Chapter Text
It ends with feasting al fresco under an apocalyptic orange sky.
But how does it begin? That’s where Van gets fuzzy on the specifics.
She knows where the story begins— the wilderness. But from there, the questions multiply like rabbits. There has to be a reason why they survived. And maybe— fuck, she doesn’t want to say it, but— maybe that reason, that why, is actually a who. She fights through the gossamer that encases her memory, tries to wrap her hands around something solid—
Van opens her eyes to September 11, 2001. But what the hell is a September, anyway. What’s a year besides a muddle of names and numbers. A most human way of measuring change. All because some dude at some point in history— probably a king— decreed that it must be measured somehow.
A half-formed groan dies somewhere in Van’s throat. Gradually, a less-than-pleasant collage of realities piece themselves together around her.
She’s on the couch, where she fell asleep, which is just fantastic news for the crick in her neck. Count on her to be twenty-three going on forty.
On the mid-century sculptured carpet sits an almost empty bowl of anemic cheese puffs. Shitty store-brand ones that are somehow less orange than her hair. Than that sky in her skull.
On the nearby armchair lies her potentially dead mother. Potentially dead until that potential slips away with a shattering snore.
And for the grand finale, on the floor at her fingertips is the landline, ringing incessantly. Shit, she should probably get that.
She hits a button and drags it up to her ear. “Yeah?”
“It’s me. Don’t turn on the news.”
“Why? Something bad happen?”
“It’s nothing good.”
“What could be as good as, I don’t know, a plane crash? Or you dumping me again? Oh, wait.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I didn’t do that. You did.” The sardonic lilt in her voice— and the tilt of her mouth as she speaks, tilting around the scars— they don’t have the same bite they used to, the same stroke of satisfaction. “Go ahead. Tear out my heart again, why don’t you.”
Lightyears away on the other end of the line, Taissa sighs. “I’m not going to give you that relief, Van.”
A pause allows them both to acknowledge the dwindling seconds of this phone call. The sooner Tai gets back to postgraduate life, gets her mental state the fuck out of New Jersey before it sucks her back in, the better. Their schism is so vast, Van can’t even keep track of Tai’s phone number anymore— she has to sift through the white pages every year like a loser. No rope tied taut; no love in blood.
“Listen to me,” Tai says, “just... don’t watch the news for a little while. If you go anywhere—”
“If I may go anywhere—” Van mocks.
“— don’t turn on the radio in the car. Just, I don’t know, put in that beat-up Weezer tape or something.”
“I vow to faithfully follow your instructions to within an inch of my life, Teach.”
“Can you be serious about anything anymore? Or is that switch permanently flipped?”
A moment passes. A stray cheese curl yields to Van’s molars.
When Taissa speaks again, her words are spun from silk. “It’s been almost a year. Really, you should be...”
Where she trails off, loses her trademarked momentum, Van echoes the phrase, also leaves the blank unfilled. “Mm,” she hums. “Yeah. I should be.” She pops another puff in her mouth, chews, grinds. All she can taste of it is the fact that it’s edible.
The second-worst part of this, she thinks, is that both of them leave the worst part unspoken. The worst part is that this time, their split was more mutual than ever. This time, it might have been Van herself who dealt the final blow— if only she hadn’t been so drunk, her brain bobbing around like the olive in a dirty martini, then she might remember the true story. That this time, it was her who made Tai walk the plank. Her who invited Tai onto the lifeboat, only to throw her overboard to the wolves and waves.
The real question is, which Taissa succumbed? One is a bit more chatty than the other, so the answer should be obvious, and Van likes to tell herself that she fell for both sides of the coin, liking the outcome no matter which way her girlfriend happened to land that day, but—
But.
“You’re in your head again,” Tai tells her now, nothing more than a bodiless voice over a cordless phone. “Get out.”
Get out. Get out. So Van crawls out of her skull, claws scrabbling for a hold, trying to catch onto any nick or dent in the bone, trying to hang on so she can haul herself out. Her head breaks the surface, and—
She opens her eyes and finds that she’s been dropped in the coda of an ongoing match. Van is stationed at her post on one end of the field, away from the heat of the action, protecting the goal with every square inch of herself. In other words, she’s doing her thing.
Her muscles are fluid as she instinctively slips into her old familiar crouch, kneecaps flexing against the rigidity of her shin guards, eyes glued so closely to the ball that she practically becomes the ball itself. In fact, she can see everything from its black-and-white perspective.
