because he's going to live his life and if she's happy about the way he does that than it's just lucky for her, "He's my sponsor."
"AA?" she asks, and Logan can't figure out whether to be pissed off about the question, like he has so many bad habits she can't decide which one he is trying to deal with, or her tone, so deliberately casual like she's trying to make him feel that it doesn't matter to her. He's gone through a few therapists so he can find one who doesn't make him feel like he's being smothered by their "safe space," and he doesn't need that feeling in his apartment.
Still, he takes a deep breath, because Jen, his current therapist, has been really good with him, and tells her that he stumbled into an AA meeting when he arrived in the city and eventually happened to be paired with Jack. "Started off as just calls when I needed someone to remind me that drinking myself to death would not be ideal, but then we actually became friends. He's always there when I need him and when he calls me on my shit, I know he's being serious."
Veronica sets the picture down and looks delighted. "You have a Wallace!" and when Logan considers it, he kind of does. Taller and definitely pushier, with an AA chip of his own, but the dependability and the sense that even with the stuff Logan knows about him, he's somehow above it…there's the Wallace part.
It seems only polite to ask about Wallace, who Logan didn't keep up with even though after Veronica left the two of them could have become friends, and then Mac. It's been a while since he's been close enough to observe her body language, but Logan can tell by the way Veronica twists her words that she's not in regular contact with either of them, that she's stretching and filling in the gaps with old information or guesswork. It's something he's going to have to talk to Jen about, this way that he feels that Veronica is somehow too good for him, despite all the flaws that he knows she has, and the swooping sense of victory when those flaws are further proven. But he keeps up with this polite acquaintance façade they've been playing with, doesn't point out her failures in career over old friendships and before he knows it it's eight AM. She checks her watch and says it's time for some sleep and he teases her about becoming nocturnal as he shows her to the door.
"Hey," Veronica says as he prepares to swing it shut behind her. "Thanks for telling me about Jack. I know that…Thanks."
He says "Sure," closes the door, gets ready to take a shower, but he doesn't want to admit that it was hard for him give her that. Information was always leverage to Veronica and while he doesn't know if the rules are the same, he's afraid that they are. That's why he didn't tell her the rest.
That he had showed up for junior year and believed that she would be there, back from her second summer of junior FBI boot camp or whatever the hell she did. They had been stumbling back toward each other for the whole year and he was sure that it would finally happen, that it would be their time. She had one thing that she was doing that she wouldn't tell him about, but he had been willing to have the patience to wait her out. But then she hadn't showed up for school. Her cell had been out of service and when he went to see her father, Keith had told him that Veronica had transferred to somewhere on the east coast and had even spun some semi-convincing story about her changing cell phones because there was a cheaper plan.
"I'll get you her new number," Keith had promised, but Logan could see the slump of his shoulders as the door closed and had been struck by the alarming realization that Keith Mars did not know where his daughter was.
He had dealt with her absence the whole year, attending his classes, making a few friends and decent grades. He had stopped spending so much money, had moved out of the Grande into a nice apartment near the beach and had tried to be better because he had always felt like the screw-up when it came to her. She had always seen the nasty underbelly to his humor, cocky attitude, and excessive lifestyle. He had convinced himself that if he did well this year on his own, when she came back for the summer, she would see that he had changed and they would be inevitable.
But she hadn't come back for the summer and if her father or her handful of friends knew where she was, they had all become excellent liars. Logan had never realized how long college summers were until he needed to surf or play video games or get ice cream enough to fill the endless days.
And then in August, Dick Senior had used his pull to get a private cell rather than a day with his son and Dick Junior had killed himself. Logan found him in the living room with booze and pills and called an ambulance right away, but the paramedics said it had been hours already.
All through the funeral, the one Logan had arranged through a combination of guessing and random pointing to the pages of funeral home samples because Dick hadn't been thoughtful enough to leave a will, Logan expected Veronica to show up because he was sure that she was keeping tabs on everyone in her creepily endearing way. He had stayed after everyone left, standing alone by the graveside, knowing that she would come up and slip her hand into his and let him lean on her. It might not last, but he had needed that strength.
But he had stayed until dark and she hadn't showed up and he had gotten trashed for three days straight and decided that taking a road trip was a good idea. He still wasn't entirely sure how he had managed to make the drive; he remembers little of it but waking up in random spots along the side of the road and a startling variety of venues dispensing alcohol. There was no hangover the entire way. He had called Hearst from Ohio and told them that he was taking the year off, and had laughed until he choked when they wished him a good journey.
