Chapter Text
contents under pressure
May 1995, and also all the fucking time
This is how it always, always starts:
“It’s a party,” Jackie Taylor says, because there’s a party. There’s always a party. “Have fun!”
No, that’s not right.
It starts before that. Sometimes days before, sometimes hours. On a few, rare occasions, it starts weeks before. It builds and gathers, darkening the sky and thickening the air like an oncoming storm. Lightning cracks the sky, presaging the sound of thunder. Sometimes it strikes in the locker room, or in the hallway outside Mrs. Lemay’s Trig class, or in the cramped confines of Shauna’s Ford Festiva, but the one thing it never, ever does is dissipate harmlessly.
It bursts the same way every time, or near enough to it: “Jeff and I are done.”
By the dying days of her junior year, Shauna Shipman knows how to weather the storm. She knows what to say and where to go, what ice cream to buy and what movies to rent from the Blockbuster on Crescent near the elementary school. She knows how to let the downpour wash over her, how to caulk her seams and joints to keep it from seeping inside her, where all it will do is feed the strangling mold that has grown so long and so deep that she would have to tear her own insides out and spread them on her ragged front lawn to get rid of it.
She knows to say absolutely nothing of substance, because the other thing it never, ever does is last forever.
(She’s learned that lesson the hard way.)
When the storm arrives, Shauna knows that she’ll need to have a collage of outfits ready by the coming weekend. If there’s not a party, Jackie will make one happen. She’ll cajole someone into hosting, probably one of the other Yellowjackets, because everybody knows what her parents are like and because everybody wants to feel Jackie’s light shine upon them and this is the one thing, maybe the only thing, that Jackie won’t ask of Shauna. Jackie loves Mrs. Shipman too much to risk puking in her kitchen sink or, worse, in one of her potted plants.
(Besides, Shauna knows her house sucks for a party. It’s small and its ceilings are low and it’s overstuffed with boxes that still haven’t been unpacked in all the years that have passed since they moved from the house on Belford Drive, just a block and a half away from the Taylors’ colonial, to the haggard-lawned little house on Willows Court.)
Once there’s a party, it’s just a matter of time. A party is a basin that gathers the lagan of Wiskayok High School. Homecoming kings and queen bees, jocks and nerds, wastoids and burnouts all stand shoulder to shoulder clutching red plastic cups like badges of belonging, and it’s like the sight of so many of their so-called peers flips a switch in Jackie’s head.
The switch flips while Jackie is getting ready, or maybe she just lets Shauna see a glimpse beyond the storm while she cocoons herself in lip gloss and designer clothes, aesthetics and aspirations. Sometimes, she tells the story, full-throated groveling and half-hearted apologies on one side or the other, or occasionally both. Sometimes, she lists the terms of the treaty: promises made, milestones scheduled. Sometimes, she explains it, justifies it, connects the dots for Shauna’s poor brain, which is rotted through by perpetual singlehood and nothing else. Sometimes, she just says that it sucks being alone.
(She says that last one no louder than she says anything else, but it’s still loud enough to give Shauna the worst splitting headache of her feels-too-long-already life.)
Shauna knows all the reasons, the real reasons, by heart. Jackie wants to be seen, but not like Shauna sees her (bare-faced, sweatpants, sports bra, tangled hair, sweat on her brow, triumph in her eyes, clammy and flu-stricken, hungover and puking, imperfect but not), she wants to be seen only how she dictates. She is a prom queen in the making, a brutal tyrant of the city-state of adolescence. And what is a queen without her king? What is a tyrant without her emblem of office?
Jackie emerges and the party isn’t the ocean and its raging whirlpool, she is. Shauna drowns the desert of her mouth with whatever she can pour into it. She can’t hold her liquor for shit, she gets nauseous at every fucking party (especially certain ones), but Malibu and milk is thick enough to stopper her throat against all the bits of her insides that might seek to escape. Like clockwork, like sunrise and sunset, like death and motherfucking taxes, Jeff Sadecki and Jackie Taylor are anything but done.
Jackie is beautiful and she’s terrible and she gathers all the world they know around her. She is Charybdis and Jeff is just a sailor with a dumb fucking grin plastered on his face, at least when Jackie isn’t eating his mouth for the whole school to see. Shauna hates that grin, that face, that boy who is too stupid to know how doomed he is. Doomed to use and misuse, doomed to superfluity, doomed to mediocrity.
(Doesn’t he know that Jackie is so much bigger and more than he will ever be, than he will ever be able to let her be? One day, Shauna will run her maiden voyage aground trying to prove that to herself.)
(Well, from a certain point of view.)
But that’s the thing about storms: they pass, even if they’re too close to the coast, to the edge of dry land, to vanish into nothing. The storm moves, green and orange graphics on a weatherman’s map, to less urgent territory.
