Logan, Use Your Telescope

Countless stars glistened above them, an entire universe teeming with galaxies yet to be discovered, and still, she couldn’t help but wonder if there was anyone out there who felt the same way she did at that exact moment in time.

Kandi Jenkins had spent her most of her young life learning about the stars. Intrigued by the heavens at a young age, it was a fascination sparked by balmy summer nights spent lying on her back in the grass and staring up at the night sky. Back home in South Carolina, she could see the stars clearly with nothing more than a pair of honey brown eyes, but on this rooftop in the middle of the city, it took Logan’s high-powered telescope for her to achieve that same clarity and definition. Here in Los Angeles, she had to squint through the smog to make out even the most elementary constellations, a detail that frustrated her to no end. It was almost as if the pollution had stolen every single shard of light the city had to offer, trapped it in the haze, and then reflected it all back come nightfall. Sometimes it looked like Los Angeles was burning, this living, breathing inferno that she could never seem to wrap her mind around: a land where everyone was overly obsessed with perfection and no one was quite who they claimed to be.

But Logan was different somehow. It wasn’t the fact that he didn’t care much about the way he dressed, that his fair skin remained alabaster white even in the heart of summer, or that he spent more time buried in his science textbooks and watching documentaries on Discovery Health than he did hitting the nightclubs. It was some indescribable, elusive quality of his that she had yet to pick apart, and she doubted that she ever would. He was the one constant in this tumultuous sea that had become her life, and the more Kandi thought about it, the more she realized that she had no idea what she’d do without him. He had snuck his way into her heart in that undeniable way of his, and now she’d reached the point where she couldn’t picture herself without him at her side. It was a need that she couldn’t begin to explain, something buried deep in her bones like marrow.

The two of them were both transplants to the so-called city of angels, and while Kandi longed for the unbearable heat of the South, she knew the harsh winters of Minnesota still coursed through his veins. They were two wanderers that had come across a foreign land, both desperate to make some sort of sense out of a world where they didn’t feel like they truly belonged.

In a way, Logan had become her Hollywood security blanket: the one person she turned to when things became too hectic, those times when life’s endless stresses began to wear her down and made her doubt herself. He was the only good luck charm she’d ever needed to ace her auditions, the first person she told whenever she received good news, and the only boy who would ever let her cry every bit of her mascara all over his sweater. He was her safe place to fall, the one person in this city with whom she felt she could truly be herself. She didn’t have to act with him; she’d never felt that need to tack on a façade or paste a fake smile across her lips in the same way she felt around everyone else.

She stole a glance at the boy’s profile. Without any gel to hold them in place, his soft espresso locks fluttered with the breeze, landing in soft curls against his forehead as he kept one coffee-colored eye pressed to the lens. As badly as she wanted to cross the space between them, to weave her arms around his lean frame and press her cheek to his back, she decided against it. Logan was taking an astronomy class at one of the local colleges, yet another credit he was determined to get under his belt while he was still in high school. That night, he’d set aside the time in hopes of making some progress on one of his labs for the course, but a part of her knew that, regardless of whether or not she was the root of his distraction, he wasn’t going to get anything done. Not tonight, at least.

In the morning, she’d leave for Vancouver, devoting the next two months of her life to her latest project, and as much as he tried to be the rational, practical one, Kandi knew that on that night, his thoughts were just as scattered as her own.

She knew the constellations like the back of her hand, she’d taken the time to search out every planet (and that was back when Pluto was still considered a true planet), but then again, that’s just what you did when you were seven years old and your mother bought you this fancy telescope. The price tag had to have been astronomical, but of course, Kandi had been too young to realize it at the time. It was exactly the sort of gift a single mother would buy her daughter in an attempt to make up for the father’s love she would never receive. Even now, at the age of eighteen, Kandi found her mother trying to make up for a night spent working late at the office with some new shoes that Kandi had been lusting for or a pair of tickets to a concert she’d been dying to see. Ms. Jenkins had slipped into the pattern of trying to buy her daughter’s love, of merely throwing money at the bottom, but it never seemed to be enough. It never balanced out the fact that the once tightly knit relationship between them was beginning to unravel at the seams. Kandi had become fully aware that she could no longer confide every little detail of her life to her own mother. Some things had to be hidden and kept secret because she knew her mother would never be able to handle them.

