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Stuck beneath a sun blank sky,
I can’t climb down from memory,
knowing down there is where we’re not—
you’re not—
meant to be.
— Sean Glatch, " Yeti Hunting "
Every year in mid-December Jackie’s parents host a holiday party at their house. All their country club friends come over for drinks and a dinner that Jackie’s mom spent hours on, after which the men sit in the dining room sipping glasses of the expensive whiskey her dad likes (it’s gross; she and Shauna once made the mistake of sneaking it out of the liquor cabinet and trying it) and rant about Bill Clinton or discuss improving their golf game or whatever, while the women migrate to the living room to politely talk shit about everyone else they know. Jackie is typically trotted out like a show pony at the beginning of the evening for a few rounds of artificial small talk and then mostly ignored for the rest of the night.
“We’re just so proud of her,” her mom says, one bony hand tight on Jackie’s shoulder. That’s news to me, Jackie considers saying. She feels uncharacteristically crabby tonight. The house is sweltering, stuffed full of people with the fireplace roaring; the fabric of her dress is itchy and the straps keep digging into her skin.
When she was younger the Shipmans were always invited to these parties, too; their parents didn’t get along with each other particularly well, but having Shauna there kept Jackie from getting bored and bothering the grownups all night. Shauna’s parents stopped coming when they got divorced and her dad moved away, but Shauna continued to show up every year for Jackie’s sake all the way up until she started dating Jeff. At that point they both decided that it was probably weird to continue using her best friend as a plus-one instead of her boyfriend. But tonight, Jeff is busy with his own family, leaving Jackie to fend for herself; she knows she shouldn’t be annoyed at him for that, but she can’t help but feel a little abandoned. It’s worse than usual this year because she’s a senior, so the conversation has a pointed, almost hostile edge to it, questions thrown at her like lances: Have you decided on a school yet? What are you going to major in? Are you going to play soccer in college too?
Her mom answers that last one for her, laughs and says, “Oh, no, she won’t have time for that.” Jackie smiles tightly and chooses not to refute this. Maybe she really won’t have time, although she’s pretty sure she won’t be majoring in anything that would keep her that busy. She doesn’t know what her mom expects her to be doing. They haven’t discussed it much beyond some vague comments about how it’s important to study something practical, followed by her mom saying something like God knows what Shauna’s going to do with an English degree, which pissed Jackie off enough to derail the conversation completely.
“You know,” says Mrs. Kasich, leaning in conspiratorially and enveloping Jackie in a cloud of her old-lady perfume, “college is the perfect time to find yourself a husband. Keep an eye out.” She punctuates this with a wink.
“Oh, um,” Jackie says, unsure what to do with this advice. She fakes a laugh. “Yeah, definitely. I will.”
As soon as everyone’s had enough wine to forget that she exists, she goes to her room and calls Shauna. The phone rings unanswered for long enough that Jackie starts to worry: maybe Shauna has plans for tonight. It would have to be something that came up last minute, because otherwise Jackie would’ve known about it, right? But what could she possibly be doing without Jackie? Sometimes she forgets that Shauna exists as a whole person of her own even when they’re not together, which Jackie knows makes her sound like a conceited bitch, but it’s not that she thinks Shauna’s world revolves around her, exactly—it’s just jarring remembering that they’re separate people, the phantom-limb shock of realizing a part of you is no longer where it’s supposed to be.
Shauna picks up on the sixth ring. “Hello?”
“Hey,” Jackie says. “It’s me.”
“Hi.” Shauna’s voice relaxes into the one she uses with Jackie, softer and looser. “How’s the party?”
“Oh, you know, just a barrel of laughs. Same as it is every year.”
Shauna laughs. “So you called me to ask if I can come bail you out, huh?”
That’s exactly why she called, but she doesn’t want Shauna to think she’s just using her for her car. “Mmm. Did I? Maybe I just wanted to talk to you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What are you up to tonight?”
“Take a guess.”
“You’re…holed up in your room with a book.”
“Close. A magazine.”
“Jeez, Shipman, you’re wild,” Jackie says. “Well, as exciting as that sounds…can I tempt you into maybe doing something way better?”
Shauna sighs, but it’s performative irritation, not the real kind. Jackie can tell the difference even over the phone. “Jackie, you can’t expect me to just drop whatever I’m doing to come be your, like, on-demand chauffeur whenever you want.”
“I know,” Jackie says, drawing out the word. “But…just this one time, can you? Please?”
“Hm,” Shauna says.
“Please? I’m so bored I could honestly die. Like I’m in genuine medical danger.” She hears indistinct shuffling on the other end. “It’ll be fun, I promise. We can do literally whatever you want.” More shuffling. “Shauna? You there?”
Distantly, she hears Shauna say, “Shut up so I can find my coat!”
“Oh. Okay.”
Shauna says she’ll be there in fifteen minutes, and Jackie uses that time to swap her dress out for something more comfortable. Everyone has migrated to the dining room to eat, so it’s easy for Jackie to slip out the back door unnoticed, although by now her mom is probably so deep into a benzo-and-Cabernet-fueled fugue state that Jackie could stride right past her seat and still not provoke anything more than an eyebrow raise.
The battered Ford Festiva is easy to spot amid the Lexuses and Range Rovers parked on the street in front of the Taylor residence. “So,” Shauna says, once Jackie’s seated and buckled in, “where are we going? You promised fun, you know. I have high expectations.”
“I promised we’d do whatever you wanted,” Jackie says. “So? What do you feel like doing?”
Jackie regrets giving Shauna this power about ten minutes later, when they come to a stop across the street from the used bookstore downtown. Shauna rolls her eyes when she sees the look on Jackie’s face. “Relax, this is just a pitstop. I need to pick up a few things I asked them to hold for me.”
