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They lope out of the school arm in arm, smiles on their faces. Their bodies slant towards each other with such intensity that they can hardly walk. Their hands clasped together, their hair soft and downy around their childlike faces. They part ways at the very edge of the sidewalk - at the latest possible point - and kiss goodbye. The shorter of them teetering on the tips of her toes to reach the other girl’s lips.
Shauna sits in the car and watches, and something inside her falls apart.
She shouldn’t be here. She wouldn’t have been here if Jeff hadn’t fucked up his timesheet. Another late night at the store for him. Another night alone for her. A listless dinner, an evening of finding chores and puzzles and pastimes to keep herself busy. Anything to avoid just sitting on the couch, to avoid the feeling that her body is seeping away into the faded softness of the upholstery.
But Jeff did fuck up. And she is here. Watching these two teenage girls so casually entwined in each other’s arms.
She asks Callie about them, on the ride home. Callie scoffs, and rolls her eyes, and tells her it’s 2021. It doesn’t matter. It’s no big deal.
Doesn’t it? Isn’t it?
There had been a moment, in the wilderness. Impulse. Passing thought. Shauna tells herself she barely remembers it - that all of that first winter is just an awful, blood-stained blur. But she knows this is a lie. Even in her journals, the act had felt too wrong to name. But she remembers, still.
The freezing shell of Jackie’s skin. The force with which she’d had to part the lips. A cold, unmoving tongue that her own had tried to coax back into life. The hair, at least, had stayed the same. She had run her trembling fingers through it and, curled in Jackie’s lap, she had been able to pretend.
She had been terrified. Stealing glances at the door, flinching at every sound from outside. Bracing herself all the while for discovery. In her mind, kissing a corpse had been the lesser crime. Kissing a girl - kissing Jackie - had felt worthy of execution.
That feeling hadn’t been rare, back then.
Here - grown and safe in her husband’s house - Shauna holds the memory of Callie’s schoolmates in her mind. She cannot name it, but it prickles. It stings.
It’s usual, when Jeff isn’t there, for Shauna to prop one pillow beneath her head and hold another in her arms. Tonight, in the plush expanse of duvet and mattress, as she is drifting into sleep, she does the same. She thinks of Jackie’s small body - still a child in Shauna’s mind, as she will always be.
She clutches the pillow tighter to her chest.