He ended up at the church because even the sight of his credit card hadn't convinced the hotel he tried to stay at that he was a reliable customer and he physically couldn't drive anymore. And when he was awoken at eight in the morning, it was by the early AA meeting, the members of which weren't judgmental or pitying when he sat up from the pew where he was lying to yell at them to keep it down. They had given him a cup of pretty crappy coffee and mostly ignored him while they told stories that, if he was comparing, were often worse than his. He had been sober enough then to get a hotel room, had slept hard before waking up and observing that he was in Washington and it was seven in the morning, and there was enough time to go back to the church to see if there was another meeting.
He didn't tell Veronica that that's how it had started, with a comparison of pain, that there was no remorse at first. He was still going out and getting smashed, but he had switched to late afternoon drinking so he could get up early in the morning and hear the stories of other people's pain that made his own feel small. He has since figured out that this was pretty messed up, but at the time it was a lifeline. And eventually he had picked himself up and decided that if these people, who should have been so broken, could start to fix themselves, then so should he. He wasn't a devotee, mostly instead using the people there as a crutch and a marker by which he could measure how screwed up he was. He had done research and found out about the AA failure rates. He attended meetings with many kind people and many people who were pushy, who nagged at him to work the program harder, to consult AA resources more frequently, to pick a sponsor already.
Jack had switched jobs midway through Logan's second month attending meetings which meant that he had started becoming a regular in the mornings. Logan hadn't liked him. He could charm some of the people, could roll his eyes and blow others off with a witty comment, but Jack didn't stand for that. As Logan was leaving one Tuesday morning, Jack came up to him.
"I see what you're doing," he had said, the first words he had spoken personally to Logan, "And I think you need to stop coming if you're going to keep taking without giving any of yourself back."
Logan had scowled and shoved the heavy hand off of his shoulder and ten days later asked Jack to be his sponsor. Jack said no, that he was probation officer who dealt with punk kids all day and didn't need one calling him when all he wanted to do was go to the gym or make dinner. Logan asked him every couple of weeks, staggering it so he seemed like less of a stalker, until finally Jack had caved.
Getting Jack to give in had taken up so much of Logan's energy that he had put it slightly out of his mind that he was actually going to stop drinking. He was glad, for once, that there weren't people in his life, because it meant that he was mostly irritable to the barrista at Starbucks or random people on the Metro rather than anyone of lasting importance. He started biting his nails again.
"When I tell myself I don't need it," he told Jack, "I'm absolutely lying. I do need it and I don't want to feel this."
But he pushed through, started sharing a little at meetings. Eventually Jack asked him what he did during the day.
"Well, I'm almost done with all the possible tours of DC. Nice that I ended up in a city where there are a lot. Avoided the FBI one, though; I'm not sure I could get in. And if I'm not on a watchlist already, I don't plan on presenting myself to them." (His low-tech flight from Neptune had meant that he had unintentionally fallen off the grid. The east coast either didn't recognize him or didn't care, so unless he ran into someone from Entertainment Tonight or The View, he felt pretty anonymous.)
"Kid," Jack told him firmly, "You need a job."
That had seemed too daunting. "Can we start with something smaller? Like making a Star Wars reboot that doesn't suck."
"Fine." Jack had taken a bite of his burger. A slip of tomato dropped out of the side. Logan still found him pretty intimidating. "Go into therapy and go back to school." He swiped his napkin around his mouth. "You asked me to be your sponsor, and this is how I do it."
Hearst transferred his credits to Wilson, a similar small liberal arts college thirty minutes outside the city. They were sorry to see his checkbook go, but didn't give him much hassle about it. He had a service pack and ship his stuff, sold his place through an agent and moved into a condo.
He had declared an English major back at Hearst because the deadline was coming up and it seemed versatile and he hadn't known what to choose instead. Plus he could BS his way through a paper pretty well. He continued pursuing the degree, sitting in the middle-back of small discussions about Jane Austen and Walden and even raising a point every so often, but he didn't know where it was taking him.
"Therapy," Jack grunted as he punched a hard pitch to the back of the batting cage. "It'll help you sort out all the shit in your head. Isn't everyone in therapy back in Hollywood?"
Logan had slapped a helmet on for his turn. "Yeah, but that's not who I'm looking to emulate." But he had started searching for therapists anyway.
It took him until the winter of that senior year to find Jen. This was after the guy who would nod through whatever tidbit Logan felt comfortable sharing with that knob, squint and say, "I've often felt similar" or "That reminds me of when" and take up ten minutes with his own life story, and the woman who was so quiet that feelings and memories would pour out of Logan just to fill the silence but whose sessions left him exposed without any way of dealing with everything he had just unearthed. Jen had been mentioned by the chatty Psych major who sat behind him in his American Poetics course ("I worked in her office last semester, mostly just clerical stuff, but the people who came out of her office had had their lives changed, I swear…") and he figured he might as well try her out because the other option was to continue running down the list he had gotten from Google, and the worst she could be was a different kind of crazy.
