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There are certain things that should be unlivable. Shauna believes that grief should be one of them.
She feels as though she’s living in a stolen body, harboring a criminal, hiding them beneath the floorboards of her chest. As punishment, the world is stripped of everything. She no longer sees color the way she once did, or tastes things the same as she did before. Rather, it’s as if, upon her return to Wiskayok, she was born anew and cursed for her second coming, damned from the start.
Her mother drives her home from the airport. Neither of them say a word to each other, and for that, Shauna is thankful. The ruthless questioning by the detective teams had drained her of everything she had, a vampire in daylight, sinking sharp teeth into rotten flesh. Her bones ache and scream as she sits oblong in the passenger seat, her hood pulled up and over her head, watching the city zip by through her window.
Though her world has shifted catastrophically, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of change in the sleepy town. The telephone wires still line the highway, the potholes still jostle her weak limbs, the grass still grows ochre and yellow as it heals from a seemingly harsh winter. Shauna wouldn’t know; she wasn’t here to see it.
She doesn’t dare speak on the unfairness of it all. She swallows her tongue when bile rises in her throat. She doesn’t give voice to the tragedy, to the fact that Jackie isn’t here to see the world as it is, isn’t here to hold her breath past the graveyard on Sycamore or punch Shauna in the arm when a pale blue Volkswagen Bug zips by in the opposite lane. Jackie isn’t here, and Shauna is left in her wake.
The drive from the airport isn’t terribly long, but the silence within the car seems to stretch the trip into an unfathomable distance. The road seems to elasticize, time stilling while wheels continue to burn against hot asphalt. The radio is left off and the sound of her mother’s manicured nails tapping against the steering wheel becomes the only rhythmic tune. Shauna is thankful when they pull into a familiar driveway, the porch lights still on even during the day.
“We kept them on for you,” Shauna’s mother says sadly. Shauna says nothing.
They exit the car and Shauna wanders into the house on wobbly legs, a newly born fawn still learning it has hooves, stumbling across the threshold. The door closes behind them and her mother escapes to the kitchen without a word. Shauna ascends the stairs in silence.
The wood still creaks in the same places, still dips in others, and Shauna tries to ignore the way it reminds her of the attic. She tries to ignore the way it reminds her of Jackie’s practiced footsteps, crawling up the ladder and sneaking across the floor at night, wiggling beneath the blankets and holding Shauna to her chest.
Jackie had never quite learned how to avoid the weak floorboards. It wasn’t until she was gone that Shauna found it endearing. When Shauna couldn’t sleep, she used to press her palm to the moldy floor and, if she found the right spot, bask in the squeak that filled her ears as a result. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine it was Jackie crawling back to her.
The top step of the Shipman house groans, pulling Shauna from her daze, and she swallows bitterly. It burns on the way down, as if the memory has thorns around it. Shauna coughs and half expects blood to coat her jacket sleeve. It doesn’t, no matter how much she wants it to.
Her bedroom is exactly the same as she left it. She lingers in the doorway with an unease about her, discomfort in her own home, as if she’s a stranger in the very house she grew up in. She thinks she must be; she’s never existed without Jackie before.
A conjoined animal split down the center is never meant to live.
It warrants a single, shaking breath of bravery before she takes a careful step inside. Before, her mother would have had a fit about Shauna wearing shoes in her bedroom, squawking about how it dirties the carpet and invites pests. Neither of them seem to pay much mind to such trivial things anymore, not in the wake of such disruption. Saying more than a few words to Shauna seems to pain them both, so Shauna’s black Converse soles find the plush carpet without complaint.
The blinds are open just above her headboard. Her bed is unmade, seemingly left that way on purpose, as if tidying the bed and pulling the sheets taut would be an admission of abandonment. As if touching anything within the room would allow for lost hope.
In the weeping, afternoon light, Shauna’s eyes devour everything in perfect clarity: the posters hanging loose off her walls, the stale air heavy and pulling on their cheap thumb tacks and tape. The ceramics lined along the windowsill, collecting dust and repainted by sun exposure. The clutter on her desk, the stool still pulled out and crooked from where Jackie had sat the night before the trip, tugging through her hair in the mirror.
Shauna drops her thin bag, a pitiful excuse for belongings. She only took two things from the dilapidated plane when rescuers hoisted her into the helicopter: a uniform that doesn’t belong to her and an evergreen dress. Both Jackie’s. No one had said a word about it, in fear that they would quickly meet the jagged edges of her canines or the harsh dig of her broken eyes.
Besides, Travis had taken the wolf totem, had tucked it deep inside his jeans pocket when he thought no one was looking. They all grieve in different ways.
