Chapter Text
Then
Jackie wakes up to the sound of her own name on Shauna’s lips—frantic, desperate, pleading. She’s sobbing it out, and Shauna’s the first thing that Jackie feels, too: the warmth of her against Jackie’s numb, stinging skin. She’s behind her, pressed against the length of her, arms wrapped around her stomach, and Jackie feels her body being jostled, rocked.
At first she thinks that it’s Shauna doing it—and in a way it is, because Shauna’s shifting and trembling is making the warm water they’re submerged in slosh around and the momentum is what has Jackie’s body moving. Her eyelids feel heavy, and Shauna is whimpering, “Jackie, please… please come back—“ into her ear, and her mind is foggy and worried and so she finally manages to get her eyes to flutter open.
What she’s met with is the sight of her own nude body in the tub, and too many faces crowded around the edge, staring, terrified, at her. Misty’s at the helm, and is the first to react: a grin splits her face wide and she declares, “It’s working! She’s awake!”
Shauna’s grip tightens on her. “What?” she asks, alarmed, almost not daring to believe it. Jackie tries to speak, tries to move, but it’s like her body won’t respond to commands from her brain. Her memories are flooding in too quickly and she feels sick. She wants to get out of the tub. She doesn’t want Shauna touching her. She thinks maybe she wants to die.
“You’re alive, Jackie,” Misty tells her gently, reaching out for her, touching her cheek. “You’re gonna live. You’re gonna—“
Now
“—be okay,” she’s told when the tests have been run and the doctor assigned to her has returned to her bedside to deliver the news, and it feels so silly, being told that she’ll be okay as she’s looking down at a hand with no pinky and half a ring finger gone and her torso is covered in scars and she’s so skinny and starved that she can barely walk without feeling light-headed.
There are more wounds. The missing toes and the tip of an ear, and the ones in her mind she’s spent too long trying to ignore for months, a year. She wonders how it’ll feel to be back now. To try to return to normalcy. It’s odd to have something to look forward to, to finally not be waiting to die. To reconnect with the Jackie Taylor that had run Wiskayok High, that had shoved things down and put on her best smile and won Homecoming Queen with Jeff Sadecki at her side. She’s missed her. She’s missed being able to become her.
-
Two days in Wiskayok and her parents are already trying to act like it had all never happened. Which isn’t at all surprising. They want the old Jackie back too. She hadn’t expected anything different from them.
“Jeff’s been, just—a total wreck,” her mother tells her in the morning while she’s making Jackie a hearty breakfast—one thing that has changed, one small reminder that her parents can see how different she is, how little she’s been eating. Am I skinny enough now? had been Jackie’s first wry thought upon seeing her mother rush toward her bed back in the hospital, and then she’d felt guilty for it, and now she has her answer to it. “He’s been working at the furniture store for your father. Never went to college. He missed you every day, just like we did.”
Jackie bites down on a piece of toast so that she doesn’t laugh dryly instead, or spill about Jeff and Shauna just to get a reaction. “Just me?”
Her mother gives her an odd look. “Well, we missed Shauna, too, of course,” she says, misunderstanding. It isn’t the first time that they’ve said Shauna’s name, and each and every time Jackie has had to fight the same urge not to bristle at the sound of it. “I spoke to her mother yesterday—“
“I’m really hungry,” Jackie interrupts, aware that she’s not being subtle, but the urge to avoid this topic outweighs her desire to go undetected. “Can I have more toast?”
Her mother stares at her for a beat, like she’s not sure what to make of her, and then bustles off to make it. The slice in Jackie’s mouth starts to taste like nothing.
Then
They don’t speak often. It’s not for Shauna’s lack of trying; there’s no question as to which of them is avoiding the other. Shauna’s stomach swells in the passing weeks, and her cheeks grow rounder and fuller to match, and she follows Jackie’s movements around camp with wide, sad eyes and accepts her brush-offs with a trembling bottom lip.
The other girls feel sorry for her. Jackie doesn’t. Shauna’s the one who’d betrayed her. Shauna’s the one who’d sent her outside and then hadn’t come looking for her.
Jackie replaces her with Nat, who had saved her life, and Nat accepts her new role grudgingly—though not without the occasional barb about “Just don’t start calling me Shipman,” or “It’s kind of ironic that you hate your best friend for fucking your boyfriend but you’re trailing after me of all people”, both jokes that make Jackie glare at her the first time she says them but earn self-deprecating laughs from her by the time Nat’s repeating variants of them well into Winter.
