Chapter Text
In the movies, they say that high school girls’ sports teams are like families. Natalie Scatorccio knows better.
The Wiskayok Varsity Yellowjackets (and hell, throw JV in there for good measure) are a mercenary band of couture-denim-clad, friendship-bracelet-wearing bitches. And Nat may not wear Calvin Klein jeans, but she’s sure she’s just as Lord of the Flies as the rest of them. All ready to throw someone else under the knife to win the next game, or the favor of the team captain, or something. (Well, Nat doesn’t care if Jackie Taylor likes her very much, but she’s cutthroat, that she knows about herself. She doesn’t take shit, and even though there’s a distinction, it doesn’t make her that much different from the others, when you step back and squint.)
Nat’s not friends with anyone on the team, and if it weren’t for soccer she probably never would have spoken to any of them, period. Maybe Van, who’s pretty chill and shares a joint with Nat sometimes at parties – that’s probably it. No, actually – Akilah, because they’re in the same English class. But that’s it.
Suffice to say, to cut a long story short, that Nat would have never interacted with the bright-eyed-bushy-tailed-overly-virginal Jackie Taylors of the world if not for that fateful day she had signed up for JV soccer to get out of gym class freshman year (not her fault she ended up liking it). To cut a long story shorter, Nat would have never even registered on someone like Lottie Matthews’ radar if they didn’t share jersey numbers two digits apart. Not that that’s something Nat’s noticed.
Here is the limited list of things Nat is allowed to know about Lottie Matthews, even after they’ve been teammates for four years: Lottie’s parents are very, very rich, and even she isn’t quite sure why. Lottie lives on the exact opposite side of town from Nat (she only knows this because Lottie turns out of a different side of the parking lot in her fancy BMW after practice). Oh, Lottie has a BMW. Also, she listens to a lot of Madonna.
And that’s literally it. Nothing about Lottie Matthews makes Nat think Lottie might have taken a particular interest in her, nothing about Natalie’s manner – outwardly, at least – that would suggest she has a particular interest in Lottie Matthews. The fact that she finds Lottie cute in a long-legged deer kind of way does not count.
Nothing ties the two of them together, until the night when Lottie Matthews crawls through Nat’s bedroom window. (The first time.)
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It’s maybe 2:00 AM, if that, and Nat has been woken up by a thudding.
A distinctly human sounding thudding. It’s human sounding because it sounds like a human that went “ouch.”
“What the fuck?” Nat asks, eyes catching first on her open bedroom window – shoved all the way up to accommodate something precisely teenage girl-sized – and then on a lump on the ground, curled around itself. “What the fuck?” she says again, and the lump sits up, rubbing its head.
Lottie squints at Natalie in the darkness of her room, lips making that pouty little face that they do whenever she’s concentrating on learning a new play (again, not that Nat’s noticed). She’s wearing a pale-pink matching pajama set, the cuffs of her satin pants tucked into a pair of pristine berry-blue Converse. It seems like the perfect Lottie thing to do, to tuck her pants into her shoes so they don’t get dirty while she walks to Natalie’s home in the middle of the night. (Did she even walk? Where did she come from? How long did it take her to get here? Why the fuck-)
“It’s going to rain,” Lottie says, apropos of nothing, cutting off Natalie’s inner monologue. All of the sense snaps back to attention in her brain, and she shoots out of bed, launching herself at Lottie and shoving a hand over her mouth. Lottie, who is still rubbing at the side of her head absentmindedly, raises her eyebrows.
She didn’t speak loud enough to wake Nat’s mom – probably. She doesn’t want to risk it. It’s been bad enough the few times her mom has caught boys in Nat’s room during the daylight. She doesn’t want to think about what assumptions Felicia Scatorccio would make if she saw pretty little Lottie Matthews sequestered in the darkness of Nat’s room in the illicit hours. Speaking of-
“Lottie, what the fuck are you doing here?”
“It’s going to rain,” Lottie says again, as if that explains anything, except Nat is still covering her mouth with her hand so it sounds weird. She pulls her hand back.
“Why- you didn’t need to…”
“No, sorry.” Lottie rubs the corner of her lip with her thumb, staring hard at the ground with her brow furrowed. “That started wrong. It’s going to rain, very hard, tonight, and it’s going to flood the areas of town that are at a lower elevation.” When Nat doesn’t say anything, Lottie continues: “This part of town has some pretty low elevation.” She blinks at Nat owlishly.
“You can just say trailer park, jesus.” Nat tugs on the roots of her hair, sighing. How, exactly, Lottie knows this information, Nat is unsure – the sky is cloudy, sure, but even if she licked her thumb and proclaimed smells like precipitation it wouldn’t give her the insight to know it’s going to flood – nor the certainty to speak the way Lottie does about it.
Then again, Lottie’s always been a little off. (In an endearing way, Nat feels the need to clarify.)
“I’m sorry for breaking in,” Lottie says very suddenly. As if seeming to sense Nat’s question, she says “I would have come through the front, or knocked or something, but I didn’t want to wake anyone up but you. And I threw a rock,” she points out the window, “but you didn’t hear it.” A beat. “You’re a deep sleeper.”
“Thanks,” Nat says, and then realizes that probably wasn’t the right way to respond to that. “Uh, thanks for the meteorology report, Lottie, but some of us actually sleep at night, instead of hiking to our teammates’ neighborhoods, so, uh-”
“No, you’re not understanding me.” Lottie grunts exasperatedly. “The, uh, trailer park- is going to flood.” This statement does not carry the same weight of import to Nat that Lottie seems to think it should. “Like, your yard. Is gonna flood. The water’s gonna get all in the ground and it’s gonna-” Nat shakes her head, not knowing what Lottie’s getting at. “Rocky, Nat.”