“I wasn’t complaining!” Jackie says, relieved but hopefully not obviously so. “You know, if you did actually want to hang out here all night, that would be fine with me.”
“Sure,” Shauna says. “You can wait in the car if you want.”
“Can you leave it on?” Jackie says. Shauna gives her a look. “So I can listen to the radio! What else am I supposed to do to entertain myself?”
“I’m literally gonna be in there for like, five minutes,” Shauna says. She leaves the key in the ignition anyway.
While Jackie waits she turns on the radio, listens to half of “O Holy Night” before switching to the next station, which is playing a different, slightly worse rendition of the same. She eventually gets bored enough to start rifling through the cassette tapes and CDs that Shauna keeps in here, looking for something listenable and coming up empty.
From the car she can see the windows of the bookstore all lit up, neat yellow squares like pats of butter, Christmas lights hanging over them. Five minutes have come and gone with no sign of Shauna, so Jackie zips up her coat and turns off the car, preparing to brave the cold for the thirty seconds it takes to walk from the car to the store.
A bell above the door jingles cheerily when she walks in. The store is warm and cramped, rows of shelves running like veins down the length of it, the space in between them only wide enough to accommodate a single-file line of people. She spots Shauna at the end of one of these rows, talking to a tall, messy-haired man who’s wearing the dorkiest pair of glasses Jackie’s ever seen but who manages to be good-looking despite them.
Jackie’s too far away to hear what they’re saying, but she sees Shauna laugh and rub her neck, tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear with a shy dip of her head, and it’s immediately clear to Jackie what’s happening here: Shauna’s flirting. It’s a rare sight, and frankly kind of cute, so Jackie ducks behind the adjacent shelf and gets close enough to hear them without being seen. A total creep move, she knows, but—Shauna so rarely talks to boys, even though recently Jackie’s been trying to subtly nudge her in Randy Walsh’s direction. (Admittedly, her motives for this are selfish. She knows he’s totally wrong for Shauna, but he’s Jeff’s best friend, and wouldn’t it be fun if they could all go on double dates together? Despite Jackie’s best efforts, Shauna has yet to be swayed by this argument.)
The guy is saying something about the book he just handed Shauna. “Oh, and if you like that one, you’d love Blood Meridian. You should give that a go too.”
“Yeah, I’ve, um, been meaning to read it,” Shauna says. “Do you have it here?”
“You know what, let me go check.”
He turns the corner and emerges right in front of Jackie, who jumps and smiles nervously at him, even though he has no reason to suspect that she was eavesdropping on his conversation.
“Hi,” he says. “Anything I can help you find?”
Shit. Shauna’s still right on the other side of this shelf, definitely within earshot. Jackie has no choice but to blow her own cover by talking. “No, I’m good. Thanks.”
He walks away right as Shauna says, “Jackie?”
“Hey,” Jackie says, stepping into view. “I got bored waiting. Wanted to see what was so fun in here.”
“Sorry,” Shauna says. “I got distracted.”
“Distracted,” Jackie repeats. She sidles closer, lowering her voice. “By the books, or...?” She tilts her head toward the front, where the guy Shauna was talking to is typing on the computer that sits by the cash register.
“What?”
“He’s cute,” Jackie continues. “Could probably stand to lose the glasses, but still. You should go for it.”
“Go for—? Jackie, we were just talking about books, it wasn’t like that.”
Jackie levels a skeptical look at her and shrugs. “I dunno, I saw you guys. It kinda seemed like it was like that.”
Shauna tilts her head and frowns at her. “You—were you watching me?”
Mercifully, they’re interrupted by the guy—James, according to his nametag—returning with empty hands, holding them up apologetically. “Okay, so, it looks like we don’t have it right now.”
“Oh,” Shauna says. “That’s too bad.” She avoids Jackie’s eyes, but Jackie can still sense the shift in her tone, her demeanor. Jackie keeps glancing at her neck, the skin there flushing brightly and tempting Jackie to reach out, touch it, see if it’s as warm as it looks.
“Yeah,” James says.
Jackie glances between the two of them, Shauna fidgeting with the tail of her shirt, and decides to throw her a bone. “Well,” she says, drawing out the word, “I guess that means we’ll have to come back.”
James turns toward her and flashes her a smile, teeth sharp and white. “I guess you will.”
Shauna still doesn’t say anything. Jackie nudges her, as subtly as she can. “Right, Shauna?”
“Right,” Shauna says flatly. She leaves it there. Well, Jackie thinks, whatever. She can’t do everything for her.
When they return to the car Jackie can tell immediately that something is different. The air between them feels chillier, and not just because the heating in Shauna’s car has been on the fritz ever since she got her license.
This kind of thing has been happening more often recently: Jackie will say or do something completely innocuous, and then the next thing she knows Shauna’s snapping at her or going inexplicably broody and quiet, leaving Jackie to retrace her own steps in an effort to figure out where she went wrong. She’s usually unsuccessful. It doesn’t matter, because whatever it is, Shauna always gets over it within minutes anyway, but it makes Jackie feel a little unbalanced every time it happens, like she’s missed a step going down the stairs. It’s like Shauna has started playing by a different rulebook entirely, one she won’t allow Jackie access to.
“Earth to Shipman,” Jackie says. She pokes Shauna in the shoulder. “Hey. How long are we gonna sit here?”
“Oh,” Shauna says. “Sorry. Um—where are we going from here?”
“You tell me. We’re doing whatever you want.”
“I kind of wanna go home.”
“Ouch.”