She hasn’t spoken to Shauna—not truly, not deeper than civil passing comments with no eye contact, not in a way that means anything—in so long by then. They still don’t. She spends time away from camp, joining Nat and Travis on their futile hunting trips, not learning much herself but happy to keep quiet when they tell her to. Sometimes she’ll see them leaving and try to follow and they’ll turn red and tell her to stay back this time, and she feels particularly lonely then, when she has to hole up alone in the cabin and pretend she doesn’t envy them—the having someone, having their person here with them. All she’s got is a cheating asshole she’d never loved back home and an ex-best friend she can’t look at without feeling her heart break all over again.
And then it gets worse, because Shauna’s baby comes.
-
She can remember it faintly, despite her best attempts to forget: what it had felt like to almost die. What had come afterward. Shauna’s voice in her ear—“Jackie, Jackie, please”—and how tightly Shauna had held on to her. She knows what it’s like to almost die, and Shauna knows what it’s like to think that her best friend is dead.
They swap. Jackie feels like she’s dying for a second time.
“No, Shauna—“ Her hand is gripping Shauna’s arm so tightly, shaking her, and Misty’s voice is somewhere that feels close and faraway all at once somehow.
“There’s so much bleeding… She’s losing a lot of blood—“
Shauna’s eyes are closed, and she’s so pale, and her baby is still and silent. “Shauna,” Jackie says again, and her tongue feels too big for her mouth, her heart feels like it’s pounding in her stomach. “Please, Shauna, wake up. Please wake up, I’m sorry, just wake up, Shauna, Shauna—“
An arm pulls at her. Then Tai’s voice is in her ear: “Give them some space, Jackie. Misty and Akilah need—“
Jackie wrenches out of her grip, reaching for Shauna with tears streaming down her cheeks, a raw, “No!” tearing out of her throat. She doesn’t look at anyone else—not Lottie holding the silent bundle in her arms, not the other girls crying too, not Misty kneeling between Shauna’s legs. Her hands reach for Shauna’s shoulders, her sweaty neck, her clammy cheeks. “Come back,” she cries, and leans in close, whimpering the rest for only Shauna’s ears to hear. “Please come back. I can’t do this without you. I don’t wanna do this without you.”
She’ll never know if Shauna had heard her, just like she’d heard Shauna in the moments just before she’d woken up in that tub.
She only knows that Shauna’s eyes open, then. Like she’d just been waiting for Jackie to ask.
Now
Her bedroom door creaks open with a tentative pressure to it that betrays an obvious amount of uncertainty, which doesn’t rule out either of Jackie’s parents, because despite their best attempts at sweeping everything under the rug they’re still tiptoeing around Jackie like she might break at any moment.
It’s harder to put on makeup and to do her hair with a finger and a half missing on her dominant hand, but she’s been making do, settling back into the comforting routine of it. She’s nearly finished up when the creaking door tears her eyes away from the vanity, and Shauna’s there in her doorway, looming in the entrance like a shadow, a dark memory of what she’s left behind.
Jackie hasn’t seen any of them until now. She feels like she’s looking at a ghost. She keeps her expression even, carefully reined in, just like she has for the few reporters who’ve managed to get a mic in front of her face in the past three days. “Hi,” she says casually, like Shauna’s appearance is no big deal, like she’d shown up for yet another study date and a sleepover.
“You’re not taking my calls,” Shauna says, a thread of cautious accusation underlining her tone.
“I’m not taking any calls,” Jackie replies, and a part of her knows exactly how brutal it is, what’s going unspoken: You’re not special.
Shauna’s mouth twitches. Her jaw clenches in the way it had only started to sometime after her baby had died, when the anger had finally started to fully overtake her sadness.
Jackie can’t bear to watch it happen, so she turns away, leans in close and paints her lips with cherry gloss. Her face is thinner, of course, but otherwise she could almost be mistaken for her old self. She tries for a smile. It’s dazzling. If the reporters she’s been hiding from could see it, they’d snap pictures of it and spread it across the nation in articles and on magazine covers, she thinks. She tries to memorize what it feels like to hold it on her face, so she can do it again when it matters. It’s been so long since she’s forced her facial muscles into this exact expression.
Shauna’s voice is low, resentful. “Is this what you’re doing, then?”
Jackie drops the smile, rubs her lips together to smooth out the gloss, and then caps the wand of it with a soft pop. “It’s nice to finally not feel like shit,” she says easily, still not looking at Shauna, placing the gloss back into her makeup bag. “You should try it.”