The bag hits the floor with a muffled thud and Shauna flinches at the noise. She had expected it to be louder, ricochet across the room, not remembering that carpet would suffocate the noise with efficiency. There’s a lot about this world that she doesn’t remember.
She loiters around the open closet door, desperate to look inside but paralyzed with fear at the thought. Her palms become dewy with sweat and the room feels sweltering, suffocating, and she knows enough about houses being lit ablaze to know how eerily familiar this feels. She bites at her cheek and pulls the thin string inside the closet, hanging from the ceiling, suddenly illuminating the space with a warm glow.
It’s haunting to see her clothes mixed with Jackie’s. It used to be sweet, a gesture of friendship, unbreakable bonds, Shauna making room to house whatever Jackie inevitably left in her bedroom after a sleepover. Now, it grows claws that tear down the center of Shauna’s chest, leaving her bleeding and raw. She’s left flayed at the maw of a time capsule.
She catches a glimpse of the homecoming dress that Jackie had planned to wear and she feels violently ill, her stomach rolling and swaying like an unmoored ship. She looks away and turns off the light as soon as her mouth fills with saliva, chills collapsing down her cheeks. She breathes through the nausea as she tries to distract herself within her disorienting surroundings. A taste of smoke lingers on the tip of her tongue and she prods at the backs of her teeth as if pieces of Jackie would still be there. It’s a nasty habit, but it’s all she has left.
Shauna walks over to her desk, examining the mess against the white wood, using trembling fingers to sift through the piles. She moves through her things as if they don’t belong to her, gentle with them the way one might be with a library book or a family heirloom. Her fingernail catches on a piece of gold string, elastic and wrapped around something. She pulls it out and feels her eyelids burn.
The discarded Saint card Jackie had teased her about on that last night, wrapped in golden thread, lies in the middle of the desk. It’s from a deck of faux trading cards that the nearby Catholic church had doled out to the neighborhood kids two years ago. The one that stares up at her now is Saint Seton, her raven hair enclosed by a tufted bonnet, a golden halo behind her head.
If Shauna had any leftover humor buried within her, she would laugh hysterically at the irony. She would grasp at her sides as stitches pull through her ribs, begging her to breathe. Instead, she frowns at the card and rips it clean in half.
There is no holiness in grief. There is no sainthood in calamity. Being the last one standing is being the one to bear the weight of everything, and Shauna is far too tired for such a thing.
It’s dismal, she knows, perhaps a bit too macabre, but in those last days out there, encased by barren forest and diminishing food, Shauna admits that she wondered what it would have been like to die first.
Sometimes, she wishes that she had been left there, buckled into a metal death trap, a mask around her face that didn’t help at all, made delirious and immovable from the drugs in her system. It would have been peaceful that way, like falling asleep and never waking up. Like freezing to death.
Stupid Jackie.
Stupid Jackie and her need to save everyone. Stupid Jackie and her insatiable urge to give, to rescue, to escape. Stupid Jackie and her inability to leave Shauna behind, a trait that Shauna clearly doesn’t share.
If it hadn’t been for Jackie, she could have died there, peacefully, her body found by scavengers with a gold heart necklace resting heavily against her sternum. Now, she’s left with this. What is she to do with the costly pain of living? What is she to do with the knowledge of being the only one left?
There’s a gaping wound in her side, half of her organs spliced in half and torn away from her. How is she expected to live like this, to continue on, like nothing ever happened? Her heart barely beats the same.
Shauna fishes inside the discarded bag on the floor, quickly finding the soft, cotton fabric of Jackie’s Doomcoming dress and pulling it out. She gently lays it on the left side of her bed, Jackie’s side, before crawling atop the sheets beside it.
She curls into a tight ball against the fabric, protecting the softest parts of herself from the harshness of the day, and surrounds herself with the feeling of someone who isn’t there. She figures her mother will have no qualms about her missing dinner tonight of all nights, so she falls asleep early with the image of Jackie’s body next to hers.
________
She stopped seeing Jackie’s ghost the day they buried her bones, sticky and charred. The second Natalie took the remains away from the pyre, the visits ceased. Even the pillow in the meat shed was cold, and Shauna’s eyes had run dry and cracked with the tears released over such a loss.
Even with pathetic recreations, with Jackie’s dress draped intricately against Shauna’s bed, even with Shauna’s fist curled tight into the fabric when she wakes in the morning, Jackie’s ghost remains absent.
It’s early Sunday morning during the second week of spring and Shauna is worried about forgetting.
She’s consumed with the fear, lying on her back and staring at the ceiling, trying desperately to remember every inch of Jackie that she had spent so many years tracing with her eyes. She feels like she’s drowning, weighed down by rocks in the middle of the Delaware, something for unsuspecting fishermen to stumble across. She’s lying on her back, her chest unobstructed, and still she breathes water into her lungs.
