Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Lottie Matthews doesn’t always know what’s real.

She knows that—accepts it, even. The pills muffle the voices, make it so they’re nothing more than ambient noise. She can tune them out like the bubblegum pop permanently on repeat at the corner store. The visions, once in high definition, are reduced to shadows, peripheral movements that could be dismissed as mere tricks of the light, were Lottie any other sixteen year-old.

The brick exterior of Wiskayok High School feels menacing, like the building itself is eyeing her hungrily. It smells fresh blood, she thinks. Despite being in eleventh grade, it’s Lottie’s first day here, and she’s overwhelmed by the feeling that she’s on the precipice. The precipice of what, though, she doesn’t know.

Dense forest looms behind the football field, taunting her. The leaves are just starting to yellow, the early September breeze carrying the quiet promise of death and decay, and Lottie knows that if she looks, she’ll find her standing there. When Lottie was twelve years old, she asked her father who the woman was—the one with the antlers who followed her to school, watched her at the playground, stood outside her window at night. He had chided her, told her she was too old to be making up stories.

She was unnerving. Still as a statue, faceless underneath her woven headdress. Even obscured, her eyes bored into Lottie. She spoke through the trees, melodious but insistent, whispering of blood and sacrifice, urging Lottie to comecomecome. It reminded Lottie of the sirens of ancient myth, except Lottie wasn’t a sailor, and this was dry land. She was supposed to be safe here.

The siren song crescendoed, like the diverging lines that sometimes underscored the notes in the sheet music Lottie practiced. Mf became f became ff, a relentless cacophony that left her lying awake more nights than not. What do you want, she would whisper, but she knew the answer. It wanted her.

It all came apart—no, that wasn’t right. Lottie came apart—in the backseat of her parents’ Benz. The woman, the thing, whatever it was, stood directly in their path, and Lottie knew. The woman was going to kill them. They’d swerve to avoid hitting her, and the car would lose control, and they’d die painful deaths, all of them. 

She remembers a blood-curdling scream (they told her later it had come from her), then white. Chalky white walls, blinding fluorescent lights. An ivory veil, draped over antlers. Three of them, holding her down with unnaturally long, spindly fingers, driving something sharp into her skin. It was Lottie’s fault. She had not gone willingly, and now they were here for her blood.

It took weeks for Lottie to come back to herself. Slowly, the cervine apparitions morphed into orderlies, billowing white robes becoming scrubs. The needles were replaced by pills, two-toned capsules in paper cups. 

The days blurred together, but Lottie must have been deemed sufficiently sane at some point, because eventually her clothes and shoes were returned to her, laces and all. The psychiatrist sat the Matthews family down in his office, sliding an orange pill bottle across his desk. He said childhood-onset schizophrenia and antipsychotics and lifelong and her mother cried. Her father looked at Lottie like she was gum on the sole of his shoe.

Malcolm and Emilia Matthews weren’t particularly present parents at the best of times, traveling for Malcolm’s business more often than not, but after the diagnosis, their Wiskayok mansion was rarely graced by their presence. Lucky for them, they owned plenty of other properties in New York and LA and other places far, far away from the black mark of Lottie’s existence. Parenting duties were relegated to the army of staff her father kept on standby: they cooked, cleaned, and chaffeured. They doled out her pills in the morning, always checking under her tongue, and Lottie got the message loud and clear: You’re crazy, and you can’t be trusted. Sometimes, when she sat alone in the empty Matthews mansion (she always thought it was more like a mausoleum than a home), she found that she missed the constant whisper of the wilderness. 

By the time she reached her teens, her parents had given up all pretense of parental involvement, and arranged for Lottie to be sent away. Maybe the help got tired of her, too. Four years in an obscenely expensive Montreal boarding school, and somehow Lottie was lonelier than ever. It was only this summer, after months and months of begging and promising she could act normal, that her parents agreed to let her come back to Wiskayok.

