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The cold finds Jackie before she even realizes she’s shaking.
It slides against her skin the way a shadow passes over a room—quiet, inevitable, unnoticed until it’s far too late. Snowflakes settle in her hair like little white seeds, clinging to each dark strand, melting slowly before freezing again. She doesn’t brush them away. Her arms stay wrapped around herself, fingers curled into fists she can’t quite feel anymore.
Her breath scrapes out in thin, shaky clouds. Each exhale makes her chest ache, as if something inside is cracking open. She’s not crying, though. She refuses to cry.
Not after the way Shauna looked at her. Not after the words she spit out—words Jackie didn’t even know she had the capacity to say, not in that tone, not with that much venom.
The cabin door shut behind her hours ago. She can almost still hear it. The muffled slam, the unspoken finality of it. As if she’d been the problem all along. As if her leaving was the solution.
She huffs out another breath, and it ghosts in front of her. She watches it vanish. “I’m not wrong,” she mutters into the dark, into the cold, into the silence swallowing the woods whole. Her voice feels too loud, even though it’s barely above a whisper. “I’m not wrong. I’m not.”
But the forest doesn’t agree or disagree. It just waits.
Her teeth clack together once, loud and chattering, and she clamps her jaw shut so hard she feels it in her ears. For a moment, she almost turns around. Almost stands up. Nearly goes to the door and knocks, tells them they’re all insane, tells them she didn’t deserve this.
But then she remembers Shauna’s face, flushed with anger. The way she didn’t soften. Not even for her. Shauna was always supposed to soften for her.
A shiver rolls through Jackie, sharp enough to make her inhale hot and panicked. She pulls her knees closer, curling her body smaller, like she can escape the wind by becoming less of a target. The cold laughs at her for trying. Her blanket is too thin. Her socks are damp. She didn’t think she’d be out here this long. Honestly, she didn’t know they’d let her stay out here this long. She thought Shauna—
God, she thought, Shauna would come after her.
The firepit is nothing but a dark circle of dead ash. She remembers when it used to glow, when they’d all sit around it, pretending they weren’t slowly unraveling. She remembers when the warmth felt like something she deserved. Now she’s sitting in the ruins of it all, and every time she shifts, she feels the crunch of ice crystals forming beneath her. She tries to steady her breathing, but it keeps hitching. That annoys her more than the cold. She hates that she sounds scared.
She’s not scared. She’s fine. This is fine. She just needs to wait. Someone will come get her. They have to. Jackie closes her eyes—not because she’s tired, but because she’s furious. And if she opens them, she might cry after all.
It’s not like she did anything wrong. All she did was say the truth. They just didn’t like hearing it.
She digs her fingernails into her palms, trying to anchor herself with the tiny pinpoint of pain. She barely feels it. Her hands are stiff, slow, trembling in a way she can’t fully control anymore. She imagines the cabin right now. Someone probably threw another log on the fire. Someone is probably curled up on the mat she usually sleeps on, next to Shauna. Shauna is probably pretending not to think about her.
Jackie scoffs. “Yeah. Right.” A gust of icy wind rushes down from the trees, and she instinctively ducks her head. Her hair whips across her face, strands plastering against her cold cheeks.
How long has she been out here? An hour? Two? Time feels thick. Like syrup or wet clay.
She tries to move her lips, but they feel sluggish, numb. She rubs her hands over her arms, but there’s no heat left to generate. The cold has already burrowed past her skin, deeper, deeper still.
If she’s being honest— (if she let herself be honest, which she usually doesn’t) —she’s starting to worry. Just a little. She’s so tired. But the idea of walking back to the cabin feels worse than the cold.
She can’t face them. Not after that fight. Not after Shauna said those things, looked at her like she was… like she was nothing special. Like she was a problem. Like she was someone to despise.
Shauna never looked at her like that before. Even during their biggest fights. Even when Jackie knew she was being difficult just to get attention. This time was different. This time it felt real.
Jackie presses the heel of her palm against her forehead, trying to wipe away that memory—Shauna’s voice cutting into her, sharp and disappointed. The words still echo:
“I’m not jealous of you, Jackie,” Shauna spat during that fight. “I feel sorry for you. Because you’re weak. And I think that deep down, you know it. I’m sure everyone back home is so fucking sad to be losing their perfect little princess, but they’ll never know how tragic and boring and insecure you really are. Or how high school was the best your life was ever gonna get.”
They hit harder than the cold. Her throat tightens. She swallows, but her throat feels gritty, frozen. The woods give nothing back. They don’t care who she is. She shifts again, trying to get comfortable, but the frost has soaked through her leggings. The moisture chills her right down to the bone. Her breath trembles, then trembles again.
She looks up. The sky is painfully clear—endless black, scattered with stars that feel too far away to help. The moon slices the treetops with a pale, gentle glow that makes everything look softer than it should. Beautiful, almost. Her eyelids get heavy. Just for a moment. Just long enough for her head to dip forward.
A memory flickers. A warm one. Summer. Sunlight. She and Shauna, lying on her bedroom floor with their legs up the wall, laughing at something stupid. Shauna was wearing one of Jackie’s shirts, sleeves too long, the collar slipping off her shoulder. Jackie thought Shauna looked perfect like that.
The memory slips away as easily as it came. She exhales, and her breath clouds in front of her. She watches it dissolve into the air until she can’t tell where it went or if it was ever even there. She’s quiet for a while. The forest breathes around her. The snow whispers wherever it lands. Her mind drifts.
She tries to warm herself with thoughts instead of blankets or fire—old moments, old comforts. Her birthday parties. Finals she never studied enough for. Prom dress shopping. Jeff’s stupid grin. Shauna’s voice saying her name the way no one else ever said it. It works, a little. Or maybe she’s imagining it.
Her body feels like it’s floating just slightly above where it is, like the cold lifted her out of herself. Another shiver. A longer one. The edges of her vision blur for a second, but she shakes her head hard. She won’t pass out. That’s dramatic. That’s stupid. She’s fine.
She looks toward the dark line of the cabin. She doesn’t see the door open. She doesn’t see anyone come out for her. Jackie laughs, but it’s weak, brittle. “You’ll feel stupid in the morning,” she tells herself. “They’ll all feel stupid.” She blinks, slow. The cold has stopped stinging. That worries her in a quiet, faraway sort of way.