What color were Jackie’s eyes? They haven’t been open in so long, so many months eating away at Shauna’s rotting brain, she can scarcely remember the tint of them. Were they deep brown and infinite like Shauna’s? A color so sad and endearing it can mask the violence of being young? Or were they golden, like the autumn leaves, like the sugar maple in the backyard, like honey that Shauna can’t recall the taste of?
The images of Jackie blur together in her mind and she drives herself mad lying still, losing her grip on reality, unable to piece together the fragile shards of her best friend. She rolls her eyes and lurches forward, swinging her legs over the side of the bed before finally moving.
It’s the first time in three days that she’s ventured out of her bedroom. Her mother comes with food sometimes, but she always collects a full tray in the morning. Shauna’s stomach has grown so used to being small that the thought of a meal makes her gag.
She passes by her mirror on the way out and is briefly stunned by the reflection looking back, emaciated and made small beneath an overgrown t-shirt that once fit comfortably. She ignores it.
The stairs creak on the way down and Shauna moves quickly so she doesn’t have to hear it. She doesn’t want to get stuck in the same trap as her homecoming, metal jaws clamping shut around her ankle and holding her hostage inside of her memories. She lets out a sigh when she hits the tile of the entryway with a swiftness.
She wanders into the kitchen with timid feet, still a guest in her own house. She doesn’t even know if the dishes are in the same cupboards as before. She does, however, feel her own absence in every corner of the room.
The dish towel with illustrated rabbits that once hung near the sink is replaced for something more benign, a plain eggshell with a blue trim. The pictures have been removed from the fridge, probably far too painful to look at every morning. The birthday parties and the team shots and the gap-toothed baby are all gone, taking the magnets with them.
On the side of the fridge is a sticky note with a number scrawled in permanent marker. Shauna recognizes it immediately: it’s the tipline number for the missing team. It was on the posters in the investigation rooms, in both Portland and Newark. Across the coast, people were looking for them. They’ll be looking for Jackie forever.
Shauna shakes her head and opens the fridge, grabbing a carton of orange juice and rifling through the upper cabinets for a cup, standing on her toes to search through each one.
She was right. They had been moved.
________
The return to Wiskayok High is both intimidating and excruciating.
They should have graduated in ‘96 with the rest of their class. Shauna should have walked across the stage with Jackie right in front of her, quickly joining arms at the bottom of the short stairs. She should have thrown her cap with her teammates and taken family photos on the soccer field, or maybe near the sloppily-cut topiaries out front.
Yet she didn’t. And because she didn’t, Brown rescinded their acceptance.
When all that was left of her in Wiskayok was a ghost, there was no response to the university about her approval or denial. She was unable to write back — what would have been quite hastily, no doubt — and tell them that she would be more than happy to join their incoming group of freshmen. When they heard nothing back, just before gossip began about missing girls on the Eastern coast, they sent another letter — this time of rejection — to a person that no longer existed. Her mother had shredded it the second she got it.
Her time in the wilderness, all nineteen months of it, had essentially nulled her last two months of school, the ones she would have passed with flying colors upon her prideful return from Nationals. Although the school board clearly pities her, there’s nothing they can do to excuse the absence, no matter how valid and unique the circumstances.
Shauna can still remember their downturned eyes in the meeting last week, how they looked at her, how they chewed on their own tongues whenever they wanted to ask about whatever happened to Jackie Taylor. They had laid condolences upon deaf ears and Shauna had readied herself for being back in school.
At least she doesn’t have long. She can survive two months. Afterwards, she reasons, she can go to Rutgers and paint her walls pink and green and get a queen-sized bed and refuse to share it with anyone else. She can live vicariously through Jackie’s hopes and dreams, her goals and beliefs, and no one would dare tell her differently. She is grieving, after all.
Besides, she thinks, she wouldn’t have wanted to go to Brown anyway, regardless of what she said in the end. She wouldn’t have wanted to go anywhere without Jackie — she didn’t know if she could survive being serrated like that, and now she knows wholeheartedly that she can’t. She won’t. It would further cut open the hole in her chest, make it unstichable, being anywhere where Jackie’s ghost couldn’t follow.
In Wiskayok, she can see blonde hair reflected beneath streetlights. Who knows what darkness would await her in Rhode Island?
Her arrival to the steps of the drab, gray two-story building of Wiskayok High is met with familiar faces, ones that clearly mimic her lackluster enthusiasm for re-enrollment.
Old teammates, equally haunted and no less monstrous, linger at the top of the stairs. Their demeanor does well to discourage any passersby who want to share their sympathies about a situation they’ll never begin to understand. Despite their familiarity, Shauna doesn’t feel comforted by the girls in the slightest.