The geography of Wiskayok High School is so settled, so certain, that the storm inevitably lumbers through the air to take up residence over Shauna. It’s smaller, milder, calmer. It has spent the bulk of its energy, but the drizzle and thunderclaps are there in the downturn of her mouth, in the dull, hard distance of her gaze. People avoid her, entirely if they can or just with their eyes if she’s standing too close to Jackie to be so thoroughly evaded.
Jackie isn’t the only one who can metamorphose. Shauna emerges from her chrysalis six-headed and fanged. Her teeth are pink-red with the gristle of the unwary. She is Scylla.
Or, at least, she is until Jackie looks at her with big, lightly glazed eyes and flicks her nose with one pink-painted fingernail. Shauna almost bites at the fingers, teeth clacking like a vise trap, but even tilting her head seems like a precarious act. Jackie is pouting beneath the liquor haze, because why limit yourself to controlling what people see when you can control what they feel?
She beckons Shauna in closer, through the pungent brutality of Jeff’s cologne. They can’t have been back together more than fifteen minutes and he’s already smeared all over her skin like grease stains on her favorite shirt, no color of its own but unmissable and slimy and horrible. Some stains never come out, some stains transfer by touch. Shauna swallows the storm, holds it in her throat and her lungs and her belly, because the glaze of Jackie’s eyes is a candy shell that Shauna’s afraid to break, like crème brûlée at a restaurant that she’s ordered without checking the price, and now that it’s in front of her she thinks that if she just leaves it immaculate she won’t owe what she can’t pay.
“It’s a party.” Jackie shouts a honeyed rupture into Shauna’s eardrum. “Have fun!”
Yeah, like Shauna Shipman can refuse Jackie Taylor much of anything.
mistaken identity
May 1995
It’s the end of junior year (or close enough to it), and Shauna teeters on the warm, cushioned edge of blackout. She cradles her red plastic cup to her chest like it’s a child, except she’s clenching it too hard and the plastic is buckling. She’d make a shitty mom anyway, she’s pretty sure of that, but whatever. That’s a long way off, and everybody knows it. If Jackie is a priss, dating Jeff for three (mostly) contiguous years without putting out, then Shauna is downright frigid. But that’s why Jackie is making out with Jeff after another two-day breakup, hidden only by the brim of a cheap party store sombrero, and the only thing slipping into Shauna’s mouth is the cool night air.
So she doesn’t want to get slobbered on by Randy Walsh, fucking sue her. If a guy worth spending time with wanted to spend time with her, she’d run the bases as quick as anyone. (Maybe not anyone, but fast enough to make varsity softball.) And she can’t believe that Jackie’s back together with Jeff again, honestly. She really thought this time would be different, because this time Jeff’s the one who dumped Jackie.
It was over something deeply stupid. Jeff bragged in the locker room, the way they’ve always been half-told and half-warned that boys do, that Jackie promised to give him a blowjob on the Fourth of July, and he must have let slip that this would be the first time she did that. As far as Shauna is concerned, the story thus far justifies Jackie breaking up with Jeff, not the other way around, but apparently the other guys convinced Jeff that it was in some way fucked up that Jackie wasn’t doing that already.
That’s ridiculous, and Shauna doesn’t mind saying so. Well, she doesn’t mind thinking so. Saying so isn’t on the agenda. But seriously, as if there are girls lined up to suck Jeff Sadecki’s dick on any timetable. Anyway, the Fourth of July is literally sixty days away, and Shauna doesn’t understand how Jeff thinks that’s some impossible burden. Some things are worth waiting for. It’s not like anyone’s lined up to suck her dick, either, or, you know, the equivalent.
Maybe the uncertainty of being the one dumped is why Jackie was so pissed, pissed enough to browbeat Mari into hosting, of all things, a Cinco de Mayo party. Shauna knows Mari has been stressed about it, too. Mari is still a new face for her, so new that Shauna isn’t totally sure she knows her last name—though that could be because of the booze.
Mari moved to Wiskayok the summer before and they don’t have any classes together, not even Spanish because Mari tested into the AP class as a junior. The first time Shauna met her was at tryouts in September, and the next time she saw her was the first practice of the year. She’s dating this guy in their class, Danny Mears, who has always seemed nice enough. She’s social and pretty and nice, even if she’s a bit of a gossip from what Shauna’s heard. Shauna can’t hold that against her: Shauna has mostly heard that from Jackie, who is also a bit of a gossip.
Mari is so nice that Jackie felt a little bad about haranguing her to host, even though she does it to all the juniors except Lottie (who’s always game anyway) and Shauna, and even though if Mari really wanted to she could’ve just dragged everybody to Allaire like Van usually does. On any other day, Shauna would interpret Jackie feeling bad as a gratifying if surprising sign of empathy from a teenage girl, or something pretentious like that, but this time all she can feel is self-pity. Jackie’s late-breaking surge of empathy, combined with the undefinable whatever-the-fuck of her breakup with Jeff, led her to exert a truly draconian level of control over their usual party prep. Specifically, Jackie decided she hated everything Shauna thought she might want to wear.
