Chapter Text
They name Shauna Antler Queen and then things really go to shit. Not to say that things weren’t bad already, but they were more civilized before. Then, when Shauna realizes Nat is gone, Jackie has to talk her off the ledge.
She yanks her unceremoniously into their hut and pulls off the outfit they’d created for her. Shauna fights against her, kicking and trying to yank her hand away to go after Nat, but Jackie refuses to let her go.
“You need to calm down,” Jackie says.
Shauna glares at her.
“They all fucking, like, conspired against me!” she narrows her eyes. “Did you know about this?”
“No,” Jackie scoffs. “And I can’t believe you’d ask me that.”
Shauna’s expression softens slightly. It’s barely noticeable, but it does, and Jackie knows it will be okay.
“This is good,” Jackie says, tentatively.
Anger flashes across Shauna’s face like a thunderstorm, but then it claps out with a boom, and Shauna looks 16 again, bottom lip trembling. And then she cries. Jackie hasn’t seen Shauna cry in a long time, and it’s unsettling. She had to relearn Shauna through the months, see who she had become, and now it’s like she’s unlearning it all again. She pulls her against her chest as Shauna lets out loud, gasping breaths. Jackie rubs circles on her back, over the costume they’d created for her. That’s really all it is. A costume. They’re just kids playing pretend and they all know it.
“I don’t want to go back,” Shauna hiccups.
“Why not?” Jackie asks gently.
Shauna lets out another sob. Jackie can feel that her shirt is soaked through. She doesn’t care.
“I don’t want to leave him,” is all Shauna says.
Jackie pulls her tighter. Words are hard.
“He’ll always be a part of you,” Jackie whispers into her hair, pressing a kiss there.
Jackie knows she’s telling the truth. The honesty of that nearly knocks her over with its candidness. But more than one thing can be true, so she also knows she’s omitting some of the story. Shauna likes the power because she grew up feeling less than, and some of that was her fault; Jackie can admit that. So when she tasted power, it became intoxicating, and she couldn’t handle it.
She doesn’t really think Shauna is a good person anymore. She can’t say with certainty that she is either. None of them really are. But she finds, as Shauna clutches at her like a little kid crying in the lap of their mother, that it doesn’t matter.
Nat comes back the next day, fists clenched tightly and face set like she’s expecting a fight, but Shauna just looks past her dimly. Nat made contact with the outside world. She actually talked to someone. Jackie can barely believe it. But they aren’t out of the woods yet, pun fully intended. They don’t know where they are. Nat wasn’t able to give a very good description before she lost connection again. But it’s a start.
Rescue is finally on the horizon. And it tastes like ash.
Another month passes, and suddenly it’s the end of August, the dog days of summer. They’re feeling it – skin tanned and always sticky. It’s too hot to be outside much recently. That, and when they’re outside, they’re inundated with back-to-school signs, and it reminds them that if they’d never crashed, they’d be starting Junior year of college. They’d be over halfway done with the final leg of their schooling careers, looking for jobs and internships.
Instead, here they are. Stuck.
Jackie spends a lot of time wondering what they’d have been like if they’d made it to Nationals. She knows from reading Shauna’s journals that she would’ve gone to Brown. She thinks that pre-crash her might have taken a really long time to get over that. She had created the idea of them being roommates in her head and wanted it so badly, wanted to share every experience with Shauna. So they might not’ve talked very much Freshman year. But they would’ve found their way back to each other eventually. She has no doubt in her mind about that.
At some point, Jackie reasons, they’ll have to either go back to school or find a job. It just doesn’t feel worth it. They’d have to be apart even longer, apart for good. She can’t stomach the thought. All the survivors got big payouts from the company that Lottie’s dad hired. He’d made sure of it – with the best lawyers he could find, who divied up the winnings. It’s enough to keep them comfortable for a while. So Jackie doesn’t see the point in getting a job. And she doesn’t want to go to college without Shauna. And Shauna isn’t ready. So neither is Jackie.
They lay tossed across Shauna’s bed, in short shorts and tiny tank tops, her fan on the highest setting to try to fight the heat. The central air in is house is doing very little to cool them down and the day is sweltering.
The heat must be frying cells in Jackie’s brain, or maybe it’s the way she feels ready to jump out of her skin, or some combination of the two, but for whatever reason, something compels her to turn on her side, propping her head up to look at Shauna on her back and say:
“Can I ask you something?”
Shauna tilts her head to look at her, but stays lying down.
“Of course.”
“Remember out in the wilderness?”
“No, I don’t remember that,” Shauna says, rolling her eyes. Jackie shoves her with her free hand.