There’s a long silence. Jackie spends it rummaging for something else to put on even though she’s done now. Faking it, looking busy and disinterested while her heart beats out of rhythm and her brain screams go go please just go, just leave.
Shauna’s response is so quiet it’s nearly a whisper, but it cuts Jackie straight to the bone nonetheless. “You’re pathetic, Jackie.”
Jackie barely stops her body from flinching. Shauna’s feet shift over the floor, and then the door slams shut, and she’s gone.
Jackie looks at herself in the mirror, licks her lips and tastes cherries, blinks and watches a tear fuck up her mascara and then make its way down her cheek.
“She’s wrong,” she says to herself, wiping it away, using a tone she’s still trying to find again after going so long without using it. She’s the team captain. The Yellowjackets are down at halftime and need a pump-up speech, need someone to believe in them. “You’re strong.”
It doesn’t help. She just needs more time to get that old part of herself back again.
Then
When she’s finally lucid, Shauna still doesn’t say much of anything at all for several days. Jackie watches her with red-rimmed eyes and doesn’t know what to say or do, how to comfort her or if she even should given how long it’s been since they've properly spoken, but finally she gets brave enough to follow her into the meat shed, not sure what she’ll find inside, why Shauna’s been exiling herself to it in a clear effort to get away from the rest of them.
She finds Shauna tucked into the back corner, face buried in her knees, crying quietly. Shauna lifts her head quickly at the sound of Jackie entering, tears streaming down her puffy cheeks, but then seems to resign herself to company when she sees who it is. She’s still sobbing, almost hopefully, as Jackie heads straight for her.
“I know you hate me,” she warbles, which is how Jackie knows that Shauna has no memory of anything from those in-between hours after she’d woken up but still been out of it, overcome with exhaustion and grief, because Jackie had been by her side for all of it, keeping her warm and hydrated. “But I just really need my best friend right—“
Jackie sinks down at her side and wraps her arms around her, which makes Shauna cry harder, louder—a mix of devastation and relief pouring out of her.
“I want my baby,” she sobs, and Jackie strokes at her back and cries silently with her.
-
They don’t reconnect in the way the others maybe expect them to. The days pass, and Shauna stops crying, and gets even quieter, and Jackie and Tai take turns checking up on her. Shauna doesn’t really speak to her. She doesn’t speak to anyone. There’s a part of Jackie that aches for normalcy, to have Shauna in the way that she’d used to, the facade that was their friendship. And then there’s the rest of her: the part of her that settles for the relief of Shauna living, that finds taking steps toward repairing them too daunting, maybe impossible.
She’s happy that Shauna’s alive. She doesn’t avoid her anymore. She looks at her more than she’d used to. Sometimes even touches her—a brush of their arms, a hand on Shauna’s shoulder when Jackie passes her by. Sometimes Shauna’s eyes follow her and she feels comforted by the feel of them on her. They leave it at that.
She can tell that Shauna is moving past her sadness and embracing her anger maybe a day before any of the others spot the difference. She knows what Shauna looks like when she’s quietly resentful, when she’s holding onto something inside and needs to find a way to unleash it. She can look back and recognize it now. See in her what she hadn’t seen before.
And then, finally, Shauna explodes. And Lottie steps forward to take the brunt of it.
Jackie’s pushing her way into the middle of them before she can think, before Shauna can swing again, before Lottie can offer herself up any further. “No,” spills out of her mouth. “Let me take it.”
When her mind catches up, she knows it’s right. Shauna’s always been her responsibility. Jackie’s the reason she’s even on the team, here, suffering. It’s Jackie’s boyfriend that had put a baby inside of her.
(Maybe Shauna will hit her until it kills her. Maybe she can’t think of a better way to go, a better way to finally be free of this hell.)
She braces herself, faces down Shauna’s clenched jaw and fists as Nat drags Lottie away and some of the other girls tend to her—and to Misty, who Shauna has hit, too.
“It’s all my fault,” Jackie says to her, tears in her eyes. “Everything that’s happened to you is my fault. My team. My boyfriend. You’re my best friend. Hit me.”
Shauna’s eyes, cold and hard, change when she blinks them, and then they’re sliding everywhere, all over Jackie, like she’s not sure what to make of this.
It aches like an open wound: seeing Shauna hit Misty and Lottie without a second thought and hesitate now with Jackie. Like after everything, she’s still special.
Shauna’s fists relax, fingers uncurling. Disappointment pangs in Jackie’s chest. She knows that she won’t be dying tonight.