That’s why Shauna is dressed in a bright yellow sundress that Jackie got last year. She wore it exactly once and never again, because Mrs. Taylor said it made her look like a banana. Shauna likes bananas, they’re high in potassium and they perk her up after a hard game or a long practice, but that comment was enough for Jackie to consign the dress to the deepest depths of her closet.
Shauna understands what Jackie was thinking. Just because something looks good on Jackie doesn’t mean it will look good on Shauna, they've learned that lesson the hard way, so it stands to reason that just because something doesn’t look good on Jackie doesn’t mean it won’t look good on Shauna. She thinks she has that right as, like, a proposition of logic or whatever. But what they failed to consider, what Jackie wouldn’t hear even after Shauna could point to her own reflection as incontrovertible evidence, is that just because something doesn’t look good on Jackie doesn’t mean it will look good on Shauna.
It would be one thing if Jackie was seriously taller than Shauna, if a dress that came down nearly to Jackie’s knees might start a bit longer on Shauna. But she isn’t, she just seems taller because she’s so slender, and actually Shauna is two inches taller than Jackie now. To make it worse, Shauna feels like her hips and thighs are tugging the dress up no matter what she does. She feels big in the dress, and not in a good way. Jackie can say she looks sexy or womanly or whatever, but Shauna feels like she’s spilling over the top and the sides and out of the bottom of the dress and she hates it. She hates the way Randy Walsh leers at her chest and she’s sure if she could see out of the back of her head that she’d hate how people are staring at her ass. It doesn’t even look good. The color might look nice on Jackie’s perfectly even tan but it just makes Shauna look sickly and washed out. She feels hideous and she feels like Jackie set her up for this. She knows that’s not true, knows Jackie would never do this to her on purpose, but doing it on accident feels worse somehow, like she didn’t care enough not to.
Honestly, Shauna would be less pissed about the banana dress if Jackie hadn’t taken Jeff back, or if Jeff hadn’t taken Jackie back. Shauna doesn’t know how it went. She’ll find out tomorrow, through the painful grime of what is already shaping up to be a hangover for the ages. She would be less pissed if she could just drag Jackie to one of the bathrooms or even outside by the pool and just talk to her, just tell her that she feels fat and ugly, because she’s had enough to drink that she’ll believe it for a minute when Jackie tells her that she isn’t. Instead, she has to navigate the party alone, in a dress she hates, with a stomach full of bile and rum and two-percent milk.
At least it’s a pretty decent party, all things considered. It has all the fundamentals: lots of cheap liquor, good snacks, decent mixers, tasteful (read: tasteless) decorations that are on theme. Most of the varsity team is here, even the seniors, and they’re all looking to blow off some steam after they crashed out of the Sectionals tournament. That’s usually a recipe for a good time, or at least a memorable one.
Still, it doesn’t strike Shauna as all that weird that Mari is sitting at the edge of the pool, legs emerging from beneath her red patterned dress to sink into the water like flower stems in a vase, crying. Shauna kind of gets that. She wonders where Danny is, because while she’s pretty sure she just saw him inside, this seems to Shauna to be the whole point of having a boyfriend. Turning around one hundred and eighty degrees to retrieve him, however, seems like an incredibly intricate task, so she just stumbles up to the edge of the pool, kicks off her shoes next to Mari’s discarded flip-flops, and sits down next to her. Credit where credit is due: thanks to the banana dress, she doesn’t have to think about hiking it up. There’s a ping-pong ball floating in the pool, but it’s brown. It’s probably a stray from an aborted beer pong game, but Shauna doesn’t know why it’s brown and she’s not sure she wants to.
“Hey,” Shauna says, and then squawking laughter swallows whatever she’s going to say next. Mari is holding half an avocado in her hand, or what’s left of it. A good portion of it is smeared all over her face.
“Shut up,” Mari says, and she mashes the avocado to her mouth, biting out the green-yellow flesh. She chews, and then she tugs Shauna’s plastic cup out of her hands and takes a drink. Mari’s face twists. “Oh my God, what is that? Is that Malibu and…milk? That’s awful.”
“You’re literally eating an avocado like an apple,” Shauna says.
“Yeah, because it tastes good and it’s, like, hydrating,” Mari says.
“Is that true?”
Mari shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s called an aguacate in Spanish, and, you know, agua means water. So I kind of figured.…”
“Agua does mean water,” Shauna says sagely.
Mari nods, which shakes more tears out of her.
“Are you okay?” Shauna asks.