She is passed to Taissa first. Van tries not to smirk as she enjoys this easy excuse to stare openly at the defined muscle in Tai’s legs, at her pumping arms, at her stupidly endearing game face. She’s running like O.J. in the Bronco, as if there’s some kind of finish line to reach. Van stands in the opposite direction of where she wants to go, but not the ball— Tai wants the ball close. So Van swallows away that dose of irrational hurt and makes herself the ball.
From Tai she goes to Nat, and from Nat she goes to Shauna. Shauna dribbles for a bit, evades one of the other team’s alarmingly tall offensive players, and then she offers her to Lottie. Van pounces in a short arc over to her waiting foot, but Lottie quickly gets cornered and has to send her sailing back, and then—
Well, who else could she go to next but Jackie, waiting in position near the opponents’ goal, bouncing on her toes, last but not least? In a quick exchange of looks, she and Shauna whisper their own language, a shared code word spoken in tongues, and then in an explosive flurry of muscle and movement, Jackie takes Van and sends her rocketing past the rival goalie’s outstretched arms. Van jolts back into her own body just in time to see the net bulge triumphantly as the ball punches into it. Another win secured for the Yellowjackets.
The resulting cheers are deafening, like the noise is contained in a room with a ceiling, like the acoustics are poor between the turf and the sparsely-populated bleachers and the overcast sky. Like the noise has nowhere else to go. Van jogs only partway across the pitch, watching as their striker disappears within a roaring huddle.
Tai stands just off to the side of the writhing mass. Hands on her hips, squinting, panting in Van’s direction. They both stand apart for a moment more before giving in and folding themselves into the howling pile of which Jackie Taylor is the beating heart. Easiest to take all the credit when she’s the most recent in memory, the maker of the final move.
And this could be the end of a mediocre John Hughes film— freeze frame, roll credits. Make their faces pixelated blurs, reduced to shit smears displayed through a wheezy VCR. All of them merely the background for a song that will be overplayed on the radio for years to come.
Van can almost hear the director calling Cut!, can feel the names of extras and stunt doubles creeping over her cheek like millipedes. Stay still, she silently begs the other girls, her teammates, even as she joins them in their jumping. Be still. Jackie is shrieking, arms raised, bathing in the adoration. Van is struck by the incandescent glaze in Shauna’s eyes as she looks at her— now those eyes seem to understand a language that even Jackie doesn't.
Some of them are better at being in the background, at being frozen, than others.
The celebration was held in typical haphazard fashion that night, Van remembers— a union of fake IDs, five boxes of pizza from the place on Leporid Way with the giant pepperoni slices, and a dimly-lit park with a falling-apart gazebo that somebody’s parents had their wedding photos taken in some twenty years ago. Otherwise known as: pure perfection.
A stereo is set up with Mazzy Star playing, until enough boos and complaints are heard for it to be switched to Tupac. Van picks her way across the ankle-high grass, refilling her cup as needed, watching cars pull up. She’s wavering in this strange void, sort of pissed off at Tai for not looking at her enough in the time between the game and now, but she isn’t pissed enough to admit it, because it’s stupid and it doesn’t matter, really. It is what it is.
She gulps another wave of beer, which crashes down her diaphragm and splashes into her stomach with underwhelming gusto. She needs something stronger. Something Nat-stronger, maybe, a fucking confection under the tongue, dissolved and rewiring her brain chemistry within minutes. This— this is just the shit her mom drowns her brain in.
Van is about to overturn her drink into the grass when she sees Shauna’s puny three-door shudder into a spot between two pickup trucks. For what it’s worth, the little car holds its own where it’s sandwiched valiantly between larger foes, utterly unashamed of looking like the right size shoe for an average basketball player. Van’s wrist freezes mid-twist, flips her cup upright. She’s in a teasing mood, she decides. And when the fuck isn’t she?
She saunters up to the cranked-down passenger window, tossing several elements through it: her arms, her face, her drink, and just a touch of shit-eating. “Evening, miss,” Van quips. “Do you know how fast you were going just now?”
Shauna, for what she’s worth, plays along. “Sorry, officer,” she says, distracted by sliding on a flannel and rolling up her window. “I’ll be sure never to break the law again.”
“Where’s Jackie?” Van asks.