“You’re invited, obviously,” Shauna says, rolling her eyes. “Come on. It’ll be nice, we can watch a movie or something. I have a pint of mint chocolate chip with your name on it?”
“I know,” Jackie says. "You always do." Shauna hates mint, insists it tastes like toothpaste no matter how many times Jackie tells her how dumb that is, but it’s Jackie’s favorite flavor of ice cream and therefore the Shipman house maintains a constant supply of it. She knows it’s a minuscule gesture of friendship that doesn’t take much effort beyond an extra five minutes in the freezer aisle and a couple additional dollars on their grocery bill, but she still thinks it’s sweet. “Oh my God, wait. I just had the best idea.”
“What?”
“You remember where we went apple picking this year? That little family farm? They have a whole Christmas thing this time of year that’s supposed to be really cute, like all these lights and a little shop and whatever. I keep asking Jeff to take me, but you know him, he’s not really into that stuff.”
“Right,” Shauna says dryly. “Because God forbid he has to do something that doesn’t involve shoving his tongue as far down your throat as possible.”
“Ew, Shauna, don’t be gross.”
“How is it gross for me to say that but it’s not gross for you to be on the receiving end of it?”
“He doesn’t shove his tongue down my throat,” Jackie insists. “We’re not fourteen. He’s a good kisser.”
Shauna scoffs and shakes her head. “I guess I’ll take your word for it?”
To be honest, it is kind of gross, but no one really loves the clumsiness with which boys kiss, do they? It’s just one of those things you have to put up with. She imagines sex—which unfortunately for Jeff she’s still working up to—will be the same way, which is fine. Life’s all about compromise. She doesn’t think Shauna would understand. Plus, she doesn’t want to give Shauna another reason to dislike Jeff and his relationship with Jackie, which she very plainly does. She’s never actually said anything about it, but Jackie can tell. She gets it, though; you can only watch your best friend cry over so many dramatic breakups with the same guy before you start to hate him a little.
And then there’s a small fucked-up part of her that wonders if maybe Shauna’s jealous of him. An even uglier question has occurred to her too, more recently: does she want Shauna to be jealous of him? It doesn’t make sense; shouldn’t she be upset that the two most important people in her life don’t get along? But the idea of Shauna being greedy with Jackie’s time has an undeniable appeal to it.
“So,” Jackie says. “Bookstore guy.”
Jackie’s looking at herself in the little mirror on the sun visor, fixing her hair, but she hears Shauna sigh and can imagine the expression on her face. Still, she can’t resist poking the bear. “What about him?” Shauna says.
“Well, you’re gonna go back, right? To talk to him?”
Shauna shakes her head. “Probably not.”
“Why?” Jackie says. “He’s totally your type.”
“I don’t have a type.”
“Everyone has a type,” Jackie insists. Shauna shakes her head, her hair shifting with the movement to reveal a hint of the earrings she’s wearing, the gold hoops that Jackie likes on her. “You don’t think so?”
“I just think it’s dumb to put people in boxes like that. Like, I can’t just be into whoever I’m into? I have to pick a category?”
“Oh my God, Shauna, it’s not that deep.”
“It kind of is, though. People aren’t that simple.”
“Boys,” Jackie says, “absolutely are that simple.”
“That’s depressing.”
“Not really.”
“It’s boring.”
“So? Sometimes boring is nice.” She means it. Jeff is boring and predictable and easy to please; she never has to wonder what he wants from her, never has to think herself in circles trying to interpret his silences the way she does with Shauna, who is currently glowering at her side mirror like Jackie has genuinely said something wrong. “Okay, wait, what are you into?” Jackie says. Now that they’re talking about it, she’s not sure she actually knows. “You’ve never really liked anyone, have you? Besides just, like, little crushes.”
“Um,” Shauna says. There’s a long pause while she thinks. “There was that Swedish kid. The one who went to our school for like a year and then disappeared? Leif, or something?”
“That was literally ninth grade.”
“Well, it’s not like I have a lot of good options around here.”
“Actually, yeah, that’s fair. You’re definitely too good for Wiskayok,” Jackie says. Shauna regards her with an undecipherable expression. “I bet you’ll clean up in college, though. All those deep, brooding writer types in your English classes.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Shauna says.
It occurs to Jackie, then, that for all her idle daydreaming about what college will be like for them, she’s never given much thought to what their lives might look like outside of each other. It’s always been her and Shauna surrounded by a supporting cast of faceless strangers; all the new friends they make will still come in second-place to each other. She’s never considered the possibility that Shauna might not think the same.
Shauna jams the key in the ignition, the car juddering to life, and signals to pull out of her parking spot. “So where did you say this Christmas thing was?”
“Shrewsbury,” Jackie says distractedly.
The thing is, Shauna doesn’t have to worry about Jackie replacing her with someone smarter, more sophisticated, better for her, because that person doesn’t exist. But—should Jackie be worried about the reverse happening? So far Shauna’s world has been limited to Wiskayok, and Jackie has never had any reason to doubt her place in it. Now for the first time she wonders if that will still be the case once they’re at Rutgers. If things will change. If she’ll have to hold on tighter to Shauna to keep them from changing.
Jackie lives for this kind of corny seasonal shit. She likes the ritual of it, the reliability of setting the same scene year after year: putting up the tree and having Shauna over to help decorate it, holding the ladder for her dad while he hangs lights along the gutters and down the columns in front of their house, wreaths and garlands and her home feeling as warm and lived-in as it did all the time when she was a kid. It’s nice to be reminded that there are still things she can count on, no matter how much the world around her changes.
Shauna is definitely not as openly sentimental. “How insane do you think their electric bill is?” she says when they get there. Jackie just laughs and shakes her head. “What? I’m asking important questions.”