Mari’s crying intensifies. Shauna tries to make soothing noises, but they just come out as: “Oh, oh no, oh no.” She pats Mari’s shoulder with a tight, flat hand, panic rising.
“I hate this place,” Mari says. “I hate Wiskayok.”
“Yeah,” Shauna says. “Yeah, me too. I think a lot of people feel that way.”
“I don’t understand why we had to move here, like, my dad’s stupid job has stupid offices all over New Jersey, and I don’t know why he couldn’t have picked one in a place that doesn’t totally suck. No offense.”
“None taken,” Shauna says, mumbled and a little slurred. “It does suck here, yeah.” Maybe more than a little slurred.
“And it’s not like Union City was super cool or whatever,” Mari says. “But you can’t even get a decent tamal here and nobody speaks Spanish and—and—” She dissolves into tears again, and not demure ones. They come with big, honking sobs.
A thought bubbles up in Shauna, a half-formed image that makes only some sense. “Do you want me to get Danny?”
This is the wrong thing to say, clearly, because Mari starts bawling even harder.
“We broke up,” she says. “I think.”
“You think?” But Shauna gets this, too, because she has become an anthropologist specializing in undead relationships, in ends that unwrite themselves. She calls upon her fieldwork handbook: “Do you want to talk about it?”
Mari shakes her head, but then she says: “He’s in there with—he’s making out with Susanna on the couch.” She somehow croons this, like a tragic ballad.
Shauna frowns, her brow furrows. She’s drunk, and not so drunk that she doesn’t realize it, so she’s pretty sure she heard that wrong. “Susanna?”
“That’s what I said, Susanna.”
Her lips purse, and she prods: “Susanna…Mears?”
Mari nods.
“Aren’t they…?”
Mari howls, rage and pain raggedly seasoning her words: “They’re fucking cousins!”
There’s not really much to say after that. Mari weeps, and Shauna sits in stunned silence until she asks the question that weighs on her, drags her mind down to the bottom of the pool in which their feet are dangling.
“But they weren’t fucking, right?” Shauna asks. “They were just kissing?”
Through the downpour of tears, Mari laughs, sniffles, sobs, and then laughs again. She leans her head on Shauna’s shoulder. Shauna’s brows knit together for a while, until the feeling of puzzlement fades beneath soft hair and warm skin against her and she can’t quite remember why she was so puzzled in the first place.
“I’m hosting a Cinco de Mayo party, fuck!” Mari seems to have a good sense of the present moment. Shauna appreciates that.
“It’s a good party,” Shauna says. “Like, very appropriate for the holiday.” She winces.
“Yeah, well, how would I know?” Mari scowls at the pool. “I’m not even fucking Mexican.”
“What?”
“I’m Guatemalan.” Mari says it different than Shauna’s ever heard it before, even though it’s the same. It’s a little difference, the kind of thing that she’d notice between Señora Ramos from last year and Señorita Caldwell this year.
“Oh,” Shauna says.
Mari glances at her. “It’s okay if you don’t know where that is, or whatever. I’m not going to get offended, I’m not from there from there. I was born here, in Jersey.”
“No, I just—I didn’t know,” Shauna says. “I mean, I know where Guatemala is,” she says, pretty sure she does. “I just didn’t know you were from there or that, like, that’s where your family is from.”
Shauna kicks her feet lazily beneath the surface of the water, letting the pool lights halo her feet. She can’t feel their warmth from this distance, but that’s how all light is when you’re not right next to it. “I feel bad, we’ve been teammates for a whole year and I feel like I don’t know anything about you.”
“It’s okay,” Mari says. “It’s soccer, it’s not like we do a lot of sitting and chatting.”
“Yeah, but there’s before games, and on bus rides.” Shauna ticks them off on her fingers one by one. “After games, or practices, at parties, in the locker room.”
“Sure, but then we’d miss Lottie and Laura Lee doing rap battles or whatever.”
Shauna giggles. It feels like it’s been a long time since she giggled. It feels like she’s been holding her breath for a while, maybe a day, maybe exactly forty-eight hours or something. “That’s a good point. But still, you know? It’s worse because you just moved here. I think we’ve all known each other so long that we’ve forgotten how to act around people who haven’t been here forever.” That’s mostly true, she thinks. Taissa moved to Wiskayok right before high school, and some of the other girls went to different elementary schools. Mari’s the first new girl since they started freshman year. “Fuck, I don’t think I even know your last name.”
Mari laughs. It reminds Shauna of hitting the high keys on the piano in Jackie’s living room that no one ever plays, back before Mrs. Taylor started keeping the dust cover over it. “Oh, seriously? It’s—”
Something crashes inside the house, and Mari twists to shout toward it. What she shouts is loud and slurred and Shauna doesn’t understand it, but Mari’s reaching for one of her red flip-flops with one hand and waving her avocado menacingly at the sliding glass door with the other. When she twists, Shauna realizes that her dress is patterned with little strawberries. It’s really cute and Shauna wishes she had a dress like that, that she was wearing a dress like Mari’s (like Mari), that she had some strawberries to snack on because she really likes strawberries.