She watches Shauna sit there for a second— a split hair of a second, stuck between responses like a second-guessing contestant on Jeopardy. Van is just about to start humming the game show tune when Shauna finally says, “Not here.” The two syllables are a layer cake of ambiguity.
“Huh. Thought you two were attached at the boob,” Van says, eagerly snuggling into her grave after she’s dug it. “Didn’t know one came without the other.”
“Ha, ha,” says Shauna. She gets out of the car, then adds, an afterthought, “She’s coming a little later with Jeff. They had... stuff to do first.”
Van couldn’t care about what that stuff is if she tried, so she skips a joke about implied missionary sex or hand stuff or whatever it is that Jackie lets Jeff perform poorly on her body in sweaty awkwardness, because those two have proven that it’s possible for a pair of conventionally attractive people to possess the chemistry of a blanket and being wet. Instead she goes, “Why can’t this be a ladies only affair, y’know? I mean, is it too much to ask for guys to not show up when we’re celebrating our win? I didn’t— I didn’t see Jeff Sadecki out there today, making Manasquan’s goalie munch grass.”
“Oookay. Hi, Shauna. Bye, Shauna.” And suddenly Taissa is unfurling out of the woodwork, steering her away from Shauna’s owl eyes, and they’re going to sit on a picnic table— butts on the table part, of course— and Van’s cup is strangely dry.
“Well,” Van says as Tai parks her ass where some nice family will probably want to eat sandwiches tomorrow afternoon, “that wasn’t very cool of you.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“We— we were having a conversation,” Van explains. Brain like pudding, she attempts a sloppy hand motion between herself and empty air. “Me and Shauna. Yeah. So... not nice, what you just did there.”
Tai huffs. “How are you this drunk already?”
What can I say? It runs in the family. But Van slams that drawer shut, locks it, and swallows the key. “Maybe you’re the one who’s drunk,” she says pensively, “and everyone else is sober, and they all seem worse in— in comparison, ‘cause they’re sober. And boring.”
“Hm. Didn’t realize it was opposite day.” Tai leans forward, elbows on her knees, and peers at her with eyes that see a little too much. “Hey. What’s going on with you?”
Van looks at her, and she wants to discover a new way to wrap her mind around Taissa Turner. A better way to grasp all that she is so that it doesn’t feel like juggling anymore. So that it might finally feel like Van is good enough for her.
She doesn’t know what to do. So she does what she knows. She opens flippant lips and whispers, like a child sharing a secret, “Wanna go make out behind that tree?” And she points. But Tai doesn’t follow the direction of her finger.
Van has noticed that things only work the first time when it comes to Tai. Like that line— wanna go make out behind that tree— it did work once, a month ago when Van convinced her to slip out of some yawnfest assembly early, convinced her to give up earning extra credit for an honors class by not attending, and they ended up outside, free with limbs loose under the sun. Tai had fallen for that line then. Not now, though.
Van’s finger trembles. She drops her arm.
That’s when Tai’s intense stare flicks a millimeter to the left. So subtle that only Van would notice it. She turns, peeks over her shoulder.
The star of the evening, the almighty scorer of goals, has arrived. Jackie leaps out of her boyfriend’s truck and rushes into her best friend’s half-open arms so violently that Shauna’s drink spills a little, a tumble of cheap alcohol to brown the grass. There is always a place for Jackie to land, always somewhere waiting for her. Meanwhile the picnic table bites into the underside of Van’s thighs, the backs of her knees, indignant about being sat on by her.
How can Jackie and Shauna be so open with their affection, constantly touching, Jackie always hanging off of her, head on Shauna’s shoulder, and it’s alright? Van craves all that they have, yet wants no part of it. She isn’t all that literate in the romantic classics, but she can read Shauna’s frown loud and clear.
She looks away, eyes her empty cup. Her hand flexes. Plastic crunches beneath. “What do you say we fill that with some water?” Tai suggests.
By the time the cops are called on them, and everybody’s scattering, catching rides in random cars, Van might hate herself a little less. She makes a break for it, her muscles oozing pent-up honesty, and that water sloshes in her stomach, brackish with beer.
She’s sprinting across half of Holmdel, and then there’s the hard edge of a table digging into her ribs, an edge like a blade, and she watches Shauna’s cup run over, not empty, far from it. The liquid forms rivulets on her hands, tributaries down her arm, retreating from a greater ocean of need— or is it want? Do they want to do this? The liquid is an organic color. Crushed grape, but prettier. Sunset over sand, but deeper. A shade of humanity.
