Chapter Text
“This is the last time.”
Nat stretches her limbs languidly as she climbs off Kevyn Tan’s lap and rolls onto her back, suffering a twig to the shoulder blade while she flops down onto the dirt. She hopes he hears some sort of conviction in her voice to match that in her mind, though if she’s being honest she isn’t sure it exists in there either.
“I mean it. We aren’t doing this again.”
Kevyn fixes her with a dopey, smug smile, the freshly-rolled joint once tucked behind his ear now held lazily between his lips. He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t beg. He just chuckles, takes a drag and fixes the fly of his jeans.
“I’ll see you on Wednesday then?”
“Fuck you, Kevyn.” Nat hisses as she stands up, lurching to regain the balance she lost somewhere between her fourth and fifth drink. She pulls on her faded Nirvana t-shirt, swearing into the freezing night air as it snags on her rings and her elbows and her nose and-
She takes a breath. In through her nose and out through her mouth, like Laura Lee taught them when Jackie had a panic attack about losing to their local rivals. Nat hadn’t cared too much about the result, but for a highly-strung, chronic over-achiever like Jackie, she could sort of understand why anything less than perfection interfered with her ability to breathe.
Nat had given up on perfection long ago.
She kicks through the bushes towards the bonfire, returning to the buzz of an exclusive party that Jackie had coerced Mari into throwing for the Yellowjackets and their circle of friends.
Nat didn’t particularly like being social, much less attending parties full of people she knew would make excruciating small talk to avoid the delicate issue of her dad blowing his own fucking brains out.
It had happened a year earlier, but Nat was done with grieving a father she never really had in the first place. Ready for people to stop treating her as if she would splinter at any moment.
“Nat! Nat, I was looking all over for you!”
Misty’s mittened hand closes around Nat’s wrist and she feels herself being dragged over to the fire, where the rest of the Yellowjackets sit huddled in varying states of sobriety.
Nat didn’t hate Misty. Sure, the girl was insufferably optimistic with more zest for life than Nat had ever possessed. And more pairs of mittens than any sensible person could find a use for. But there was something endearing about the way she showed up for the Yellowjackets time after time sporting a wide grin, baby blues magnified by the thickness of her glasses and orange slices at half time.
“Sorry Misty, just needed to pee. Drank too much too quick.” Nat hooks Mari’s solo cup out of her hands as she passes her en route to an empty log, sticking her tongue out at the girl’s indignation.
“Fucking thief.” Mari mutters under her breath and Nat narrows her eyes at her as she sits down across the circle.
“Oh, so you weren’t out there with Kevyn Tan then?”
Nat chokes on her mouthful of cheap whatever the fuck was in Mari’s cup and silently revokes every nice thought she ever had about Misty. Several sets of eyes swivel towards her, and the hairs on the back of her neck stand up under their collective attention.
“I saw him heading the other way towards his truck,” Misty rambles on, oblivious to the spotlight she had unwittingly shone on Nat. “He only had one shoe and his shirt was in his hand, which if you ask me isn’t the right place for a shirt to be in this temperature.”
A few snorts rise from the group as Nat cautiously sweeps her gaze across the circle. Some look amused, notably Crystal, who Nat is sure doesn’t even know what sex is. A few look disappointed in a way she’d seen far too many times before. Van is staring at her as if she had grown a spare head, though Nat supposes that’s more about the fact that Kevyn is a man than the fact she had snuck out of the party to fuck someone who wasn’t even on the guestlist.
Nat’s eyes eventually land on Lottie fucking Matthews, who’s looking at her with an expression Nat isn’t able to read. It’s carefully controlled, a mask of indifference and laissez-faire. She’s sure that underneath it is nothing but disdain and condescension, but at least she has the social decency to hide it from her.
The taste of beer in Nat’s mouth sours and she abandons it in search of the crumpled joint she knows is sitting deep in her jacket pocket. She sparks it into life and takes a long, slow drag, staring past it into the flames rising from the bonfire and doing her level best not to feel as though it’s she herself being burnt at the stake.
“Misty, respectfully, get flying fucked.”
The group giggles again, though thankfully this time with Nat rather than at her, and conversation turns to their latest soccer result (a resounding victory thank you very much). Nat allows the easy banter to wash over her as she introspects on just why the fuck she feels so put out by Lottie’s reaction to the Kevyn incident.
Lottie Matthews was, for want of a better description, an enigma. She enjoyed a level of popularity Nat had no interest in, lived in a fancy house with rich parents and (rumour had it) a set of staff to cater to her every need. She wore expensive clothes and drove a fucking Mercedes.
Yet Nat would often catch her sitting alone, nose deep in a thick, dog-eared novel with her tongue poking out in concentration as she lost herself to worlds beyond their own. She had almost zero social media presence (Nat had checked). Most curious of all, she had disappeared for three months over summer for reasons unknown to their entire senior cohort.
