Chapter Text
Shauna Sadecki is a perfectly ordinary woman with a perfectly ordinary life.
She has a husband she likes but doesn’t love and a daughter she loves but doesn’t like.
She’s a housewife, and Jeff has a shitty little furniture store, and they live in the suburbs, and she drives a minivan despite only having one child because multiple kids were in the plan but, by the time Callie was three, Shauna was certain that she never wanted to experience parenting a toddler ever again, and Jeff had whined and pouted and tried to knock her up anyway until she threatened to cut his balls off and feed them to him.
Ordinary.
Aside from the fact that when she was seventeen, she was in a plane with the rest of her soccer team, and the plane crashed, and she and her teammates spent a year and a half in the Canadian wilderness, indulging in sex, violence, and cannibalism to survive. And sometimes, when she lies awake at night while Jeff snores beside her, she licks her lips and remembers the taste of Jackie Taylor’s corpse, how juicy and warm the flesh was as it gave beneath her teeth, how sweet her best friend tasted after weeks of nothing but pine needle soup.
It’s all she has to remember her friend; the taste that lingers on her tongue decades later, the knowledge that her husband wanted Jackie first, and the occasional hallucination of honey blonde hair and doe-y hazel eyes.
She doesn’t talk about Jackie, not even to Jeff, and he doesn’t talk about her, either. He knows that Shauna would kill him if he did.
Shauna Sadecki is perfectly ordinary, as far as she can be.
Shauna is walking past her daughter’s bedroom when she hears it.
Jackie’s giggle.
Her hallucinations rarely go like this.
Jackie always appears directly in front of her, or behind her, or off to the side, or whatever will jolt Shauna hardest in the moment.
There’s no point to a hallucination she can’t see.
The laundry basket she’s holding falls to the carpeted floor beneath with only a muffled thud, and Shauna whirls around the narrow hallway, searching for her oldest friend.
Nothing.
Another giggle floats through the door. Callie’s.
Hallucinations aren’t hereditary in most cases. Callie has no idea what Jackie looks like, has never seen a photograph, never heard the name Jackie Taylor. It was enough of an apology to live the life Jackie was afraid of falling into, Shauna didn’t see the need to turn her house into a shrine to the girl. That was her logic. That and the fact that Jackie was still here with her, in a sense. She didn’t need the photograph staring at her beside the ghost.
Then she hears it. Callie’s voice, saying ‘Jax,’ in that pathetic whiny tone that Shauna used to use. That tone that meant please, I’m here, I want you.
Shauna opens the door.
Callie scoffs loudly, ‘Jesus, mom! Knock!’
Shauna doesn’t respond, determined to not look towards her daughter in case she saw her sharing the ghost of Jackie. She puts the laundry basket down on the dresser and methodically removes Callie’s clothing from the basket to place it in the drawers in front of her.
That’s when she smells it.
Sicky sweet and cloying and rich, like sandalwood mixed with sugar, some cheap and shitty perfume from GAP that Jackie Taylor wore about as much as she wore her own skin. Shauna teased her about it when they were teens, bought her gift sets full of it, found a body wash and triumphantly gave it to her friend with a, ‘now you can actually bathe in that stuff.’ Jackie sprayed it when she woke up, and after the showers when they played soccer, and in the Canadian wilderness, so often that Shauna picked it up secondhand, had the scent seep into her pores and linger there long after Jackie’s passing, and now, in 2025, it was in her daughter’s bedroom.
She clears her throat and exhales through her nose, hoping to get the scent of Jackie out, hoping to push her ghost away, ‘sorry, Cals,’ she says, ‘I was holding a house worth of laundry, I couldn’t exactly knock. Hope me washing your panties for you isn’t inconvenient.’
Callie’s response is indignant as always, ‘oh my god, mom! I have a friend here. What the fuck?’
Shauna cannot look behind her.
She can only look down at her daughter’s balled up socks that she’s cramming into an already overflowing sock drawer.
‘Hi Mrs Sadecki,’ a voice says behind her, soft and rumbling, and Shauna knows that voice. She hears it more than she hears her own. Always has.
She doesn’t respond.
She takes a few neatly folded tank tops and scrunches them up in her hand and shoves them into the back of a drawer.
Callie groans, ‘mom, you’re being so rude right now. This is why I don’t invite people over.’
‘It’s fine,’ the voice says, ‘she probably doesn’t want to see me.’
Shauna turns around.
Jackie Taylor is sitting on Callie Sadecki's bed.
Jackie Taylor is braiding Callie Sadecki's hair.
Jackie Taylor hasn’t aged any one of the twenty-five years that Shauna has.
Shauna forces a pinched smile, lips sealed shut and eyes wide open because the second they close she knows tears will fill them, and she nods at the girl who can’t actually be Jackie Taylor and has to be another of Callie’s classmates that her haunted brain is making look like Jackie Taylor, because the Jackie Taylor she knows is too dead to braid her daughter’s hair.
