Chapter Text
It might seem weird to be so sure you are different, it might make you seem entitled, seeking attention, or recognition. But the truth is, Jaqueline Elizabeth Taylor always knew she was different, from the way she talked and walked, to the things she liked and disliked.
It wasn’t as if her mother didn’t do an active job of reminding her of it, all those country club classes for “proper behaved ladies”, all those nights making her stand in front of a mirror counting the days to the start of first grade learning how to smile just right, all those weird diets from magazines that her mother never bothered to completely read. There were one hundred reminders of how different she was, how messed up she had come out of the womb.
“Don’t slouch, Jaqueline,” her mother would say, pressing her shoulders back in front of the mirror as if posture alone could fix everything. “Don’t laugh so loudly—it sounds desperate. And stop staring at people like that; it makes them uncomfortable. If you’d only learn to tone yourself down, people would like you better.”
Jackie used to nod and promise she would try harder, though the words always tasted like sand in her mouth.
She liked to believe that she had mastered it just right, when to speak and when to stay quiet, the exact tone her laugh needed to sound sweet and genuine. But the truth was that she never quite got it right. She often talked over others, struggled with eye contact—holding it too long or not long enough—liked things too intensely, and hated things just as fiercely. Yet there was one thing she knew like a spell: she had to hide the parts of herself that she couldn’t explain, the parts she couldn’t write off as childish or adolescent.
So, she couldn’t really judge Shauna and Jeff for what they did. It hurt, of course—it hurt so much that she cried until her eyes ached and lost her voice to uncontrollable sobbing—but maybe she deserved it. Maybe she had read everything wrong about them. She knew she could be self-centered, cared too much about soccer, watched the same movie on a loop for hours, and was so scared of her parents that in her fear of upsetting them, she could come across as selfish without meaning to.
And yet, at the same time, she didn’t think she deserved it. Not the silence, the way it seemed like everyone else knew they were sleeping together behind her back, and nobody thought to tell her, not even to give her the tiniest glimpse of what was really happening behind closed doors.
Her mother called her too trusting, saying she should have known to watch her back. Her father told her she was being childish, that it wasn’t a big deal, and that she would understand once she started university.
But the truth was that it consumed her every thought for weeks on end. Even as she was getting her diploma, even while loading her things into the truck that would take her to Rutgers, she couldn’t shake the thought that maybe, if she had done something differently, she wouldn’t have faced that kind of betrayal, the hidden animosity that left her second-guessing every step for most of her first three months at university.
In the dining hall at Rutgers, when the table behind her erupted in laughter, she would froze with her fork halfway to her mouth. She could almost hear Shauna in the sound, that same dismissive edge curling around every giggle. Don’t be weird. Don’t talk too much. Don’t look desperate. The words looped in her mind until her stomach clenched and she would have to push her tray away, leaving it untouched, telling herself she wasn’t hungry.
So when the six month mark hit, and she had spent the whole semester obsessing over the same things over and over again, going to classes she really didn’t like, rushing for a sorority full of people who could never get her, she decided to call it quits. She knew she was being ungrateful, and maybe a little conceited, thinking things would turn out right without a plan, but the truth was: she had planned everything her whole life, and she ended alone, in a room full of people and feeling more alone than ever, missing her friendship with a person that apparently never truly liked her, missing her teammates, who had chosen a side in their silence.
And she thought, if I’m going to go out, I might as well do it all the way.
So she packed up her stuff, folded her clothes into bags that seemed too light for how much she was leaving behind, and rehearsed the lie in her head until it almost sounded true.
She dialed her mom first.
“Rutgers isn’t working out,” Jackie said quickly, before she could lose her nerve. “I think I need… guidance. Aunt Clara said I could come stay with her for a while.”
There was a long silence on the other end, then her mother’s voice, sharp as broken glass: “Clara? Don’t be ridiculous. That woman lives like a vagrant. She can’t even keep her own life together, let alone help you with yours.”
Her father’s voice cut in faintly from the background, firm but almost pleading: “Let her talk to Clara, Elaine. It might not be the worst idea.”
Jackie muted the phone and pressed her forehead to her knee, her heart hammering with the wild hope that maybe—for once—her dad’s word would hold.
She thought of her aunt’s crooked little apartment in Chelsea, the one with wind chimes on every window and paint peeling off in the balcony. The woman was a mystery wrapped in cigarette smoke and salt air—her mother’s shame and her father’s fascination. Jackie had only met her three times, but each time, Clara had looked her in the eye without flinching, as if she wasn’t too much, wasn’t broken or loud or desperate. Just… her.
And that was enough of a reason to run.
It took one call to have her aunt Clara agree, she didn't even thought about it, saying that she must have her own reasons, and to just take the first bus to New York that she saw.
Jackie stepped off the bus with her two duffel bags digging red marks into her shoulders. The station smelled like wet cardboard and diesel, and she felt absurdly small, standing there in her pressed jeans and Rutgers hoodie, like a girl caught between running away and begging to be chased.
Clara was late. Of course she was. Jackie sat on the curb and counted the cracks in the pavement until a battered blue pick-up came rattling around the corner, exhaust coughing like it was on its last breath.
“Taylor!” Clara leaned out the driver’s side window, aviator sunglasses sliding down her nose, a cigarette dangling between her fingers. Her gray-streaked hair was pulled into a knot that looked accidental. “You planning to sit there all night, or are you getting in?”
Jackie almost smiled, almost didn’t. She dragged her bags into the truck bed and climbed into the passenger seat, careful not to disturb the piles of crumpled receipts, candy wrappers, and two half-empty coffee cups rolling on the floor.
