A More Deserving Blackness by Angela Wolbert

eye.  I raise my sight and see Logan watching me as well, his dark brown eyes taking everything in.
                  “Do you want to go first this time?” Emma asks lightly, and I blink at her.  I have no idea what she’s talking about.  She gestures inanely at the table and I glance around, seeing kids hiking themselves up onto the long tables and laying back, little bursts of uncomfortable laughter fraying apart from the general din.
                  My chest freezes.
                  No.  No no no.  Nonononono.
                  But I’m supposed to be fine, I have to be fine, I can’t have a panic attack in the middle of health class and keep up the façade for Trish, I can’t shatter in the middle of a CPR tutorial when I’m supposed to be fine.
                  Emma’s waiting, that probing look quickly becoming something else, so I take a deep breath and slide my butt back onto the cold table and lay down in one quick motion, pretending the nausea I feel sliding up my throat is from lying down too fast.  The table is hard beneath my shoulder blades and when she touches me, positioning both hands on top of one another for the chest compressions, my eyes fly open.  All I see are the school’s neon overhead lights.  So bright my eyes water.               
                  Colored lights, red and yellow and green spinning around sickeningly, around and around above my head.  Raindrops dropping on my skin, one after another, measuring time in excruciating slow motion. 
                  I can’t breathe.  I lurch up, gasping, distantly aware of a wide-eyed Emma stumbling back from me in alarm.  I throw myself off the table, clutching my chest as I try to stop screaming – why can’t I stop screaming?  But I’m not screaming, it’s in my head, filling my ears until I can’t hear anything else, and I don’t think, I just run.
                  Out of the classroom, down the hall, slamming through the restroom door and I’m gripping the edge of the sink, my head hanging, clawing for air.  I feel like I’m suffocating, dizzy from those lights.  My head is spinning.
                  I don’t even make it into a stall before I sink onto my knees on the checkerboard patterned tile, seizing my wrist in my other hand and slashing my thumb across it, again and again, waiting for her to stop screaming.  God, I just want her to stop screaming.
                  But she won’t stop because the screams aren’t someone else’s, they’re mine.  They’re always mine.
                  A big hand grips each of my wrists, prying them apart.  I almost cry out at the loss, my arm stinging but not nearly enough, and then my hands are flattened against a warm chest and Logan’s face floats before mine.  He breathes for me, in and out, inhale, exhale, coaxing me with his eyes. 
                  My shaky, rattling breaths are nothing like his, and I clench my eyes shut.  I can’t hear anything else.  Rain dribbles down my face.
                  Logan lets his head fall forward against mine and our foreheads are touching, huddled there on our knees on the bathroom floor, his hands pressing mine against his heart.  I try to focus on his body, his breathing, his heartbeat, the steady pressure of his hands over mine.
                  At some point, the screaming fades.
                  I pull back carefully.  Logan straightens, and his eyes are red, as if it were he who’d been crying and not me. 
                  Tears.  It’s only tears that he reaches up to brush from my cheeks, not rain.  He watches me closely as he pulls my hands from his chest into his lap.
                  That’s when I notice the blood.
                  I must’ve scraped the scab loose on my wrist because there are