Archive of Our Own

“Sonofabitch,” she mutters, wrinkling her nose in frustration.

“I got it,” Nat says before Tai can open her mouth. She takes the bottle and twists off the cap while Van offers an embarrassed half-smile in thanks.

The team has gathered outside a shabby concession stand near the entrance of a roller coaster charmingly named “The Barf Bag”. It’s the crown jewel of Echo Pier, a boardwalk known for its rickety rides, FDA-violating refreshments, and the spots under the pier where people shoot up or fuck or murder somebody—sometimes all three in one go.

The sun makes its lazy trek over the boardwalk, sauntering through a cloudless sky and cheerfully boiling the poor bastards below. The smells of sunscreen, cigarettes, piss, and sugar congeal into an olfactory crime against humanity that would probably make the locker room after a late spring practice smell like a field of wildflowers by comparison. Taissa chews on saltines—the only food at the concession stand that looked remotely palatable—and tries to will away the migraine pressing on the underside of her scalp.

Why Jackie thought it was a good idea to drag everyone to a hive of sleazy carnies and screaming children is anybody’s guess. But she paid for everyone’s tickets, and so here they are: sweat-soaked and sunburned, enjoying a late lunch of dubious hotdogs and high fructose corn syrup.

“No one’s signed your cast yet, Van,” Shauna says. It’s the first time all day that someone’s acknowledged it. They met at the entrance to the boardwalk at ten in the morning, Van rolling up fifteen minutes late with her arm wrapped up and no explanation. Everyone carried on like things were normal, like Van hadn’t fucking disappeared back in April and just showed up in August with nothing but an injury and a smile.

“I didn’t want you guys to think I hung out with other people like some kind of hussy,” Van says. Taissa smiles, despite herself. Van’s been in rare form all day, a nonstop one-woman comedy act chatting up ride operators and jovially haggling with gift shop cashiers. Earlier, the whole team was on a coaster that got stuck at the top of a hill, and Van told jokes and spun stories that untied the anxious knot in Tai’s stomach and made their twenty-minute delay feel like no time at all.

Tai thinks Van’s a magician sometimes. But she doesn’t need smoke or cards or sleight-of-hand. All the magic’s in her voice.

“Hang on a minute,” Lottie says, digging in a white leather bag that probably costs more than Taissa’s car. She produces a bouquet of sharpies, each with a different color cap. Tai swears Lottie’s bag is bigger on the inside. She’s seen Lottie pull whole wine bottles out of that thing. It always seems to have whatever the situation calls for. Hair ties, granola bars, ibuprofen, chapstick, condoms, three or four different brands of cigarettes, and, on one memorable occasion, a taser. Tai’s long since stopped questioning it.

“Ooh, dibs on pink!” Jackie calls, plucking the pink-capped sharpie from Lottie’s hands and taking off the cap with a satisfying ‘pop’. She writes her name in huge bubble letters near Van’s elbow.

“Leave a little room for the rest of us, Greedy Gus,” Laura Lee teases, taking a sharpie with a gold cap and adding her name and a heart with a little cross in the middle of it. In a few minutes, Van’s arm is a yearbook page, smattered with signatures. Tai goes last. Maybe it’s the heat, or the way Van’s return has turned on a light Tai didn’t even know had gone out. Either way, she’s feeling a surge of audacity as she takes Van’s hand in her own, coaxing her fingers apart so she can write her name in neat purple letters on her palm.

“Saving the best for last, right?” Tai asks. Van’s blush is tucked safely behind her sunburn. Tai holds her hand for a moment longer than necessary, and the rest of the team seems none the wiser.

Fuck it, maybe she’s a magician too.

They’ve scattered again. Jackie’s tried multiple times to keep the team together, and each time the group frays apart again within minutes. A gaggle of juniors went off in search of more rides. Laura Lee’s at a gift shop to pick out souvenirs for her million siblings, and Lottie tagged along, probably for the chance at a five-finger discount. God only knows where Natalie is. Tai’s with Van, Mari, Jackie, and Shauna, ambling past a row of carnival games. Puffy pastel prizes hang in garish rows around the game booths. A particularly large purple teddy bear sits beside a game called “Three Point Shot.” Jackie elbows Shauna in the shoulder, grinning.

