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Everything fell apart.
Shauna couldn’t wrap her mind around how she hadn’t seen this coming. She should have. In the back of her mind, she’d always known that she was being horrible. And to keep evidence of how horrible she was somewhere Jackie could find it? That was just stupid. She’d been stupid.
She hadn’t expected Jackie to find her journal in their hotel room in Seattle after they’d won Nationals. She hadn’t expected to see her best friend brokenhearted and crying, fingers wrapped tight around the edges of her journal.
The worst part was that Jackie hadn’t yelled and screamed. She hadn’t lashed out. She’d just sobbed and asked why. What had she done? Why did Shauna hate her? Why hadn’t Shauna talked to her?
It wasn’t even about Jeff. The tiny, scared part of Shauna that had occasionally imagined getting caught had always assumed it would be. She had been having sex with Jackie’s boyfriend—a boyfriend Jackie wouldn’t have sex with herself—behind her back. That was a huge thing. But Jackie barely even mentioned it that night.
They hadn’t talked about it since, either. Actually, they hadn’t talked at all. They’d gone through graduation without speaking. That was actually kind of impressive, considering they were right next to each other, as always. Shipman and Taylor, side by side, stilted and silent.
Their split had split their friends down the middle, too. Some had flocked to Jackie while others had stayed with Shauna. Lottie and Tai were Shauna’s strongest supporters. Taissa made it crystal clear she didn’t condone what an asshole Shauna had been, but she understood bottling up her feelings—a statement that had made Van snort with laughter and vehement agreement.
One weekend, in mid-June, Van had proposed a day trip down to the lake. They rode in Lottie’s SUV and found a spot to settle under a huge beach umbrella, pinning their towels to the sand with books and shoes to keep the breeze from blowing them away. Once Shauna was covered in sunscreen, she pulled her Yellowjackets baseball cap on, lowering it to shield her eyes, and spread out a book on her lap.
She hadn’t wanted to come on the trip, if she was honest. She couldn’t remember a single lake trip she’d taken without Jackie in the last fourteen years. There was hardly an inch of this beach that didn’t have a memory of the two of them, even as recently as their last spring break. She felt tense all over, and even Lottie’s attempts to comfort her with a hand on her shoulder weren’t enough.
“Have you talked to Jackie at all since graduation?” Lottie asked quietly.
Shauna’s jaw tightened, and she shook her head. Her eyes filled with tears, but she refused to let them fall. She hadn’t broken down once since that night. She had no right to cry. She was the one who had ruined everything.
“You must miss her,” Lottie said. When Shauna looked up at her, she looked genuinely empathetic. “I’ve never known you two apart like this.”
Taissa shrieked from the water as Van pulled her under the waves, and Shauna looked up, watching them. Less than two months ago, Jackie had been the one lunging at Shauna, laughing that bright, goofy laugh of hers as she tried to dunk Shauna and failed.
“I did this to myself,” she told Lottie, wiping across her eyes with the side of her hand. “I loved her, and I hurt her. I don’t deserve to miss her.”
Lottie stayed silent, her hand on Shauna’s shoulder tightening into a firm squeeze. Shauna still didn’t really understand why Lottie had chosen to support her in all this mess, but for the first time, she honestly appreciated it. There was no one less judgmental than Lottie.
“Lot!” a voice called, stealing Lottie’s attention away from Shauna.
Lottie’s expression lit up, and she stood, taking a few steps forward to meet Natalie as she sauntered over in a black swimsuit and a floppy cream-colored hat that looked suspiciously familiar.
“Nat,” Lottie said, wrapping her arm around Natalie in a quick side-hug. “What are you doing here?”
“I had a stroke of genius,” Natalie said, lips curled into a smirk that Shauna immediately did not trust. “Heads up, Shipman. Got a surprise for you.”
Natalie pointed down the beach, and Shauna followed, her stomach dropping. Laura Lee was towing a beach chair on her back, walking beside—of course—Jackie, whose arms were occupied with an oversized beach bag.
The hat Natalie wore made a lot more sense now.
“Nat,” Lottie scolded, slapping at Natalie’s arm. “What were you thinking?!”
“What?” Natalie shrugged. “Listen, this is bullshit. They need to talk. If they still hate each other afterward, I don’t care. But this silent treatment crap needs to end.”
“It’s not your business, Natalie,” Shauna snapped.
“It’s everyone’s business, Shauna,” Natalie shot back, unafraid. “We can’t all be together anymore because of this shit, so get over yourself and fix it.”