By now, she’s well-practiced in differentiating the real from the hallucinatory. When she was young and learning to read, her teacher always said if you don’t know what a word means, look for context clues. There are almost always hints in the surrounding words, it’s just a matter of looking hard enough. Her first line of defense is observing the people around her, reading their reactions, or lack thereof, to unusual sounds or sights. Even when she’s alone, there are tells—figures that don’t leave shadows in the sunlight, footfalls that make no sound. So while she knows that if she looks to the forest, she’ll see the antlered entity that’s been stalking her since sixth grade, she also knows that it won’t be real, and that’s a very important distinction—knowing means she has at least one foot planted in reality.

I’m in control, she reminds herself, steeling herself to walk through the double doors into the new frontier that is Wiskayok High. She’s about to take the proverbial leap, one foot over the threshold, when a body slams into her shoulder, sending her stumbling forward.

“Fucking watch it,” someone growls from behind her. Lottie whips her head to look at her assailant, prepared to chew out some asshole jock. Instead, her breath catches, any and all retorts dying on her lips. 

The girl standing before her is all monochrome, her dark eyeshadow and leather jacket sharply contrasting her pale skin and bleached shag. She must be half a foot shorter than Lottie, but she holds herself like she’s the tallest in school. There’s violence in her posture, in the cock of her head, the twitch of her fingers. She looks like a mouse squaring up against a cat. Defiant. 

Lottie thinks this girl might be the realest thing she’s ever seen. The kind of girl who dances like nobody’s watching, who marches into every room like she owns it, who is never anything but completely, unabashedly herself. The kind of girl Lottie, whose secret shame weighs her down like manacles, will never be.

Lottie manages to mumble an apology, to which the girl just scoffs.

“Whatever.” She stalks off into the crowded hallway before Lottie can reply, the sea of students quickly swallowing her from sight. 

“Jesus Christ...” Lottie exhales slowly, slightly dumbstruck. She should probably be irritated by the girl’s blatant rudeness, and she is, but a part of her welcomes the directness. When she was younger, before she became a source of embarrassment, her father would parade her around at fundraisers and charity galas and dinner parties. The guests there practiced a particular type of warfare unique to the rich and powerful, where threats came packaged as compliments, every word calculated and weighted, like some twisted game of chess. You’d be so entranced by their pretty words that you wouldn’t notice the knife in your gut until it was too late. Lottie can appreciate the kind of person who wears their hostility on their sleeve. At least you always know where you stand.

She makes it to homeroom without incident—another incident, that is. The girl lingers in her mind all morning; more than once, she finds herself scanning her surroundings in search of bleach blonde hair, an unfamiliar excitement burning beneath her navel.

Biology class drags on so slowly that Lottie’s having trouble remembering a time she wasn’t in this classroom listening to a balding white guy drone on about cell structure. She’s starting to feel like she might scream. What would happen if she did? Would they drag her away again, lock her up where she couldn’t endanger her father’s reputation? She’s busy musing on this when she feels a nudge against her elbow. She turns to the person seated next to her, a pale, freckled girl with a copper ponytail and a mischievous grin.

The girl slides her open notebook across their shared table and looks at Lottie expectantly. Lottie reads the message scrawled at the top of the page: This class is making me wanna kill someone. I haven’t decided who yet, but someone is not making it out of this room alive.

Lottie has to clamp a hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter. If I hear him say “endoplasmic reticulum” one more time I’ll gladly volunteer myself, she replies.

The girl smirks conspiratorially, hurriedly writing her response. I don’t know, I think maybe we can take down good ol’ teach, make it look like natural causes.

Lottie nods thoughtfully, as if she’s considering the proposal. We’d really be doing a public service if you think about it. His lectures are basically child abuse.

The redhead actually snorts, earning her a reproachful glare from the teacher. “Vanessa,” he warns.

She glowers at him. “My name is Van.” He ignores her, resuming his monologue about mitochondria. The girls sit in silence for a minute, and Lottie, noticing that Van has deflated slightly, pulls the notebook back to herself.

Lottie, she writes. Van looks at her quizzically. If we’re going to be partners in crime, it’s only fair you know my name too, right Van? 

