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【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ: ᴘᴀʀᴇɴᴛᴀʟ ᴀʙᴀɴᴅᴏɴᴍᴇɴᴛ, ᴠᴇʀʙᴀʟ/ᴇᴍᴏᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ, sᴇʟғ-ʜᴀʀᴍ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ʙᴜʟʟʏɪɴɢ】
Some marital separations are clean. Things stop working and it’s clear...and it hurts, it has to, but the split is handled well enough. Parents part ways and kids manage to cope.
...Sometimes they’re messy, and that’s what the situation was for Logan, growing up. His parents married too young and tried to patch things with permanence by having a child. He grew up in a turbulent household with lots of yelling and little love, and he spent his childhood in the shadows of his parents’ marital troubles. Mostly unseen, mostly unheard. A quiet witness to a private suburban apocalypse. When he’s eleven years old, things change. His mother packs her bags and, standing in the doorway flanked by her suitcases, emphatically tells both him and his father that she’s done; she’s leaving and she has no intention of “having anything to do with” either of them ever again. And she follows through; she drives off, moves across the country, and never looks back.
After that, Logan starts to lose some of his invisibility. It turns out to not be that good a thing. His father doesn’t deal well with the pain of his wife leaving, and Logan—with her same dark hair and hunched-shoulder habit of looking at the ground—reminds him of her. It hurts, and he deals with that hurt through anger. If Logan’s not getting the cold shoulder, he’s getting yelled at. He becomes a replacement of sorts for his mother; the same controlling standards that caused her to leave get put on him, and he too fails to live up to his father’s expectations. Further exacerbating the problem is that his dad doesn’t really “get” neurodivergency; both ADHD and Bipolar II are things that he feels Logan should be able to “man up and get over.” By the time they move to Long Island from Boston a year after his mother leaving, Logan already feels as if he has next to no relationship with his father.
His cat, JJ, and his skateboard don’t stay his only friends for very long after that, though. He starts his second year of middle school and his kick-flips in the parking lot don’t go unnoticed. It’s not more than a few days into his first year at East Rockaway that a pastel-haired boy shoots him a broad grin out of a departing school bus’s window and yells “YO! SLICK MOVES!”
The day after that, on his way across the cafeteria at lunch, Logan hears a familiar voice shout “Hey, Slick! Over here!” and when he glances over his shoulder to meet eyes with the boy from the bus and mouths “...Me?” he’s met with the friendliest “DUH” imaginable.
From there, life grows less lonely. The grinning boy who’s named him Slick introduces himself as Roscoe (“Your resident theatre kid, with a name so old you know it’s gold”), and welcomes Slick into his friend group: There’s Cameron; soft-spoken and shy, but frequently smiling. July; smart, quick-witted, wry...And Olivia, Kohao’s daughter; fiery, driven, and sharp—both in intonation and intellect. Slick falls in with them easily, and all together they’re nothing but trouble: They tag subway stations and bus stops using allowance-bought cans of pink spray paint; they sneak out, climb fire escapes, cough on the smoke of teenage rebellion cigarettes. They take to calling themselves the Flowerbombers, and when they meet Caelum on their way towards tenth grade and he asks “So...who are the flowers and who are the bombers?” Slick’s inclined to call himself a bomb but before he can speak, Olivia says “It’s not like that. We’re all the flowers and the bombers.”
“So, a beauty-in-destruction sort of vibe?” Caelum asks.
“More like beauty as destruction.”
And sure, yeah: That’s what they are and what they do, with their street art and book smarts and their flower-power-can-smash-the-state stances...but Slick feels the words “beauty as destruction” deeper and darker than that. He has his friends and their little world lends him life: Roscoe sums it up best when (the last night of spring break, when they all really should be getting sleep and not be illegally up on a convenience store rooftop) he passes the joint to the left and responds to Caelum’s minor concern of being spotted with; “C’mon. We basically own Oceanside—East Rockaway too. ‘No Trespassing’ is the same as fuckin’ ‘No Skateboarding’—it’s only ever a suggestion. Our city, our rules.”
And really, he’s essentially right. But Slick’s ownership of the city feels like it ends at his dad’s doorstep, or when a depressive episode rolls in like dark clouds from the sound. The Flowerbombers easily function as the most popular group of self-styled outcasts a high school could sport, but Slick views himself through the lens he grew up with; blind to the fact that he’s seen by a fair percentage of his peers as cool, as slick, as the image itself of a deep and brooding bad-boy. No, Slick tunes into the couple jocks who push him around on occasion and stacks that on top of his father’s ever-present disapproval, and he ends up with his brand of beauty-as-destruction being india ink and bladeless pencil sharpeners and more destruction than beauty.
Fortunately, outside of his father, people notice the road he’s heading down. His friends start texting or calling him every night he’s at home, and those nights start to become fewer. He’s over at Roscoe or Olivia’s houses more and more often, and it’s at Oli’s that he makes a connection that turns his life around. Olivia’s dad seems to see something in him, and starts asking questions...and listening to the answers. He asks why Slick rubs ink into his cuts instead of just offering shock and sadness and “Stop doing that”; he nods slowly when Slick fumbles his way to answering “...I guess I don’t want ‘em to fade. It feels like if they fade then it won’t matter.”
“‘It’ being your pain, or ‘it’ being you?” Kohao asks him softly. “They’re two separate things. That’s important to remember...It took me a really long time to figure out.”
They share a moment with their arms side-by-side, Kohao’s scars faded but not gone; Slick’s stained grey, and suddenly Slick has an adult in his world that understands. In the months that follow he notices which home it feels he has a father at, which home he feels as though he’s a family member—and it’s not the one he’s living in.
He and Roscoe start dating and Kohao’s the first to hear, and after a couple weeks the ‘closet’ back home is too cramped, and his father’s alternating coldness and cussing too constant. So Slick—with JJ perched on his shoulder—leaves, like his mother did, suitcase in hand.
“You don’t care about me!” he shouts at his father from the front step. “You don’t even know me! You don’t know any of my friends' names, you don’t ask about them! BUT I HAVE FRIENDS; people LIKE me! People who aren’t YOU! I HAVE A BOYFRIEND AND YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW I’M BI! I’m going to Olivia’s: Her dad knows me better than you do!” He slams the door and storms off...all the way to the Winters’ household, which welcomes him—and his cat, JJ—with open arms.
He ends up with a “dad”, and a “mom”, and a sort-of-sister. They encourage his artistic endeavors, attend his boyfriend’s plays. Willow showers him in hugs and love and helps him paint his half of the bedroom; Kohao teaches him to drive and takes him to get proper piercings (“Because I’ll have an actual aneurysm if I see you with more safety pins sticking out of your head.”) They notice his depressive episodes and hypomania and attention issues and don’t dismiss them, and he’s able to start his junior year of high school medicated and feeling pretty fuckin’ stable.
Eventually, sometime after turning 18, when he’s working his tattoo shop apprenticeship, he does manage to make some sort of amends with his birth father—who seeks him out and apologizes for letting so much get in the way of being a loving parent. It takes some time, but they end up on decent enough terms. Eventually Slick cuts down on calling him “Gary” or “Mr. Fielder,” and his father starts to be his father again. But Kohao earned his place as, and stays, his dad. That never quite manages to change.
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ғᴀsʜɪᴏɴ ʀᴇғᴇʀᴇɴᴄᴇs ʜᴇʀᴇ
ᴀʀᴛ ʀᴇғᴇʀᴇɴᴄᴇs ʜᴇʀᴇ
ᴀᴇsᴛʜᴇᴛɪᴄ ʙᴏᴀʀᴅ ʜᴇʀᴇ
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