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There are a lot of people out there who love to construct tortured metaphors about the Yellowjackets.
Over the years Shauna has glimpsed these fantasies in bits and pieces; on glossy magazine covers at the grocery store, from talking heads as she flips through television channels, and in comments on articles ( ‘never read the comments’ Jeff will say, and he isn’t wrong.)
Lately it’ll come out of nowhere in giggly, chatty digressions on podcast episodes that are supposed to be about some other topic. People are certain they know exactly what happened after the plane crash, and what they think happened can be grafted onto larger societal issues. The surviving Yellowjackets were like a rosetta stone for understanding sociopathic CEOs, or dysfunctional church communities, or the Manson family, or that one group of bitches in high school who made fun of you.
And when the latest anniversary rolls around, out come the articles where the authors have clearly brushed up on their assigned reading memories of Lord of the Flies. That, or they skim wikipedia articles about that plane crash in the Andes or those hikers in the USSR, and they’d be full of opinions on what the Yellowjackets’ experiences had to say about Society in General. At some point they started throwing references to Mean Girls in there and Shauna can’t watch that movie now. Not that she ever really could have. Jackie would have liked it too much.
Here's the truth that no one seems to get: Life while stranded had been long, long timeless eternities of mind-numbing boredom, interspersed with moments of terror and delirious joy. Towards the end, the boredom had started to seem as dangerous as starvation and thirst or even hypothermia. And the terror and joy had become all intertwined and inseparable. Shauna won’t tell anyone that the Yellowjackets’ time in the wilderness was like nothing that had come before or after it.
But maybe motherhood is the closest thing.
She’s reminded of this as she helps Callie memorize seventh-grade English vocabulary. Today things today have landed firmly on the ‘boredom’ side of the equation. They usually do.
“I don’t see why I have to learn this stuff,” Callie whines a few seconds after correctly identifying that the word atlas came from a Titan who was cursed to hold the world on his shoulders.
“Because,” Shauna says, already on to the next flashcard, “you failed your last quiz. And the one before that. And I’m only letting you go to this sleepover with Ilana if you can get all of these cards right.”
“Not that. Why do I have to learn this Greek myth stuff anyway? Knowing that ‘Adonis’ means ‘a handsome youth’ won’t help me do my taxes or whatever.”
“Oh, so do you want to help me do our taxes in a few weeks?”
Callie lapses into mutinous silence but, since she had correctly identified the latest card during her rant, Shauna puts it to the side.
“A lot of the words we say came from myths. Knowing that sort of backstory can help you understand the world,” Shauna says. “For example, me threatening to take away your sleepover privileges is your own personal Prison of Tartarus, apparently.”
There had been so many tears when Shauna raised the possibility of punishment. During that ordeal, a distant part of her had been forced to remember all those years in which being forbidden from attending a party with Jackie had felt like being imprisoned for life.
Then she’d slammed a mental door on that recollection and stood her ground.
The two of them make their way through words like pyrrhic and narcissistic and chronic. A few weeks ago Callie’s English teacher had called Shauna to inform her that mentioning how Chronos had eaten his children had made some of the other little shits in the class nudge and tease Callie about her mother. Shauna had prepared herself all afternoon to comfort her daughter, but Callie had come home particularly defiant.
Like she’s being now. “Okay, okay, but who cares if I know what an oracle was or that they sat around getting high and ripping people off or the most important one was in Pythia? No one’s asking that in job interviews, right?”
During Shauna’s own middle school years, the textbook on Greek myths had come with amazing illustrations. Middle school was a gray, dull time in general, and her bored eyes had hungrily consumed the reproduction of a beautiful pre-Raphaelite painting of the Pythia. Then she’d seen Jackie out of the corner of her eyes (they always sat next to each other if there wasn't assigned seating) and found herself noting the similarities between the illustration and her best friend.
“Well,” Shauna says after the last card. “Sometimes knowing your myths can help you tell when things are full of crap.”
“What do you mean?”
“In America we use the caduceus symbol for medical things even though that’s usually meant to symbolize liars and thieves and negotiations. It fits health insurance here perfectly.” Yes, this was a personal complaint. Shauna had spent the morning on call waiting with the family’s insurance company, trying to get them to cover a medication for Jeff.