The pair share a smile. It feels easy, comfortable in a way Lottie forgot was possible. The girls in Montreal were their fathers’ daughters—charming and well-mannered, but there was a hunger in their eyes, and an uncanny ability to smell weakness. They wore power like a second skin, like they expected the very universe to bend to their will (the problem was, it usually did). Lottie had grown accustomed to the backstabbing and politicking of the one percent. Looking at Van, she sees nothing but sincerity—no ulterior motives, no plotting, just a genuine desire for connection. It’s enough to make her heart swell with hope. Maybe things can be good here.

She’s pulled from her reverie by a pencil poking her forearm, signaling a new message from her coconspirator: So I’m thinking poison...

Entering the cafeteria as a new transfer student feels like entering an active combat zone. Lottie’s half-convinced she’ll be blown limb from limb if she takes a wrong step. The thing about being Malcolm Matthews’s daughter is, it’s fifty-fifty whether the overwhelming sense of being watched is an effect of her illness, or if everyone’s actually staring at her. Either way, she feels stripped raw under their scrutinizing gaze.

Instinct takes over, and she slips into performance mode, spine ramrod straight, smile gleaming and effortless. The skill was a seed planted by her father, and cultivated in Montreal, where only the socially adept survived. 

“Oh my God, Charlotte Matthews? It’s been too long!” The voice comes from a girl Lottie recognizes from charity galas of years past. Her dad was a leech, according to Malcolm, always kissing the asses of people more successful than himself. It only takes half a second for Lottie to determine the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

Lottie doesn’t actually remember this girl’s name, so she just smiles softly. “It’s Lottie now, actually.”

The girl bulldozes forward without acknowledging the correction. “Where the hell have you been? No one’s seen you since, like, 1991.” Underneath her saccharine smile, Lottie sees something wolfish and cruel—like the girl knows something, and is asking just to make Lottie squirm.

Lottie won’t give her that satisfaction. “Boarding school, actually!” she replies without missing a beat. “Just so much more opportunity abroad, and learning French was a plus.” She doesn’t need to know that it was Québécois. Let her think Lottie was gallivanting across Europe.

The girl’s smile falters for a fraction of a second before she catches herself. “Right,” she says icily. “You know, I heard the craziest story about you recently.” She draws out the vowel in crazy, letting the word linger in the air between them.

It knocks the air out of Lottie like a punch to the gut. What does she know? Her eyes dart around, the discordant chatter of the cafeteria suddenly suffocating, too close and too distant all at once. They’re laughing at her. Jeering. They know all of it. They can read her mind.

A hand on her arm jolts her back into her body. “You coming? I saved you a seat.” Like an angel from above, Van from biology appears beside her. In that moment, Lottie swears she can make out the faint glow of a halo atop the girl’s auburn hair. 

Suddenly Lottie remembers how to breathe, her mask snapping back into place. She smiles at Gala Girl. “Looks like I’m needed elsewhere. So nice catching up with you,” she says with barely-contained mockery. Van grabs her arm, and the two of them hightail it across the cafeteria.

Lottie stares at Van in bewilderment, heart still drumming in her chest. “So, you’re officially my fucking hero.”

Van barks out a laugh. “Fucking Brittany Howard. She was in my homeroom last year—absolute monster. You know she made a teacher cry? Broke him so bad he had to miss a week of school. Here—this way.” She motions for Lottie to follow her to a table in the corner of the room, where a curly-haired girl sits, her face buried in a book.

“Figured I’d save you, seeing as you’re new and all,” Van continues. “Plus, who’d be my murder accomplice if I let her break your brain with her freaky popular girl mind games?”

They reach the table, Van gesturing for Lottie to sit. “Lottie, Taissa. Taissa, Lottie.”

Taissa glances up at Lottie. “Lottie Matthews? No shit,” she says, looking vaguely impressed.

Van looks between them in confusion, opening her mouth and then closing it, realization washing over her features. “Oh. Huh. That explains a lot, actually.” She shrugs, taking a seat next to Taissa.

Taissa gives Van a playful smack on the arm. “You’re a moron.”

