And then, because you ruined all that and you want to pick at the scabs that have hardened over your heart, you ask it to punish you. So you sit there and torture yourself with every high school embarrassment, or time you got wasted and made a friend cry, or when you were too careless with someone’s heart when they were really into you and you dated them because you were bored, and then jesus, you’re watching your mother cry at your bedside the time you overdosed. And then you’re watching her die, again and again, withering away to a cancer months before the cure is found. Through the snot and the tears and the blubbering you see the one person on this Earth—the one who loved you before you knew how to love yourself—die again and again.

Anyway. Logan.

He slid open the glass door as me and Yusuf ran with the wolf pack out of the restaurant. He crunched through the snow, shivering, in his pen eye-mask with his tasseled drape-cape trailing behind him. What the fuck? one of the guards whispered to another. The floodlight on the mini-tank swept over him as he walked closer.

“Where’s Yusuf?” Figueiredo screamed. “He comes out too or we’re going in after him.”

Joel, at the front, spotted the ruse first. He could see through the painted mask and whatever costume Logan was wearing for another one of his stupid theme nights to try to make being here less miserable.

“That’s not him,” Joel said. “It’s Logan.”

I’d like to think that Kaori and Figueiredo had twisted Joel against Logan. I don’t know why. What I know about their relationship sounds pretty shitty, but I’m rooting for any couple that looks like me and Yusuf.