Tai and Van are joined at the hip, and Shauna supposes that some things never change, no matter which direction time moves. They don’t touch as much as they once did, but there’s barely enough room for a thread between them, both of them standing side by side and leaning back against the cement half-wall with pinkies nearly colliding against the stone. They’re a peculiar sight, twins and antipodes, sharing the same organs with entirely different skeletons. They’re halves that work best as a whole, they give what the other cannot, as if designed for each other through the weaving hands of a creation myth.
Lottie and Nat are the same in some way, though Shauna doesn’t have as much vocabulary to describe them right. They evade all profiling, entirely unique, the outline of one cut into the body of the other. The two are counterparts, antitheses, and yet they are far more alike than either of them would dare admit aloud. They stand beside Tai, nearly crumpled together as they often are, as if being close is painful but being apart is worse. Lottie’s bag is slung across one shoulder and she wavers on her feet like stray wheatgrass, Natalie refusing to mimic the nervous motions and allowing their thighs to bump together on every reset.
Natalie’s hair is still long but the bleach is back and sharper than ever. It’s as if the girl had tried to fry out the memories hiding within her scalp, burn them with hot water and douse them in chemicals. Her hair is nearly white now, there’s a thinning spot along her temple, and only Shauna can understand why.
“I still think it’s fucking stupid,” Natalie huffs, kicking at the pavement with the heel of her shoe.
It’s new, recently purchased, and Shauna wonders if it’s from the settlement or from Lottie. She heard that the two were living together now, something about Natalie taking the Matthews’ guest bedroom on the second floor, but she also reasons that the hundred grand they each received in the lawsuit could buy a few things.
“We all do,” Van responds coldly, and Shauna takes to eyeing the vivid red line of her scar, the one that stretches from her scalp to the corner of her mouth. It healed nicely, considering the elements, and though the irritated redness stays, the jaggedness is slowly diminishing. She remembers when Natalie had held down Van’s legs to get the stitching just right, cooing at her through the pain, holding the goalie as she cried. Now they barely look at each other.
“We don’t have a choice,” Lottie nearly whispers, her chin downturned and distracted, watching Natalie’s irritated foot scuff the ground.
The conversations have been stunted for some time. Although, Shauna thinks, it doesn’t really matter anymore. They could probably read each other’s minds at this point, so speaking aloud has become moot. Being in a pack can do that to any animal if given the time to adjust.
“It’s just two months,” Shauna tries, throwing out the bait of a normal conversation. “We’ve survived worse, right?”
That earns her a barbed look from Taissa, who scoffs at the hook in the water. Shauna supposes things will be weird between them all for a while. Taissa has yet to forgive her for the laws of that place, the ones that don’t discriminate, stealing anyone from a child to a lover. Natalie and Van have matching wounds along their jugulars, the mark of what almost was, and Shauna swallows pitifully.
The air seems to shift with the disgruntledness of the group and Shauna picks up on it instantly. No one speaks as they break apart into their respective pairs, going their own ways in hushed conversations. Privacy was a privilege out there, not something often had, but things are different now. They all take advantage of their ability to separate.
Lottie and Nat walk down the stairs, their elbows bumping together as they descend, though neither of them dare to reach for a hand. Natalie crosses her arms over her chest defiantly and Lottie hooks her thumb around the strap of her bag, the other one hanging loose and feeble. They’re no doubt taking the south entrance, cutting across the old soccer field and heading in through the back way.
The soccer field hasn’t been tended to since April of that year in memoriam of the spirits that haunted it. Privacy is bountiful in that direction, especially for creatures as timid and slinking as those two. Shauna wonders if they’ve already made ‘their spot’ in the bleachers, or if they try to ignore the field at all costs.
Tai and Van head inside, Van throwing a gentle smile behind her as they get up to go. Tai pushes her hips from the half-wall and gathers her belongings, shrugging her backpack over her shoulders and waiting for Van to do the same.
It takes Van some time to do so and Shauna pretends not to notice, trying not to stare. The wolf attack had rendered her left eye uncoordinated and a bit blurry around the edges, the nerve damage on that side insurmountable and effectively irreparable. She had been checked by a physician upon their return to Jersey, as they all had, and the doctor’s conclusion had been what they knew all along. Still, it doesn’t seem to affect her too much, just slowing her hand movements until she gets her bearings.
Before long, Shauna is left standing alone at the top of the stairs, idling aimlessly in an attempt to put off the infliction of pain she knows she’s about to feel. She knows it’s going to be like eating fire, like swallowing embers and hoping they don’t melt her insides, like trusting that something inherently violent is capable of showing her kindness.
Her locker is still next to Jackie’s.