Van gapes at her in mock offense. “Sorry I’m not a rich bitch who keeps up with the lives of the Central Jersey elite. I only know who Malcolm Matthews is because of Jackie.”

Lottie blinks, disarmed by Van’s lack of reaction to this new information. Usually her last name precedes her, but for those who somehow don’t know about her family... Well, when people find out Lottie’s father owns half the wealth in the tri-state area, it changes things. They either start kissing her ass, or they hate her on principle.

Lottie looks at Van uncertainly. “This doesn’t... change anything?”

Van frowns and cocks her head. “Should it?”

Lottie shrugs. “Most people seem to think it should.”

“Well, unless you wanna buy me a mansion, I couldn’t care less. Or a Mustang.”

“What the hell are you gonna do with a Mustang?” Tai looks up from her book, amusement lacing her tone.

“Lean against the hood and look cool. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Taissa deadpans. She rolls her eyes at Lottie before breaking into a grin.

Van lobs a baby carrot in her direction. “Watch it. People who mock me don’t get rides in my Mustang.”

“Did you have a good first day?” It’s a question that should be coming from Lottie’s parents, but that would require them to actually be here. She’s not even sure what country they’re in.

Instead, the question comes from Greg—her driver, and probably the closest thing she has to a friend, if she looks past the fact that he insists on calling her Miss Matthews, and approaches their conversations with the solemn professionalism of a Beefeater.

Lottie hums thoughtfully as she considers the question. A smart-mouthed ginger and a curly-haired overachiever flash through her mind, and she smiles. “Yeah, I did,” she says, and is surprised to find that she actually means it.

The house stands barren and unwelcoming, like the carcass of some massive prehistoric beast left to rot in the sun. It’s perfect, of course, made of the finest materials (Malcolm Matthews wouldn’t settle for anything less), but it’s not a home. It wasn’t built for living in; like so much of Malcolm’s world, it was built for appearances. A shiny, plastic house for his shiny, plastic family.

Lottie knows her dad resents her for her diagnosis. She’s the one thing he can’t pay to have fixed. He can slap on a fresh coat of paint, cover up the unsightly, broken parts, but the structural damage will always be beyond his reach. He used to show her off like a trophy: his beautiful Charlotte, heiress to the Matthews’ business empire. What is she now? She supposes she’s still the heir to the company, but she’s certainly not his beautiful Charlotte. She stopped being his beautiful Charlotte the minute she started talking about strange figures with antlers.

She watches Greg leave, reversing down the long, winding driveway that isolates the Matthews’ residence from the rest of the street (Lottie thinks this was intentional: another way for her father to assert his family as superior to the New Jersey rabble). He’ll be back in the morning, along with various maids and housekeepers, but until then, the house is hers, all twelve thousand square feet of it.

Lottie ditches her sneakers near the door and heads for the living room, socked feet sliding across the hardwood floor. The far wall is made up of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. She grabs her cigar box from its spot on the shelf, nestled among the hardcovers. Laying the box on a nearby coffee table, she surveys the cassette tapes inside, running her finger along the spines as she deliberates. She settles on Weezer’s Blue Album, popping it into the tape deck and cranking up the volume (she knows it’s probably not good for her ears, but it makes the house feel less empty).

Backpack slung over one shoulder, she makes her way to the kitchen, distorted electric guitar blaring behind her. She grabs the phone from where it sits on the counter, punching in a few quick numbers. She has the local Chinese place on speed dial. She’s pretty sure she’s their best customer—she knows all the delivery drivers by name, and unsupervised access to her dad’s credit card means she tips very generously.

Half an hour later, new cassette tape in play (The Cranberries’ No Need to Argue), Lottie happily shovels pork lo mein into her mouth as she retrieves a slightly crumpled flyer from her backpack. The top reads “Fall 1995 Girls’ Soccer Tryouts” in blue and gold lettering. She abandons her lo mein for a moment, mindlessly fiddling with her chopsticks as she reads the details. 

