Chapter Text
July
The first time it happens, Taissa tries not to think about it.
That’s her survival strategy for most of her waking hours these days, and though her new therapist insists that this is fine, it doesn’t feel fine. It feels like being dead with a headache. It feels like being propelled through new sets propping up around her each day, nodding along when she’s supposed to, moving her mouth and hands around as needed. She’s not so much floating as she is treading water, saline, stinging, but she hasn’t gone under again and that has to count for something.
The Quetiapine was supposed to prevent the night terrors, and quell the sleepwalking, and the Zoloft was supposed to suppress the panic attacks, but here she is, trembling and gasping awake at 3am, trying to sob quietly enough that her parents don’t wake up to check on her. She tries a technique her therapist taught her– imagines a blank wall, and when the intrusive thought tries to affix itself there, she imagines painting it white again. A white wall. Trees, greener than possible in New Jersey, smoke, fire on the wind. A white wall. The head-filling scent of thick wet blood. A white wall. A mouth full of dirt and tubers. A white wall. Her , thinner than she ever should be, collar bones stark and cheeks sunken in, tattered and dirty and exhausted and alive . Taissa ejects this thought ( dream? memory? ) as quickly as it appears. It aches so intensely that her breathing is shaky and she can’t do this again she can’t she can’t think about her .
Nausea roils through her and she runs into her en suite bathroom to vomit all over the beige tiled floor. As she scrubs up the mess until the sun is shining through the windows, she can’t get the smell of smoke and burning hair out of her nostrils.
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The second time it happens, a week later, she carefully broaches the topic with Dr. Schneider. She is a nice, old white woman with perpetually messy hair, and Taissa likes that she’s always chewing on something. Pen tips, lollipop sticks, gum. She imagines that the good doctor has just quit smoking. Taissa has recently picked it up– it’s an easy way to feel full when you have no interest in eating. It gives her something to do in the long hours when she isn’t sleeping but is supposed to be.
“It was about them. The team. Um. And her. I guess a lot about her.”
“When you say ‘her,’ are you talking about Vanessa?” It burns Tai, hearing the name, like a physical blow. It must show on her face.
“Is it hard for you to hear her name?” Dr. Schneider asks. Tai can only nod. Her throat feels tight. Her eyes sting.
“Van. It’s just—she just goes by Van,” Taissa chokes out. If Dr. Schneider noticed that she used the present tense, she says nothing.
“Got it, Van. I know it’s hard to talk about, because when we talk about it, we have to face it, right? But I do think it will help, Taissa, if you feel ready. Tell me about your dream.”
The thing is, she’s not ready. She won’t ever be ready to talk about this, because this will be the biggest and most defining horror she will ever have to live through, and how can your life go anywhere after that? How is she supposed to just keep driving her car and buying coffee when her friends are all dead ? When they probably died horribly, painfully, so scared?
“Ok. Uh, she’s in the woods somewhere. I guess it’s what I imagine Canada looks like, cold, snowy. Lots of pine trees. And she’s— she’s skinny. Too skinny, like she’s starving. She’s got cuts and bruises. The other girls do, too. But they’re all alive. There’s a building, like a cabin or something, with a fireplace. They live in there. That’s all I remember.” This isn’t exactly true— the dreams have been nothing if not hyper realistic, like no other dreams Taissa has ever had. There are smells, and sounds, and little bits of conversation picked up. But that doesn’t make sense, that’s not how dreams are supposed to work, so Taissa keeps it to herself.
“The weird thing though, is that I’m her. She looked into a bucket of water and I saw her reflection, but it was me. Like I was remembering it from her point of view.”
Doctor Schneider pauses to reflect on this. She scribbled some notes down and Taissa feels queasy again.
“What do you make of that Taissa?”
This reflective questioning shit really grates on Taissa’s nerves. Why was she here then, if she had to solve all this shit on her own?
“I don’t know, Doctor Schneider. Probably because I don’t want them to be dead, and they are. Seems like a good enough reason to me.”
“You’re angry with me. Why?”
And Taissa then notices that she is, in fact, angry. Furious, actually. Hands clenched so hard her (newly long) nails pierce into her skin.
“I’m not. I’m… frustrated.”
Dr. Schneider looks at her.
“Why are you frustrated?”