She leans back against a log that used to be part of the firepit. Snow settles on her shoulder. She wants to move but her body feels rooted, heavy in a way she’s never experienced before. Like gravity doubled just for her. She tries to think of something warm—her mother brushing her hair on the morning of picture day, Shauna’s arm linked with hers walking down the hallway, cocoa at sleepovers—but the warmth never quite reaches her. Her breath grows slower, each inhale hesitant, searching. She closes her eyes. And then—
“Jackie?”
Her eyes fly open.
The voice is soft, warm. Familiar.
Shauna sits beside her, close enough that Jackie swears she can feel heat radiating from her. Her hair is loose around her face, glowing a little in the moonlight. She’s not wearing a coat, but she doesn’t seem cold.
Jackie startles upright, a breath caught in her throat. Relief floods her so fast she nearly sobs. “Shauna? What—why are you—did you come to get me?”
Shauna smiles gently. It’s the smile Jackie knows best, the private one, the one meant only for her.
“Of course I did,” Shauna murmurs. “You didn’t think I’d leave you out here alone, did you?”
Jackie lets out a shuddering breath. Her hand reaches toward Shauna before she even realizes she’s doing it. Shauna’s hand meets hers halfway. It’s warm. So impossibly warm. Jackie melts into the touch like she’s been waiting her whole life for it.
“I knew you’d come,” Jackie whispers, voice breaking in ways she doesn’t want to examine. “I knew it. I knew you wouldn’t just—just let me freeze out here.”
Shauna’s thumb brushes over her knuckles. “Never.”
Jackie tries to lean into her warmth, tucks her shoulder against Shauna’s, lets her eyes slip shut. The cold fades to something distant, insignificant.
“I’m so tired,” she whispers.
“I know,” Shauna says softly. “Just rest.”
Jackie does what Shauna says. But she doesn’t notice that Shauna’s feet leave no prints in the snow. That Shauna’s hair doesn’t stir in the wind. Jackie just knows she’s not alone anymore. Not in the cold. Not in the dark. Not in the moment she needs someone most. For now, that’s enough.
The warmth of Shauna’s hand fades, and the glow around her flickers like a candle struggling against a draft. Jackie blinks, and the forest dissolves—not all at once, but piece by piece, like someone peeling layers of wallpaper away to reveal the original room beneath.
She’s standing in a backyard she hasn’t seen in years. The grass is summer-green. The air smells like sunscreen and lemonade. Colored streamers twist from the porch railing, fluttering in a soft breeze. Kids run around with paper crowns and fistfuls of frosting. A bubble machine burbles somewhere behind her, releasing iridescent spheres that drift lazily toward the sky.
It’s her seventh birthday. The “princess party” one. The one everyone talked about for weeks. She sees herself—tiny, dressed in a pastel pink lace dress so stiff it looks like it might stand upright if she weren’t wearing it. The skirt flares wide and perfect, the bodice smooth, every wrinkle steamed out by her mother that morning.
She remembers how it felt. Scratchy. Constricting. Beautiful, though. And she knew she had to be beautiful first and comfortable second.
Little Jackie stands near the table stacked with presents, her hands clasped carefully in front of her just like her mother taught her. A smile is stretched across her face—too wide, too practiced. She can hear the voice before she sees the woman.
“Sweetheart, shoulders back. And smile nice. People took time to come here.”
Her mother breezes into view, a gracious hostess in a sundress, pearls, and perfect lipstick. Her voice is soft but sharp around the edges, like velvet wrapped around a knife. She bends down and adjusts the bow in Jackie’s hair.
“Smile,” she repeats, as if it’s the most important instruction in the world. Little Jackie obeys instantly.
The adult Jackie, watching all this unfold from outside her own body, feels a pinch under her ribs. She knows this version of herself. This tiny performer. This child rehearsed into perfection. She watches as one of the neighborhood boys trips while chasing a balloon. He goes down hard, knees scraping the patio, palms dirty with gravel. He wails instantly, loud and unfiltered.
His mother laughs, scoops him up, brushes dirt off his cheeks. “You’re okay, bud! Big brave boy.” Jackie remembers watching him at the time. Watching and wanting something she couldn’t name.
He cried loudly. Publicly. Messily.And no one told him to stop. No one told him to be grateful and polite and pretty.
She remembers looking down at her stiff dress and thinking: I wish I could cry like that and still be loved.
Her mother straightens, plastering on a bright host-smile. “Everyone! Time for birthday photos!”
Jackie is ushered toward the center of the yard. She poses next to an enormous cardboard castle cutout her father ordered special. The other kids gather around her. Some wipe frosting from their lips. Some squirm. One girl looks half-asleep. The camera flashes once, twice. Jackie doesn’t blink. She doesn’t fidget. She doesn’t ruin the shot.
“She’s so well-behaved,” one parent comments.
“She’s so put-together,” another adds.
Her mother beams. Jackie—adult Jackie—feels her throat tighten. She remembers how she soaked up every compliment like a plant starving for sunlight. She remembers trying so, so hard to be the version of herself that made adults nod approvingly.
Now she’s indoors. Same day. The party’s over. The decorations droop. Wrapping paper litters the floor like fallen leaves. Tiny Jackie sits on her bedroom floor, feet tucked under her skirt, staring at a new doll still taped into its box. She’s not smiling. Her face is soft, blank, strange. Her shoulders slump.
Her mother steps into the room, clapping lightly. “You were perfect today.”
Jackie looks up. “Can I take this off now?”
Her mother hesitates, just a heartbeat too long.
“You still look so pretty in it,” she says. “But yes, go ahead. Carefully.” Little Jackie peels off the dress with meticulous slowness, as if the fabric might cry out if she yanks too hard. When it’s off, she folds it neatly—learned behavior—and sets it on the bed. She puts on a T-shirt. Yellow with a cartoon cat on it. Soft. Worn. Her shoulders drop with relief.
That’s when she hears laughter from downstairs—kids who haven’t gone home yet. They’re still wild, still messy, still allowed to be imperfect. The jealousy creeps in again. Not because they have more toys. Not because they have friends she doesn’t. But because they get to be loud. Real. Ungraceful. She never does.
The memory flickers. Jackie feels snow under her again, but then Jackie finds herself at the elementary school playground.
