Chapter Text
“I’m pissed at you,” Jackie says to her hoarsely. She hooks one arm across her chest to hold where the sadness was stuck.
The wind blows against the wall. She could feel where it shuddered, old wood smacked by the cold pressure of it. A bit of blood was frozen on the ground by her foot and it was tacky, sticky looking from where it sat. The colour reminds her of fruit, of something sweet.
She inhales in response to the wind. Jackie then tries again. “Remember using all those strawberries to make smoothies? We used every single banana there was in the kitchen, that full bag of ice… I forgot to put the lid on.” The kitchen ceiling might still have that stain. Her mom never fixed it entirely after the event in which blenders were banned from the house. She wanted strawberries, though, so Shauna showed up with a pint for her. Everything else spiralled from that one craving, that singular want. “I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore. Fuck, Shauna.”
Maybe it was just the lingering, endless hunger twisting her memories up so they were stuck with other memories of food. She thinks of Shauna and remembers sticking chocolate bars in the fridge so they could be cold for after practice. She thinks of Shauna and remembers the French Fries dipped into milkshakes, both of which being definitely not on any meal plan. She thinks of Shauna and remembers stale beer, sour apples, bread with the crusts cut off.
Jackie thinks of Shauna and remembers her shoving her into the pantry, locking her in with all the shadows. “Yeah. I’m angry. And I get to be angry, really fucking angry, Shipman. Why'd you even do that? I don’t— I just don’t know. When did it start?” Jackie falters. She has the patience of a person running out of everything. Her precious control was slipping through her fingers and the best she could do was cling tight, hands to fists, trembling. “Jesus, you all suck. Like, congratulations. You’re all shitty, terrible friends.”
The team doesn't bother to say anything. Their quiet was loud.
The shed was crowded for all the wrong reasons. It hurt being in with them, only the sun leaching through from where she left the door opened. It showed the bodies propped in together where they could fit, a literal puzzle of Yellowjackets snugged in tight.
Misty’s glasses sat crooked on her face. Her face had artificial colour still, that slight pink blush frosting her cheeks, lids painted blue from Jackie’s makeup, from Jackie’s brushes, from Jackie’s hands. She was all made up for a party and the party was dead, frozen right down to the bone.
“Why’d you leave me there?” Jackie asks Shauna’s unmoving mouth, her unmoving expression.
“So you’ll talk to them. Just not me.”
Jackie jolts. Her hand crushed against her mouth when she turned and saw Natalie standing behind her.
Time briefly suspends itself in the dead space. Natalie shows no signs of moving inside the shed. Snow was dropping from the sky in giant, fluffy flakes, pushed around the air by the sighing wind. When the silence persisted, Natalie raises her eyebrows. It was a silent kind of challenge. Jackie slowly withdrew her hand from her mouth, licking away the taste of salt from her lips as she did so.
“I— don’t.” The words got twisted. It was a bedsheet, Jackie imagines. A piece of fabric in need of ironing. Start from one corner and work to the other end. “They’re not listening. It’s easier.”
“You’re the only thing in here with a pulse. They can’t listen when they’re dead,” says Natalie quickly, sweeping her gaze around the space without lingering once on a single face. “This really where you want to hang out?”
She swallows. “Where else am I gonna go?”
Her eyes roll. “Inside. The one place that we’ve got where you won’t get hypothermia.” Her feet don't want to move. Jackie stays where she was crouched down low just to provoke a seething hiss from Natalie. “You know how hypothermia works, right?”
That was brutal. She didn't have to slap Jackie just to make the pain land. Her mouth traces over the word hypothermia and she's struck down deep, smacked by the coldness.
Taissa and Van are sitting together. It made sense because Natalie found them both together, dragged them one by one to the shed, hauling them roughly just to gently place them down. I call shotgun, came a wisp of Van’s voice. Jackie lets her mind stretch itself backwards and fold into something safer. Every away game meant piling into Old Reliable, the bus that the school chartered for them. Twice it broke down on the same road to the same place, earning the catty name from Van.
Or maybe it was Mari who named the bus.
She couldn’t remember with confidence anymore. Parts of ordinary life felt blurry, like she was a bystander trying to squint through a blurry window.
But Van calling shotgun? That was ritual. Jackie always sat in the very back of the bus, already seated every time Van popped up the few short stairs, announcing her claim even though she habitually took middle row, tossing herself lengthways across the seat to sleep.
Her shoes would stick out into the aisle. Sometimes she wouldn’t even bother waking up during pit stops and Jackie would brush against the toes of those shoes to get by.