This simultaneously makes more and less sense than before. Because Rocky, Nat’s pet hamster from back when she was eight and who died under fairly suspicious circumstances involving a potential suffocating, is buried in the scrap of dead grass behind the trailer that Lottie had so generously referred to as her yard. Rocky had been Nat’s whole world for about a year, her most treasured friend. He was orange and squeaky and his cage was too small and she didn’t clean it enough but it didn’t matter, because it felt good to take care of something. But after Nat’s dad got laid off (again) and started complaining about Rocky chirping all the damn time, she came home one day to find him dead, buried under a mound of bedding and discarded food, his tiny little lungs empty of air. She had never been sure if it was on purpose or not, and she never got up the balls to ask.
Nat had buried Rocky’s little body out behind the trailer, and thinking it through – yeah, flooding would probably disturb his tiny grave a bit. All that makes sense.
What doesn’t make a lick of sense is how Lottie knows about all that. Nat’s never mentioned Rocky to anyone – not Kevyn, not anyone on the team, literally nobody knows about that fucking hamster. But now Lottie’s invoking his name like an angel or something.
“Lottie, what the fuck,” she says, for what feels like the millionth time. “What do you-”
“You have a hamster named Rocky, right?”
“I had a hamster named Rocky,” Nat points out. “He’s dead. Clearly you know that, cause you’re talking about his grave.”
“Well, yeah.” Lottie frowns. “I’m sorry, Nat. But we have to dig him up.”
Geez, it’s one curveball after another with this girl. “What?”
“We should dig him up. Oh, and also,” Lottie adds, as if the first statement was a totally mundane thing to say, “I didn’t hike here. I took my bike. It’s from when I was, like, twelve, but I could still ride it.” The image of Lottie riding a child’s bicycle across town to get to Natalie is momentarily distracting, especially because Nat can just picture the look of intense concentration Lottie must have had while doing it, her steadfast determination to inform Nat of her hamster’s imminent demise. Also, because Nat remembers twelve-year-old Lottie, and she was a good deal shorter than Lottie is now.
“Why do you want to dig up my dead hamster?” Nat asks, when she’s partially recovered her sanity.
“Because,” Lottie sighs, as if Nat is the one being unreasonable here, “the flood will pull him out of the ground, and he’ll get all swept away and you’ll never see him again.”
Nat isn’t sure if that’s exactly how flooding works, but it’s also two in the morning, and the logic is starting to come together. Sort of. Or, Nat likes Lottie just enough to pretend it is. (Just enough.)
“Okay,” she says, “okay.” Then: “um, did you bring a shovel?”
“No?” Lottie frowns. “I rode my bike here, Nat.”
“Okay.” Nat thinks for a second. “The retiree a few lots over has one in his yard. I’ll borrow it.”
---
Less than ten minutes later, they stand in the patch of scraggly yard behind Nat’s trailer, staring at the ground, and the tiny pattern of stones pressed into the earth in the shape of a cross – what constituted a grave when she was eight.
Nat squints up at the sky. “How long do we have?” She forgets to add until the rain but Lottie understands her anyway.
“About a half hour,” Lottie decides after a moment.
“What will you do if it starts raining while you’re going back?” Nat asks. She starts to dig at the ground, pushing the stones aside with the shovel.
Lottie waves a hand in the air. “Oh, I’ll be fine,” she says breezily. Nat doesn’t ask further questions.
Nat does the digging, and Lottie kneels in the dirt by the makeshift grave – definitely ruining those designer pajamas of hers – and soon enough, little Rocky’s body is uncovered. Nat hadn’t really dug very deep when she buried him, or anything. She was eight, what was she supposed to do?
Something that has been dead for around ten years should probably not look as recently-alive as Rocky does, fur and meat still clinging to his little body as Lottie lifts him gently from the ground. Distantly, Nat hears thunder. She swears she can see Rocky’s eye twitch. This whole thing is starting to freak her out a little, even more than it did when she woke up and someone she knew was in her bedroom.
“Little guy,” Lottie coos affectionately, rubbing Rocky against her cheek exactly the same way Nat used to do when she was little, to feel his soft fur on her skin. Nat makes a face.
“You shouldn’t do that when he’s…”
“What?” Lottie looks up, eyes wide, and all Nat can do is uselessly shrug.
“Dead.”
Lottie looks down at the body of Rocky, who admittedly doesn’t look that dead. “Well,” she says, and then she scoops him into the breast pocket of her pajamas, stands up, and brushes the dirt from her pants – it doesn’t really do anything, but it was nice that she tried. “Good job with the shovel.”
“Uh, thanks?” Nat swings it over her shoulder like a preening lacrosse player with his stick, and immediately cringes inwardly, because sure, that’s the kind of move that will impress the girls. Lottie doesn’t really notice it, regardless.
“I’ll see you at practice tomorrow,” Lottie says, and away she walks, with hardly a wave at Nat. It leaves her spluttering for a second before she finds her words.
“Wait, you’re taking my hamster?”
“I’ll lay him to rest,” Lottie grins over her shoulder.
Nat starts to say: “You’re not going to-”
“No, Nat, I’m not going to eat him.”
Why did I even ask that? Nat thinks, and forgets to register the fact that Lottie answered her question before she voiced it. Instead, she watches Lottie walk away until she’s climbed back on her tiny bike – yep, the image is as funny as Nat thought it would be, especially because the bike handles have strawberry-colored tassels – and pedaled away, back to her McMansion on the good side of the tracks. Once Lottie is well and truly out of sight, Nat sneaks back to her neighbor’s yard to return the shovel and crawls into bed just as the first few droplets of rain fall.
---
By the morning, the yard is flooded. Nat never questions Lottie again.