‘Hi,’ Shauna forces out, ‘sorry, I’m busy. Laundry day.’
She grabs her laundry basket and leaves the room before Callie can roll her eyes.
Shauna needs privacy.
She has a bedroom that she shares with her husband, and he isn’t home right now, but it’s still not private enough. She needs a space that isn’t tainted by Jeff or Callie or her stupid fucking life that makes her head spin and her ears ring.
She picks the closet.
She shuts herself inside it and opens the box that contains Jackie Taylor’s Yellowjackets uniform, and places Jackie’s shirt over her face, blocking out the light and filling her senses with the same perfume that clouds her daughter’s room.
Maybe, she thinks, if I let her in, she’ll go away.
This Jackie has to be a ghost. She has to be. Hallucinations aren’t shared, unless her carbon monoxide detector needs a check. Shauna likes to consider herself rational, and rationality states that Callie cannot be seeing Jackie Taylor unless Jackie Taylor is some third party that operates outside of both of them. Ergo, ghost. And, according to most horror movies, the closet is the perfect place to hide from the supernatural, so Shauna settles in a foetal position, shirt still pressed to her face to keep the ghost away.
She only gets a few minutes of it, of the blackness and silence and isolation, before the hinges of the closet are wailing their protests at being cracked open.
She doesn’t move.
‘You okay there, Ship?’ Jackie’s voice is back.
Shauna ignores her.
‘Shippy?’
Shauna inhales the godawful smell of Jackie’s perfume, overwhelmingly sweet now.
‘Shipman?’
Shauna doesn’t think she’s capable of responding to the voice even if she wanted to.
A heavy sigh and then, ‘Sadecki?’
Shauna snaps her head up, looking up at Jackie from where she’s crouched on the closet floor, ‘don’t fucking call me that!’
Jackie’s ghost raises her hands in mock surrender, ‘Jesus, Ship, sorry. Just assumed that if you took his name you wanted to keep it.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Nothing, just hanging out with Cals.’
Shauna jumps to her feet, only stumbling slightly over the lid of the box that contains the ghost’s clothing. ‘So you’re a fucking ghost now? Living in my brain got cramped for you?’
‘Wrong on both. Think, Ship.’ Jackie’s eyes are locked on her, and her hair is in a half-ponytail that Shauna wants to tug. Jackie pulls the closet door fully open, and that’s when Shauna realises.
‘You can touch things.’
‘I always said you were smart,’ Jackie’s tone is dry, and it makes Shauna itch.
‘Can ghosts do that?’ Shauna asks.
Jackie shakes her head. ‘I’m here.’
Shauna’s hand shoots out before she can register it, fingers seeking Jackie’s face. One hand goes to her left cheek, the other to her right ear. Shauna pushes her hair back. Jackie’s ear is missing a chunk. Her fingers continue to roam. Jackie’s face is warm, and her breath puffs rhythmically from her pink lips, and her hair is soft, and her eyes are bright.
Her hallucinations can’t do that.
‘How?’ Shauna asks.
Jackie shrugs. ‘Don’t know, don’t care.’
It’s not a satisfying answer, and Jackie isn’t meeting her gaze, but Shauna has bigger concerns.
‘Callie?’
‘I’m eighteen, I have to finish school. We’re in a couple of the same classes so I thought-’
Shauna shoves Jackie back, surprising them both, ‘you thought you’d make friends with my kid to get to me? What the fuck, Taylor?’
Jackie catches herself on the edge of Shauna’s bed. Jeff’s bed. Shauna and Jeff’s bed, where they sleep and fuck and conceived their daughter and Shauna dreams of eating Jackie whole and seeing Jackie’s fingers grip the corner of it fills Shauna with a revulsion unlike anything she’s ever experienced before.
Jackie’s response is quiet, ‘she’s so much like you.’
Shauna doesn’t have time to think about any of it too hard. About her best friend being back from the dead and hiding how she got here and cosying up to her daughter and braiding Callie’s hair the way she used to braid Shauna’s. She has questions and Jackie probably doesn’t have answers but they’re still questions that need to be asked and she will pin Jackie to her marital bed until she has everything she wants from her best friend if that’s what’s needed but Callie interrupts.
‘Jackie, the bathroom is down the hall. Come on, I’ll show you,’ Callie says, appearing in the doorway with a good natured eye roll and a vape in hand. She smiles at Jackie, a half-grin that shows some of her teeth and looks just like the one Shauna used to give Jackie, and Jackie’s grip on the bedpost tightens a little.
She releases it. ‘Right, thanks, Cal. Got turned around.’ She walks towards the door and then stops, turning back and looking at Shauna, ‘nice to meet you, Mrs Sadecki.’