Nat didn’t understand her. Nat didn’t like things she didn’t understand. Ergo, Nat did not like Lottie Matthews. Right?
She takes a sip from the hip flask Van had offered her, wincing not at the spirits hitting the back of her throat but instead at the fact that she barely felt them at all. She tunes back into the conversation happening around her as it breaches a subject widely considered by those present to be something of a broken record.
“Shauna, just put on your big girl pants and go by yourself,” The pitch of Jackie’s voice increases steadily as it rings across the clearing, somehow amplified by the alcohol and THC making their way around Nat’s nervous system. “Me and Jeff are going to see a movie, I can’t come with you.”
Nat holds her breath.
Jackie and Shauna were like two black holes, dancing magnetically around each other, getting closer and closer until their gravities inevitably hurled them together to create one giant, fucked up black hole. Nat was sure it would consume all the oxygen on Earth, choking everyone around them until only Jackie and Shauna remained in an Eden of their own creation. She thoughtfully considers that Shauna might actually enjoy that.
Nobody truly understood what was going on with them, but the homoerotic subtext to their friendship barely even required a set of eyes to see.
“You’ve seen Jeff every day for the past week Jackie! Is it too much to ask for you to come with your best friend to the exhibition you know I’ve been wanting to see for months?”
“Are you a fucking stalker Shauna!?” Jackie wriggles out of the blanket wrapped around her and Shauna, rising to her feet and pacing to a log on the opposite side of the bonfire. “Why are you keeping tabs on me? I’m not your girlfriend, I’m Jeff’s!”
Nat catches Tai’s eyes above the flames of the bonfire, seeing her own wide-eyed shock reflected back at her and mirrored across the circle of girls as they all pull their blankets and coats just that bit tighter round their shoulders. She looks at the ground and releases the breath she’d been holding with a sigh, draining the contents of the flask in one swallow.
Shauna’s face crumbles into a portrait of hurt and betrayal, big brown eyes shining with unshed tears. It lasts half a second before the hurt hardens into anger, and she’s on her feet too, advancing towards Jackie with an accusatory finger held out in front of her.
“You know that I understand that more than anyone Jackie,” Shauna’s voice, low and dangerous, carries across the clearing in the deathly silence that has descended over the group.
Even Misty fucking Quigley has the sense to stay quiet, but then again Nat has always recognised a prey’s instinct to keep its head down in the face of a predator.
She herself knew best. Years of having the words “worthless burnout” spat in her direction taught her to keep her mouth shut or pay the price for talking back.
“Okay everyone, shall we all calm down a bit? It’s been a nice evening, let’s not spoil that!”
Laura Lee, ever the voice of reason, was probably the only person who could walk a delicate tightrope over the chasm of Jackie and Shauna’s repressed feelings to emerge unscathed at the other side. She forces a smile and motions for Shauna to sit down next to her, eager to dissipate the arsenic that their argument has leached into the air.
Jackie huffs and drops herself onto the ground beside Lottie, crossing her arms and legs and facing decidedly away from Shauna and Laura Lee. Nat thinks she looks like a petulant pre-k toddler who just had their ice cream taken away.
She keeps that to herself.
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As the fire dwindles, the temperature plummets and darkness creeps further beyond the edges of the clearing. Not that Nat would have noticed – she was too crossfaded to even know what fucking day it was.
The group had shrunk. Some of the girls had essays to finish and Shauna had cleared off shortly after her fight with Jackie, which suited everyone just fine as she took her bad vibes with her.
Tai and Van sit huddled under a blanket, sharing sips from the same cup and whispering quietly with their heads rested together. Jackie, Misty, Laura Lee and Lottie are engaged in a heated discussion about whether Coach Scott has a girlfriend and, if so, whether she’s as good looking as he is.
Nat sits alone on the floor, propped against a log with her feet kicked out in front of her. She wiggles her toes and watches her teammates through half-lidded eyes, giggling at the way her kneecaps feel like they’re made of popping candy.
She doesn’t mean to stare at Lottie, but really if the girl was going to have the audacity to wear a pink pleated miniskirt and matching fluffy jumper in temperatures comparable to the most recent ice age, Nat feels she is well within her rights to be critical.
In her head of course. She had long since given up trying to string a slurred sentence together, and even if that wasn’t the case she wouldn’t have wasted her breath telling Lottie fucking Matthews to put on some fucking pants.
She lets her head fall back onto the log and shuts her eyes tight to squeeze the thought of Lottie’s long, bare legs out of her mind. She wonders if Lottie’s legs ever feel like popping candy too. Probably not. Princess Matthews wouldn’t go near a joint even if it curtsied to her first.
Nat sniggers then at the thought of a joint lifting its skirt and bowing delicately low to the ground. It’s the little things.
“Nat?” A disembodied voice floats through her weak grasp on consciousness.