They wander underneath rows of trees that bow together like spindly, steepled fingers, covered in what is admittedly an egregious amount of string lights. Everything is covered in lights, actually, sheets of them, pinpricks of color cascading down the roof and walls of the farmhouse and along the banks of the shallow gorge that cuts through the middle of the property. From a distance it looks like a field of scarlet stars.
Wondering out loud, Jackie says, “What do you call stars right before they’re about to die and explode?”
“Is this a real question or the set-up to a joke?”
“It was a question,” Jackie says. “But I can think of a punchline if you want.”
Shauna tilts her head in thought. “I don’t know if improv comedy is one of your strengths.”
Jackie gasps, mock-offended. “Fuck you, I’ll have you know I can be very funny when I want to be.”
“Okay,” Shauna says, pressing her lips together like she’s hiding a smile.
“You think I’m funny, so what does that say about your sense of humor?”
“I think you’re funny?”
“You’re literally trying not to laugh right now!”
They meander across a short wooden bridge toward a sign that promises fifty-cent hot chocolate. Jackie loops her arm around Shauna’s elbow, tucking herself into Shauna’s side.
“Is this new?” she asks, running her hand over the fabric of Shauna’s jacket. “I’ve never seen you wear it.”
“Yeah, I bought it a few weeks ago. Figured it was time to ditch my old one.”
“God, finally. That thing was, like, one winter away from completely falling apart,” Jackie says. “Where’d you get it?” She reaches behind Shauna’s neck to pull out the tag. She catches a glimpse of the label—A&F—before Shauna jumps and squirms away from her.
“Jesus fuck, Jackie, your fingers are freezing,” she says. Jackie shrugs, unapologetic, and resumes her previous position of clinging to Shauna’s arm. “Thrift store in Red Bank.”
Jackie hums and nods. “Wait, you went shopping without me?” she says. Shauna rolls her eyes. “Well, I guess a thrift store makes more sense than you willingly stepping foot inside an Abercrombie.”
“I have nothing against Abercrombie,” Shauna says. “You know Hemingway killed himself with a gun he bought from Abercrombie?”
She laughs the kind of laugh that only Shauna can elicit, the kind that spills out of her like soda from a shaken can, fizzy and bubbling. “What?”
“It’s true.”
“What the hell kind of fun fact is that?” Jackie says. Shauna shrugs. “You are so fucking weird, Shipman.”
As they walk, Jackie yammers about nothing, and Shauna listens with that intent, thoughtful look on her face that Jackie sort of adores. She talks about soccer: they have a strong team this year, and Jackie doesn’t want to be too optimistic but she thinks they could go all the way if they really focus. (Shauna agrees.) She talks about college, about how nice it’ll be to share a dorm and not have to spend so much time apart. Jackie doesn’t have a fucking clue what she’s going to major in, but at least she can count on her best friend being there by her side while she figures it out.
“Honestly, that’s all I need,” Jackie finishes. “Just you and me against the world, Shipman.”
In response Shauna is quiet for what feels like a long time, so long that Jackie starts to worry that she said too much, weirded Shauna out somehow. She retraces her words, trying to figure out what she could’ve said wrong, but nothing stands out to her.
“Yeah,” Shauna says, finally. “You and me.”
The glow from all the lights around them spills over Shauna’s face, staining it with color, but her eyes seem to remain impervious to it; they look as dark and expansive as always, bottomless, like if Jackie isn’t careful she might fall in. Like Shauna possesses a kind of gravity of her own, threatening to pull Jackie forward. Like there’s such a thing as getting too close.
"Let's go find the hot chocolate," Jackie says.
The hot chocolate in question turns out to be located at a booth near the exit, where they wait in a long line for a harried-looking woman to ladle Swiss Miss into a paper cup for each of them. They take it back to Shauna’s car and drink it while sitting in the parking lot.
“This isn’t bad,” Jackie says, following a contemplative sip, “but I miss the kind your mom used to make.” She hasn’t had it in a long time but she can still remember the taste, the memory of it woven into winter evenings and snow days. That was back when Mrs. Shipman was a reliable presence in Shauna’s house, before she had to work so much.
“I could still make it for you sometime,” Shauna says. “It’s basically just cocoa powder and half-and-half.”
Jackie wrinkles her nose. “Wait, it’s all half-and-half? Isn’t that, like, a thousand calories?” Then she pauses, horrified. “Jesus, I sound like my mom.”
As they peel out of the parking lot Jackie says she’s hungry, and they bicker lazily about what to eat while sailing down the highway. Shauna wants to pick something up and go home, but Jackie wants real food, so they end up going with real food. Shauna pulls off at the exit for Mindy’s, a diner that’s admittedly just barely above Waffle House in quality, except you can have a meal there without having to worry about a physical brawl interrupting it.
They order a giant stack of chocolate chip pancakes and share it, their forks colliding intermittently, sparring for the last bite. Shauna wins.
“Oh my God,” Jackie says when she’s done, letting her head tip onto the backrest of her seat. “I’m gonna have to add an extra mile to my run tomorrow, but that was so worth it.”
“Definitely better than whatever nightmare casserole thing your mom made for tonight,” Shauna says.
“One hundred percent,” Jackie says. “It was tuna casserole, by the way.”
“Okay, what is with your mom and making everything with tuna?”
Jackie snorts midway through a sip of her soda, and has to blink through the burning in her nose before she can reply. “Honestly, that’s a great question. I think my dad likes it?”
Shauna makes a face that gets Jackie to inadvertently aspirate her Diet Coke again.