Jackie was the only one who looked honestly surprised when she and Laura Lee came upon the group. Laura Lee had the good grace to look a little bit ashamed for whatever part she’d played in this orchestration while Natalie looked entirely unbothered.
Jackie glanced only briefly at Shauna before she said, “Natalie, what–”
“Talk,” Natalie said simply, nudging Jackie in Shauna’s direction. “Or break each other’s noses if that’s what it takes. But we all hate this. Even Laura Lee.”
Laura Lee’s face pinked, and Lottie moved to wrap an arm around her protectively.
“This is the last summer we’re all gonna be together,” Natalie continued. “You losers are all going off to college, and I’m… I don’t know. But my point is that I’m not gonna do this back-and-forth thing anymore. So figure out how to tolerate each other through August.”
“With you three as an audience?” Shauna huffed, glaring up at Natalie.
“Nope.” Natalie pulled the chair off Laura Lee’s back and dropped it haphazardly on the sand. She grabbed Lottie and Laura Lee by the hands and marched them off toward the water, leaving Jackie and Shauna to stare at each other in relative privacy.
Shauna sighed, closing her book and looking at Jackie. Her best friend (former best friend?) stood frozen, beach bag still dragging down her shoulder. They stared at each other for a long moment before Jackie took a slow breath. She seemed to be grabbing for some composure, and then she set down the bag and folded herself down onto Taissa’s unoccupied beach towel.
“I guess you didn’t know this was happening either?”
Shauna shook her head. “No. This was all on your side.”
Jackie scoffed. “My side?” she echoed, irritation flaring in her eyes.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Shauna protested. “I’m just saying, I didn’t know anything about it, okay? And Lottie clearly didn’t either. I guess I can’t speak for Tai and Van.” She waved broadly in the direction of the rest of the girls. “But Natalie sprang this on me just as much as you.”
Jackie relaxed just a fraction, but Shauna saw it. She let herself relax too. She couldn’t say she’d never gotten snippy just to get a reaction out of Jackie, but that hadn’t been her goal this time. If they were going to be around each other again, even if it was only for the day, she wanted things to be calm.
Neither of them said anything for a little while. Instead, they just sat there, neither sure where to look. Before Nationals, Jackie would have curled up against her or laid across her lap without hesitation. But everything was different now. She didn’t know if this was actually fixable, no matter how much Natalie insisted on it.
Finally, quietly, Shauna said, “We don’t have to talk about it. But I guess I don’t want to make things awkward for everyone else either, so… should we?”
Jackie looked at Shauna again, hazel eyes soft as they studied her. Shauna shifted self-consciously. The past few years had been this way; as much as she wanted Jackie to look at her, she never quite felt like she measured up.
“I miss you,” Jackie said finally, swallowing hard. “I want to be furious with you. I’ve tried to be. But I just miss you.”
Shauna nodded, taking off her baseball cap and sticking it under her thigh. She wrung her hands together in her lap, looking down to gather herself before looking at Jackie again.
“I just said to Lottie… I don’t think I deserve to miss you,” she admitted. “But I do miss you. All the time. But it’s my fault we’re apart now.”
“Yeah,” Jackie agreed. It wasn’t said harshly, and Shauna knew it was true. Still, hearing Jackie confirm it made the guilt feel more crushing than ever.
“But I wasn’t perfect either,” Jackie continued, causing Shauna’s eyebrows to rise. “I didn’t always listen to you. I expected you to do everything I wanted. I didn’t ask because I thought it was all a given.”
Shauna nodded slightly, surprised but feeling more seen by Jackie than she had in a long time. She had felt stuck in the same things she and Jackie had planned back in junior high, before they had really grown up, before they really understood life outside of each other. And that had bubbled under the surface for so long, only released as vitriol on the pages of her journal. Those feelings were never supposed to be known, let alone read, but it felt good that Jackie seemed to really understand now.
“I should have talked to you, though,” Shauna countered, cracking a couple of knuckles absently. “You’re my best friend. I should have trusted you to hear me. I told myself you wouldn’t, and even if you did, you wouldn’t understand. And I made myself even angrier thinking that way.”
A small laugh fell out of Jackie. “I wish I could say I would’ve understood, but I probably would’ve taken it personally. I mean, I’d been counting on Rutgers with you for years, and if you’d told me you wanted to go somewhere else… yeah. I get why you couldn’t say anything.”
Shauna let a moment pass before she said, “You’ve really thought about this.”