On those nights when her mother worked late, Kandi wasted the hours away with Logan, crashing on the couch in front of the TV with an array of Chinese takeout at their disposal or, much like tonight, camping out up on the roof of their apartment building. She had stumbled upon the stairwell that led to the roof by accident, and in the two years she had been a tenant, the door had never been locked once. With Kandi still living with her mother and Logan sharing an apartment with his three bandmates, this rooftop had become their secret hideout, the place they fled to whenever they needed a break from the hustle and bustle of the streets below.

“Ready for a refill?” she eventually asked, breaking the silence as she held up a bottle of wine for his approval.

Logan’s shoulders slumped as he pulled away from the telescope, and that was the moment she knew she had broke him down. He made his way over to the quilt she was resting on and offered her the empty Styrofoam cup to fill to the brim.

As she held her own cup to her lips, Kandi inhaled the rich scent of blackberry merlot and was immediately transported back to carefree summer days when she’d come across the dark berries growing wild in the pasture beside her house. She could still vividly recall the texture of blackberries on her tongue, the way it felt to puncture their skins with her teeth and send the juice squirting down her throat. More than anything, she wished she was home. Home in the small town where everyone knew her name but no one was desperate to get a picture of her. Home, where no one gave a shit about who she happened to be dating at the time and she could actually go out and have dinner without the paparazzi ambushing her, bombarding her with questions while each flash of their cameras stole little sips of her soul. She longed to roam the fields with Logan at her side, to settle down for a picnic and find different shapes in the clouds. She wanted to be able to talk about everything and nothing at all with him, without having to keep her voice soft and low in whispers or having to shout above all the noise of the city that was constantly surrounding them.

In spite of L.A.’s pleasant climate, she could still feel the summer beginning to fade away, those first few hints of autumn making themselves present in the chill that filled the air. She crossed her arms over her chest and watched the red lights of airplanes blink across the sky.

“Are you cold?” he asked as he slipped an arm over her shoulder, bridging the gap between them.

Kandi shook her head, but he was able to see straight through the faint smile clinging to her lips.

“Here.” His voice remained soft as he began to remove his cardigan. “Take this.”

“Thanks,” she replied, easing her arms into the sleeves. There were so many words waiting on the tip of her tongue, so many things she felt she needed to tell him before she left, but she just couldn’t bring herself to leave the comfort of his arms. For the moment, she was safe. She was loved.

The minutes ticked by in silence, and as Kandi laced her fingers into his, Logan finally got the nerve to speak up. “K?”

Her voice was still a mumble as she struggled to stay awake. “Yeah?”

She squinted, fighting off sleep as she watched his arm reach out towards the sky. “Can you make out those stars?” The tip of his index finger traced out the constellation in question, and while not all of the stars were visible, she knew the area well enough to fill in the gaps. “Yeah,” she murmured, relishing how his arms tightened around her. “It’s Aquarius.”

It was the water-bearer, the sign of her birth, and she could feel her breath catch in the back of her throat as she listened to him nervously fumble with his words. “I know it sounds cheesy, but while you’re in Vancouver, if you ever feel alone, just search for those stars and know that I’ll be right here, waiting for you.”

In the weeks that followed, Kandi kept his sweater, and even though it could never measure up to being in Logan’s arms, she could still feel him in each thread of gray cashmere, breathe in the crisp scent of his cologne embedded in every stitch. Each night as she made her way back to her hotel room, she took a moment to glance up at the stars because she knew that somewhere out there, the boy she loved was gazing up at the same night sky, dark eyes pressed against the lens of a telescope.