“Is it bad that I’m kinda glad Jeff couldn’t make it tonight?” she says, once she’s done as much coughing and sniffling as she needs to.
“What, did he have a basketball game to lose or something?”
Jackie stifles a laugh and says, “Shauna, that’s mean.”
Shauna smirks and shrugs.
“And just FYI, he’s not doing basketball this year. Focusing on baseball instead.”
“Oh, is he,” Shauna says, not bothering to hide the complete and utter lack of interest in her voice.
“Sorry. I’ll stop talking about him,” Jackie says. “I was just trying to say I’m having a good night.” She didn’t mean for it to come out sounding like a confession, but she only realizes once she’s halfway through the sentence that she feels strangely vulnerable saying it, like she’s peeling a layer away and presenting herself to Shauna raw and open, like the shiny pink skin unroofed by a scraped knee. “You’re a good date, Shipman.”
With a little smile, the kind of look she gets when she’s trying not to seem too pleased by a compliment, Shauna says, “I try.”
The place is relatively empty—it’s a weird time of night, a little too late for dinner but too early for the late-night crowd of drunk stragglers from the bars further down the street—so Jackie doesn’t feel too bad about occupying the table for another couple of hours, but their waitress is definitely fed up with them. She keeps aiming pointed glances in their direction and aggressively popping her gum. It’s fine, Jackie thinks. She’ll just leave a generous tip.
Shauna keeps fidgeting with her menu, and eventually the clack-clack-clack of the metal corners hitting the table gets deep enough under Jackie’s skin for her to say, “Are you okay?”
“Hm? Yeah. Why?”
“Because you keep throwing that menu around,” Jackie says, “and it’s kind of driving me insane?”
“Oh.” She drops it, but looks no less restless. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Jackie says, warily eyeing Shauna’s hands, palms flat against the table like she has to consciously resist the urge to move them, “just—you seem kind of on edge. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m just, uh, nervous. About—finals,” she adds, unconvincingly.
Jackie raises her eyebrows. “You’re nervous about school?” Shauna nods without meeting Jackie’s eyes. She’s such a terrible liar it almost gives Jackie secondhand embarrassment. But they’re having a good night, so Jackie decides to leave it, for now. “What, are you scared your GPA might go from like, a 5.0 to a 4.9?”
“That—that doesn’t even make sense mathematically.”
“Nerd,” Jackie says. “Besides, with your SAT score I’m pretty sure you could fail literally every class you’re in and Rutgers would still take you.”
Shauna smiles weakly. Jackie studies her face, lingering on details she only notices because she’s spent enough time around Shauna to have memorized them: the faint lines under her eyes that Shauna always asks Jackie to dab extra concealer over when she’s doing her makeup, too stubborn to believe Jackie when she tells her she likes them; the pretty shape of her mouth and how she always seems to keep her lips slightly parted; the almost imperceptible bump over the bridge of her nose, and the curve at the end of it. That dumb non-smile is more endearing than it has any right to be, and it occurs to her that she can’t remember the last time she got to just sit and look at her like this. She’s been stretched too thin this year, attending to Jeff, her parents, college stuff, Yellowjackets stuff, all taking from her and leaving her with little left over for Shauna.
She misses the days when she and Shauna would while away hours at a time holed up in one of their rooms, or laying by the YMCA pool in summer, or sitting at the spot on the local bike trail that overlooks the canal, which they only know about because of the time Jackie lost control of her bike and went careening down the embankment and into the grass. It’ll be different next semester, though. She’ll make sure it is.
On the drive back, Shauna is quiet. Jackie has come to understand that Shauna’s silences come in different flavors; this one seems pensive, tense, like a bubble of chewing gum about to burst. Jackie keeps glancing sideways at her to see if she’s about to say anything, but she doesn’t.
To Jackie’s immense relief, by the time they pull up to her house all the cars lining her driveway and curb are gone. “What time is it?” she asks.
Shauna glances at her watch, the no-frills Timex she’s had since freshman year. Jackie’s pretty sure she got it in the boys’ section at Marshall’s, but it looks good on her anyway. Especially now, with her hands at ten-and-two on the steering wheel and the cuff of her flannel sliding down her arm, exposing the slender line of her wrist, the watch encircling it, her pale skin and tendons going taut with each movement. These shirts, which Shauna basically lives in every fall and winter, have a way of making her look softer, warmer. More touchable.
The glass of the watch face is all scratched up from years of use, the strap worn and frayed. It’s sorely in need of being replaced. Maybe Jackie can get her a new one for Christmas.
“Eleven,” Shauna says, sounding surprised. “I didn’t realize it was so late.”
“If you want, you could just sleep over,” Jackie offers. “We can bake cookies. I have a bunch of that Pillsbury Christmas dough, you know the kind with the little trees? The one where you just have to pop out of the packaging and put in the oven?”
“Does that really count as baking?”
“It does to me!” Jackie insists. Shauna laughs, and for one hopeful moment Jackie thinks she’s convinced Shauna to stay. “So?”
“I don’t know, I’m kind of tired.”
“Hence the sleeping part of sleeping over,” she says. But she can sense Shauna’s reluctance in her voice and her one-shouldered shrug, the same way she’s been picking up on the distance widening between them throughout this semester, which she’s been doggedly ignoring in the hope that whatever it is will fix itself on its own. Or that maybe she can fix it herself. “Okay, okay. That’s fine.”
“Sorry,” Shauna says. “Maybe next weekend?”
“Sure, yeah.” She fishes her house key out of her pocket, and when she looks back up Shauna’s chewing on her bottom lip and staring at her steering wheel. “Thanks, by the way,” Jackie adds, in an attempt to bring Shauna back to her and away from whatever’s clearly been bothering her all night. It works. “For coming to my rescue tonight.”