“I’ve barely thought of anything else,” Jackie confessed, sadness plain in her voice. “I still have the journal.”
Shauna nodded. “I know,” she murmured. She had tried to take the journal back a couple of times that night in Seattle, but Jackie had held onto it like her life depended on it. She wouldn’t let go of it, and eventually, Shauna stopped trying to take it back.
“You said I made you feel invisible.”
“You did.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“I know.”
Jackie’s hands wrapped tightly in Taissa’s towel. “You don’t like soccer.”
Shauna couldn’t help but laugh. She hadn’t known where this conversation was going since it started, but she hadn’t expected it to turn to soccer. That was easily one of the tamest complaints she’d written in that journal.
“Don’t laugh,” Jackie huffed, but she was smiling just enough that Shauna knew she wasn’t really upset.
“I don’t hate it,” she offered. “But I probably wouldn’t have joined the team if you hadn’t wanted me there.”
“You should’ve said you didn’t want to play.”
“Jack–”
“Seriously.”
“Jackie, you just said you probably wouldn’t have understood if I told you I wanted to go to Brown instead of Rutgers. But you would have been totally okay if I’d said no to soccer?”
Jackie sighed and crossed her arms over her chest, her mouth settling into a pout. It wasn’t meant to be dramatic, but Shauna couldn’t help but find it funny. It was such a classic Jackie reaction to having a mirror shoved in her face.
Shauna actually genuinely smiled, poking at Jackie’s calf with one foot. “I wanted to spend time with you, so I played soccer,” she said simply. “I wrote about hating it because I–”
“You hated me.”
“No,” Shauna replied sharply, her smile evaporating. She shook her head, forcing herself to soften. “I didn’t hate you, Jax. I didn’t then, and I don’t now.”
“You literally wrote that you hated me,” Jackie countered.
Shauna let out a frustrated sigh, dropping her head and burying her face in her palms. She couldn’t deny it. She had written those words, probably more times than she even remembered, but she hadn’t meant them even once.
“I told you,” she said, her hands still cupping her chin when she looked up, “that I was angry. I felt like you didn’t see me and didn’t care about my opinion, and I was scared to tell you how I really felt. I didn’t write that because I meant it. I wrote it because I was mad at you and… I don’t know. That’s how it came out.”
Jackie didn’t say anything, staring off at their friends in the lake for a while. Laura Lee had somehow ended up on Lottie’s back, arms wrapped around her neck. Nat and Van were aggressively smacking each other with pool noodles while Taissa floated on her back nearby. It looked fun.
“Do you really think things can ever be normal again?”
Shauna’s chest ached. “I really hope so,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “But I don’t know. Can you really forgive me? For… everything?”
There was so much. The journal had been where she poured everything: her awful feelings, her boring thoughts, the details of her whole affair with Jeff. There was so much in there that had hurt Jackie; even now, Jackie was convinced Shauna truly hated her. Shauna couldn’t blame her for that. She had written it, and Jackie wasn't in her head. All Jackie had were the words on the page.
Jackie’s eyes closed, her fist closing in the towel beneath her again. Shauna felt like she was holding her breath, but she didn’t push for an answer and tried not to let her mind wander to the worst option.
“I want to,” Jackie said, so quietly that Shauna would have missed it if the beach were any louder.
Shauna bit down on her bottom lip, trying to hold back the surge of happiness. She didn’t want to get ahead of herself. That wasn’t a yes.
“I know we can’t start over,” Shauna said, “and I don’t think we should. But at least we’re finally talking about it. Maybe we can figure it out together.”
“Yeah.” Jackie’s eyes focused on Shauna, considering her. “I think we can. But we have to talk about Jeff.”
Shauna went still. Somehow, her brain had filed Jeff away as not worth talking about because he wasn’t the biggest part of the problem. She’d hoped Jackie would see it that way too, but apparently not. She took a moment to convince herself not to respond with something like ‘why bother’ before nodding.
Jackie cleared her throat and crossed her legs, turning her entire body towards Shauna. Shauna’s pulse thrummed faster. She was nowhere near prepared to get grilled for this, but if it meant even a chance of being okay again, then she would take it.
“Why did you sleep with Jeff?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shauna.”
“What?”
“You can’t just say ‘I don’t know’ to that. You do know,” Jackie said firmly.
Shauna made a face and ran a hand through her hair, trying to gather herself. She had never wanted Jackie to know about Jeff. She had wanted Jackie to know the reason she was sleeping with Jeff even less. She was starting to get nervous, her hands tingling uncomfortably, but she had to push forward. For Jackie.