“I’m serious,” she says.
“Fine,” Shauna says. “Yes, I remember. What about it?”
“You and Melissa…” she says, trailing off. Shauna tenses.
“What about me and her?” Shauna asks. Her voice is hard, guarded.
Jackie wants to take the words back, to go back to their silent agreement to not talk about things like that . But it’s too late now.
“Did you like… actually like her?”
“I didn’t really like anyone out there,” Shauna says. “Except for you.”
“Yeah, but you guys were… together, or whatever.”
“We weren’t ‘together.’” Shauna says, putting the word in air quotes. She stares intensely at the ceiling.
“You were something, though,” Jackie says, voice so soft, so gentle.
She can see Shauna chewing on the skin of her cheek, eyes still fixed above. The fan whirs.
“Yes,” Shauna says, finally. “Something.”
Jackie knew – everyone knew – but nobody had ever asked Shauna directly about it and the confirmation slams into her, knocking her world off its axis and then back into place, but somehow mirrored, everything she thought she knew gone inverse.
“Okay,” Jackie says.
“I’m sorry.”
Jackie furrows her brow.
“Why are you sorry?”
“For not telling you. For doing… stuff with you.”
Now Jackie’s uneasy. The truth has a way of making you dizzy. But she’s a master at pulling away from the edge before she can fall off.
“Don’t be silly,” she says, injecting pep into her voice. “What we did is different.”
Shauna nods, a tear streaming down her cheek.
“Right,” she says. “Different.”
–
Jackie thinks Shauna is mad at her. And she’s not taking it well.
They’d had that talk over the weekend, and the next day they’d slept at Jackie’s. Everything seemed normal until the following morning, when Shauna had left early, slipping out of bed before Jackie had even fully woken, pressing a kiss to her forehead and whispering that her mom needed her to come home.
She’d come back that night, but not until late, and she barely spoke to Jackie before falling asleep. She made another excuse in the morning, a flimsy, paper-thin thing before practically running out the door, almost slamming it in Jackie’s face.
Jackie feels out of control, like she’s spiraling. She feels anxious and sweaty – and not just because of the heat. She’s bitten her nails down to the quick, and she has bruises on her thighs from digging her fingers into the soft skin there. She doesn’t know what she did, but this is the least amount of time they’ve spent together since they got back, and she can't explain it other than feeling wrong .
When dinner time passes and Shauna still hasn’t even called, Jackie makes the walk over herself, determined to get answers. She hauls herself across town, down the sidewalks, ignoring the cars of her classmates who are about to leave for another semester at college, their faces stuck out the windows, gawking at her.
She lets herself into Shauna’s house with the key they keep under the rug. She finds her in her bedroom, scribbling in a journal. Jackie stands silently in her doorframe, arms crossed over her yellow tank top. Shauna turns around slowly, with no surprise at all, like she’d been waiting for Jackie to show. Maybe she had.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey?” Jackie repeats. “What’s going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you mad at me?” Jackie cuts straight to the chase.
“No, Jackie,” Shauna sighs. “I’m not mad at you.”
“Then why are you acting so weird?”
(A flash of a memory – Jackie and Shauna standing half in a pantry, half in the cabin. Her confronting Shauna for acting off. Shauna telling her she was pregnant. Shauna lying . She wonders if Shauna is thinking this too.)
“I don’t think I am,” is all she says.
“You’ve been leaving early, barely talking to me, not coming around as much. That’s textbook weird, Shauna.”
“Maybe I’m allowed to have my own life,” Shauna snaps.
Jackie stands there, arms dropping to her sides, whatever retort she’d had prepared slipping from her tongue.
Instantly, Shauna stands up, hands outstretched.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “That wasn’t fair.”
“No,” Jackie says. “It wasn’t.”
Shauna comes closer. She looks like she might cry. Jackie realizes she herself already is. She reaches up to touch the tears on her face. Shauna tracks a drop as it rolls down, falling from her chin.
“I’m sorry,” Shauna says again. “Being around you. It’s hard.”
She’s even closer now. Jackie can see the flecks of hazel in her eyes, the slightly jut of her bottom lip, the skin there raw and red fromher habit of gnawing on it when she’s anxious.
“Why is it hard?” Jackie whispers.
Shauna brackets Jackie with her arms, hands on either side of the doorframe. Her eyes drop to Jackie’s lips. Jackie’s breathing goes ragged, her chest rising and falling unsteadily.
“I’m sorry,” Shauna whispers before she kisses her.