It’s late afternoon in October. The sky is a soft, golden pink, the kind of sunset that stains everything with warmth. Kids shriek and climb and leap from swings with reckless abandon. The wood chips smell like sap.
Little Jackie is sitting on top of the low plastic slide, her legs stretched out in front of her, shoes scuffed at the toes. She’s holding a sticker book—her current prized possession—and she rearranges the stickers over and over, unable to decide where anything belongs.
Then she hears footsteps crunch the wood chips. A girl approaches. Small. Quiet. Shoulders hunched inward like she’s trying to take up less space. Shauna. Eight-year-old Shauna with messy brown hair and too-big glasses that always slip down her nose. The knees of her jeans are permanently stained grass-green. She holds a paperback book against her chest like a shield. Jackie feels her heart swell with nostalgia at the sight.
Shauna looks up at her with wide, uncertain eyes. “H-Hi.”
“Hi,” little Jackie replies, smiling without needing to be told this time.
Shauna hesitates, then asks, “Can I… sit with you?”
Jackie remembers this moment. Down to the way the wind pressed her bangs against her forehead, down to how important it felt without knowing why.
“Yeah,” Jackie says simply. “You can.”
Shauna climbs up the side of the slide carefully, her small hands gripping the plastic bars. When she settles beside Jackie, her knee accidentally bumps Jackie's. She apologizes instantly. “Sorry—”
“You’re fine,” Jackie says. “You don’t have to apologize for like… existing.”
Shauna blinks at her, startled. Then she smiles. It’s tiny, awkward. Perfect. Jackie watches the memory unfold with a soft ache. This was before complications. Before secrets. Before jealousy and betrayal and the years of unspoken things that festered between them. This was the beginning.
Little Jackie holds out her sticker book. “Do you want to help me put some of these in? I can’t decide.”
Shauna looks surprised—delighted, even. “Really? I… okay.”
Her small fingers hover over the page like she’s afraid to touch anything. Jackie nudges her playfully. “Just pick one.” Shauna laughs nervously and chooses a glittery star sticker, pressing it carefully into the corner of the page.
When she glances up, Jackie sees it happen for the first time: That look. The one Shauna will give her for years. The look of admiration. Of awe. Of quiet devotion.
Like Jackie is someone worth following. Worth impressing. Worth loving. The adult Jackie watching it feels her chest clench so tight she almost bends forward. That look lit her up from the inside as a kid. It made her feel bigger, brighter, important. She chased that admiration like air. She built her entire identity around being someone worth looking at that way.
Little Shauna swings her legs. “You’re really pretty,” she says suddenly, eyes widening as if the compliment escaped without permission.
Jackie goes still. No adult told her to smile. Shauna isn’t forcing anything out of her .The smile comes on its own. Small. Real.
“Thanks,” she says. Her cheeks warm.
Shauna ducks her head, pushing her glasses up her nose. “I just… thought you should know.” That warmth grows. Jackie’s whole face feels lit from within.
This is the first time she realizes something important—not consciously, not in words, but in feeling: Being admired feels like being chosen. Being chosen feels like being worth something. And she wants that feeling desperately.
The wind shifts. The smell of wood chips and crayons and autumn sunlight grows faint. Shauna points to Jackie’s sticker book. “Can I put another one on?”
“Yeah,” Jackie whispers. “You can.” Shauna reaches for a butterfly sticker. Glossy. Pink. Sparkly.
“It looks like you,” she says. Jackie’s breath catches. No one has ever said anything like that to her. Not like this. Not so earnestly. Not so simply. The memory begins to crack at the edges, like someone tapping on glass. But before it shatters, little Shauna looks right at adult Jackie—impossibly, as if memory and present overlap for one strange moment—and she says:
“I like you just like this.” Then everything collapses into snow.
Jackie jolts back into the cold, gasping. The hallucinated playground dissolves into flickering stars overhead, the warmth of the childhood sunset replaced by needle-sharp winter air.
Her chest feels too tight. Her hands tremble harder now—not just from cold, but from remembering.She presses her palm over her heart, like she can hold the pieces together.
That memory… It wasn’t just sweet. It was the beginning of everything. The first time someone loved her not because she performed, not because she was pretty, not because she was perfect, but because she was Jackie. The cold swirls around her like a living thing.
Shauna—grown Shauna, hallucinated Shauna—kneels in the snow beside her again, materializing gently as if she’s always been there, waiting for Jackie to notice.
“You remember,” Shauna murmurs.
Jackie’s voice cracks. “I didn’t know that day mattered so much.”
“It did,” Shauna whispers, brushing Jackie’s hair out of her face. “To both of us.”
Jackie swallows hard. “I shouldn’t have… needed you to look at me like that. I shouldn’t have—”
Shauna presses a warm finger to her lips.
“Jackie,” she says softly. “You were a child.”
Jackie’s eyes sting with tears she didn’t mean to summon. “I just wanted to be good.”
“You were good.”
Jackie shakes her head. “No. I just tried to be… whatever everyone else wanted. All the time. And you—” Her breath shudders. “You made me feel like myself.”
Shauna leans in, forehead against Jackie’s. It feels real. Too real.
“You were enough,” she whispers. “Even then.”
Jackie clings to the warmth, to the voice that feels like home, even if she knows it isn’t really here. She lets her eyes close again. Maybe to rest. Maybe to sink deeper. Maybe because the cold is getting harder to fight, and as she drifts, another memory is already waiting for her—soft, golden, warm as breath on glass. The past isn’t finished with her. Not yet.
Jackie remembers being twelve and realizing the world watched her differently.
In middle school, the girls started wearing lip gloss, and the boys suddenly cared about who sat with who at lunch. Jackie had barely grown into her own limbs, still all knees and freckles, but somehow she was already expected to glide instead of walk, shimmer instead of sweat.
Her mother bought her her first makeup compact—pink, delicate, smelling faintly of roses. “Just a touch,” she’d said, brushing the powder over Jackie’s cheeks. “You want to look lively, honey, not cheap.” Jackie laughed then, but the words stayed. They always stayed.
By eighth grade, people began calling her “really pretty,” “put-together,” “the one who’s going places.” Praise stuck to her like static electricity, buzzing in her ears long after it was said. She learned to hold her shoulders back when she walked, to smile just enough, to never let anyone catch her looking unsure.