Jeff’s eyes widen in panic when he arrives home.
Shauna is placing dinner - lasagne - in the middle of the table. Callie and Jackie sit together, close enough for their shoulders to touch, and Shauna attributes her arms shaking to the weight of the pan. Jackie had offered to help her, the same way she would any friend’s mom, and Shauna had barked a refusal that made Callie flinch.
‘Shauna!’ Jeff calls from the doorway.
Shauna doesn’t look up from where she’s tearing apart garlic bread and moving it from a baking sheet to a serving dish, the kind of action Jackie had always called pointless - it’s only creating more dishes, who’s too good to eat from the pan - and Shauna now did nightly.
‘Yeah?’ She asks, pulling the bread into too many pieces.
‘Do you see her, too?’ Jeff asks, voice weak.
Callie rolls her eyes, ‘dad, this is my friend, Jackie Taylor. I’m sorry for not clearing it but don’t be a dick.’
‘I know who she is,’ Jeff says.
Jackie offers a megawatt smile and stands, extending a hand towards her ex boyfriend, ‘hi, Mr Sadecki. It’s a pleasure to meet you.’
Jackie was always good with parents, and with boys, and Jeff hangs his coat on the hook and carefully treads to the table, ‘Jesus you look just like her.’
Jackie tilts her head, calculated, arm still out for a handshake that Jeff doesn’t take, ‘like who?’
Shauna slams the garlic bread on the table between them, and it makes her husband’s head snap towards her, ‘what the fuck, Shauna? What kind of sick fucking joke is this?’
‘You think I did this?’ Shauna is incredulous, and Callie is no longer slumped in her chair, bolt upright and watching her parents. She’s perched on the side of her chair, as if she might get up and leave.
‘What did I do to deserve this?’ Jeff is asking, ‘whatever you’re mad at me for it can’t be this bad.’
‘What exactly are you accusing me of here?’ Shauna asks.
‘What the fuck is happening?’ Callie’s voice is tight as it cuts across them.
‘Sadeckis, listen up!’ Jackie interrupts, though Shauna thinks the would have let them go longer. Her hand is on Callie’s shoulder, reassuring, and Shauna wants to smack it away. Her other hand is held up slightly, wide open and non-offensive, as if to soothe the hurt that spills across the table. ‘I think I can explain.’
Three pairs of eyes snap to her. She looks to Callie instead. Shauna feels the surge of decades-old jealousy as Jackie starts to speak.
‘Cal, I’ve not told you everything. Your mom and dad went to school with my cousin. I’m named after her.’ Jackie turns her gaze to Jeff, and the jealousy inside Shauna comes to a boil, ‘I get told I look like her all the time. Kind of annoying to be stuck in her shadow like that. I don’t see it, but I can see how it might have freaked you out. When Mrs Sadecki didn’t freak out, I figured I was good, but I’m sorry for scaring you, sir.’
She bats her eyelashes and dips her chin and it’s all so Jackie that Shauna wants to laugh, but Jeff softens and nods and offers the handshake Jackie had gone for, and she takes it, squeezing so hard Shauna can see her hand strain from it even as her smile flutters back to her face.
Jeff takes his hand back and slumps in his seat. ‘I’m so sorry J-’ He stops, shakes himself, continues, ‘Jackie. God, I’m sorry.’ Shauna doesn’t know who exactly he’s talking to, but he blinks, hard, and rights himself, and smiles at Jackie, and Shauna wants him dead, but she hands him the spatula to take a piece of lasagne.
Callie and Jackie whisper to themselves until Shauna itches all over, and then she asks, ‘so, Jackie, do you do any extracurriculars?’
Jackie shakes her head, ‘no. Not my thing.’
‘Not even soccer?’
Jeff slams his water glass down with a thud and a small splash.
Jackie ignores him, ‘nah, I used to but my team was a nightmare to deal with. Put me off sports forever.’
‘A nightmare how?’ Shauna asks despite herself.
Jackie hums thoughtfully and then smirks like she planned this as she tells Shauna, ‘you know, the kind of team that would chew you up.’
Shauna watches Jackie put a forkful of lasagne in her mouth, chew, swallow, moan. ‘This is amazing Mrs Sadecki,’ she says.
Shauna ignores the barb. She’s still reeling from the fact that anyone but her can see Jackie after twenty-five years of Jackie just being hers. It hurts. Jackie is hers, has been hers, will be hers. No one else has seen Jackie for decades. She’s the only thing that is just Shauna’s. And now she’s going to be shared with Callie and Jeff and however many people remember her. It makes her feel violent.
‘You know,’ Jeff says, ‘you actually don’t look that much like your… cousin. Like it hit me at first but the more I look at you the less I see it.’
Shauna snorts into her wine.