This is far from the first time they’ve kissed and yet something about it is different. It makes the bottom of Jackie’s stomach feel like it’s dropping out beneath her, along with the floor and the rest of the Earth.
Jackie kisses her back, deepening it. She wants to taste more, more, more even as the rational part of her mind is screaming at her to stop. There are a million reasons this is a bad idea, but she can’t remember any of them right now.
Shauna tugs her backwards and they stumble to Shauna’s desk. Shauna spins her around, so her back is to it, and pushes her against it. Jackie removes her hands from Shauna’s face only to shove herself up so she’s sitting on top. Shauna’s journal is beneath her, pens in a cup go scattering as her back hits them.
Shauna probes gently with her tongue and Jackie opens her mouth to her. Shauna pulls back and Jackie genuinely whines.
“I’m sorry,” she says again, expression almost fearful. It makes Jackie want to cry again. She realizes, with a start, she still is crying.
“Do you want to stop?” Shauna asks.
“No,” Jackie says. “Never.”
She leans in again, wrapping her legs around Shauna’s waist and pulling her closer. Shauna unbuttons Jackie’s cargo shorts and plays with the zipper, teasing Jackie until she’s nearly rutting against her. Shauna laughs, husky and so damn sexy Jackie can feel herself growing wetter. Shauna slides a hand inside her shorts, pushing aside her cotton underwear. She grins against Jackie’s mouth at what she finds, stroking her gently.
Jackie whines again.
“Please,” she gasps.
Shauna does as she’s told.
She slides a deft finger inside of her, moving back and forth. With her thumb, she circles Jackie’s clit, and it’s too much to bear for too long. When Shauna adds another finger, she moans at the stretch, squeezing her legs even tighter around her. Shauna curls her fingers and Jackie can’t hold back anymore.
She comes hard, pressing their lips together so hard she can feel the bruise blooming already. She shudders around Shauna’s fingers, dropping her head to rest in on Shauna’s shoulder, both of them breathing heavily. Shauna pulls her hand out of Jackie’s pants, wiping it on the front of her shirt. Jackie watches the wet mark it leaves on the light green of her t-shirt, cheeks flushing at the visual representation of her arousal.
Shauna steps back, sucking in a breath.
“I think you should go,” she says.
“What?” Jackie says, still reeling.
“You should go,” Shauna says again, looking down at her feet.
“Why?”
“This wasn’t right,” Shauna says. “It’s not fair to me. Or you.”
Jackie opens her mouth to protest. But she can’t find the right words.
“Okay,” she says, slowly sliding off the desk. She buttons her shorts again, straightens her shirt. She shoves her fingers through her hair to try to tame it.
Shauna doesn’t look at her as she walks out of the room, down the stairs, and back outside.
Things get even worse. A week passes without rescue and they start to lose hope. It’s too reminiscent of when they first crashed, how holding on to hope for too long just caused more pain. Maybe they need to give it more time. But none of them can bear to have their hearts broken again.
Tensions flare and even one wrong look can spark a physical fight. They’re all sporting bruises and lacerations, limping and licking their wounds at night. Lottie says they need another hunt. No one disagrees. The last hunt led to Nat getting a signal. Maybe another will conjure up rescue.
It’s more animalistic now, but not in the howling, bounding through the woods way it was before. Now it’s quiet – predators in the dark. They don’t talk to each other. They slink around trees and breathe quietly through their noses. They are wicked.
One week in, they decide Hannah is too much of a liability. Misty grinds plants she foraged into a powder and sprinkles it into Hannah’s portion of the food. It’s a gentle end – one not many have been afforded. Shauna doesn’t have to be asked before she’s stealing away as the sun sets, preparing the body. Jackie wants to go out to her, to help her. But she’s too weak.
They are desperate. They are rabid. They have food and yet they stop eating. Their bones become more and more prominent. They spend a lot of time wandering through the woods, looking for nothing in particular. And then – rescue does come.
And it’s never the right time – there is no right time for them anymore. But they are too weak to fight back. They hear it before it arrives. They toss bones in the lake and say a desperate prayer of sounds not words and hope it’s enough. They are more animal than girl, so they are able to be coaxed into a helicopter. They promise to come back for the rest when they can only fit a few. They all scream, No. Jackie doesn’t let go of Shauna’s hand.
They bring in a second helicopter. The girls board. Nat drags Lottie kicking and screaming. She’s so much taller than her and yet she doesn’t give her an inch at all. They have something on board that they give her. Lottie slackens in Nat’s grip and a tear runs down her face.
Jackie watches out the window as the camp they built gets farther and farther away. It’s so small. So meager. It is everything. Shauna doesn’t look at all.