“You don’t have to thank me. I wanted to.”
Something in Shauna’s voice makes Jackie’s breath catch. She’s grateful for the dark and the fact that the indoor lighting in Shauna’s car stopped working years ago, because she’s sure there’s something on her face that Shauna would otherwise be able to read. “Still. I know I shouldn’t expect you to just, like, show up to be my knight in shining armor whenever I ask, but—you always do.”
“Yeah, well,” Shauna says. Still the same quiet delicate voice as before, like the words themselves are fragile and have to be handled carefully. “I always want to.”
She’s looking directly at Jackie now and it makes Jackie wish she’d go back to the steering wheel. She’s looking at Jackie like she wants something from her, and Jackie can’t figure out what it is.
Her mouth dry, Jackie says, “You’re a good friend.”
When Jackie gets out of the car, Shauna follows. “I’ll, um, walk you to your door?”
Jackie snorts. “All one hundred feet?”
“Fine,” Shauna says, “never mind.”
She goes to open the car door again, but Jackie grabs her arm and stops her. “Oh my God, no, I’m sorry. I just meant, like, I’m really not concerned I’m gonna get murdered in my front lawn.”
Shauna rolls her eyes. “That’d be an interesting Dateline episode.”
“Who’d be the culprit, you think?”
“Taissa," Shauna says, a little too quickly. “Or maybe Mrs. Lipson.”
Jackie laughs hard at that, the idea of her tenth-grade trig teacher, who hated everyone in general but Jackie in particular, killing her. “Jesus, seriously what the fuck was her problem? You remember when she tried to give me detention for asking to borrow your calculator? That bitch had it out for me.”
“Maybe she was just jealous of your superhuman trigonometry prowess,” Shauna says, finally grinning when Jackie slaps her shoulder and causes her to stumble a little. “Ow!”
“Fuck off, that class was hard for normal people,” Jackie says. “And it’s not like I did bad. I got a B+! Which I think is pretty good!”
The driveway is slippery, forcing them to take little penguin steps so they don't fall.
"Do you really think Tai’s still mad at me about the captain thing?" Jackie says.
"Who knows. She did really, really want it."
"Well, she should be mad at Coach, then. It's not my fault—"
"I know," Shauna says gently. "I’m on your side. I think it's dumb that she's mad."
"You do?"
"Of course. Is that even a question?"
Jackie shrugs. "Just checking."
"Checking…?"
"That you don't, like, secretly think I'm gonna do a shitty job or something."
"Jackie," Shauna says. It's the tone of voice she uses when Jackie calls her to inform her that she and Jeff have broken up again, the one she used when they lost states last year and Jackie spent that whole evening enumerating all the ways it might have been her own fault.
"Sorry," Jackie says. “I know it’s a stupid thing to be so nervous about, I just—I don’t know. I don’t want to let anyone down.”
“You are not gonna let anyone down,” Shauna says. “And—I really don’t think you have anything to be nervous about. I mean, everyone loves you. People listen to you, without you even having to try.”
She has to make a conscious effort not to seem too pleased, or Shauna will think she’s fishing for compliments. Which, to be fair, she kind of is. “Thanks,” she mutters, ducking her head so Shauna doesn’t see her grin. “How do you always know how to make me feel better?”
“Lots of practice?”
It’s started snowing, although Jackie doesn’t remember when exactly. Had it been snowing the whole drive?
They get to her front step. Jackie leans against the door and jokes, “Well, I guess this is my stop.”
“Guess so,” Shauna says.
“Night, Shipman.”
She pulls Shauna into a hug, and everything up to this point is still as familiar as always. Jackie tucks her nose into Shauna’s hair, takes in the sweet clean smell of her shampoo, one of those vague scents whose names tell you nothing about what they actually are—Ocean Breeze or whatever. There’s no reason this should feel any different from the hundreds of nights before this that have ended this exact same way, but it does. It feels important. Does Shauna feel it too? She’s brought her hands up to press them flat against Jackie’s back, holding her in place.
Don’t go , Jackie wants to say, all of a sudden irrationally desperate to keep Shauna here. Stay here, stay with me.
But Shauna doesn’t. She drops her hands but pulls away only slightly, so their faces are still close enough for Jackie to see the details of her eyes, the rim of color that usually remains indistinguishable from the black of her pupils coming alive in the light above them.
“Jax, there’s something I need to tell you,” she says, all at once like she’s purging it from her body.
“Uh-oh,” Jackie says, a nervous attempt at keeping things light. “Is it something…bad?”
“No,” Shauna says hurriedly. “No, it’s just, um—earlier, you were talking about college, so—”
Shauna’s wringing her hands together, an old anxious habit that always makes her look younger. It makes Jackie feel younger too, wrenches her out of the present and back to a time when making Shauna feel better was her sole responsibility, the one thing she could always count on being good at. Seven years old, Shauna’s first time on a plane; fourteen, chattering nervously over the phone the night before their first day of freshman year; seventeen, waiting on SAT scores to come out. Muscle memory compels Jackie to take Shauna’s hands, stilling them, the warmth of her skin spreading like a fever into Jackie’s body.
“Shauna,” Jackie says.
The snow is floating lazily to the ground the way it would in a shaken-up snow globe, flakes coming down so slowly it’s like they’re suspended in mid-air. It’s peaceful, dreamlike. The world is quiet and still around them, and there’s nothing to temper the heady drowning feeling of Shauna’s eyes on her. Sometimes in moments like this—sleepovers when Jackie wakes in the middle of the night and feels Shauna sleeping next to her, or the immediate aftermath of winning a big game when Shauna beams at her and jumps almost violently into her arms—she wonders what would happen if she allowed herself to enjoy at least this. If she leaned into the feeling, and let it wreck her.