“Because I haven’t been sleeping. I’m sorry.” It’s a cop out, and they both know it. Maybe another day Dr. Schneider would call her on her shit, but she must look frayed enough, because she leaves Taissa alone this time. They talk about her eating (bad) and her sleeping (essentially nonexistent) and Taissa lies about all of it. She can’t handle going to the hospital again.
The drive home has to be abandoned after a few minutes, Taissa pulls off the turnpike, unable to get enough oxygen into her lungs. In the backseat, a shadow, a girl. Hung from the rearview mirror, a green peace sign necklace. There are dusty boot marks on the floor mats and how was Taissa ever supposed to know what dust was hers?
She screams. And screams.
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By the third time, Taissa at least expects it enough that she doesn’t need to vomit immediately. She cries, of course, and gasps, but deploys one of her new tricks before the pain overwhelms her.
There are ways she’s discovered to quell the rising tides of intolerable grief; like newly-grown finger nails raked across her inner thigh hard enough to draw blood. Like punching herself where bruises won’t bloom easily. Like skipping meals until she feels dizzy and light headed, empty with purpose at least.
This time, Van is chewing sinew. There’s dark purple-brown meat piled on a tin plate at the center of a rough hewn table, in front of a fireplace. Her hands are pink with washed off blood, and Taissa knows the dusting of cinnamon freckles like a rhyme. Her jeans are filthy with mud and blood, and held up by a belt of rope. Taissa hears nothing this time except for chewing and the occasional shifting of half-dead teenage girls tearing meat with their hands and teeth. Taissa feels nothing except hunger , true hunger, like she has never experienced in her life before. Hunger that twists her guts and rings through her bones. Hunger that replaces all other thoughts and fills your skull with red yawning
Eating has been hard for Tai ever since It Happened. Nothing tastes as good. Every mouthful she chews through is mealy and unappealing, even dishes she had loved a few months ago hold little interest. This time, when she wakes up at four in the morning, her stomach is a gaping, angry hole. She eats an entire rotisserie chicken crouched in front of the refrigerator, pulling the cold greasy meat apart with her fingers. She drinks a gallon of apple juice, the good shit her mom gets from the farmer’s market and will be pissed to see gone already, to wash it down.
She thinks about Her feeling that horrible emptiness for days , weeks even, and she has to pinch her thigh hard to keep from going down that road. She’s not starving, because she is not alive. She’s gone. Probably burned to death in the wreckage of the plane. Taissa punches herself hard enough to bruise. And then again. And again. Until she can make the thoughts stop.
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The fourth time is just excessive.
She’s terrified and so exhausted that it’s shocking she hasn’t collapsed yet. Blood pools in her Adidas from the scrapes on her legs, and her arms tremble from over-use. Above her head she’s pushing up the poles of some sort of jerry rigged stretcher. There’s a girl in the stretcher, screaming. Misty– Misty? -- is jogging alongside, shouting instructions, which is bizarre because Misty Quigley is certifiably unhinged and should not be leading anyone. When they set the stretcher down in front of that creepy cabin, she sees Emma, one of the JV girls, with her arm split open. The white of the bone is shining in the twilight against the dark blood and flesh. She holds Emma’s other hand while she screams, and Misty brings the axe she has apparently been heating in a fire down between the split in Emma’s arm and her elbow. She vibrates from fear, shaking so hard her hands are fairly still. Emma can’t even cry– she gargles a bit, and then goes limp.
When Taissa wakes up, she’s trembling, and her face feels warm and wet, like she’s been crying. She lifts her hands to wipe at her eyes and finds them suspiciously dry, which is confusing until she tastes the blood. In the harsh fluorescents of her bathroom, Taissa’s nose drips crimson all down her chin, and onto the neck of the shirt she’s been wearing to bed every night for nearly two months now, unwashed, stiff in the armpits and neck from sweat. The drops roll off of her chin and plink in the sink basin. Taissa wipes the blood off of her face, but the taste lingers even after an aggressive tooth brushing. She looks awful— bags under her eyes more fitting of a woman twice her age. Dark circles. She stinks of tragedy, like someone people would be scared to touch for fear of infection in the Middle Ages. She thinks, not for the first time, that she should be dead, too.
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The sixth dream is accompanied by a call.