She remembers standing in front of the bathroom mirror before school, practicing expressions. Happy-but-not-giddy. Confident-but-not-arrogant. Flattered-but-not-desperate. It felt ridiculous, even then. But every day, someone rewarded her for it. A compliment. A lingering look. A teacher calling her “a natural leader.”
Jackie breathes out into the snow. The breath barely fogs the air. How much of her life had been a performance? And did anyone ever see the real girl underneath? The cold is deeper now—patient, humming beneath Jackie’s skin like a second heartbeat. Her body feels like a house she’s slowly locking the doors to, one room at a time. She can’t tell where the numbness ends and memory begins, because both wrap around her with a strange, sorrowful familiarity.
She squeezes her eyes shut and middle school rises around her. The years where everything in her life shifted—not suddenly, not violently, but slowly, like a tide pulling her in a direction she didn’t choose.
She remembers being eleven and wishing desperately that she could crawl out of her own body. Her limbs felt wrong—too long one week, too short the next. Her face was all angles she hadn’t learned to manage yet. Her hair rebelled against every brushstroke. And worst of all, her emotions spilled everywhere, clumsy and loud and unpredictable.
Other kids got to be awkward. Other kids were allowed to be strange, dramatic, lopsided. Not Jackie.
The first time she cried at school—over something stupid, a math quiz she’d overstudied for—the teacher pulled her aside after class and said, with a tight smile, “You’re such a mature girl. Don’t let little things get to you.”
And her mother echoed it later: “Jackie, sweetie, you’re better than outbursts.”
Better than outbursts. Better than emotions. Better than being human. So Jackie swallowed everything after that—her anger, her embarrassment, her fear of being mediocre. She learned to put on the version of herself that adults found charming.
It worked too well. Kids liked the girl who seemed above the childish messiness they were drowning in. Teachers praised her composure. Parents told their own daughters to “take after Jackie.” She became the blueprint before she even knew how to draw herself.
It happened in eighth grade. The school was putting on a showcase performance—nothing big, just a series of skits and dances in the auditorium. Jackie wasn’t the best singer or dancer. She wasn’t even the most confident kid on stage. But she fit the “image.” Pretty. Polished. Poised.
That’s what Mrs. Harland said when she chose her for the main role: “Jackie just looks like the lead.”
Jackie remembered the way the other kids looked at her—half envy, half confusion. Some of them had practiced harder. Some genuinely wanted the part. Jackie had wanted it too, but for the wrong reasons—she wanted the approval that came with it.
She tried to shrug it off, joke about it, pretend it didn’t matter. But it mattered too much.
That moment became the first of many where she learned something dangerous: It’s easier to be liked than to be good. It’s easier to be chosen than to want something. It’s easier to smile than to ask, “Why me?”
She spent weeks preparing for the performance—not because she cared, but because everyone else did. Because her mother bought her a new dress. Because her classmates whispered her name like it meant something.
She remembers standing backstage, stomach twisting, as Mrs. Harland adjusted her hair and said, “You always look so perfect, Jackie. Just trust yourself.” But she didn’t trust herself.
She trusted the image of herself reflected in her teacher’s eyes.
And when the applause came—loud, warm, enveloping—Jackie felt a rush she would spend the rest of her life chasing. She wonders if that was the moment she lost the ability to want anything just for herself.
The snow shifts beside her, tiny whispers of wind dragging through branches. Jackie’s breath rattles, and another memory rises—sharp, vivid: The night she told her parents she wanted to try something new.
She was thirteen. Her English teacher had read one of her stories aloud in class—something Jackie had written in a whirlwind of inspiration one Sunday afternoon. She’d loved the way characters formed under her hands, messy and flawed. Real.
For the first time, Jackie wanted something not because it made her impressive, but because it felt like hers. “I want to take the creative writing elective,” she’d said at dinner, voice small but earnest. “I really liked it. And maybe—I want to write more?”
Her father barely looked up. “Writing isn’t a real path.”
Her mother gently placed a hand over hers. “Honey, you already have so much going for you. Soccer, student council, advanced classes. Let’s not spread yourself too thin with… hobbies.”
Hobbies. As if passion was something disposable. As if Jackie wanting something messy, something expressive, something imperfect was a threat to the version of her they curated.
When she tried again, her mother’s face pinched with stress. “Jackie, listen to me. You have a role. People look up to you. We don’t have room for distractions right now.” And that was that. Approval was not optional. Ambition was not hers to choose.
She still remembers walking up to her room afterward, heart aching in a way she didn’t know how to name. She’d looked at the story she’d written—creased, ink smudged from her own fingers—and wondered why she’d been stupid enough to imagine she was allowed to want anything real. She stopped writing after that. Her dreams were easier to carry when they belonged to other people.
The cold begins claiming her stomach, her hips, her chest. Her breaths shorten. The world flickers in and out like a dying candle. And she thinks, with a bitterness that tastes like blood and regret: No one ever taught me to want something for myself.
She wanted what she was told to want. Wanted what made others proud. Wanted what would keep the compliments flowing. She never learned what she loved. Only what made her lovable.
She wishes she could go back to thirteen-year-old Jackie, sitting cross-legged on the floor with her rejected story. She wishes she could tell her: You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to be admired. You don’t have to be the girl everyone expects. You can want something even if you’re not good at it. You can want something even if it doesn’t make anyone else proud. You can want something that’s yours.
But she didn’t know any of that then. And no one told her.
So she became a shape sculpted by the eyes around her—teachers, parents, classmates. A girl loved for all the wrong reasons. A girl who traded authenticity for acceptance, dreams for applause, personality for approval.
A girl who couldn’t tell the difference between being liked and being alive. The wind sighs beside her, almost sympathetic. Jackie blinks at the stars overhead—blurry, distant, cold—and feels something hot sting behind her eyes. Regret is the only warmth left in her body.
The cold shifts around her body, as if listening.
Jackie thinks of Shauna.
Quiet, steady Shauna, who never needed Jackie to sparkle to stay near her. Freshman year, they’d sit on the curb outside school after practice, eating peanut butter crackers and watching the sun disappear behind the trees. Shauna had this way of seeing her—not the version everyone else wanted, but the version Jackie didn’t even know she was allowed to be.