Jackie stares at herself in the mirror of her own bathroom, alone, trying to figure out what she did wrong, how she messed up.
She sees a girl. Hair dark blonde and honeyed from the sun. Her skin is pale in the fluorescents, showing every vein that runs through it. Her eyes are wide, brown with green on the edges. Not deep and oaky like Shauna’s. They’re red-rimmed. She cried the whole walk home. She looks how she remembers looking. Older, maybe, but the same girl, probably. It’s hard for her to tell, but she doesn’t think she’s changed that much.
So why does she feel so different?
Bathrooms aren’t good for her anymore; she always practically runs in and out, too scared of looking at herself for too long, or of ending up on the floor like that night before. She forces herself to stare this time. She doesn’t understand anything.
Well, what she does understand is that she’s been cleaved in two. She just doesn’t understand why she doesn’t look more different.
Shauna doesn’t want her anymore and it’s probably her fault. Her room feels empty without her floating around. She feels aimless.
She can’t stand to look in the mirror anymore. She lies face down on her bed, shoving her face into her pillow and breathing in deeply. She can still smell Shauna – the perfume her mom gave her for her 18th birthday that she doesn’t really wear anymore but somehow still clings to her skin, the smell of her shampoo, Jackie’s body wash that she borrows when she sleeps over, the innate scent of her that she learned in the wilderness when they were wild.
She thinks about the past 7 months. The things she’s done. The things they’ve done. The excuses she’s made. The fear she started operating on 26 months ago and hasn’t let go of since. She’s struck with the sudden realization that she is an actor in the story of her own life, that she’s letting herself be dictated by other people’s desires.
She shed those expectations briefly, partially, in the wilderness, but even then, she was afraid.
She’s still afraid.
It’s been one hour. She misses Shauna. She’s missed her her entire life.
She doesn’t know how to be honest about the things that she wants. But she wants Shauna. She wants her pressed against her in the night and she wants her laughing in the sun. She wants her crying in the winter and smiling as the leaves change colors. She wants her here, in the boisterous suburbs, and she wants her in the screeching silence of the Canadian North.
She doesn’t know how to have what she wants.
But she wants to try.
There’s a story she thinks about sometimes. A true story. A long time ago, two girls met and they declared each other their best friend the moment they saw each other. The one little girl told everyone she met about her best friend and how she was the greatest ever. Adults would laugh and tell her it was nice she had such a good friend.
The little girl cried when her friend called out sick from school and would hug her so tight she’d exclaim she couldn’t breathe when she got back. They had playdates together and sleepovers every weekend. When they got older, they spent their afternoons doing homework together as well. They spent less time apart than they did together.
Then the now-not-so-little girl met a boy who everyone told her was perfect for her. He seemed perfect, like maybe he’d come out of a story book, but she still would’ve rather hung out with her friend. She listened to everyone, though, and gave the boy a chance. She spent less time with her friend and more time with him. He was nice, most of the time, but something wasn’t right.
She wasn’t right.
As much as she tried, she couldn’t make herself like him the way he claimed to like her. He claimed to love her and she said it back but really she only saw her friend's face in her mind when she said it. Which she at first thought was a completely normal reaction that anyone would have. She would tell her friend about the things she and the boy did and her friend would just frown. What she didn’t tell her was how the time they’d kissed – a secret, private moment they didn’t talk about in the light – made her feel more than she’d ever felt with the boy.
It terrified her so badly that she pushed it all the way down until she could only just barely feel it. She threw herself into the boy, into sports, into becoming more popular so she could pile those attributes on top of it and keep it from ever coming out.
But then the girl and her friend were on a plane that crashed in the middle of the Canadian wilderness.
And those weights she’d placed on top of her truth were rattled free. She felt lighter, but she had to devote every second to keeping it down, keeping it secret. She knew what happened to girls like her. Girls who felt like that.
When they got home, it was like when they were kids and spent all their time together again. Those feelings she had tried so hard, and for so long, to tamp down boiled over like water in a pot, threatening to spill right out. And she was so worried about getting burned. So she kept ignoring, as long as she could.
But you can only ignore something for so long before either it shows itself or it kills you.
She’s already survived death once. She isn't interested in facing it again.
“I can’t sleep,” Shauna whispered tentatively into the darkness.
“Neither can I,” Jackie whispered back.
“Do you ever feel them?”
“Every day.”
“Have you forgiven yourself?”
“No. Have you?”
“No.”
Jackie reached across the bed for Shauna, pulling her close. They wrapped their arms around each other, pulling the other in close. They fit together like that – two pieces made to be slotted together. They didn’t sleep but they held each other and that was enough.