“You hungry?” Clara asked, gunning the engine before Jackie could close the door properly.
“I… I guess,” Jackie said.
“Good. There’s a diner on the way. Best pie in the county. Place looks like a crime scene, but the cherry pie could convert atheists.”
Jackie blinked at her. Nobody talked like that in Wiskayok. Nobody talked like that in her house.
The drive was quiet except for the rattle of the truck. Clara hummed along to an old Springsteen tape, tapping the steering wheel with nicotine-stained fingers. Jackie stared out the window at the blur of neon signs, wondering if she’d made a mistake, if this was just another version of running. So when they pulled up to Clara’s building—half peeling paint, half jungle of overgrown ivy at the front—Jackie felt her stomach sink.
“This is…” Jackie began.
“A dump?” Clara offered, grinning as she killed the engine. “Yeah. But it’s mine. And for now, it’s yours too.”
Inside, the place smelled like incense, and something faintly burnt. Books and records were stacked in teetering piles. A cat slunk across the kitchen counter, knocking over an ashtray. She set her bags down and suddenly felt ridiculous—too polished, too cautious, a visitor in her own life.
Her aunt popped open a can of soda, leaned against the fridge, and looked at her for a long time.
“You don’t have to tell me why you’re here,” she said finally. “People run for all kinds of reasons. Doesn’t matter if you’re running from something or toward something. What matters is whether you’re willing to see where your feet take you.”
Jackie swallowed hard, not trusting her voice.
Clara smirked, lighting another cigarette. “You think running’s weak, kid? Hell no. It’s instinct. A rabbit runs and it lives another day. You just gotta know when to stop running and start burrowing.”
And for the first time in months, Jackie felt something loosen inside her chest. Maybe she didn’t need to have a plan. Maybe being here—chaotic, unpolished, impossible Clara—was enough to start over.
She didn’t stay long at Clara’s. A few months, maybe. Time blurred there—the kind of blur made of cigarettes on the balcony at midnight, diner pie at two a.m., and the sound of Springsteen tapes looping in the background. Clara didn’t lecture her, didn’t ask questions she wasn’t ready to answer. She just let Jackie exist. Messy. Quiet. Loud. Whatever she was that day.
By the time she left, Jackie wasn’t fixed. But she was lighter. A little looser at the edges. For the first time, she thought maybe she could belong somewhere she chose for herself.
So she chose Bushwick
The apartment was tiny, the rent barely manageable at the beggining. The floor creaked, the radiator hissed,smelled permanently of incense and cheap weed and the neighbors fought like it was theater. But it was hers. The ceilings were high, the heat unreliable, the rent split three ways between people who barely knew each other. Her room was just wide enough for a mattress on the floor and a milk crate for books, but it was hers, and no one knocked on the door to tell her she was too loud or too strange.
Her roommates were odd in the best way—Jules, who came home with streaks of paint up her arms like war marks, and Diego, who called himself a DJ but mostly just carried crates of vinyl to other people’s gigs. Jackie didn’t fit with them, not really, but that was the point. She didn’t have to. They didn’t ask about her past, and she didn’t ask about theirs.
She worked shifts that didn’t matter, wherever would take her—folding shirts at a thrift store, handing out flyers on corners, pouring drinks at a bar until she got caught giving away too many free shots. Made friends who called her Kie instead of Jackie or Jack, and learned how to laugh without checking if it was the right volume. Nights bled into mornings with cheap drinks and cheaper takeout, but she felt—if not happy—then at least alive.
Bushwick was chaos, and chaos suited her. Rooftop parties that lasted until dawn, graffiti murals that changed weekly, music shaking the warehouse walls. Nobody told her she was too much here. Nobody told her to smile softer, laugh quieter. In Bushwick, she could just be.
Sometimes, in the early hours when the building rattled with Diego’s music or Jules’s newest fling, she lay awake and wondered if she’d only traded one performance for another. If freedom was just another mask. But then the sun would rise pink over the rooftops, and for a moment, she believed she could really be new.
Rutgers had been a punishment. Clara’s house had been a warning. But Bushwick? Bushwick was a dare, and Jackie said yes.
A year and a half later, Jackie thought she had finally done it—outrun Wiskayok, outgrown the girl who cried herself sick over Shauna and Jeff. She had her dive bar, her crowd, her laugh that nobody told her to quiet down.
And then came the dive bar.
It wasn’t special—just a cracked neon sign, floors that stuck to your shoes, a bartender who poured heavy and never asked questions, and who gave Jackie free drinks when he remembered how much he laughed teaching her to pour drinks, only for her to get fired when she hit the one-month mark at another bar a few blocks away. But to Jackie, it was home. She came here with friends, with strangers, sometimes alone. The kind of place where nobody cared if you drank too much or laughed too loud. The kind of place where she believed, more than anywhere else, that she had finally outrun Wiskayok.
A year and a half after she’d first left Wiskayok and Rutgers, Jackie thought she had done it. She had carved out a version of herself that no one from back home would recognize.
But life has a way of being funny in the worst way, just as she was halfway through a story, waving her cigarette like punctuation, the door opened. She didn’t look up right away—she knew the rhythm of the place, knew the faces. But then she heard it. A laugh, sharp and familiar, curling like smoke into her chest.
Natalie Scatorccio. And behind her, Vanessa Palmer, striding in like she still owned every room she entered.
The air went thin in Jackie’s lungs. Her fingers froze around the glass.
Of all the bars in the city, of all the nights they could’ve walked in, why this one?
The walls of Bushwick, the rooftops, the freedom she thought she’d built—suddenly it all felt paper-thin.
Jackie felt her stomach drop.
Some things, it seemed, were impossible to outrun.