She remembers one afternoon when Shauna told her, voice soft, almost embarrassed, “I’ve never had a friend like you.” Jackie had felt something warm flood her chest. Wanted. Needed. Cherished. And maybe that’s when she started depending on it too much.
Because Jackie liked who she was when Shauna looked at her: cleaner, clearer, softer. Like she could afford to put the mask down for a minute before picking it back up. There was a sleepover sophomore year, with Shauna curled up on the carpet, Jackie lying on the bed staring at glow-in-the-dark stars. Shauna had confessed that sometimes, she felt overshadowed by Jackie.
Jackie had laughed, thinking it wasn’t serious. She never realized how much it mattered. How much damage a single dismissive giggle could do. Now, lying in the snow, she wishes she could take that moment back. Tell Shauna she was wrong, that Jackie wasn’t a sun swallowing other planets. She was just a scared girl pretending to shine.
The Yellowjackets. The uniform. The expectations. Jackie can still remember the first time Coach told her, “You’re not just on the team, Jackie. You lead it.” It felt good. Too good.
She pushed herself harder, even when her body begged her to slow down. She smiled through every ache, laughed off every bruise, encouraged the team even when she felt like she was unraveling.
Being captain wasn’t about being the best player. It was about never letting anyone see you break. She remembers once, after a disastrous practice, locking herself in the shower stall and biting her lip until the crying stopped. Not loud. Not messy. No one could hear weakness from the captain.
In every photograph, she looked golden. Bright. Effortless. In every mirror, she saw all the places she was failing to keep up with her own image.
The memory comes slowly. Carefully. A shadow she doesn’t like to look at even now.
It started small—subtle corrections, little “improvements.” Skipping part of lunch on days she felt bloated from stress. Ignoring her hunger at practice to “stay sharp.” Fixating on comments from friends and family, things that burrowed deep into her brain.
Jackie never thought she had a problem. Problems were messy. Problems were for girls who didn’t have control. And Jackie? She prided herself on control.
She liked the way people complimented her discipline. How clothes fit “better” when she was too busy and tired to eat normally. How being hungry felt like proof she was doing something right, becoming someone sleeker, cleaner, more worthy of the pedestal everyone put her on.
No one questioned her. No one saw anything wrong. Jackie hid it behind good grades, perfect hair, a dazzling smile, and the excuse every teenage girl could use without anyone looking too hard: “I’m just not hungry.”
But the truth was uglier. Scarier. Something she couldn’t admit even to herself. She remembers one night staring at a plate of dinner she had no intention of touching, her mother praising her “willpower.” And Jackie had smiled, hating that the praise felt so addicting.
She wonders, through the numbness creeping up her legs now, what would’ve happened if she’d told anyone she was hurting. Would they have listened? Would they have cared about the real girl behind the curated one? Or would they have shrugged and said, “But you look great”?
Jackie drifts further. The cold is crawling, slow and steady, up her arms. Winter formal comes back like a ghost.
She remembers the dress—sparkly, perfect, the envy of half the junior class. Jeff spinning her under the lights. Cameras flashing. Girls telling her she looked like a fairy tale. She’d smiled until her face hurt. She’d posed until her feet throbbed. She’d danced until the mask felt welded to her skin.
Afterward, she ducked into the bathroom to reapply lip gloss, alone for the first time in hours. The fluorescent lights were harsh, unforgiving. The mirror showed her a girl who should have been glowing. Jackie felt hollow. Empty in a way she couldn’t name.
She presses her face into the snow now, letting memory and cold blur together. If she could go back, she wouldn’t fix her hair or her smile. She’d fix the way she lived trying to be someone she wasn’t allowed to grow beyond. She’d let herself be real. Ugly. Honest. Human.
She’d tell Shauna she loved her. Tell her parents she was scared. Tell anyone—everyone—that perfection was killing her long before the wilderness ever had the chance.
The cold has reached a place inside her she didn’t know could go numb. It’s in her ribs now, sliding between them like thin sheets of ice. Every breath feels lighter than the last, like she’s slowly breathing herself out of the world. And as the edges of everything blur, her mind drifts to something she’s never allowed herself to think about too deeply: love.
Or whatever version of love she lived with. It’s strange, she thinks dully, lying here in the snow and feeling her pulse weaken—how much of her life was tangled in boys. Boys she didn’t even care about. Boys who were more like props than partners. Boys she chose like checking off boxes, each one meant to reinforce who she was supposed to be.
It began early, earlier than anyone made a fuss about. She remembers being twelve and the girls at her school whispering about crushes, about hand-holding, about kisses exchanged behind the gym. Jackie didn’t care much about any of it, but when someone asked who she liked, she froze. It wasn’t the question that scared her. It was the expectation. Every girl had to like somebody, and of course Jackie had to like someone “good.” Someone who made sense. Someone who didn’t make people raise eyebrows.
So she picked a boy. A random boy with sandy hair and a shy smile. And she told her friends she liked him because that seemed like the right answer. When he asked her out months later—through a mutual friend, awkward and red-cheeked—she said yes because everyone expected her to. Not because she wanted to hold his hand. Not because she wanted to hear his voice. Just because it felt like the next step in the version of girlhood she was being ushered into.
She remembers their first date in fragments: the smell of popcorn, the sticky movie theater seats, the way he kept smoothing his shirt as if she were someone to impress. Jackie wasn’t cruel, but she wasn’t kind either. She smiled, she nodded, she laughed at the right parts. But inside she felt nothing. A blank space where feelings were supposed to live.
Still, when she told her friends afterward and they squealed about how cute they were together, a tiny spark of satisfaction warmed her. Not for the boy. For the approval. That’s what dating felt like for years after—collecting small bursts of validation, like tiny trophies she could tuck away. Boys became mirrors she held up to prove she was someone desirable, someone wanted, someone perfect.
And then there was Jeff. She tries to summon feelings for him as the freezing night curls closer. She liked Jeff—liked his easy charm, his confidence, the way people lit up around him. Liked that he made sense. Liked that dating him reinforced the image she had built so carefully.
Jackie knows something now that she never let herself say aloud: She never loved him. Not the way she was supposed to. Not in the way that changed anything inside her.