“You loved him,” Shauna said slowly. She pressed her lips together. “You kissed him. You did things with him…”
“Not that,” Jackie interjected.
“Yeah, I know,” Shauna retorted. “I know you didn’t do that. But you were with him, and I just felt like… It was as close as I could get.”
Jackie blinked. “To what?”
“To you,” Shauna blustered, overwhelmed. “To you, Jackie. You’d kiss me when you were drunk or high or when someone dared you to, but I wanted you to just kiss me because you wanted to kiss me. But you didn’t, and Jeff got that side of you.”
Shauna felt out of breath when she finished, her cheeks burning red. She could hardly believe she’d let all that out, but she hadn’t been able to hold it back anymore. If they were here, talking to each other and facing all their shit, they needed everything out in the open. And evidently, her subconscious had decided this was the moment to let the dam finally break.
Jackie didn’t speak. She sat there, stunned, then stood up abruptly and walked away. Shauna stared after her for a moment, watching her go, then scrambled to her feet to follow. With longer strides, she caught up to Jackie quickly and reached out to grab her arm.
“Jackie, wait–”
“Shauna, stop.” Jackie ripped her arm away, and when she looked at Shauna, her eyes were full of tears. “I need a minute, okay? I need a minute.”
Shauna froze immediately, pulling her hands back to her chest so she wouldn’t touch Jackie again. Her mind zoomed back to that night in Seattle, how she’d tried several times to touch Jackie, to hold her, to offer any kind of physical comfort because that was what Jackie liked. She’d pulled away then, too.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
Jackie nodded rapidly, trying to steady her breathing. Shauna watched tears drip down her chin and onto the sand beneath them. The urge to reach out grew stronger, but she resisted, gripping her own shoulders instead.
They stood there, not talking, for what felt like ages. At one point, Shauna caught Taissa’s eye when she happened to look in their direction. Tai’s eyebrows rose when she noticed them. She shifted towards them instinctively, but Shauna gave a minuscule shake of her head. Tai coming over here wasn’t going to help anything.
Eventually, Jackie turned to face Shauna again. Her face was pink, and she rubbed away lingering tears with her palm. Shauna dropped her hands to her sides, shoving them in the pockets of her shorts instead.
“So, you having sex with Jeff… it was about me,” Jackie said slowly. “I mean, it wasn’t that you liked him. It was that you liked me, but you didn’t think I liked you back?”
Shauna bit her bottom lip and nodded. “Yeah.”
Jackie raised her arms, folding them over her head. She took a long, deep breath and looked at Shauna intently. “You love me?”
“You know I do,” Shauna replied automatically.
“No,” Jackie said, shaking her head. She reached out, her hands landing carefully on Shauna’s shoulders. “Not like this.”
Shauna’s chin trembled, and her heart felt like it might jump out of her chest. Her hands clenched into fists in her pockets, then unclenched. Her body fought every single thing she thought about saying, shoving those feelings back down into the fearful pit in her chest that had hidden them for so long.
“I can’t,” she began, the words coming out like they were being pushed. She swallowed hard. “I can’t remember a time I didn’t love you. Not always like this, but…” Her breath shook, and she shut her eyes for a split second to gather herself. “It’s been like this for a while. Like, years.”
“Like this,” Jackie repeated, searching Shauna’s face. “So, like, romantically?”
Shauna just nodded. Her jaw had tightened too much for words, trying to keep herself controlled.
“I wish you’d just told me,” Jackie murmured, taking a small step closer. Her hands moved from Shauna’s shoulders to her jaw, thumbs brushing along Shauna’s cheeks until the tension began seeping away.
“I couldn’t.”
“I know.”
Jackie leaned in, pressing her forehead to Shauna’s for a moment before she hugged her around the neck. Her body pressed flush to Shauna’s, and Shauna’s barely-there composure collapsed. She wrapped her arms around Jackie’s back, holding on tight. She’d been sure she’d never have this again; it almost felt too good to be true.
“I need time to forgive you,” Jackie said into her ear. She drew back to look into Shauna’s eyes. “But I don’t want to miss you anymore.”
“I don’t want that either,” Shauna said quietly, rubbing small circles into Jackie’s back. “And it doesn’t have to change anything. I just want my best friend back. If you want that too.”
“I do. And everything else…” Jackie brushed Shauna’s hair off her cheek, tucking it carefully behind her ear. “We’ll figure it out together.”