Jackie shivers involuntarily, and Shauna frowns. “Are you cold?”
“No, I’m fine,” Jackie says. “Quit stalling, Shauna, you’re making me nervous.”
Shauna shuffles almost imperceptibly closer. Jackie tries to back up to make room for her, but she’s already right up against the door. Something tightens in her chest, like her ribcage is closing in on her heart, threatening to crush it.
“Sorry,” Shauna says. She’s beautiful in the cold, bleeding warmth into Jackie with just her presence, the chill reddening her cheeks, nose, mouth. Winter suits her. Standing under the yellowish glow from the lamp above the door, she looks like a painting. Museum-worthy. Jackie very much wants to preserve her like this, keep her frozen here, formaldehyde-fresh and hers.
“Shauna, what’s wrong?” When Shauna still doesn’t say anything, Jackie tries again. “You know that even if it is something bad you can tell me, right? I promise I won’t freak out. Okay?”
Shauna studies Jackie’s face, says, “Okay,” and kisses her.
Jackie goes still, feeling like caught prey. She can taste the Chapstick that Shauna is constantly applying and reapplying in winter, and it’s not the tinted kind Jackie uses but she feels like it should leave a stain on her mouth anyway. Her lips are as soft as they look, a realization that makes Jackie wonder how often she looks at them, and her movements are gentle, so slow they’re almost reverent. She puts one cautious hand on Jackie’s cheek, cold fingertips gliding over Jackie’s burning skin and then settling in her hair, and when Jackie opens her mouth to her she realizes with a sinking feeling that this is going to ruin kissing for her forever. This is nothing like it is with Jeff. She didn’t know it could feel like this. She wants to un-know it.
It isn’t until she feels herself start to kiss Shauna back in earnest that her mind seems to catch up with her body. The shock of clarity that accompanies it is like stepping into a cold shower, sobering her up and rendering her clearheaded enough to make the choice she knows she needs to. If Jackie were a different person—a better, braver person, the kind of person Shauna apparently thinks she is—she’d wrap her arms around Shauna’s neck, arch into her, work Shauna’s snow-dampened hair out of its low ponytail so Jackie could run her hands through it, and kiss her until dawn started to peek over the horizon.
She hates letting Shauna down; she wishes she could be better for her. But Jackie knows: she is not that person, no matter how badly she wants to be.
With a horrible ache deep in her gut, she splays her palm over Shauna’s sternum and pushes her away, gentle enough to not seem grossed out but firm enough for Shauna to understand: no. Shauna stumbles back like she’s been slapped, like Jackie did something to her. Like Jackie’s the one who just set Shauna’s world on fire, divided her life cleanly into a before and after.
“Shauna—”
“Shit. I’m sorry,” Shauna says. Her eyes have somehow managed to get wider, and she touches her lips like she’s checking to see if they’re still there. She looks—scared, Jackie realizes. Scared of Jackie? What kind of person does she think Jackie is? “Jackie, I didn’t—I wasn’t—”
Partly because, as always, she can’t resist the impulse to make Shauna feel better and partly because she doesn’t want to hear Shauna say something like I didn’t mean it, I wasn’t thinking, Jackie interrupts her. “Shauna, stop, it’s okay,” she manages, wondering if the expression on her face makes it too obvious that it isn’t remotely okay, that she liked it, that she wishes Shauna would do it again. “Look, it’s—it’s fine.”
There’s that kicked-puppy face again, and Shauna’s eyes roving across Jackie’s face like she’s searching for something there. Jackie’s nervous she might find it.
“It’s fine?” Shauna says. “What—?”
“Yeah.” Somehow she relaxes her features into a breezy, reassuring smile. “It’s not a big deal.”
Shauna hesitates and for one excruciating second the world narrows to just the sight of her standing there, still so close, a face Jackie knows every inch of by heart. The snow mutes everything, and all Jackie can focus on is the sound of their breathing and the thrum of her pulse.
“Right?” Jackie prompts.
“Right,” Shauna mumbles, which is the response Jackie wanted. Isn’t it?
“See you Monday,” Jackie says, swallowing against the lump in her throat. She’s pretty sure Shauna says something else before turning to leave, but her ears are ringing from the force of how bad she wants to follow her down the driveway and kiss her one more time by her car, so she doesn’t really catch it.
Jackie knows how this night ends: she’ll go up to her room, keeping the lights off and skipping the creaky stair so her parents don’t wake up. She’ll take her makeup off and brush her teeth and change into her tank top and sweats. Then she’ll get in bed, curl up on her side, and cry. Really cry, the ugly kind that requires shoving her face into her pillow to muffle any noise she makes. This night, she realizes, feels eerily familiar. A story she’s told herself over and over again, the past and future happening on top of each other with Jackie caught in some kind of limbo in between. And she knows how it ends, but she still finds herself standing on her front step with her key halfway turned in the lock, watching Shauna’s retreating form as she shuffles back to her car, and wondering if it’s too late to make a different choice.
“Shauna!” she calls.
Shauna doesn’t stop or turn around, so Jackie tries again, a little louder. It’s like Shauna can’t even hear her. The snow has gotten heavier, thick fat flakes that quickly begin to accumulate on the ground, muting everything. Actually, now that she thinks about it, when did the snow start to fall so heavily? And she’s so cold: colder than it would’ve been that night, and definitely too cold to spend an hour outside looking at Christmas lights. Tired, too, bone-deep exhaustion like she’s never felt before, clogging up her mind and her senses like weeds choking and consuming a flowerbed. A film of white obscures Shauna from view entirely now, and a thought shoves its way into her brain like an intruder—this is different. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. This isn’t how it went. Is it?