Jeff was a comfortable choice, a socially approved choice. A choice that made her life look perfect from the outside. But with Jeff, everything stayed on the surface. She knew what he wanted from her. She knew how to meet those expectations. She knew the lines to recite, the smiles to give. Their relationship was glossy, like a magazine spread. Attractive, impressive, hollow.
There were moments, though, when she tried to convince herself it was deeper. When he’d hold her hand at the movies or kiss her neck during winter formal. She’d tell herself, This is what love feels like. But it never lingered. Never settled into her bones the way she always imagined it would. It was never the same as being with Shauna. That thought hits her with a force that steals what little air she has left.
Shauna.
She’s still here beside her, warm, golden, unreal, watching her quietly. Jackie doesn’t know when the hallucination appeared again, but she doesn’t have the strength to question it. She lets it stay. She needs it. She needs her.
Because the closeness she had with Shauna was something no boy ever matched. With Shauna, she didn’t need to pose, to perform, to edit herself into someone more palatable. With Shauna, she could sit in silence and feel understood. With Shauna, she laughed in ways that weren’t pretty but were true. With Shauna, she felt seen—not admired, not praised, not validated. Seen.
She wonders now, shivering violently, if she ever truly loved anyone the way she loved Shauna. A kind of love she didn’t know how to name when she was younger. A love that scared her because it meant something. A love she needed more than any boy’s approval.
She thinks of Jeff, solid, predictable Jeff, and realizes she had always chosen him because he was safe. Because people approved. Because he looked good on paper, beside her in yearbook photos, on the homecoming court.
But Shauna? Shauna was the one who held her heart in messy, unpolished hands. Shauna was the one she would have chosen if she’d ever allowed herself to choose what she truly wanted. Shauna was the one who knew her better than she knew herself.
The snow settles into her eyelashes. Her breaths get shallower. The hallucinated Shauna reaches out, touching her cheek gently, warm as summer. Jackie leans into it—knowing it isn’t real, but needing it anyway.
“I should’ve chosen differently,” she whispers, her voice barely audible. “I should’ve chosen me. I should’ve chosen… you.” The wind takes the words, carries them into the trees. Jackie lets her eyes close, just for a moment, as the cold finishes its slow, inevitable climb.
Shauna sits with her in the snow now, closer than before. The glow around her has softened into something warmer, something familiar. Jackie stops pretending she doesn’t notice how her breath doesn’t fog the air. She stops pretending she isn’t hallucinating. It doesn’t matter. She’s grateful for the company.
“Why are you here?” Jackie whispers. Shauna doesn’t answer—not really. She just tilts her head, encouraging Jackie to keep talking, the way she always did. It almost hurts more than the cold.
Jackie thinks back to every moment she brushed past Shauna’s feelings. The times Shauna came to her with a confused frown or a half-formed worry, and Jackie treated it like an inconvenience. Like Shauna was being dramatic again. Like Shauna’s emotions were less real than her own. She can almost hear her past self saying things like, You’re fine, Shauna. It’s not a big deal. Words meant to soothe, but only ever dismissed.
There was a day—one Jackie hadn’t thought about in years—where Shauna had asked her, quietly, “Do you ever feel like you’re pretending?” And Jackie, without looking up from her textbook, had said, “No. Why would I?” Shauna went silent, and Jackie had assumed the moment would evaporate. She never noticed the way Shauna’s face closed off, the way she’d shut something fragile back inside herself.
Now, lying in the snow, surrounded by a night that feels too wide and too hungry, Jackie feels that silence like a wound reopening. “I didn’t listen to you,” she tells the hallucinated Shauna. “Not once. I don’t think I ever asked how you were. I mean—I did, but it was surface-level. Like… I cared only if you were still orbiting around me.” Shauna’s expression flickers, softens. Jackie swallows hard. “You were my best friend,” she says, voice cracking. “But I treated you like a reflection. Like your whole job was to make me feel… enough.”
The wind answers in a low whistle. Shauna’s hand rests near hers, not touching, but almost. Jackie stares at their skin, so close, and wonders if she should reach out. She doesn’t. It feels too late even for that.
She thinks about love—real love, the kind she never learned how to touch without guarding herself. She thinks about how love with boys had been easy, curated, rehearsed. She knew the lines to that script. But with Shauna? It terrified her. It was deeper, older, like something pulsing under the skin that she kept insisting wasn’t there.
“I loved you,” she whispers. “Not the way I said I did. Not the ‘best friends forever’ way. I mean… deeper. Like you were the only person I ever wanted to really see me.” Shauna’s eyes soften, and Jackie feels a tremor in her chest—not from the cold, but from the truth finally forcing its way out. “I didn’t want Jeff,” Jackie continues, voice shaking. “I wanted control. I wanted to feel like I was choosing all the right things. The right boy, the right friend, the right future. And when you slept with him—God, I thought I was mad because you betrayed me.”
Her breath hitches. “But I wasn’t jealous of you being with him.” She swallows. “I was jealous that you had something—something I never let myself have. Something that was yours alone. Something I couldn’t define or manage.”
Shauna looks at her with a kind of aching tenderness that makes Jackie want to disappear into the snow. Or maybe into her arms. She can’t tell the difference anymore. She doesn’t think she ever could.
“I pushed you away,” Jackie says. “And not just tonight. For years. Every time you tried to get closer than I was comfortable with. Every time you tried to tell me something real. I acted like you were weak for wanting closeness. But the truth is… I wasn’t strong. I was scared.”
She feels her lip tremble and bites down on it, but the tears still come, freezing before they can fall. “I was scared you’d look at me long enough to see I wasn’t perfect. That I wasn’t anything close to it. That I was… hollow. All performance, no substance. And if you saw that, you’d stop loving me.”
Shauna’s hand moves—slowly, gently—until her fingers brush Jackie’s. It’s a touch so soft it makes Jackie flinch. Then melt. Then break. “I should’ve apologized,” Jackie whispers, voice barely audible. “Right before I walked out. I should’ve said I didn’t mean it. I should’ve told you I was scared. That I didn’t want to sleep alone. That I didn’t mean the words I spit at you. I should’ve taken your hand. Asked you to stay. Just… stayed with you.”
Her chest tightens with a painful clarity. “I should’ve told you I didn’t want to lose you. Not ever.”