She forces one eye open and sees Van peering down at her with a look equal parts concern and amusement.
“Vanessa, I am sorry to say this but you appear to be upside down.” Nat mumbles, giggling as if she’d said anything remotely funny.
“I’m not upside down, but you’re definitely sideways,” Van crouches down, putting herself directly in Nat’s eyeline and speaking with the same tone one might use on a scared horse.
“You’re over here by yourself laughing at nothing. Someone might think you’ve been let out on day release.”
Nat laughs again but this time it’s hollow. The amusement of her fizzing joints has disappeared, replaced instead by the familiar feeling of self-induced disgust.
“They’d have to catch me first. I’m all good.” She says, gripping onto Van’s arms to hoist herself to her feet. A wave of nausea crests in her stomach and she grimaces.
“I’m gonna get Lot to take you home okay? She didn’t drink and I don’t want you walking like this.”
“Van, I’m grown! I can get myself home!”
“You smell fucking flammable right now dude. Let us help you.”
Nat peers past Van’s shoulder to see Lottie standing awkwardly nearby with her eyes firmly on the ground. Jackie, Laura Lee and Misty are nowhere to be seen.
“The others headed back together and I’m catching a lift with Tai and her mom. Lottie’s gonna take you back.”
Nat huffs and crosses her arms, taking unsteady steps in the direction she thinks Lottie left her maroon Mercedes Benz 190.
“Nat?” Lottie follows behind her and takes her by the shoulders, steering her into a half turn that Nat barely manages to execute. “My car’s this way.”
Through the assortment of substances fighting to drag Nat into oblivion, she registers the firm but warm grip on her shoulders. It’s patronising, she thinks, so she shakes herself free and stumbles in a zig-zag towards the car.
She reaches the door and pulls it open, sprawling onto the passenger seat and wrestling with the seatbelt. She might not be sober but she’s not an idiot.
Lottie slides into the driver’s seat and starts the car, adjusting her bangs in the rearview mirror while glancing sideways at Nat as if she had caged a feral cat. Nat turns and glares at her, silently enforcing a no-talking policy for their ride home, then focuses her attention out the window.
It smells like vanilla and apple in the car, along with something uniquely Lottie that Nat can’t put her finger on. Probably some rich-girl perfume with a price tag the size of Nat’s trailer.
On a regular day (read – a sober day, though lately that’s up for debate), Nat wouldn’t have minded the smell. She could imagine it following Lottie around, faint expensive traces of an elusive mystery.
But right now? Right now Nat feels like her stomach is about to turn itself inside out.
She takes deep breaths through her mouth, pressing her forehead against the cool glass and praying to gods she doesn’t believe in. She can not puke in front of Lottie Matthews.
“Nat are you okay?”
Nat throws her an unconvincing thumbs up and hums an indication that she’s still breathing.
Lottie continues on, but her words are drowned out by the voice in Nat’s head warning don’t throw up, don’t throw up, don’t fucking throw up.
“Nat if you puke in my car I will fucking kill you, don’t think I won’t.” Lottie’s eyes remain fixed on the dark track ahead, but the whites of her knuckles wrap tightly around the wheel.
“Lottie pull over the car.”
“Pull over the car? We’re on a single track road in the middle of nowhere,” Lottie’s voice rises in pitch and volume, echoing around Nat’s skull. “I can’t pull over the fucking car, hold it in!”
Nat swallows thickly and turns to Lottie, bloodshot eyes widening as she contemplates how damaging the hospital bill would be if she jumped from a moving vehicle.
“Stop. The fucking. Car.” She whispers.
“Nat we’re five minutes from my house,“ Lottie’s shouting now, a stark contrast to Nat who has clamped both hands over her own mouth following a suspicious hiccup. “Don’t you fucking dare!”
In a perfect world, Nat wouldn’t throw up in Lottie Matthews’ car. She wouldn’t be this wasted, or have fucked Kevyn Tan up against a tree in Mari’s parents’ woodland. She wouldn’t be regretting every choice she’s ever made in her life (aside from the acid smiley face handpoke she gave herself 3 months ago, because that was fucking dope).
But this isn’t a perfect world. And Nat is by no means perfect.
“Nat what are you doing? Natalie? Nat fucking STOP!”
“Lottie shut up I’m gon-“
“Oh fucking God, oh God okay, fuck!”
Lottie slams the brakes and scrambles over the centre console, getting further into Nat’s personal space than her sober self would have ever allowed. She cups her hands under Nat’s chin while craning her neck as far as it allowed in the opposite direction, eyes screwed shut.
“Move your fucking hands what the fuck are you doing!!”
“My carpets!” Lottie wails, still refusing to watch Nat’s body lose its civil war of wills. “Oh God it’s warm Nat, why is it so fucking war-“
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“Lottie?”
“Don’t.”
“I’m sorry about your carpets.”