Shauna wakes up shivering, her back aching from the hard cabin floor. She’d been having a weird dream. It isn’t unusual for her to dream about Jackie—it’s pathetically, embarrassingly frequent, actually—but this dream was different. A night pulled almost verbatim from her memory, uncannily vivid, one she’s tried her hardest to forget.
It seemed real enough that she can still feel the dull ache that had taken up permanent residence in her ribcage that December, pain like a ghost haunting her body. She was so miserable that whole winter, sick with the knowledge that she still hadn’t figured out how to tell Jackie about Brown, sicker still with the increasingly persistent thrum of wanting, the growing appetite she didn’t know how to sate. She remembers listening to Jackie talk about Jeff all night, annoyed at herself for folding immediately to whatever Jackie asked. How being around Jackie was almost as hard as being away from her. Standing by Jackie’s front door and being so close and then finally, insanely, kissing her.
And then the sting of rejection, of Jackie pushing her away and taking a whole step back, like Shauna had some kind of contagious disease. The blind, animal panic that trapped her words in her throat. Jackie saying something flippant and cool, which was the only reaction worse than disgust; she’d realized then that it barely even registered as an event for Jackie. She’d think Well, that was weird and then go on with the rest of her life, not sparing it another thought except to maybe feel a little uncomfortable changing in front of Shauna from then on or something, and Shauna would be left alone with this feeling that had already begun to eat her from the inside out.
She never wrote about that part in her journal. She wanted to, but the actual act of trying to put it into words, make it permanent in ink, was too difficult.
It’s funny, though—as real as it felt, there were also moments that don’t align with how she remembers the night. She remembers Jackie being annoyingly invested in her love life or lack thereof, which always got under Shauna’s skin because why was Jackie so eager to pawn her off on someone else? Was she sick of Shauna third-wheeling with her and Jeff all the time?
She remembers, too, Jackie explicitly casting her in the role of Jeff’s understudy, remembers hating her for her weird need to rub salt in the wound of Shauna’s perpetual second-place status in Jackie’s life, and hating herself for craving the attention anyway. Because she did— does—crave it, no matter how hard she tried not to: the attention, the flirting that wasn’t really flirting, Jackie touching her and telling her she needed her and smiling at her like she really meant it. She’d assumed Jackie was teasing her, fully aware of what she was doing, getting close and then pulling away just because she liked to watch the effect it had on Shauna. A predator playing with its food.
But she wonders, now, how much of her memory of it had been soured by time and hindsight. It’s tempting to wonder if maybe she’d been wrong. It was just a dream, Shauna knows that, but the image of Jackie’s face after she kissed her is indelible, impossible to avoid, and when Shauna closes her eyes and pictures it now, she can no longer see the disgust or pity she thought she’d perceived in Jackie’s eyes.
The details that she hasn’t thought about in a while have come back to her in a rush, and now they fill up her brain like a rising tide, drowning her. Jackie talking excitedly about college and the ache of guilt, the awful thrill of imagining Jackie missing her; all the places Jackie touched her without thinking, taking her hand like it was nothing, their knuckles brushing in the dark; standing with her in front of her house and wondering if she’d imagined Jackie kissing her back. The drive home, the pads of her fingers still burning from the warmth of Jackie’s skin.
She didn’t talk to Jackie on Sunday, spent the whole day thinking about how fucking stupid she’d been and feeling nauseous every time she thought about it, which was about as often as humanly possible, and on Monday morning she pulled up to the Taylors’ house and watched Jeff crawl out of Jackie’s bedroom window with a kind of aimless rage that was still unfamiliar to her then. Minutes later Jackie opened her front door and Shauna thought she might actually throw up. She looked impossibly beautiful the way she did basically every day, but that morning it felt almost hostile, targeted, like she was specifically being hot at Shauna.
On the drive to school she’d been terrified that Jackie was going to bring it up, that she’d try to be nice about it but would end up making Shauna feel worse, the kind of accidental cruelty that’s so uniquely Jackie. Shauna pictured her tossing her hair back and laughing, saying something like So, uh, Saturday night? What was that all about? Or maybe it would be worse; maybe she would fidget in the passenger seat, pick at her nails, angle her body away from Shauna’s, whatever she had to do to make it abundantly clear that Shauna had thoroughly and permanently creeped her out.
But Jackie didn’t do any of that. They went through the motions of their usual morning small-talk like they were reading from a script. Jackie’s usual pep was a little too bright, almost strained, to be entirely convincing, but Shauna played along anyway. It was like Jackie was trying to wrangle them back into normalcy by force. And Shauna, like she always does, let her.
They never talked about it. She doesn’t know if even Jackie remembers. Maybe she should ask her, now that they’re in the middle of nowhere with literally nothing to lose—that is, if Jackie ever talks to her again after what happened last night. A lingering sense of unease has curled up in her stomach like an animal making itself at home there, and as she adjusts to being awake it coalesces into something familiar: Shauna misses her.
She shivers again. The first time, she assumed it was an after effect from the dream, but then she sees her breath puff out in front of her and realizes the cabin is freezing. Still dazed, she stands and goes to the window. Snow blankets the world outside, untouched and blindingly white. At first she doesn’t notice the figure lying still on the ground, Jackie’s fire reduced to twigs and ash. Instead she looks toward the horizon, and for a moment all she sees is the brutal beauty of this place: the powdered-sugar dusting over the branches of the firs that make up the tree line, and the sky empty and endless above them.