When the bell rings, a grinding, metallic sound from a rusting bell just above the front doors, Shauna no longer has the luxury of avoidance. As kids brush past her -- still giving her a berth wide enough to make her wonder if she’s contagious -- she resigns to the call and follows their lead, her feet heavy and weighed down with concrete as she crosses the threshold.
Though they’ve been back for some time now, nearly a month, the high school seems to have trouble keeping up. It’s anachronistic, frozen in a time that no longer exists, the girls’ missing posters still lingering around every corner and plastered to every bulletin board.
Inside the trophy case just across from the gym sits a memorial. It’s almost like a shrine, the way it’s lit up and cast upon with a golden haze of near devotion. It used to be an all-sports display, a mix of every team and every champion. Now, it’s only the Wiskayok High All-Girls Soccer Team of 1996 and the coaches who never saw Nationals. Now, it’s only carcasses.
When tragedy hits a small town like this, the grief can fester within every crack if not properly caulked and sanded. It can grow and morph and devour the walls and the ceiling tiles and the floorboards. It can become a thing of legends, a bedtime story, a tall tale that gets passed around like an offertory, something for each person to add to. It makes Shauna sick to look at the pictures of them all. It makes her weak to see Jackie next to her in each one.
She moves past the glass case and attends her first class, settling into her usual seat by the window. It seems that, even in this new graduating class, it has remained empty the entire semester, whether from fear or respect Shauna doesn’t know. Regardless, she’s grateful for the small sliver of familiarity that she receives, and she pulls her books from her backpack and settles in for the hour.
She tries not to think about how the girl seated next to her has the same hair as Jackie.
________
The banal drone of homeroom teachers and artificial sympathy finally buries beneath Shauna’s skin sometime during the first week of May. She doesn’t have long to go now, only five more weeks until she’s officially a high school graduate, and yet the temptation to bail grows tenfold by the day.
Shauna had been successful in getting her locker assignment changed, which was a considerable help in her readjustment, as she had practically been rendered catatonic whenever she caught a glimpse of the cards and notes and Polaroids taped to Jackie’s locker door in solemn remembrance.
However, as helpful as that was, there’s no way to escape the gossip. She can’t be reassigned to a new school with a new student body that has never heard about the infamous Wiskayok Missing Girls, so she grits her teeth for eight hours a day and endures as best she can.
The talk is impossible to drown out. Though no one asks her directly, Shauna hears their questions whispered around. They all want to know what happened out there, what really happened. They don’t particularly care about the sanity and wellbeing of the survivors actively still in school, but rather the fear mongering and rumors of whatever happened to Jackie Taylor, girl-next-door.
Shauna finds that, amongst the roar, she thinks a lot about the end. She doesn’t want to, but she can’t help it. While everyone around her speaks about Jackie as if she were some folk legend, speculations about her disappearance both amiss and abundant, Shauna can only think about that last night together. She’s the only one alive that knows the entire truth, and she vows to die with it.
She’s the only one alive that knows the thin web weaved between them, the amalgamation of their individual parts, the way they grew up together as if twins separated at birth and betrayed each other in a tragedy the Greeks would envy. She’s the only one alive that knows it’s her fault, and the firm hilt of a knife bludgeons into her chest at the thought; a harsh reminder of what’s on the other end.
She’s the only one that truly knows how Jackie tastes in her entirety, raw and cooked, sinful and divine, in secret and as a eucharist. Shauna has kissed her lips and devoured her flesh and that intimacy will die with the both of them — with the half of them still left standing.
She regrets her decade of inaction now, her inability to give name to the feelings festering inside of her for years. She had tasted Jackie’s lips in teasing jest and in callow practice, in drunkenness and performance, and now she knows confidently that she would have killed for something realer than that. She would have died for those kisses to mean love, I love you Shauna, I love you.
Shauna is the only one that knows how badly she wanted the boy lying beneath her to be Jackie all that time. She’s the only one that knows the truth of why she did what she did, in childish jealousy, not of Jackie but of Jeff . No one else knows that she had refused to kiss him unless he had recently kissed Jackie, had refused to put her nose to his neck unless he smelled of her.
The phantom taste of Jackie’s sinew lingers on Shauna’s tongue. She spends the entirety of fifth period in a state of rolling chills and feverish contrition created by the grief in her own head.
Shauna yearns to confide in someone about the vaguer parts of the matter but there’s no one around to talk to. Her secrets remain her own. Not even Jackie talks to her anymore — not after their impromptu bacchanal — on the rare occasions that Shauna sees her floating in alleyways or lingering by a stop sign.
The rest of her estranged teammates have all but cut the thin red cord that connects each of them by their aortas. Shauna suspects that they know a final snip will suffocate them all, ripping the oxygen from their veins like a sudden implosion, so they simply stretch it as taut as they possibly can without breakage. They stay in touch, greet each other in the halls, but make no effort to interact further. At lunch, Shauna sits alone.