“Thanks, by the way,” Mari says. “Not one person has come up to me and said ‘hey, Mari, great party!’ or even, like, ‘nice job.’ I’m not needy, I’m really not, but like—this whole thing was Jackie’s idea, you know?”
“Jackie’s got a lot going on,” Shauna says, and not for the first time. Usually, she’s not saying it to anyone else. It’s kind of nice to, even though it’s nice like Malibu and milk, nice in the way that will feel awful tomorrow.
“Yeah, she’s got a lot of her tongue going down that dipshit Jeff’s throat.”
“He really is a dipshit.” Shauna doesn’t mean to say it out loud, and maybe Mari knows that because she doesn’t really react.
“He’s always hanging around that Randy Walsh kid, and that guy is just a total fucking freak,” Mari says. “Most guys imagine every girl they see naked, right? But he doesn’t even try to hide it.”
“It’s so gross,” Shauna says. “And it’s like he’s so gross that it makes you feel gross. He was staring at my boobs earlier.”
“Yeah, well.” Mari eyes her banana dress. Shauna turns red, and tries to pull up the top without looking like she’s doing exactly that. She isn’t successful. “But would it kill Jackie to notice that I busted my ass on this with, like, twenty-four hours’ warning?”
“She notices,” Shauna says. “It’s just that she’s not good at compliments.” That feels bad, not true. Jackie gives lots of compliments, it’s just that Shauna doesn’t feel them. But that’s Shauna’s problem, isn’t it? Shauna’s the one who’s broken inside, she’s known that for a while. She’s known that since fifth grade when Jackie bailed her out in front of Becky Martin and Steph, who moved away long enough ago that her last name is even farther outside her reach than Mari’s. She’s known that even if she would never, ever be able to explain that knowledge to anyone, or even to herself.
(Or especially to herself.)
Mari holds out the half-eaten avocado. “Do you want some?”
Shauna looks at the mauled fruit, the empty depression where the pit once was finally clicking into place. “Oh, no. Thank you,” she says. “I don’t really like avocados.”
Mari stares at her. “What? What’s wrong with you?”
Shauna, who has been wondering the same thing for a lot longer than just this one party, shrugs. “I mean, where do you want me to start?”
Mari swallows, fruit forgotten. “Um.” Her eyes drift over Shauna’s outfit, or Shauna thinks they do, because Mari kind of goes blurry for a second like the pool has gotten in Shauna’s eyes. She doesn’t remember hearing splashes or anything, but weirder things have happened.
“Yeah, I know, it’s fucking awful,” Shauna says. “I feel like a cow.”
“You’re not a cow.”
“No, I mean, it’s not even like that, it’s just my fucking dress. It’s not even my dress, I borrowed it. Jackie borrowed it to me. Loaned it to me,” Shauna says. She takes a breath. “I like my body.” She means it as much as any teenage girl in Wiskayok possibly can. “I guess.”
“Good, because you should,” Mari says.
Maybe it’s that she says it like a fact, or maybe it’s just that it’s someone other than Jackie saying it, but that stops Shauna. “What?” It comes out as a wheeze, the last bit of air in her lungs, air that was meant for something else. “Thanks.” That comes out all the way, but only like she’s saying good game after a loss.
“No, I’m serious,” Mari says. “You’re, like, fucking hot.”
“Okay,” Shauna says. But it’s tugging at a ball of yarn inside her, except it’s not yarn. She doesn’t really know what it is, or why Mari saying stuff like this pulls on whatever it is while Jackie saying the same thing slides right off its impervious surface. Maybe Jackie just isn’t sincere about it. No, that’s not right. Jackie always means everything she says in the moment she says it, that’s something Shauna has always adored about her, and it’s kind of on Shauna if she doesn’t make room for Jackie to change her mind, isn’t it? Like, maybe Jeff experienced profound personal growth in the last six hours or whatever.
(Mari’s still talking, though Shauna isn’t really paying attention. She wouldn’t understand her if she was, because Mari is describing her with words you must learn in AP Spanish, but Shauna kind of gets the gist of it from the way Mari’s hands draw parentheses cast in shadow by the pool lights.)
Or maybe it’s that Mari is pretty but she isn’t pretty like Jackie is pretty. (No offense, she makes sure to think, in case Mari is secretly psychic or something.) That way, when Mari says it, Shauna can make herself believe that it’s not indulgence verging on condescension. Or maybe it’s that she’s kind of leaned up against Shauna and she’s warm in a way that’s nice or a little more than nice, actually it’s pretty great, and the pattern on her dress is little strawberries, and she kind of looks like a strawberry. Not all of her, just around her mouth area, like her mouth specifically, and Shauna has always liked strawberries.