But then Shauna reaches out, mouth setting into a harsh line, grasp tight on Jackie’s wrist, and suddenly Jackie’s being yanked toward the attic like Shauna’s made up her mind about something.
The girls in the way clear out, alarmed, and Jackie tries for a protest, a short, confused, “Shauna—“ but Shauna just shoves her to the ladder with enough force that Jackie has to stick her hands out to catch herself on it so that she doesn’t crash into it.
“Go.”
Jackie climbs wordlessly, then, a part of her regaining hope. Maybe this is a private affair. Maybe Shauna just doesn’t want the others to watch Jackie fully give herself over to her own undoing.
Shauna’s up quickly behind her. Jackie turns to watch her shut the trapdoor. She sees her hands, braces herself, the hope spiking like a sun blooming up over the horizon, and Shauna seizes the front of her and slams her into the nearest wall, and finally—
Jackie gasps into a mouth that isn’t her own, stunned, her mind flickering and then going quiet, dying. Her eyes close. Shauna’s teeth are harsh on her lips. Her fingers are harsher on her waist, tugging at her shirt to draw Jackie further into her, yanking at the button of her pants.
Jackie doesn’t think, just kisses her back. It’s muscle memory. This isn’t how they’d used to kiss, giggly at sleepovers, but it’s familiar enough that her body just follows Shauna’s lead, captures her lips harshly in turn.
The sound of her zipper snaps her out of it, and she jerks back, rasps out, “What are you—?”
“Say no,” Shauna pants out, mouth moving to her ear, breath tickling her neck, fingers scratching at her exposed lower abdomen right at the edge of her underwear. She sounds so harsh. As harsh as her touch, her kisses. “Say no right now, or…“
At most, Jackie has maybe a few seconds to take stock of herself and make a decision. She uses just one—feels her body burning, her heart racing, and knows that it’s Shauna pressed to her and asking for this, needing this, and right now it feels simpler than it ever will again.
She surges forward, kissing Shauna hard enough to knock their teeth together, and then Shauna’s fingers are in her underwear and drowning the pain out, and she’s being thrust into over and over again in the same rough way she’s had before from Jeff and hadn’t liked, but this time she’s starved and broken and moaning with Shauna’s mouth latching onto her neck, teeth stinging.
“Fuck,” is all she says during, just once—when it sinks in how good it feels, when it sinks in that it’s better than Jeff and better than Travis and that she can hear Shauna practically grunting with the effort she’s using to angrily bury her fingers in Jackie over and over again.
Shauna’s teeth hurt so good. Her fingers are curling like she’s done this before, and Jackie wonders if Shauna’s touched other girls behind her back too, or if she’s just gotten really good at touching herself. She pictures Shauna’s hips lifting into her own hand. She thinks of Shauna breaking apart on the same bed they’ve fallen asleep together in, pictures her with her mouth open, with her cheeks flushed, with her eyes squeezed shut.
And then she comes undone.
Now
She starts taking calls again. Tai tells her over the phone, “It’s you they want to talk to, Jackie. I’m trying, but no one wants a black girl with dyke rumors to be the face of this. That’s just the way it is.”
“We all have dyke rumors,” Jackie says back sourly after she’s checked that her parents aren’t within earshot. She tries to block out a memory that springs up in the back of her mind: Mari using that word jokingly back in the wilderness, Tai scolding her: Only our people can say it, Mar. She tries not to think about the fact that Tai doesn’t scold her for saying it now.
“You’re the team captain,” Tai says, and doesn’t need to say and you’re blonde and white and All-American. There is a statue with Jackie’s face on it. Donated by her parents, sure, but none of the others have one, and that says it all, really. “Can you do it?”
Jackie’s been practicing. None of this is coming as a surprise to her. “I think so.”
“You need to know so.”
“Okay.”
There’s a beat. Jackie tries to think of an excuse to hang up now.
“What you’re doing to Shauna is fucked up,” Tai says, suddenly.
Jackie tears the phone from her ear and presses it harshly to the receiver before she has to listen to another word.
Later, her mom tells her carefully, “Jeff’s been asking about you, Jackie. I think he’d like to come see you.”
The fucking gall, Jackie thinks, and says, “I’d like to see him too.”
-
The ever-present crowd of reporters outside of her house dissipates with the promise of a live interview. They schedule it in front of the statue, arranged by Jackie’s parents, and she has a panic attack over it in the privacy of her bedroom and then an hour later she stands with a row of microphones in front of her face and too many cameras on her. She gives them a smile she’s practiced a hundred times now.
“How did a group of teenage girls manage to survive nineteen months in the Canadian wilderness?” they ask.