Natalie sighs. She sounded less frustrated, more tired. “How’d you end up locked inside the pantry?”
Van’s left shoelaces needed retying. Jackie pins her stare to them, to her shoe. Tries to avoid looking at the ankle, her knees. The shoe was safer to look. It wasn’t the first time Natalie tried asking and every time prior Jackie just shut her eyes and yanked the blankets around her tighter. “How’d you get the bear?” She deflects instead of actually answering. The animal was butchered into a miserable looking lump in the corner. Apparently Natalie could track and shoot, but rendering it down neatly was beyond her limits.
“It just happened.”
“Right. Well, there you go.” She repeated Natalie’s own words back to her.
“It was sick, Jackie. You saw it. Easy shooting.”
Jackie had only ever seen a bear once before in real life. They were on their way home from an airport, a trip successful by lack of plane crashing in the middle of no where, and her parents pulled over when they saw one moving along the ditch of the highway. They watched it amble around for a few short minutes before resuming the drive, satisfied by seeing something unusual from their normal lives.
This one was different.
It walked crookedly. It made curious, snuffling sounds as it tipped it’s head back to peer up the end of Natalie’s gun. They found the bodies and it found them; something hungry looking for something hungry. Or maybe it was something sick looking for something sick, a stupid cycle that kept spinning around. One minute Jackie was crying into her hands and in the next it was coming out of the bushes, barely aware of the Natalie coming up behind her and shooting it dead.
“Okay.”
“You’ll freeze if you stay out here any longer. C’mon. I’m freezing my ass off. Let’s go back inside.”
Her legs feel numb. Jackie rubs at her knees to try and find her voice again. It kept drying up, like she wasted all of it’s potential by screaming against that locked door for someone to let her out. “Can’t,” she says. That one word was the best she could do, literally scraping the bottom of the barrel for something worthwhile.
Natalie’s face forms a dark grimace. She still wasn’t budging from the door but at least she finally looked around properly at the faces of their friends, a slow cringe tugging her shoulders forwards into a curl. “I’m going need a turn at freaking out, you know. If you think you could maybe pull it together for a minute or two?”
The light soaked against the outline of her body, brightening right where her shadow started. Jackie narrows her eyes to peer up at her. “What happened to synchronized hysteria?” See? I can spit out a full sentence just like a real girl! She rubs harder at her knees and tried again, fingernails scratching through denim. “Or was that just our periods syncing up as a group?”
“Only one person can go off the rails at a time.” She says it so seriously like it was actually a law that someone drafted up. Her poker face was frozen in place, tight mouth, tight eyes. Her jaw ticks slightly, though.
Should’ve called shotgun, Van’s voice says. Everybody knows that you’re supposed to call dibs on crazy town first.
“My turn isn’t finished,” Jackie manages to say. Her voice was going thin, fading out. All that screaming, all that silence. It left limits.
“That’s tough.”
“Whatever.”
Natalie stares at her. Then, flatly: “You’re stuck with me. And I don’t know if you’ve looked around and figured out how bad this is, but it’s shitty. I’m what you have and you’re all I’ve got. Don’t even think about quitting.”
Quitting. Jackie’s mouth nearly splits open to laugh. They weren’t stuck in a bad game and ready to walk off the field. She wasn’t losing at Monopoly.
Was crazy town some kind of property on the board? She’d swing for it first, build up a hotel and charge a boatload of money for anyone wanting to stop on the square.
“Maybe this is your sign to go solo.”
Her hand thrust out, palm upwards. She wiggles her fingers slightly to beckon Jackie to take hold. It was bizarre that Natalie was standing in the doorway as the patron saint of team spirit, ridiculous enough that Jackie finally accepts the offer. Their palms slapped lightly together and she was hauled straight up to her feet, forced to stand even closer. “It isn’t just going to be me out here,” Natalie told her. “You’re not doing that to me.”
"Fine."
She's never really touched Natalie before. Occasionally they knocked into each other post victory, literally slamming into each other for the sake of grabbing onto the nearest Yellowjacket player, but not like this. Holding hands was brand new territory. Her fingers felt dry, rougher. Strong, a blurry part of Jackie's mind supplies. Like she was good at grabbing onto something and not letting go.
"You were inside the pantry. The door was locked from the outside," Natalie pushes again, fingers not yet releasing her. They were still inside the dead place. The warmth of their hands touching barely made a dent in the chilled air, the cold faces. "How'd you get locked inside?"
Jackie squeezes as tight as she could. Would it help? "I did it to myself. It was my fault.”