Logan still didn't know what Jen did that changed her other clients' lives, but she worked for him. She was a non-judgmental listener who offered constructive questions and suggestions for his issues, and if he tried to quip his way out, she could dish right back and she kept pressing until he was honest, about his father or Veronica, his mother or how he still needed to deal with parts of his relationship with Lilly.
She was the one who he asked about changing his name.
"Every time I hear it, I'm reminded of what I never want to be."
She tilted her head. "Do you feel like you need the reminder?"
"No," he had said vehemently. She lifted a brow, almost seeming taken aback for the first time. "If anything I need reminding to be someone different."
"Roots are important," she had said, seeming almost casual about it, as if she was pointing out something in conversation with a friend. So he had chosen Lester, to remind him of his mother.
Eventually he had gotten around to the reason he had come in the first place her and asked what to do about the future.
"What do you want to do?" she had asked, pushing her glasses up onto her head.
"I'm independently wealthy, so I don't have to do anything."
"Yes, but what do you want to do?"
Logan had tipped his head back. "When I picture myself in the future, I'm, you know, happy and I've got a house and friends and sometimes a wife and kids, but I'm still not clear on what I do during the day."
"What scares you the most?" she had asked, and he had thought it one of her unannounced subject changes.
"Kids," he had answered, surprised even as the word came out of his mouth.
Jen has nodded. "Do something with that, then. Use your work to face your fear."
"Like teach?" His tone was incredulous. "That seems like a huge mistake. I mean, I'm afraid of kids because when I am in my body, going to class or eating pizza or whatever, I feel like a normal guy. But I know that the anger is in there somewhere, and I can't trust myself to be normal guy around kids. There were some screwed up teachers in my high school. I don't want to be the sequel to that movie."
"I think you're wrong, but what's more important is that you think you're right." Their time was up. She stood. "We can work on anger stuff. Apply to schools. And if you're really not meant to do that, we can keep looking around. You'll still be independently wealthy."
Jack was the only one who came to his graduation from Wilson, slipping in halfway through the seemingly endless ceremony and taking Logan out to a deli afterward. Most of the time he gave Logan a lot of crap, but he knew without asking that he didn't have anyone and he had stepped up so Logan wouldn't take off his cap and gown among the sea of families and go home to toss his diploma in a corner.
"I love seeing people's faces when we're together," Logan said, stuffing pastrami into his mouth. "I can't get enough of that indecision when they see a young white guy and a- what are you, fifty?"
"Forty-six."
"Whatever, this older Asian dude. You can see their brains going 'Father-son? Did his mom cheat? Is he adopted? Where does the guilt go if he is: the orphan or the disadvantaged minority guy?' And that's before they even think you might be my sugar daddy or something."
Jack had laughed, because he was low-key like that, and grabbed a fry. "Please, if anything you're the minority. Thankfully we have a shortage of obnoxious smartasses in the world. Anyway, they probably think I'm doing charity work with the mentally ill. Maybe there's no guilt, but I come out looking pretty awesome."
"Unless they settle on the sugar daddy thing."
"Hey, you know that if I was your real dad, I'd be proud of you, right?" Jack said it casually around a chunk of potato and grease, or Logan wouldn't have accepted it.
It was that moment that he clung to when he looked over at Jack running beside him and told him that he couldn't work the program anymore.
"I mean, I'm not going to start drinking again, I'm still going to see Jen, but the twelve stepping and giving yourself to a higher power…that shit doesn't work for me, Jack. I don't know why I thought it would." They had to stop and sit down on a set of steps because Logan was breaking down a bit, gesturing excessively and staring at nothing when staring at Jack got to be too much. "And I know that I asked you to be my sponsor, but please don't give up on me, man. I can't-"
"Shut up, kid," Jack finally interrupted. "I'd be a pretty crap sponsor if I didn't realize that it wasn't your thing. I know that this doesn't work for everyone. I'm not going to give up on you. Calm down. You can still call me. Just less in the middle of the night, you little shit. If you're having a problem, fine, but no more of this slumber party, 'Jack I can't sleep' bull." He had slapped Logan on the shoulder, standing up. "Come on, you know I hate not finishing a run."
Thinking about all the things he had actually avoided telling Veronica, Logan felt that he had held up fairly well. He still called Jen's office after his shower and left a message asking if she could squeeze him in Monday evening. He had stopped going to daily or even weekly therapy, but he thought that he might need it now. Veronica might solve the case and leave before the end of the week, but she had already stirred some things that Logan needed to talk about. He had come too far to have it all ruined by Veronica Mars.