A few days after they got home, they stood in the shower together, unashamed at their nakedness. They’d seen every inch of each other already.
Jackie watched the water run down Shauna’s back. She washed her hair, taking her time to lather in the shampoo. Shauna melted against her touch, tilting her head back further. She cupped water in her hands and poured it gently over her head to rinse out the suds. When she finished, Shauna did the same for her. Jackie closed her eyes and pretended she was a kid again.
She turned to face Shauna, after she finished. She counted every scar down her body. The little ones from childhood, the bigger ones from later. She pressed a kiss to each. Shauna whispered words that might’ve been a prayer, or a plea for forgiveness. Jackie knelt in the shower, water pouring over her in rivulets. She kissed down Shauna’s legs, on the scrapes on her knees. She took her hands in her own, looking at the scarred skin there. Shiny lines where the knife had slipped. She kissed them too.
There were other scars. Ones that were too neat. She kissed those the longest. Rested her face against them and hoped Shauna understood.
Jackie stood and Shauna returned the favor. She traced her way down marks on her back she didn’t even know she had. Her touch was reverent. She didn’t falter at Jackie’s own scars that she could not explain in this moment.
“What do I look like?” Shauna asked when they finally dried off, the water having run cold. They sat in their towels on the floor of Jackie’s room.
“Yourself,” she said, hoping it didn’t sound like a lie.
She waits three days before she can’t stand it anymore. Her body aches for Shauna. She hasn’t ate at all since. Just the thought of food makes her nauseous. Every bad thing she’s ever done runs on repeat in her mind. She cannot absolve herself of her it anymore.
She stands at her front door, one hand on the doorknob, just tasting what it would feel like to twist it open, to run back to Shauna. But Shauna doesn’t want to see her. She doesn’t want to cause any more pain.
As it turns out, she doesn’t have to go to her.
On that third day, when she’s stood in front of the door for an hour already, has just barely started to twist it, a knock sends her jumping backwards. She doesn’t let herself hope as she opens the door.
“Hey,” Shauna says, kicking her toe against the ground apprehensively.
Jackie reaches out for her immediately, reflex at this point, and Shauna falls into her waiting arms.
“I’m sorry,” they say at the same time.
They laugh together.
They go to Jackie’s room, shutting the door behind them even though no one is home. Shauna sits on her bed. Jackie sits on the floor. The new dynamic between them shifts uncomfortably. They both wait for the other to speak. Shauna cracks first.
“Jackie,” she says. “I need to tell you something.”
“Okay,” she says. “Then I need to tell you something.”
Shauna nods. She picks at her nails – the nervous tic she’s had since childhood.
“I…” she falters. “I’m sorry for telling you to leave.”
“I understand,” Jackie says. “Like you said. It wasn’t fair.”
“No,” Shauna says. Her eyes remain fixed on her lap. “It wasn’t.”
Jackie’s heart twists with guilt.
“I know you’re not like that,” Shauna continues. “Not like me.”
Jackie swallows down on the bile that rises in her throat.
“I might be,” she says.
Shauna looks up at her. Jackie can feel her heart racing, her hands feel clammy, she’s sure her face is pale. She continues.
“I don’t… I don’t know,” she offers up honestly. “I’m scared Shauna.”
“I’m scared too,” she whispers.
“All I know is it’s you,” she says.
“It’s me?”
“It always has been.”
“What does this mean?” Shauna asks quietly. “For us.”
“I don’t know,” she says. More honesty. “I don’t know if I can ever be what you want.”
“You already are,” Shauna says.
At some point, Shauna slid off the bed so she’s sitting on the floor next to Jackie. She clutches at her knees. She runs the tips of her fingers over the scarred skin there.
They are both so afraid of everything.
They are afraid of nothing.
Jackie leans to the side, resting against Shauna. She lays her head on her shoulder. They don’t say anything else. But the words are there. An electrical current running between them that has always existed.
I love you, I love you, I love you. Repeated like a mantra.
One day, they will spend a week apart. Then a month. They will go to college and not mind that they are older than the rest of the students. They’ll ignore the stares and whispers and call each other at night to talk about the days.
Then, the words won’t be silent wishes into the night sky of the wilderness. Then, they will be spoken aloud. So loud they can’t hear anything else.
But that’s okay. They only want to hear each other anyway.
The truth of it is this: It’s always been the two of them. Then, now, forevermore. And, even in the midst of all the terror and hate and trauma that will never leave them, there’s something beautiful about that.
Something beautiful about
them
.