Taissa and Van are making plans on their own. Shauna catches glimpses of them in the library sometimes, huddled together at a flattop, a single book shared between them that has been entirely abandoned. Taissa was accepted to Howard a few days ago, got the letter in the mail. It was a thick manilla folder that she brought to school in her backpack, told the others she was going for pre-law. Shauna hadn’t been surprised; none of them had.
Van isn’t going to college. She’s still ruminating about what she wants to do, tossing around a variety of ideas -- from fantastical to legitimate -- and hoping something will stick. She has a job at the video store on Arlington, about a half mile from the school. She seems to like it well enough, tells the others that it helps with her nightmares and keeps her from fidgeting. She doesn’t pick at her scar anymore and Shauna is consumed with a dangerous concoction of pride and jealousy.
She wonders how nice it would be to not spend every waking moment in perpetual self-destruction. She wonders how nice it would feel to have someone take her hand away from her skin before she causes harm. A kiss upon her knuckles by the lips of someone who loves her could evaporate any thoughts of self flagellation, she knows this for certain. It works well enough for Van.
There are many things Shauna doesn’t have anymore. There’s no one around to make sure she doesn’t pick until she bleeds.
Lottie is still getting acceptance letters. Her father is in a tizzy about the implication of her not following in his suede-shoed footsteps, and her frequent volleys between nightmares and insomnia are adding to his frustration.
She doesn’t talk as much now. Her throat seems to swell shut as the days go by, speaking to the group less and less. Natalie doesn’t waver by her partner’s side, and something in her icy gaze convinces Shauna that Nat would rip out the throat of anyone who questioned the quiet.
Nat, in similar fashion to Van, has decided to forego secondary school altogether. She doesn’t know what she wants, but she knows it’s not more of this, what they have now. She had mumbled something about wanting to live again, and Shauna knows that their time out there has granted Natalie a better understanding of what it means to be alive. Sitting in a classroom for four years isn’t exactly her idea of living life to the fullest, and Shauna can’t blame her.
Shauna, pressured by her parents, had sent an application to Montclair, simply to satisfy her mother’s craving for a daughter unburdened by the tribulations of being abandoned in the wilderness. The acceptance letter came last night, and Shauna quickly hid it beneath her bed, intercepting it from the postal worker before her mother had time to see.
She doesn’t want to go anymore. She once dreamed of leaving for college, tasting the sweetness of conditional independence, living with her best friend in a kitschy broom closet with squeaking twin beds. Now, she wants nothing to do with it. Now, the thought of leaving Jackie behind makes her sick to her stomach.
When the streetlights flicker on, and Shauna times it just right, she can sometimes see Jackie’s ghost beneath the halo outside her bedroom window. The captain is dressed in her uniform, a yellow bow in her hair, and she stares up at Shauna’s pane with empty eyes.
One night, Shauna had been convinced of its truth, padding down the stairs and flinging open the front door to wrap her friend in a warm embrace, finally bringing her inside like she should have done all those months ago. Instead, she had been met with nothing but an empty cul-de-sac and a concerned voice from the living room, asking if she was feeling alright. She wasn’t, so she had retreated back upstairs and curled inside Jackie’s letterman like it could soothe her shattering heart.
Now, since she’s learned her lesson, she simply watches Jackie from the window. She waits until headlights flood the street, evaporating the illusion, and only then does she look away. She doesn’t know if she’ll see Jackie at Montclair, so she decides not to go. She decides to stay right where she is, leaning haphazardly against the flimsy ledge of her headboard, staring out the glass at a girl who can’t see her.
She wonders if she’ll die here. She wonders if her last thought will be of Jackie. She wonders if Jackie’s last thought was of her.
________
It’s May 29th of 1998 when Shauna withdraws from Wiskayok High.
Though there’s only two weeks left until she’s freed from the linoleum shackles of arbitrary tests and adolescent spite, she decides she can’t bring herself to do it.
Shauna is catapulted to the end of her frayed rope by off-handed comments made by a few juniors, who just so happen to claim lockers behind her. They whisper amongst themselves, chattering quietly about the rumors that have yet to cease, made especially worse by Nat’s recent departure and Lottie’s sudden institutionalization. Now, the fire of gossip is oxygenized, fanned and fed, and Shauna has even fewer shoulders to lean on.
They’re pimple-faced boys who murmur on about Jackie Taylor, about how she was wronged somehow, perpetuating the belief that she was brutalized out there. They frantically jump from theory to theory as if leaping across an abyss, hoping that their feet land on something solid.
Shauna hears them claim that she died in the plane, probably before it even hit the ground. A few other girls had met their demise that way, the press release post-rescue detailing the known deaths that occurred. Jackie wasn’t included, as none of the survivors had dared speak the truth.