Want is a natural color.
Van sees that color in the palms of her hands, in the grit that has collected under her fingernails, in the grime she scrapes away from the nooks and crannies of her body— the curves on the outside of her nostrils, the hidden crescents behind her ears. She sees that color in Taissa’s eyes, and it’s a dark color, because it’s in all of them as they sit at that table and feast away. Feasting on the object of admiration, on who everyone either wanted or wanted to be for so long. So long.
But the color is gone the next day. Disappeared in the stark harsh light of morning, which reflects the winter sun off its gleaming teeth. And Tai has just hurled their meal back to the surface, splattering their fallen frenemy all over the snow, a vehement rejection of heretical digestion. The color comes back ugly.
Arm around her shoulders, Van guides her over to the cabin’s porch. Makes her sit down. Butt on bending, weather-beaten boards. “It’s gonna be okay,” Van mutters, rubbing her back. “Taissa, look at me.” Tai looks at her, because she always will, and Van asserts, “Everything’s gonna be fine.”
“Fine?” Tai echoes. She takes that one word, twists it until it buckles down and becomes a curse. “Nothing is fine. We...” Her stomach visibly heaves again, and she bows forward, and Van catches her. “What we did, it—”
“It was necessary,” Van completes the sentence. To Tai, it’s a mismatch, but for Van it slots into place neatly. It was necessary, what they did. It’s fucked up, as sick as a killer attending the funeral of their victim. But maintaining life is as fucked up as causing death.
And besides, it could have been anyone who burned. Anyone who froze only to meet the ultimate roast, the final warming-up of leftovers taken from the back of the fridge, eyeballed, then reluctantly shoved in the microwave.
Anyone. Fuck, it could have been her.
“We should’ve tried harder,” Tai’s whispering, every wall up, shaky cardboard trying to fuse itself into bricks. “There have to be fish under that ice. And Mari, she was boiling tree bark for a while, why did we stop—”
“Tai.” Van grips her shoulder more roughly now, as if she’s trying to hold her down, keep her from flying away. “Do you hear yourself? Do you hear how desperate this is? We didn’t have a choice.”
Tai stares at her. Those eyes are so dark, though not the same type of dark. “There is always a choice,” she says. Voice barely a rasp. She can barely keep hold of her trembling throat better than Van can keep hold of her.
“Look. It’s not like a coroner’s about to pull up and pick through the—” Van clicks her teeth together, swings her head down. “Remains.”
“Her remains. She was a fucking person, Van. We all knew her.”
“We did. But...” Van’s jaw works in ripples under her skin. She can see it, she can see herself, she’s outside of her body. “I don’t think she really knew us anymore.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Shauna knew her. She knew her better than anyone, right? And she said— she said it’s what she would’ve—”
“You know that’s bullshit,” Tai spits. “Jackie never—” She cuts herself off there, leaving that pair of sour words dangling, semi-appetizing bait for a wild what-if, an unanswerable question. Jackie never.
Van thinks back to that night, after the Manasquan defeat, when Jackie showed up at the kegger. Coasting in on Jeff’s easygoing aura, thrusting herself into Shauna’s hesitant arms, like forcing open a flower’s petals before it’s ready to bloom. Their team captain. Unlike Laura Lee, she just had to be corporeal to the end— so present, so there in every scene, filling up the world with herself until there was nowhere else left for her to go but away.
Attractive through and through, always attractive in all the ways that mattered at any given time. Perky but pernicious, prompted to perform at all moments— as an it-girl, as a shut-out, as edible. For the longest time, it was Jackie always. Then she became that. This— Jackie never. She became calories and meat and sustenance. The most substance Jackie Taylor ever had in her life, and it was for this. She died, didn’t she, for this. For her team. Captain goes down with the ship. And she had to be the worst, the most grueling to get rid of once and for all. A final middle finger from their great influencer. She united them in cleaning up the mess— her. She finally contributed something, in a way.
Van looks at her girlfriend, at her face, at this side of the coin, and searches deeper for that darkness.
So this is how it begins. Van crawls back inside her skull. When she glances up, the sky is orange through mottled treetops, and she sees, painted there with the emaciated branches, the end of hunger as Lottie foretold it.
Van will do what it takes to implicate herself in this— because survival is implication. And she has chosen what it has chosen: to live with this.