“Some of it was luck,” Jackie answers with a humble little shrug. This answer is easy. Scripted by Tai weeks ago, before they ever reached the hospital. “We pulled ourselves together as a team and scavenged for food, made shelter. Helped each other anywhere we could. We thought of what was waiting for us back home, of seeing our families again. And that kept us going.”
“How does it feel to be the face of such a horrible tragedy?” she’s asked. It’s an awful question.
Jackie absorbs it with that same smile. “I’m honored to represent the girls and to speak on their behalf, especially after everything we overcame. Each and every one of us has been so strong throughout all of this, and I know that what happened to us was terrible, but the fact that we made it back safely and this story has a happy ending can hopefully bring some comfort to anyone who’s been following it over these past couple of years.”
There are more questions, more camera flashes, more mics in her face. She does her best to not flounder under the attention, to not give away that it feels like she’s suffocating, drowning. She sticks to their story; the one they’d all agreed to.
“I think that went really well,” her mother says on the way home, almost like she’s rethinking shying away from it all.
The phone rings again for Jackie that night. When she answers, a male voice is harsh and angry in her ear, spitting at her like venom, “Fuck your happy ending, puta. Did my little sister get her happy ending? Why the fuck won’t any of you tell us—”
Jackie hangs up, sprints to her bathroom, and vomits into the toilet until she has nothing left in her stomach. Then she brushes her teeth harshly like she’d used to do after Jeff, until her rehearsed smile is pearly white and perfect again.
Then
It doesn’t happen again—not then. For days, Jackie’s neck is a mosaic of fading blues and reds and purples, and it goes unspoken, but she knows that everyone knows.
They’d probably heard. Jackie doesn’t think she’d been quiet.
Shauna is withdrawn, but pacified, at least for the time being. She doesn’t try to talk about it, and doesn’t try it again. Jackie doesn’t look at her, but for the first several nights afterward she goes to sleep thinking about her, about it, a hundred whys in her head and no answers for any of them.
It’s easier, eventually, to write it off. Shauna is alive, which is good, which is enough. Unfortunately, so is Jackie.
They live off of scraps for weeks, and then starve for weeks, and then try to figure out what to eat.
When they do, Jackie hopes it’s her, and then hopes it isn’t Shauna, and then hopes it isn’t Nat, and the universe is cruel to her, and it’s starting to feel like it always will be.
Nat’s supposed to die, and Shauna’s supposed to kill her, and beneath the familiar tremble of Shauna’s lip and hand Jackie wonders darkly if there’s a part of Shauna that wants to do it, to take Jackie’s second-most important person away from her like Shauna had taken herself away back in Wiskayok and ruined them.
Jackie doesn’t stop it, even though it’s Nat, even though it’s Shauna. She’d been the first of them to accept that they’d all be dead soon. There’s a freedom to nihilism. If nothing matters, losing Shauna to Jeff doesn’t have to hurt anymore. If nothing matters, losing Nat to Shauna doesn’t have to hurt either. If nothing matters, she doesn’t have to dissect the dreams she has of Shauna now.
She stays with Travis at the cabin while the rest of them hunt her friend. When Javi dies instead, she doesn’t ask questions. Shauna butchers him. The others leave beforehand.
“You can go,” she tells Jackie. “I’ve got it.”
“No, I can’t,” Jackie says, and watches Shauna pull down the fabric to cover her eyes without argument. Jackie doesn’t watch either, once she sees Shauna’s trembling hands find his neck. She waits for it all to be over, turned away with tears sliding down her cheeks, and they don’t say anything more to each other, but she stays.
She accepts her share of him that night, because she can tell that Nat wants her to, and because Shauna is across the room staring at her and won’t look away until she’s made sure that Jackie’s taken the first bite. It’s taken you long enough to notice, Jackie thinks, and eats for once, does what all of them can never undo, becomes what they can never un-become, and doesn’t stare back.
-
One night, she’s shaken awake with Shauna’s hands on her body and the same desperate cry of her name that she remembers from the tub. “Jackie! Jackie, get up!”
Her eyes flutter open. She becomes aware of heat, and the crackle of flames. The cabin is burning. Their home is burning.
Jackie scrambles to her feet and looks around for something to grab, to salvage, but Shauna hooks a hand around her bicep and drags her to the door without regard for who or what they might be leaving behind.
Jackie thinks of Van in the plane, of pulling Shauna from the fire without a second thought, of how angry Shauna had been at her for it.
Hypocrite, she thinks, and then: I love you too.