Mari has stopped talking and she’s looking at Shauna too, not back at Shauna like she’s returning something misplaced but at Shauna on her own like they’re passing notes back and forth. She’s looking at Shauna even though she’s not a strawberry, she’s a banana, or maybe something else, something darker. Like a date, maybe. Dates are still sweet, and that’s a nice thought, that even if she’s darker, she’s still sweet and she hasn’t gone entirely sour, she hasn’t burst through with rot. She doesn’t know if dates grow anywhere near here, but it’s almost strawberry season now. They won’t be as sweet, not the local ones, but Shauna has always liked her fruit a little tart, and she leans in, and Mari leans in, and—
Later, Jeff helps Jackie pour Shauna into the backseat of his station wagon. Jackie tugs the seatbelt over the wrinkled fabric of the banana dress, buckles Shauna in, and pats her knee. “You’re lucky Jeff and I got back together, drunkie,” she says fondly. “You were my ride. We’ll come get your car tomorrow, okay?”
“Mm,” Shauna says. “From Guatemala?”
“What?”
Jeff cranes around from the driver’s seat. “I think she said Guatemala, babe.”
“I know, but like…it’s Cinco de Mayo. Isn’t that Mexican?”
“She’s wasted, Jackie.”
“I guess.” Jackie opens the front passenger door and pops Jeff’s glove compartment.
He sighs as she pokes around, pulling out old, coffee-stained maps from Sadecki road trips long past. “What are you looking for?”
“Napkins,” Jackie says. “She’s got this green shit all over her mouth.”
team chemistry
September 1995
The summer before Shauna’s senior year passes in an ocean-scented blur. She gets a job slinging soft serve on the boardwalk, which nearly comes to an untimely end when her boss finds out how many free samples she’s handed out to Jackie and whichever girls from the team find her at the counter on any given sunny day. Jackie spreads the word, and it’s like she’s written it on a bathroom stall in the locker room: for a good time (or an extra-tall vanilla in a waffle cone) look for Shauna, next to the ring toss with the giant stuffed panda bear.
(Mari comes alone once, early in the summer, and asks if Shauna will drizzle strawberry syrup on her ice cream. Shauna gets it all over her hand. She stammers out the price and Mari drops the exact change, vanishing beneath the counter to pick up the coins from the sunbaked ground. But by the time the heat threatens to break, it’s like nothing ever happened, except that Shauna doesn’t pick around the chunks of avocado in the salads Jackie occasionally brings her for lunch.)
She works the Fourth of July, missing Randy Walsh’s annual experiment with high explosives in whichever backyard has the misfortune of hosting him. She doesn’t mind: Shauna’s mom has brought home too many emergency room stories of maimed teenagers for Shauna to enjoy fireworks up close. Honestly, she doesn’t think twice about it, not as she’s watching colorful explosions over the water from her counter, not until Jackie calls her the next day and says that she made Jeff see stars without risking her precious fingers.
They don’t talk about it on the phone, not in detail. Jackie knows that Shauna is holding the phone in the kitchen, twirling the curly cord around one finger, and Shauna’s mom will hear any question Shauna asks. So they speak in coded language, like Woodward and Bernstein.
Well, Shauna is both Woodward and Bernstein in this analogy, which Shauna figures must mean that Jackie is Deep Throat.
When Shauna finally ends up at Jackie’s house, sitting cross-legged on the soft quilt atop the bed as Jackie stage whispers all the gory details, her ears are ringing too loudly to really process all the information that Jackie spits out like the fruits of her labors. Shauna makes all the right noises, though, and feigns enough attention that Jackie feels like she’s gotten what she wanted from her. Shauna wonders if this brings Jackie and Jeff closer together.
When she’s lying in bed, unable to sleep, Shauna realizes that Jackie is afraid. She’s afraid that she’ll lose Jeff without doing things, and she’s afraid that doing things will make her seem cheap, valueless, and she’ll lose Jeff anyway. And Jackie wastes time wondering why Shauna has never shown much interest in getting a boyfriend of her own.
The problem is that by September, Jackie’s fears have come to pass. Jeff pulls away as the school year starts, and Jackie breaks up with him in a fit of pique, or maybe just to sting before she can be stung. Buzz, buzz, buzz.
The storm rages as hard as it ever has, but Shauna is going to be a good friend, a better friend, if it’s the last thing she does. She makes sure to ask Jackie about Jeff next time she sees her, and she listens, she really does. Better late than never. It’s a resolve that gets her out of bed an hour early each morning to give Jackie a ride to school, even on the days that Mr. Taylor remembers to offer to drive her. It’s a resolve that gets her to sit through yet another Saturday night viewing of Beaches in the Shipman living room while Shauna’s mom is working overnights, that gets her to run to the grocery store unprompted to make sure that they have all the fixings for Jackie’s preferred pancakes (blueberries and chocolate chips, thank you very much, and at this point Shauna makes them almost as good as her mother does).