While the boys seem hopeful that it had ended in such a way, they’re simultaneously enamored at the possibility that something far more nefarious had happened. They argue about whether she had been hunted or killed in her sleep, if her death was accidental or purposeful, if she was eaten or left to rot. They debate tirelessly about the human body’s need for sustenance, about how the mind can rationalize crazy things when it’s driven to the brink of starvation, about whether or not they would eat a person if given the circumstances.
Shauna drops out that afternoon.
Now, she lies in her bed, on her back in the center of the mattress, staring at the oddly humanoid water stain on her popcorn ceiling. She’s wearing Jackie’s old WHS athletic shirt, a heather gray number with a navy blue collar. It’s tighter around the arms but loose around her midriff, her ribcage threatening to pry through her skin.
She tries not to think about her old friends, how their thin red string has seemingly burned apart, a clean break across each and every one of them. Natalie is living with her mother again, and sometimes -- although quite rarely -- Shauna gets a phone call in the middle of the night, asking for cash to book a room somewhere. Shauna always gives it up without question, standing at the end of her driveway with a crisp $20 she steals from her mother’s pocketbook, waiting until Natalie rides up on her rusting Diamondback and handing it off with a slight nod.
Lottie is gone now, having vanished without a word. Mr. Matthews had thrown Natalie out the night before, giving the girl no explanation as to why she was suddenly homeless. It wasn’t until quite recently that the news had reached town, news about a Matthews heir being shipped off to a facility in Switzerland like some sort of cargo. Shauna, in some terrible way, thinks it’s for the best. Lottie didn’t speak a single word her entire last week in Jersey.
Taissa and Van, in their typical fashion, have become an isolated pack. They eat together, sleep together, create a ring of salt around them wherever they go. They are impenetrable now, and Shauna lets them go willingly. She misses Taissa, misses their nights together in the attic of a musty cabin, but she knows it’s a good thing. Taissa isn’t designed to become stuck in the past, grow roots in her history and become a fixture within it. She’s meant to fly, take off, abandon everything and start over from scratch, so Shauna lets her. With jealousy, Shauna lets her.
She tries not to think about her friends, shaking her head and picking at the tender skin around her fingernails. She’s sure they’re bleeding, but she can’t bring herself to stop. It wards off the sickness in her stomach, the way her bones itch to be elsewhere.
She has come to realize that she’s homesick for a place she’s never been.
She misses the slender bow of Jackie’s upper lip, the wetness of her eyes, how they open and consume the way a snake might unhinge its jaw, wide and powerful. She misses the sun-spotted skin of Jackie’s right shoulder, the patch of stardust that peeks out from beneath the powder blue halter top she only wears in the summer.
Shauna misses the familiarity of Jackie the way she might a childhood home, revisiting decades later and made anew, fingertips tracing old memories along mahogany wood; fingertips tracing bone.
She breaks her fingers apart and brings two of them up to her lips, shakily brushing across the chapped skin she finds there. She closes her eyes with a shudder, her eyes burning, as she reminds herself of what she once had.
It’s something she often does. It’s the only thing that can put her to sleep now, a type of deranged safety blanket that she wraps around her brain. It’s something she often does, thinking of Jackie, thinking of the ways she once had her.
Shauna sighs through memories of Jackie’s laugh, melodious and high, a bit stuttered to begin with as if she doesn’t quite remember how. She thinks about Jackie’s hands, slender and firm, bird wings stripped of feathers. Shauna isn’t much of an ornithologist, but she recalls reading about Cathartidae in biology before they left for Nationals. New World vultures, they’re called, quiet and strong, high fliers and easy to feed. She tries not to think about the irony of it all, comparing Jackie’s hands to the bird of death while her bones were picked clean by the beaks of hungry girls.
She thinks about their first high school party together, at Ray Moretti’s house three years ago, playing spin the bottle on the kitchen floor and sitting across from each other. She thinks about Jackie’s lips on hers, ignoring the whooping cheers from the boys around them, favorably focusing on the softness of Jackie’s mouth and the hint of strawberry from her favorite chapstick.
She thinks about their countless sleepovers, sharing a bed much smaller than this, intertwined together as if they’re welded metal. Legs over legs, arms over arms, Shauna’s nose pressed to Jackie’s neck, breathing steadily and feeling Jackie’s lungs inflate with air. She thinks about how lonely her arms feel now, empty and cold, wrapped around nothing but her own midsection as if she could be any reasonable replacement.
Jackie’s dress is still beside her, wrinkled and astray, the straps tangled and the hem flipped inside out. Shauna removes her fingers from her lips and reaches out to touch the fabric with bloody hands.