The hallucinated Shauna leans in slightly, face full of warmth Jackie no longer feels in her own body. “You didn’t lose me,” the hallucination would say—if she were real. But she doesn’t speak. Jackie fills in the silence with hope she no longer admits she’s clinging to.
Jackie lets out a small, shaking breath as her eyes burn with the tears that won’t fall. “I loved you so much, Shauna,” she whispers. “More than anyone. More than I ever understood while it still mattered.”
The snow continues to fall, steady and quiet, as if covering her confessions in soft white. Shauna’s image stays beside her, whole and warm, everything Jackie wishes she could’ve held onto. And Jackie, trembling on the edge of sleep and death and memory, lets herself lean, finally, fully, toward the love she never let herself name.
The night has grown darker, or maybe Jackie’s eyes have. It’s getting harder to tell the difference. Even the hallucinated Shauna beside her seems dimmer at the edges, like she’s fading every time Jackie blinks too long. Jackie wants to keep her eyes open, but her eyelashes feel heavy with frost.
She shifts, snowflakes softly drifting around her, and something inside her cracks with it. She thinks—not about regret this time—but about the wilderness. More specifically, how she spent months refusing to look at it directly, like a child convinced the monster in the corner ceases to exist if you pretend it isn’t there.
She’d always believed in logic. Schedules. Plans. Rules. She believed she could out-stare chaos with a perfect smile and a straight spine. She laughs, a small broken sound. The wilderness never cared about her posture.
Jackie realizes, with a strange sense of clarity, that everyone around her had been falling apart long before tonight. She had watched it happen the way someone watches a bad play—distanced, annoyed, convinced she could have written it better. She remembers the tiny ways the others tried to pull her in. Tiny ways she dismissed.
Natalie offering to teach her how to shoot, saying, “You might feel less helpless if you can do at least one thing that’s for survival.” Jackie had rolled her eyes and said, “I’m fine,” as if the word could shield her from starvation.
Van inviting her to help stack firewood. “We could use the help,” she’d said gently, not as a dig, but an offering. Jackie had shrugged it off, making some excuse about her ankle or needing to rest.
Even Taissa, guarded and intense, once tapped Jackie’s arm and said, “You don’t have to pretend you’re okay all the time.” Jackie had laughed, a bright, practiced sound, and told her she wasn’t pretending. She never realized Tai had looked at her with concern, not criticism.
Jackie can see it now. Every outstretched hand she refused, every invitation she treated like a threat. She had built a glass wall between herself and the others, convinced the transparency meant she was still connected. She never noticed that everyone else had stopped trying to press against it.
The hallucinated Shauna shifts beside her, drawing her attention. Jackie sighs, letting her thoughts drift into the noise of the wind. “They weren’t shutting me out,” she murmurs. “I was pushing them away.”
Shauna doesn’t nod, but Jackie feels the agreement like a pulse in the air.
She remembers nights in the cabin when everyone huddled near the fire, cold but communal, sharing jokes or stories or silence—together. Jackie sat apart, pretending she preferred it. Pretending they were excluding her, when the truth was she never tried to join. She was always waiting for someone to beg her, to pull her back into the center.
“They didn’t hate me,” she says slowly, trying to wrap her mind around it. “They were just tired.” Her voice trembles as she continues. “Tired of feeling like everything they did was wrong. Tired of trying to reach someone who acted like she didn’t need anyone.” She swallows the painful truth. “I thought they changed. But they didn’t.” The cold stings her cheeks, making her eyes sting. “I’m the one who stayed the same.”
She had clung so desperately to the version of herself she thought she had to be—the leader, the pretty one, the confident one—that she hadn’t noticed that person was becoming unbearable to maintain. Or unbearable to be around. She hadn’t noticed the difference between admiration and distance. She mistook fear and grief and exhaustion for disrespect. She understands it now, in a way that makes her chest ache more than the cold ever could. “They were grieving me,” she whispers. “Not because I was gone—because I never changed. Because I kept being… her. The perfect Jackie. The Jackie who smiled on cue. The Jackie who couldn’t admit she was scared. The Jackie who didn’t know how to survive here.”
The wind howls softly, like the wilderness is exhaling with her. “I kept waiting for them to snap out of it,” she says, bitterness melting into sorrow. “For them to stop being angry or weird or distant. But they were grieving someone I refused to let die. The Jackie from before. The one who only existed back home.” She pauses, feeling a cold clarity seep into her bones. “They didn’t want me to be perfect,” she says. “They wanted me to be real.”
The truth hits her like a physical blow. She had been so determined to stay recognizable—to herself, to them—that she never stepped into their shared suffering. She thought strength meant maintaining her old self. But strength was what everyone else was doing: breaking open, adapting, bleeding into the winter and reshaping themselves.
She thinks of Misty, desperate for purpose, making herself useful every second of the day. Jackie had mocked her for it, never seeing the lonely kid clawing for belonging. She thinks of Lottie, drifting into visions, terrified and fragile. Jackie wrote her off as dramatic, never realizing the girl was drowning in fear with no one to hold onto. She thinks of Mari and Akilah and the others, trying to form some kind of community—messy, imperfect, tense. Jackie had stood outside of it, arms crossed, calling herself the reasonable one.
Now, lying in the snow, she finally sees it all.
She wasn’t the one abandoned.
She was the one who never came inside.
A sob catches in her throat, small and strangled. She presses her fingers into the snow, needing something solid to hold. Shauna’s image beside her looks at her with an indescribable sadness, as if sharing the weight of all these realizations.
The snow drifts lightly across her ankles, her knees, the edge of her jacket. She exhales, long and shaky, feeling something inside her finally give way. A surrender she never allowed in life. And the wilderness, silent and ancient, seems to nod back. Not forgiving her. Not condemning her. Just witnessing.
The cold is inside her now. Not just clinging to her clothes or biting at her fingers, but sinking into the spaces between her ribs, her spine, her thoughts. It feels strangely numbing, like parts of her mind are drifting away before the rest of her body can follow. She tries to shift, but her limbs are heavy, weighted, slow. Snow gathers along the line of her jaw, soft as breath.
Shauna is holding her. Not real Shauna—Jackie knows that now. This Shauna has a warmth that doesn’t make sense, a face that glows gently even as the night around them darkens. She rests Jackie’s head against her shoulder, just like she did that night at homecoming when Jackie was crying over absolutely nothing. Shauna didn’t ask what was wrong then, just held her until her breathing steadied. Jackie remembers thinking: This is what it feels like to be safe.