“Betcha I can win you a bear, Shipman,” she says. “He’ll be the perfect boyfriend—cuddly, great listener, goes wherever you lead ‘em.” 

Shauna laughs.

“Jax, those games are all, like, super rigged. Everyone knows that.”

“Well, they gotta let people win sometimes, otherwise nobody would play,” Jackie tells her. “‘Sides, we’re, like, the best athletes in the damn state by this point. I can win at fake basketball.”

Tai played three-on-three with Jackie back in middle school gym, and she decides, since she’s feeling nice, not to comment on Jackie’s performance. She doubts it’s changed in the years since.

Jackie walks up to the booth and a vaguely familiar kid with frosted tips tells her the rules. Mari chuckles under her breath.

“Oh my god,” she whispers to Tai, “is that Ryan Bailey? Figures he’d work in a place like this.”

Lottie dated Ryan Bailey for about ten seconds back in sophomore year before she came to her senses and dumped him in the middle of her sweet sixteen party. He’s the human equivalent of a UTI but somehow girls keep willingly dating him. His latest victim is Rachel from JV. Tai saw Rachel take a ball to the head during a scrimmage back in May, so maybe that explains it.

“Last week I was with Danny at the movies,” Mari says, “and I saw Ryan there with Gretchen Case.”

Tai fights the urge to gape.

“Gretchen ‘Basket’ Case?” she hisses.

Mari nods, not even trying to conceal her shit-eating grin.

“Honestly, I think they’re made for each other. But Akilah says Ryan’s officially still with Rachel.”

Tai turns to look at Ryan, practically oozing with smugness as Jackie misses shot after shot. Tai suspects the ball is over-inflated, the hoop higher than regulation, but Jackie keeps trying, ignoring Shauna’s protests, practically forking over her whole wallet for a game she can’t win.

Out of the corner of her eye, Taissa sees Van wince. Van’s hand flutters to her cast for a moment before she drops her arm. Tai wants to ask if it hurts. Stupid fucking question—Van broke her arm, of course it hurts. More questions parade after that thought. Where have you been? What happened to you? The questions stamp around her brain, loud and insistent. Tai tries to meet Van’s gaze, as if she could pull the answers from Van’s eyes without having to say a word. Van doesn’t look at her. She’s focused on one of the prizes: a green plush t-rex with glass bead eyes and little felt teeth. Her expression softens, just a little. There’s such unvarnished, unabashed nostalgia in her gaze that Taissa has to look away.

“Alright, Taylor,” Van says after a moment. She’s swapped her distant expression for one of her trademark showstopper smiles. “I haven’t eaten in ten minutes, so I’m basically at death’s door. What do you say we rustle up some grub?”

Another round of questionable food later, Jackie has, at long last, managed to corral the whole team into one place: the Ferris wheel at the very edge of the pier. The sun has set, the heat of the day finally fading as Tai and Van squeeze onto a creaky metal seat with cherry red paint that’s fighting a losing battle with time. Gradually, the wheel turns, the lights below them shrinking until the city looks like a swarm of fireflies frozen in time. Beyond them, the sea stretches on, endless and dark, too full and too empty. Tai remembers the first time she saw the ocean, standing on a little grey beach and feeling like an ant, like a speck of dust, like an atom. Her mother told her about all the stretches of ocean still unexplored, the creatures still undiscovered. The thought of that, of miles and miles of dark, hidden places full of shipwrecks and monsters, frightened and enchanted her.

She looks over at Van, at her eyes the color of shallow waters and her hair the color of coral, and she thinks of all the things she doesn’t know.

Here, in the growing dark, she can almost pretend the cast isn’t there, that Van’s just been on vacation, and that no one’s talking about what happened because nothing happened at all.

