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Jackie’s eyes are bright in the firelight, and the sense memory of a night that happened a lifetime ago knocks the breath from Shauna’s lungs.
Shauna remembers that closed fist feeling, that intoxicating and awful rush of jealousy and possession and longing that she carried, always, over her shoulders. The feelings run deep, and it’s familiar to pick at them like a scab, pleased when blood still rises to the surface. The rest she’s aware of distantly, fuzzily, as if described to her in a dream. That Jeff should be the reason behind the delicious burn of these emotions seems strange and inconceivable to her now.
The girls around her are singing and spinning, their joy reverential, adoring. And that feels good too, this connection that they share, a bond as ancient and deeply rooted as the trees they cling to.
The world is hazy and slippery in this strange in-between place. The amber light of day has washed out, but night feels far off yet. They exist in this liminal twilight, this endless lavender eventide. It seems impossible and perfectly plausible and Shauna thrills at the contradiction.
Jackie is beautiful in the thin gray of dusk. The long evening shadows soften her pout to something somber, nearly profound. She watches Shauna approach her, still and sullen and silent.
“Dance with me?” Shauna tilts her head, dark hair rippling with the movement.
Jackie scoffs, dismissing Shauna with a roll of her eyes.
Shauna glances behind her. The girls are humming broken fragments of songs, lyrics spilling over each other as one song becomes the next. Shauna smiles, a tender ache in her chest. “The others are making do,” she says placidly.
“Come on,” Shauna entreats, her arm carving air into the gap between them, pale fingers wiggling an invitation. Jackie has never been as distant and unknowable to Shauna as she is right now, in this moment, staring past Shauna into the fire.
In her memory, the scene plays out like this: Jackie asks, and Shauna answers, helpless to the pull of Jackie Taylor’s gravity. In her memory, Jackie is warm and drunk, and they stumble together, shrieking laughter and pretending not to enjoy the attention. In her memory, Jackie tells Shauna she loves her in that simple, devot way that teenage girls love.
In reality, or at least in this strange, dreamlike world they find themselves in, Shauna reaches and Jackie hesitates. She pauses for a heart’s beat of a moment, no longer than the flutter of her lashes, but it’s there, the quick flash of doubt before she reaches up and takes Shauna’s hand.
They fold into one another, easy and intimate as breathing. Jackie is small in Shauna’s embrace, frail and ethereal. She’s lost so much weight she is nothing in Shauna’s arms, as light as fresh fallen snow. It brings to mind a poem, favored by her old self; nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.
“Don’t sleep with Travis,” Shauna says, fast, before she can convince herself not to. She adds a hushed, “please,” that gets lost under Jackie’s derisive laugh. Her shoulders hunch under Shauna’s hands, her skin bare and cool, prickled with chill.
“Why the hell shouldn’t I?” Jackie tries to pull away, but Shauna keeps a firm grip on her shoulders, and Jackie’s too weak to break her hold.
There are reasons not to. Reasons not limited to but including: it’s a shitty thing to do, it won’t make her feel better, she’s only going to end up hurting everyone involved. Reasons like: it’s not safe or comfortable out here, and despite all the bullshit, it should be something special. Jackie deserves something special with someone who loves her.
Reasons like: Shauna is someone who loves her.
Instead of saying any of that, Shauna says, “because I’m asking you not to.” Which is sort of saying the same thing.
“Why do you care what Travis-”
“I don’t care about Travis.” Shauna interrupts. Normally, she’d be letting loose the tight grip on her anger, sharp words seeking the soft places designed to hurt. But she feels curiously calm now, rooted to the earth and this moment. Her words are rounded, earnest. “You should be here. With the people who love you.”
Jackie is crying, but Shauna isn’t sure when she started. They’re big, Hollywood tears, trailing tragically down the curve of her cheeks. Shauna nudges closer, her nose brushing the curls piled at Jackie’s temple.
Something infinite has shifted - the air is fervent, the moment suspending before lightning strikes, or a wave crashes in on itself. “It’s our last night,” Shauna says, and it feels true, as if the trees are whispering the forthcoming to her, “the ending of the world.”
“I know,” Jackie says. And it could mean so many things.
There is a third heart between them. A pulse so loud it drowns everything, and those gentle confessions are left dying on Jackie’s lips.
Maybe there’s a universe where Shauna never sleeps with Jeff, where the gulf between her and Jackie isn’t so unmanageable, where they never crash in this godforsaken place and they go to Homecoming like normal teenage girls. Maybe there’s even one, somewhere out in the distant cosmos, where Shauna gets to have this.
Maybe that Shauna is a little braver and a lot kinder and better at loving other people. Maybe that Shauna brings a hand up to cup Jackie’s cheek, or maybe that Jackie reads the want in Shauna’s eyes and leans in, or maybe they finally, finally meet in the middle.
Maybe Shauna invites Jackie into that warm, dark corner of the attic where Shauna dreams at night. Maybe they’re honest with each other, maybe they touch each other, maybe, maybe, maybe. Shauna imagines a hundred ways they could fall together.
Maybe in that world, they get to go home, together.
But this story, this vicious and relentless reality where their plane crashes and their friends die and they’re all alone in the wild, it always ends the same.
Shauna remembers, too, how that night a lifetime ago ended. Jackie slips from her. She goes without saying goodbye. Only once does Jackie glance back and tilt a parting smile at Shauna.
Before the moon sets on the next night, Jackie Taylor will be dead, and all Shauna will have left of her is this memory.