Page 1 of Here We Go Again

Vista Summit, WashingtonChapter One

LOGAN

As she stands in the middle of an Applebee’s being dumped by a woman she didn’t realize she was dating, Logan Maletis has a realization: this is all Death’s fault.

The way that hunchbacked skeleton holding a sickle and crunching its way over carnage had stared up at her from the tarot card with accusation in its eyes…

She should’ve known better than to let a sixteen-year-old with a septum piercing read her future.

But it was the last week of school, and most of her sophomores were done with their end-of-year projects and were now signing yearbooks or staring blankly at TikTok. After working a sixty-hour week, grading 150 final essays, and dragging at least a dozen seniors, kicking and screaming, across the finish line so they could graduate on time, Logan was too exhausted to consider why it might be a bad idea.

And Ariella Soto was so proud of her hand-painted tarot cards, so eager to show her English teacher her newfound skills of divination, and Logan couldn’t say no to that kind of earnestness.

So, Logan sat in a too-small desk across from her student and put her fate in those intensely manicured hands.

“Tarot doesn’t predict your future, Maletis,” Ariella had explained in her best woo-woo voice. “It’s best used as a tool for introspection and self-reflection.”

That seemed so much worse.

“Ask the cards a question.”

She’d overheard Ariella reading her classmates’ fortunes, sophomores who asked questions like,Where should I apply for college?andWhat should I do with my life?Those same students had gathered around to watch Maletis’s reading, and she couldn’t exactly ask a real question, likeWill I ever move out of my dad’s house?orWhat should I do with my life?Instead, she closed her eyes and leaned into the theatrics. That’s her role at Vista Summit High School. She’s the fun teacher. The cool teacher. The teacher who doesn’t take anything too seriously. “Am I going to have an awesome summer?”

Ariella tutted disapprovingly and the rest of the class snickered. “You’re supposed to ask an open-ended question, like you make us do in seminar.”

Logan made a show of considering thoughtfully. “Whatawesome things should I do this summer?”

More adolescent laughter.

Ariella rolled her eyes at the rephrased question but flipped the first card anyway, and there was that skeletal bastard smirking up at Logan over a bloodred background. The death card. Logan’s first thought wasJoe, and she tensed uncomfortably in the tiny desk.

“It doesn’t mean literal death, Maletis. Don’t look so freaked,” Ariella reassured her. “It’s a metaphorical death, usually. An ending.”

Again, she thought of Joe, but she kept her smile broad for her students. “Like… the end of a school year…?”

“Or perhaps the end of an important phase in your life,” Ariella said in the same mystical tone. “The end of your adolescence, perhaps?”

“I’m thirty-two.”

Her students laughed, but Ariella stared at her as though her heavy eyeliner allowed her to see directly into Logan’s soul.

Ariella continued, “Or, it’s possible it’s referring to the end of a relationship….”

At this, Logan relaxed a little. The boys made lowoooonoises, and Waverly Hsu singsonged, “Maletis has a girlfriend,” over and over again.

“Maletis and Schaffer sitting in a tree,” Darius Lincoln added. “K-i-s-s-i-n-g.”

That was what she loved about working with sixteen-year-olds; at turns, they watched bothEuphoriaandSpongeBob, tried to snort aspirin in the back of your classroom, and sang ridiculous nursery rhymes like innocent children at recess. They were goofy and weird, which meant she could be goofy and weird, too.

“Something in your life will come to an end, Maletis,” Ariella decreed, bringing the room back under her spell, and filling Logan with unexpected dread, “prompting a period of newfound self-awareness.”

Didn’t predict the future, her ass.

Because here she is, three days later and two hours into summer vacation, facing the end of a relationship she didn’t know existed, while she tries to enjoy her Tipsy Leprechaun. And it’sdefinitelyDeath’s fault.

“This just isn’t working,” the tiny white woman holding a Captain Bahama Mama tells her.

“This… meaning…us?”