“Jackie,” she whispers, knowing that there will be nothing in return. “I really need you right now.”
There’s a creak in the floorboard at the foot of her bed. Shauna gasps, looking down, propping herself up on her elbows with wide eyes.
Jackie is standing there, passively interested, her arms hanging loose at her sides. She’s not wearing her letterman jacket anymore, but Shauna’s flannel, deep maroon and a size too big. The sleeves dip past her wrists and cover most of her hands and Shauna feels the cracks in her heart begin to form at the image.
Her eyes are hazel. Shauna vows to never forget it.
“Jackie,” she gasps, broken and painful, as if the name is enough to slice her throat to ribbons. She curls her abdomen and sits up straight, depositing her hands into her crossed lap and staring straight ahead.
“Shipman,” Jackie says in return, arching an eyebrow.
It’s the first time since that December that Shauna’s heard the girl speak. The bitterness has left her voice, the hostility a bit softer around the edges, and Shauna knows then that it isn’t real. For all the sins she had committed, by her hand or the will of another, there is no world in which she deserves to be spoken to with kindness. There is no world in which Jackie forgives her for what she’s done, but the figure before her has been frequently longed for, so Shauna doesn’t brush it away.
Instead, she says what she has always wanted to.
“I’m so sorry,” she sobs, the cracks in her chest parting like the sea, a chasm forming between her ribs. “I’m so sorry, Jackie. You have to know that.”
Jackie smiles kindly and Shauna can barely see the girl through the sudden onslaught of hot tears.
“I know,” Jackie murmurs, and it sounds as honest as it can be coming from Shauna’s own head.
“I never- I never said…I never told anyone…I swear I-”
Jackie moves with a furrowed expression, a line digging between her eyebrows. She steps forward and sits on the edge of Shauna’s bed, reaching out a tentative hand and resting it against Shauna’s knee. Her skin is cold and Shauna feels a chill burrow through her skin.
“It’s okay, Shauna. Seriously. I’m over it. Besides, you don’t owe anyone anything, alright?”
Shauna sniffles before a new round of tears escape through her sore eyelids, swelling them to incomprehensible levels. She dips her chin and tries to focus on the soft thumb rubbing circles against her leg.
“I think I’ll be sorry for the rest of my life,” she admits solemnly, her voice so low she isn’t entirely sure Jackie hears her.
Grief is funny that way. Repenting takes eons and penance is favorable. It lingers like a ghost, swaying between rooms and following you around. When there’s no one left to forgive you, remorse makes a nest in your heart. Made contrite and weakened by the loss of her best friend, her confidante, one half of her soul, Shauna vows to drown in the ocean of her apologies.
“I can’t promise I’ll be around that long,” Jackie admits, pulling her hand away. Shauna smiles sadly.
“I know you will. I think you’ll haunt me forever.”
Jackie’s eyes are wet, gleaming with something, perhaps the moonlight from Shauna’s open window; perhaps the love Shauna has always wanted to see.
“I think you might be right.”
Shauna wipes at her tears with the back of her hand and chokes out a pathetic laugh, muddled and low.
“Will you stay? Can you promise me that, at least?”
Jackie seems to think about it for some time, chewing on the words for a bit, digesting their meaning, their suggestions. Before long, she nods slowly, and Shauna smiles in her victory.
With jagged movements, Shauna moves over on the bed and lays back down, rolling onto her side and tucking her hands beneath her cheek the way she’s done a million times before. This is their position, their neutrality, their home amongst each other. She hasn’t slept this way in so long, afraid of feeling the emptiness on her back, but now she feels the gentle press of a chest to her spine as Jackie gets comfortable.
An arm glides over her hip, dangling fingers grazing against her lower stomach, and Jackie’s body is cold. It feels like ice, but Shauna doesn’t mind. She simply waits for the skin of her backside to grow numb.
Jackie’s perfume washes over her as the girl nuzzles her nose into Shauna’s sensitive neck, whispering recollections of their mutual memories and making Shauna laugh. Removing one hand from beneath her head, Shauna reaches downwards and tangles her fingers with Jackie’s, slotting them together for the first time in years.
It’s as if she never left, the divots of Jackie’s hand still molded to Shauna’s shape, still ready to accept whatever Shauna gives and takes. It feels like being sewn back together, lying bare on a table and given a new life. It feels like the regaining of a missing limb, a stolen part made whole again, once taken and now reunited.
Shauna falls asleep to the steady heartbeat behind her and the contentment in her soul. She falls asleep to the soft humming of a song stuck in Jackie’s head, lulled by a tune with mellow notes. She falls asleep to the sound of her grief going quiet for the first time in years, and sleep greets her happily as long as Jackie’s arms are around her once again.
It feels like coming home.