Callie’s eyes glaze over at that glimpse into the mundanities of adult life, even though the kid had been loudly proclaiming her need to do well at taxes and job interviews. Still, even though it had been like pulling teeth (and Shauna would know), Callie had kept her end of the bargain. She’s demonstrated that she memorized her vocabulary, so she’s allowed to go to Ilana’s house.
This time around, it’s a little more interesting ferrying her daughter around. Ilana’s extremely free-spirted mom had just returned from a business trip to Colorado and she’d brought back souvenirs.
“Can you believe I flew with these?” she said, handing over a package with a single marijuana-laced cake pop inside. It’s decorated as immaculately and delicately as one of the petit-fours Jackie’s mother had served on the tenth death-day anniversary brunch.
As Shauna drives away, it occurs to her that a lot of people would cluck at her for leaving her daughter at the house of someone who'd just made it obvious she'd broken the law. Instead, she glances over at her purse, knowing that the illicit dessert is hidden inside. One of the Yellowjackets who’d died immediately in the plane crash (what was her name?) had flown with weed, too. But there’d been less security back in the mid-nineties, and it had been a private flight besides all that. They’d found the plastic bag in her pocket when they’d buried her and fumes from the crashed plane had given them all the bright idea to try to plant some of it and see if it had contained seeds that would grow more pot. Shockingly it hadn’t worked, and some of them had groaned off and on for all nineteen months about wasting perfectly good weed.
It’s a little surprising to find a box on their front porch. Shauna entertains paranoid fantasies about bombs or anthrax until she gets closer and sees that it’s one of those Blue Apron knock-off subscriptions. This was her final week of the free trial. The cardboard was a bit damp and raggedy from the day’s persistent late October drizzle. She totes the box inside but then leaves it sitting in the foyer. It’s a Friday but Jeff is going to work late again, and the damn box always comes with dry ice. It can wait.
Shauna stares at the cake pop for a lot longer that she’d care to admit. From brief, stilted conversations over the years she knows some of the survivors have become vegetarians and teetotalers after their time in the woods. For her part, those things weren’t the problem. It had never been awful to butcher a deer or a beer or a squirrel in the leaner days. The death that had come before that was the truly awful thing. So it went with things like drugs. The magic mushrooms hadn’t been the problem. During long stretches of boredom, it had been wonderful to feel the world falling apart at the seams.
Jackie must have been so bored when she died. That was one of the worst parts of it all.
The cake pop tastes awful, but no one eats these for their taste. It reminds Shauna of the vague confusion she feels every time she sees non-alcoholic beer at the grocery store. Who enjoyed tasting hops without the benefits of drunkennes? The experience is also annoyingly passive. Just a few bites and it’s done. Either something will happen, or it won’t.
She and Jackie had tried smoking pot at one or two parties in their junior year. For Shauna there’d been the giddy sensation that each inhalation was slowly warping her senses. Jackie had been skeptical that it would even work until she’d laid out on the ground and starting musing that she wanted to go home to get her D.A.R.E. t-shirt. Then she’d sat up straight and started shaking Shauna.
‘Oh no, oh no, oh no, colleges drug test their student athletes. What if they make me pee in a cup and it’s still in my system in a few years and I get kicked out?’
And Shauna had just laughed and laughed, and it felt like her capillaries (was that what they were called in her health class textbook?) were going to burst out of her eyes and she'd start weeping blood like that one Virgin Mary statue they showed on Unsolved Mysteries. She didn’t know what she said in response. It had felt like she was saying something about disliking soccer, actually, but it couldn’t have been that because Jackie had calmed down and cuddled up to Shauna for hours.
There weren’t any cuddles now, but that’s fine. Shauna lies on the couch for a while, enjoying the way that the silence of her house seems to be embracing her. She puts on a random show on Netflix and proceeds to ignore it in favor of playing solitaire on her phone. Somehow this feels like the best night she’s had in weeks and weeks.
It takes her several hours to remember the existence of the box, though, and suddenly it feels important to do something about that. She’s not sure where the urgency is coming from, though, because all she can think about is how there’s very little time separating the moment this meat was butchered and frozen and when it will start to rot. The time between the past and present really is as thin as tissue paper.
She gets one of her knives out for the tape even if she probably should use the kitchen scissors Shauna makes an incision and sends it sliding across. She waits for blood to come pouring out, waits for the sticky mess of it all, but there’s just an outpouring of dry ice smoke.