Maybe that resolve makes a difference, because Jackie is unstoppable at tryouts. Coach likes to hold them early in the year so that the team can coalesce before the season starts in earnest in the spring. It’s not like there’s any chance Jackie won’t make the team for her senior season, but she still plays like she’s worried about getting cut. When she and Tai are battling for the ball, she even wins it a few times. Shauna almost misses a key pass gaping at her. Soccer has always been Jackie’s passion, but this is something different.
Even still, Shauna is surprised when Coach puts up the roster. It’s not the team that startles her—the only real shock is that some freshman, Allie Stevens, makes the varsity squad—but that Jackie’s name has a C in parentheses next to it. No offense, but the only time Shauna expects to see a C next to Jackie’s name is on a report card.
She’s not the only one taken aback. Tai storms away from the bulletin board, and she blows off AP European History, which is the only class she has with Shauna, and Van asks if anyone’s seen her during study hall. No one has.
In fact, nobody sees Tai until that night’s varsity party. Shauna doesn’t even know who’s hosting it, it’s an unfamiliar house that she has to find on a map before she even sets out with Jackie in her passenger seat. It’s the best worst idea anyone at Wiskayok has ever had: a party to celebrate the myriad varsity squads that have just been announced. Anyone with a varsity letter is invited, though plenty of other people tag along and pile in, because at some point everyone has to admit that this is just an excuse to get fucked up early in the school year.
Anyone, Shauna realizes far too late, includes Jeff. Jeff has been a varsity athlete since sophomore year in some sport or another. Baseball? Lacrosse? Wrestling? Shauna legitimately can’t remember, even though she’s pretty sure she’s gone to some of his games to keep Jackie company. Shauna sees his station wagon looming at the edge of the street like a serial killer. Jackie, ever the horror movie starlet walking into her own doom, sees nothing.
Inside, it doesn’t take long for the storm to break. Shauna feels queasy before she even gets a drink in her, watching an already sloshed Jeff slur groveling apologies to Jackie. All Shauna can think is that she can’t let Jeff drive Jackie home. They’ll end up a cautionary tale or, worse, the end of a Meat Loaf ballad.
And Jackie just melts into it, like she wasn’t the one to break it off in the first place, and it’s fucking awful, and they’re smashing their faces together like kids playing tambourines for the first time and, yeah, Shauna hits the kitchen—which is where she finds Tai.
“Hey,” Shauna says. Tai doesn’t respond, focusing instead on the trio of cups she’s pouring generous shots of vodka into. “You missed Euro.”
“Yeah, I know.” Tai knocks back one shot, then the second, then the third. Her eyes are dark and far away. “Whatever. I’ll get the notes from someone.”
“I can give you the notes,” Shauna says. “That’s not—people were worried. Van was asking where you were.”
“Yeah?” Tai looks at her, except she can’t quite aim her eyes right because she ends up looking just to the right of Shauna’s face. “Were you worried, Shauna? That’s kind of your job, isn’t it?”
Shauna feels like she should feel insulted, but it’s the most bizarre insult that’s ever been leveled at her. “Yeah,” she says. “You don’t blow off classes.”
“How would you know?”
“Because we’ve been teammates since freshman year?” Shauna says it like she’s guessing. “Because when Nat was on probation for missing all those classes, you were the one who rode her ass about not ditching?”
Tai pours another trio of shots.
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Shauna asks.
Tai narrows her eyes, and then smirks. She slides one of the cups across the counter. “Only one way to slow me down.”
Shauna grimaces and downs the shot, reaching for the second before Tai’s liquor-slowed fingers. The second is easier than the first, or maybe her nerve endings can only register so much cold vodka burn at once.
“So you think you know me, huh?” Tai says. “God, that’s fucking rich. I’m surprised your brain has space to remember anything but Jackie’s lunch order.”
“What the fuck?” Shauna asks. “Don’t be an asshole, Tai. I’m not dumb.”
Tai actually seems stricken, or maybe she’s just swaying. “I didn’t mean—I know you’re not dumb. You’re, like, really smart and whatever. It’s just that you’re kind of her bitch, you know?”
“I’m not her bitch.”
“Sorry, you’re right, that was unfeminist of me. You’re her lapdog. Always driving her around, waiting on her, picking up the pieces when she blows off that dickwad Sadekci.”
Shauna grits her teeth. “She’d do the same for me,” she says. On Belford Drive, bikes rode smoothly. The streets were always freshly paved. The pavement on Willows Court is rougher. It would jostle Shauna’s teeth as she biked over it, and she always had to watch for potholes. That never stopped Jackie.