Still, the questions slam against the inside of her skull. Where have you been? What happened to you?

She tries to force the questions past her lips, but what comes out instead is: “I can’t believe the summer’s almost over.”

“We’re gonna be seniors,” Van says. “Buncha little old ladies.”

“How, um,” Tai starts, trying to make her tone mild, conversational. “How’d you spend your summer?”

Van’s eyes, for a fraction of a second, darken. Then she shrugs with her good shoulder.

“It was good. Went to see my aunt in Ohio. By the way, did you know that hell is real? A billboard told me.” She smirks. “They’re real big on hell in Ohio.”

They reach the top of the wheel’s arc, stopping for a moment at the crown of the world. The sky deepens, blanketing the world in pale, starless night. Tai imagines the sky reaching down, building a wall of dark between her and Van. The questions in Tai’s brain multiply. Why did you leave without saying goodbye? How did you break your arm? How did you really break your arm? Are you okay? Would you tell me if you weren’t?

“Why are they so worried about hell?” Tai asks instead. “They’re already in Ohio.”

Van laughs. The world around them turns and turns and turns.

Taissa’s head is still swarming with everything her tongue can’t translate as the Yellowjackets make their way back up the pier toward the entrance. That split-second sorrow in Van’s eyes keeps flashing in Tai’s memory as she makes her way through crowds of increasingly drunk and rowdy people. A loud, broad-shouldered woman covered in tattoos elbows Taissa to the side, but before Tai can turn and yell at her to watch where she’s going, she realizes she’s been shoved into that stupid basketball booth from earlier. That little plush t-rex is still there, like a kid waiting for their mom to pick them up from school. She remembers the soft look on Van’s face when she’d seen the toy earlier. Tai pictures a ragged little dinosaur doll, bundled in the arms of a boisterous, red-headed child with bandaids on her cheeks and grass stains on her pants. The image sits in her chest like one of those heated stones they use in spas; warm, and solid, and heavy. She feels all the things she doesn’t know how to express tugging at her, pulling her down to the earth. Then she sees Ryan packing up, now doubt flush with the better part of Jackie’s allowance, and a plan forms.

“Hey, Ryan,” she says, her voice somewhere between threateningly sweet and sweetly threatening, “that t-rex is really cute.”

Ryan scoffs.

“You want it, you win it,” he sneers. “Not that you will. Girls never win this game.”

“That’s too bad,” Tai says. “But I guess if Gretchen Case wants a prize, she can always count on you to win it for her, right?”

For the first time all day, Ryan’s slimy little smirk sloughs off his face.

“Oh, sorry,” Tai says. “I meant Rachel Goldman. You know, I’ll be seeing her for conditioning in a couple weeks. Coach likes to have us work with JV, show them the ropes.” She steps closer to Ryan, enough that she can smell the buckets of body spray he poured on himself. “She‘ll be gutted to hear about Gretchen. Just devastated.”

“What do you want?” Ryan snaps.

“Give me the t-rex,” Tai tells him, feeling for a moment like she’s negotiating the world’s stupidest hostage crisis.

Ryan shoves the doll into her arms, his face contorted with fury. Tai smirks at him and heads to the pier entrance.

There is, of course, nothing stopping her from telling Rachel anyway. But if Ryan is too dumb to realize that, it’s his own fault.

Van’s unlocking her mom’s shitty hatchback when Tai stops her in the parking lot.

“I got something for you,” she says without preamble. Van cocks her head, puppy-like.

“Oh?”

Tai takes the dinosaur out from behind her back and holds it out to Van, who stares at her for a dumbfounded moment before a tiny smile creeps onto her face.

“For real?” Van asks.

“You basically gave me a whole thesis on Jurassic Park last year,” Tai says, “so I figured…you know…” She trails off, feeling little fires start under the skin of her face.

Van looks at Tai like she just handed her a million dollars and a movie deal, and for a moment, all the questions crowding Tai’s head go quiet.