“You know what’s strange? After we crashed I never got to experience air conditioning again and that bugs me. You’d think I’d have had enough of being cold.”
Jackie leans over the box, making even this look graceful. Seeing her next to a Blue Apron box (no, wait, it’s a knockoff isn’t it?) should be incongruous but it isn’t at all. This could have been her home. Maybe it’s actually her home, maybe she still has a home in Shauna.
Maybe she’s like the Pythia, breathing in fumes, seeing the future. With time dissolving around the two of them, Shauna wonders if Jackie is seeing the cheating and the plane crash and the unexpected cold front. Maybe she will convince them all to go by train instead. Shauna can feel the edifice of her adult life crumbling beneath her feet and she wills this to be what happens.
“There wasn’t getting around prophecies in any of those myths, Shauna,” Jackie says. She’s petting some of the frozen meat like it’s a cat. “Wasn’t there one where everyone did everything they could to prevent a guy from marrying his mom and it still happened anyway?”
“Yeah. He cut out his eyes.”
Jackie looks a lot like she did in Shauna’s actual memories. Sometimes it feels like those memories will be supplanted by that forward-facing senior year picture of Jackie. The one where she has an overly bright smile. The one where she drove over to Shauna’s and complained that the photographer had been annoying as hell. Shauna likes remembering Jackie’s face in that moment better than anything that ends up in articles about the worst thing to ever happen to them.
Shauna’s favorite feature of Jackie’s - Jackie’s incredibly lovely eyes - are different, though. Her eyelashes have been replaced by rime-frost, and she blinks much slower than she had in life.
“It’s kind of fucked up that we make teens learn these stories, if I’m honest,” Shauna says.
“You know teens aren’t that fragile.”
“No, I meant they don’t need any more inspiration.”
When Jackie laughs it sounds like ice breaking. On the day she died the lake had also frozen over. That ice cracking when warmer days returned had been one of the only things to shake Shauna from her stunned, grief-ravaged stupor.
“I liked the one about the girl who could run and run and no one could ever catch her.” Jackie picks up some of the dry ice now, and more tendrils of smoke frame her face. Even with protective plastic over it, it would be burning anyone else’s hands. “I used to imagine I was her in gym class in middle school, you know.”
Shauna did know. She’d read it in Jackie’s diaries over and over the past few years.
“Then a few years later I started daydreaming about falling in love instead.”
“You mean Jeff?”
“I tried to make it about Jeff, yeah.”
This was a chance to ask questions or make (even more) apologies. Jackie’s ghost is never moved by apologies, though, and she’s greedy with what she’ll choose to answer. Jackie feels even more obstinate tonight, and that makes Shauna strangely happy.
Suddenly Shauna is ravenous, and there’s no way any of that meat will thaw in time. She gets some chips out of the pantry and munches on a handful. She notices every particle of salt, riveted by the taste and texture. There’d been times, in the woods, when she’d been too hungry even for grief. If she apologizes tonight, it will be for that. All those hours when her longing Jackie had disappeared inside her primal desire for a bag of Doritos.
“During one of the coldest days,” she says, “one of us remembered that potatoes could make battery power. We had one bag of potato chips left and we tried to use those to create power.”
This is always the act of penance that Shauna chooses. During each haunting, she shares one small anecdote that demonstrates how confused and dysfunctional the Yellowjackets became after Jackie’s death. There are so many things left to share, but Jackie had died malnourished, after all. She must be a particularly ravenous ghost. This is the only thing left to care for her.
“I could have told you that wouldn’t work,” Jackie says. She’d always done well in chemistry, but that’s not the point here. It’s what she says about each and every story.
“We wouldn’t have listened,” Shauna replies. And it’s like reading from the words of a prayer printed in a church program.
They must have ended up talking for hours. Or maybe just a few more seconds. When Shauna and Jackie end up watching Netflix together, it somehow feels like they’re still talking. When Jackie lays her ice-cold head in Shauna’s lap, they’re on this couch, and they’re napping in that awful cabin, and they’re back at that party all those decades ago. And Shauna realizes she'd be okay with holding dry ice, too, even though she's still alive.
Time will always stand still, even as it keeps slipping away from Shauna.