“She’s never going to say thank you, you know,” Tai says. “Trust me, I’ve been there.”
“She’s not ungrateful. She pays for gas, she says thank you.”
“Yeah, well, she’s never going to say it the way you want her to.” Tai pours a shot into Shauna’s cup and fills another one for herself. “You’re so fucking obvious, Shauna. It’s embarrassing. You’re letting the team down.”
“Is this about that fucking pass at tryouts?” Shauna asks. “God, get over it.”
Tai just looks at her for a moment, like she’s revisiting her admission that Shauna is really smart (and whatever). “Right, okay.”
“I don’t know why you hate her,” Shauna says. “She’s never been anything but nice to you.”
“I don’t hate her,” Tai says. “We’re teammates.”
“Well, maybe try being her friend. I think you two would get along if you just tried.”
Tai scoffs. “Yeah, we can talk about Cosmo and paint our fucking nails, that sounds great.”
“Jackie doesn’t read Cosmo.”
“What?”
“She reads Sassy, not Cosmo.”
Tai looks surprised, and Shauna lets a smug grin slip over her face. It feels weird at first but then it just feels right, like an accessory that Jackie picked out for her to wear. Someone cheers outside, where someone with a brother in college has rolled up with a pickup truck loaded with kegs. The kitchen has become an abandoned battlefield, empty cups like dead soldiers.
“Why do you think we’d get along?” Tai sounds like she’s almost considering it.
Shauna shrugs. Three shots of vodka have demolished her ability to present a persuasive case. “I don’t know,” she says. “I like her, and I like you, and I think that means you must have something in common.”
Tai stares at her, and this time her aim is true.
“What?” Shauna asks.
“Nothing,” Tai says. The distance in her eyes shoots to the entryways at either side of the kitchen. “I didn’t think you had room in your head to notice anyone else, that’s all.”
“Jesus, Tai, that’s the second time you’ve called me dumb, you’re being really mean and I—”
Shauna loses her breath, the wall behind her forcing it out of her lungs. Tai is in front of her, an inch taller and smelling like jet fuel as her lips bruise Shauna’s. It’s not like Mari, warm and strawberry. It’s sweet but it burns, it’s hot, it’s rum raisin ice cream on a fresh slice of pie.
Shauna’s brain is trying to process what the fuck is happening but her body is ahead of her, and her hand finds Tai’s waist and glides around. She’s steadying herself, she’s pulling Tai closer, and her back leans in and pushes her face up (arching, that’s the word, but God, that sounds even more loaded than she is) and there’s a sound in the back of her throat that she doesn’t recall trying to make, but it makes Tai break away and mirror Shauna’s own smug smile. Not that Shauna is smiling now, smugly or otherwise. Her lips are parted and she’s panting softly. Maybe she really is a lapdog.
Tai brushes a bit of Shauna’s hair away, like no one can take Shauna anywhere. “Guess she can’t have everything, huh?”
She leaves Shauna standing there among the ruins with a half-empty handle of vodka for company.
On Monday, Tai grabs her by the wrist coming out of AP Euro and drags her to the girls’ bathroom on the far side of the school where none of the seniors would be caught dead, not even the burnouts who treat bathroom stalls like their own personal smoking plazas. Shauna wishes for a fleeting second that she put on more than Dr Pepper-flavored chapstick (don’t ask) until Tai pushes the door shut behind them.
“Nothing happened on Friday,” she says.
“What?”
“Nothing happened,” Tai says. “You and me, we talked, we did shots, you probably blacked out. So if you remember anything different, that’s just your brain playing tricks on you, okay?”
Shauna’s brow furrows. She definitely doesn’t remember getting home, though she woke up on Saturday in her own bed with a headache bad enough to keep her there well past noon. But she remembers before that with a sharp-edged clarity that sets her face aflame.
“Nothing happened, Shauna.”
“Fine, whatever.”
“Say it,” Tai says.
“Tai, what the fuck?”
Tai grabs her shoulders hard and then lets them go, like Shauna is poisonous to touch. Maybe she is, maybe that’s why the only thing she elicits is regret.
“Please, okay?” Tai says. “Just say that nothing happened.”
She looks scared, really scared. Shauna wants to argue with her, or at least tell her that it’s okay, that even if something happened it’s not like it’s a big deal. She’s not a good friend, not to Jackie and not to Tai, but she’s a good enough friend that she knows that’s not what Tai needs right now.
“Nothing happened,” Shauna says.
“Great,” Tai says. “So there’s nothing to tell Van, or any of the others, or especially Jackie, right?”
“Right.” It’s like someone else is saying it, someone Shauna isn’t, but maybe someone she wishes she were, someone she should be. “Nothing happened.”