Old hat— popping grubs between Her incisors, gnawing hunger, pine trees. Paper versions of Natalie and Lottie and Shauna, gaunt and sunken and hard in ways teenage girls from New Jersey aren’t supposed to be. Red hair that goes past Her shoulders now, and isn’t it so funny that it keeps on growing, even while the body starves? They dig a grave in earth that is nearly frozen, chipping at it with rocks and the hatchet they have. Emma isn’t in the dream, but Taissa knows because She knows that she is the shrouded object being lowered into the hole. Taissa knows because She knows that even cauterized, the stump of her arm had caught infection. Taissa knows because She knows that Emma had died screaming, delirious with fever, until the rest of the girls were hoping she would die just to make the pain stop. She sees Shauna throw a handful of dirt onto the hole, then Misty, then Lottie, then Nat, then She does.
When Tai wakes up her pillow is wet and warm, again. Her head throbs , like a hangover, like a concussion. And soon enough, her phone is ringing, which a quick check of the clock on her bedside table makes surprising, because it’s 3:30 in the morning and Taissa hasn’t gotten a call in two months. She squints into the murky predawn light and sees TAYLOR in green block letters scrolling across the phone screen.
“Hullo?”
“Taissa? It’s Jackie.”
Her blood runs cold. After everything went down, the two of them had not been on speaking terms. The last time they’d seen one another they were screaming across a parking lot, Shauna pulling Jackie towards her car, Van tugging Taissa into hers.
“Why are you calling me at 3am, Jackie?”
“Did you just have a dream?” she says, quickly, like she’s rushing to get to the thing she actually wants to talk about. There’s a sort of frantic, nervous energy behind her words, like she’s pacing.
“Yeah, Jackie,” Taissa winds up, “Remarkably, I was asleep and dre–”
“Did you dream about them ? That they buried Emma Parrella in front of a scary cabin?”
Silence. Taissa is stunned.
“I’m gonna take that as a yes. See, so did I. I think it’s real, Tai. I think that they’re alive out in the fucking wilderness or something.”
Taissa could admit to herself that she was barely alive. Breathing, heart beating, taking showers, smoking, choking down food, bruising her legs. Beyond that, there was very little left of her. Grief was a tumor endlessly consuming her old joys, degrading her will to stay like coastal erosion, bit by bit. That first week– the worst week– after hearing the news about Mr. Matthew’s jet, Death began to beckon from her soft quiet spot. Once she whispered in Taissa’s ear it was all she could think about. In the buzzing static of her mind it looked like this: one of their first away games of the year, every member of the Varsity team curled into two queen sized beds, nodding off in the too-warm television lit dark, pressed together and murmuring. Death, slim girl with a kind smile, places her hand on Taissa’s shoulder through every unbearable moment and whispers that she should come home to them, where she belongs. It would be so easy, like falling asleep, like crying.
She’d tried to go with this girl once, a few weeks after the phone call came from Nationals that the team had never made it. Taissa hadn’t wanted to die, not in those terms, but that quiet warm place where pain receded was so horrifically tempting that she’d just wanted a break . Just a few days where grief and trauma were not intrinsic to being conscious. So she downed a handful of the pain pills she’d been prescribed for her knee in pre-season but never took, and had woken up in Wiskayok General the next day. The girl from the dark was still there, but Taissa knew better now. She kept doors closed behind her now, doors that Jackie was trying to pry open with French manicured fingernails. Taissa grits her teeth.
“Go back to sleep, Jackie.”
She can’t see where the end call button is in the dark and it’s that second of pause that gives Jackie enough time to speak again.
“I’ve been dreaming about them every night, Tai. Being out in the woods somewhere, starving to death. Shauna’s been writing in her diary and she thinks they’re in the Canadian Rockies. We can call the pol–”
“Jackie! Fucking– listen to yourself! You’re acting insane. They’re dead. They’re all dead, and we’re going to have to deal with that every fucking day for the rest of our fucking lives, ok? There’s no secret plan. There’s no last minute reveal. This is forever , Jackie. It will never be ok ever again, and you have to deal with it just like I do. Don’t call me with this shit ever again.”
Whatever Jackie is going to say is lost. Taissa finds the red button and the call is over. The silence of the night spills back over into the room like it had