She hadn’t realized until now how rare that feeling was. Her voice comes out weakly. “Shauna… I’m tired.”
“I know,” the hallucination seems to whisper, though the lips never move. It’s more of a feeling than a sound.
Jackie tries to swallow, but her throat is dry. She wants to speak before she drifts too far to form the words. “I was scared,” she murmurs, each word trembling. “All the time. I just never… said it.” A single tear slips from the corner of her eye and freezes half a second later. “I didn’t know who I was supposed to be,” Jackie continues, voice cracking. “I thought if I kept being perfect… if I kept smiling and fixing everything and pretending I wasn’t falling apart… then maybe everything would stay the way it was.”
Shauna brushes a strand of hair from her face—Jackie feels it like memory, not touch.
“I wasn’t ready to change,” Jackie admits. “I wasn’t ready to grow up. Everyone else was trying so hard to adapt, but I just kept… holding on to who I thought I was supposed to be. I didn’t know how to be anyone else.”
She feels a tremor move through her body, a deep shiver she can’t stop. Shauna pulls her closer, and Jackie lets her eyes flutter shut for a moment, savoring the illusion of warmth. “I wanted to grow,” she whispers. “I really did. But I didn’t know how. I didn’t know where to start. It felt like everyone had instructions and I was just… guessing.” Her voice softens. “I loved all of you. More than I ever said. I loved our stupid team chants, and practices, and road trips, and fights. I loved the idea of us growing up together. I loved… the future. Even if I didn’t know what mine was.”
She swallows, a faint smile tugging at her lips. “I was excited, you know? For graduation, for college, for life. I wanted something big and sparkly and beautiful.” Her breath fogs weakly—thin, fading. “I loved you,” she says, looking up at Shauna’s gentle face. “More than was probably fair. More than I ever let myself think about. You were the only person who ever made me feel… real. Like I didn’t have to perform.”
Shauna’s eyes soften, and Jackie feels warmth flood through her chest—not physical warmth, but something gentler, older. “I didn’t mean to push everyone away,” she confesses, voice barely audible. “I just… didn’t know how to let them in. I didn’t know how to say I was lonely. Or scared. Or that I needed help.” Her heart stutters painfully, then steadies. “I see it now,” she breathes. “I wasn’t the victim. I wasn’t the villain either. I was just… stuck. Afraid of changing. Afraid of being small. Afraid of being anything other than what people expected.” Snowflakes settle in her hair like stars. “I stopped trying,” she admits, tears gathering again. “And I blamed everyone else for it. I told myself they turned on me. But I… I helped build the distance. I put myself out here long before tonight.”
Shauna holds her closer, and Jackie leans into the embrace like it’s the last real thing she’ll ever know. “I don’t hate them,” she whispers. “I never did. They were just… surviving. And I wasn’t. I didn’t know how.” The cold deepens. Jackie’s breathing slows. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs—her voice faint, but sincere in a way she never managed when she had time to give it meaning. “For all of it. For not being someone they could love easily. For not being someone I could love easily.” Her eyes flutter shut. “I accept it,” she whispers. “I see everything now. Everything I was too scared to look at.”
A soft exhale leaves her lips—the gentlest surrender. Jackie lets her head rest fully against Shauna’s chest, letting the hallucination hold her the way no one ever has. No judgment. No expectations.
Shauna’s warmth begins to dim. It happens gradually at first, a soft flickering at the edges of her form, like an image projected through candlelight. Jackie doesn’t notice until she leans forward and her cheek meets only cold air.
“No,” she whispers, voice cracked and tiny. She reaches out a trembling hand, fingers brushing nothing. Shauna does not speak. She only stands there, an outline made of memory and longing, her edges growing thinner, dissolving into the night like breath on glass.
“Don’t go,” Jackie pleads, or thinks she does—her lips barely move. “Please.” Shauna gives her one last look, full of every emotion Jackie never let herself receive in life: love, grief, forgiveness. For a breathless second, Jackie thinks she feels a hand press against her cheek—
Then Shauna is gone.
The space beside her is empty. The silence is absolute. Cold rushes in to fill the shape Shauna left behind.
Jackie exhales and watches the faintest ghost of vapor leave her mouth. It’s barely a whisper of a cloud. The snow doesn’t bother melting on her skin anymore.
She tries to take another breath and feels something heavy settle in her chest. Snowflakes land on her lips, and she doesn’t have the strength to brush them away. When she inhales again, it feels like the air itself is made of ice, filling her lungs slowly, gently, insistently. Like sleep is climbing inside her, one breath at a time. Jackie lies back, unable to hold herself upright any longer. The sky above her is wide, a soft gray blur. She wonders if the girls will check on her in the morning. She wonders if they’ll feel guilty. She wonders if Shauna will cry.
She hopes not. Or… maybe she hopes yes. The thought swims in her head like a loose feather. Her fingers twitch uselessly against the snow.
Thoughts drift in and out, disjointed, soft-edged. She tries to form something meaningful, something that feels like a last truth. Her memories flicker behind her eyelids—birthday candles, locker rooms, pink nail polish, laughing on Shauna’s bedroom floor, the first snowfall of the season back home.
She could have had so much. She could have been so much. The realization doesn’t hit her sharply, the way she expected regrets to feel. Instead, it washes over her gently, like warm water slipping through cupped hands.
“I could have been so much more,” she thinks faintly, the words slurring into one long sigh. But the thought isn’t bitter. It’s tender. It’s acceptance. She isn’t angry at herself anymore. She isn’t angry at the girls. She isn’t angry at Shauna. She is just… sad. A sad that feels soft around the edges.
Her eyelids droop, heavy with frost. She tries to keep them open—tries to see Shauna standing over her one last time—but everything is blurring now, turning to white. Her last clear thought is small and childlike, a whisper from the deepest part of her chest: I wish I had let myself be loved for real.
The cold quiets her like a lullaby. Her breath slows. Pauses. Softens. The world around her fades into stillness. Light blooms behind her eyes, not like rescue, but like release. There is only silence, soft and absolute, cradling her as she slips into the snow’s endless embrace.