Everyone in Wiskayok knows that girls’ soccer is basically the only thing WHS has going for it, sports-wise. Their football team is average, baseball mediocre, basketball just okay. But the girls’ soccer team, helmed by Coach Martinez? They’re the kind of team that makes you proud to be a WHS Yellowjacket.

Van and Taissa have both played since freshman year. According to Van, Tai was the only freshman to make varsity. Apparently there was some other girl who was a shoo-in, but blew her shot by showing up to tryouts practically an hour late. She still made JV (she’s that good, Van assured Lottie), but only after Coach Martinez publicly lambasted her about the qualities of a team player. She and Van both joined Tai in varsity last year.

As Van was regaling her with tales of the ‘94 varsity team’s various misadventures, Lottie made the mistake of mentioning that she played soccer through all of elementary school, and now, somehow, she’s agreed to try out with Van and Tai. She did love it when she was a kid, she reasons, idly poking at her noodles. And her shrink does keep lecturing her about the importance of having hobbies. She thinks she has as good a shot as anyone, too—she’s always been naturally athletic, and she’s a good runner. Plus, being insanely tall never hurts in girls’ sports. She’ll think about it more tomorrow; for now, she goes back to her lo mein and hums along as “Zombie” plays from the living room.

Lottie likes to fall asleep with the TV on. Most people consider it a bad habit, but for her, it’s a coping mechanism. She started leaving it on when she was twelve and hearing things she couldn’t make sense of. Unintelligible whispers from under her bed, incessant dripping when there was no water in sight, the phone, ringing for hours and hours downstairs but somehow never waking her parents up.

At the time, she thought her house might be haunted. In scary movies, it was always the kids who noticed the ghosts first—they were more in-tune with the supernatural. Lottie consulted her ultra-religious classmate, Laura Lee, who affirmed her fears, listening wide-eyed as Lottie recounted the strange occurrences.

Her parents never noticed the cross Lottie started wearing at all times, or the ever-growing mounds of salt she had taken to sprinkling around the house to ward off bad spirits. They didn’t notice the dark circles, painted under her eyes like bruises, deepening every day. Lottie’s not sure if they were truly oblivious to what was happening, or if they just didn’t care to notice. She’s also not sure which would be worse.

Tonight, she crawls into bed to the sound of Letterman, studio laughter and jazz music blanketing her room with noise. She watches for a bit as she settles in for the night. Christina Applegate walks in from offstage, strikingly blonde. Lottie watches with fascination as she struts up to Letterman with confidence, her black dress tight in all the right places. Her mind turns, unbidden, to the girl from this morning. In that brief interaction, she somehow managed to worm her way into Lottie’s brain, and Lottie can’t shake her. 

She can’t shake the light dusting of freckles across her cheeks, or the way her heavy eyeshadow made the blue of her irises all the more striking. The dark brown eyebrows that ruin any attempt to pass off her platinum blonde hair as natural. The way she looked Lottie straight in the eye, challenging her without words.

Lottie closes her eyes, listening to the audience laugh as Christina and Letterman joke about her playing a dumb blonde on TV. She thinks of chipped black nail polish and cracked leather, and feels a burning hunger rise up inside her. Her last thought before sleep takes her is that she needs to find out that girl’s name.

Chapter Text

By the time Natalie Scatorccio was ten years old, she could point out every single creaky floorboard in her family’s dilapidated trailer. She could tell you which doors squeaked on their hinges, and which of her shoes made the quietest footfalls. If there was one thing Nat was good at, it was avoiding detection. She was a ghost in her own house, silent and invisible in a way that was deeply unnatural for a girl her age (a skill that came with a steep learning curve—she has the scars to prove it).

Sometimes she forgets that he’s gone and can’t hurt her anymore. She hasn’t forgotten what happened—no, she’s sure those images will be burned into the back of her eyelids until the day she dies—but it’s like her body doesn’t understand that she’s safe now, like something’s going to jump out at her while she stands in the kitchen toasting her Pop-Tarts. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Nat glances at the cluttered table that sits in front of the couch. More specifically, the aftermath of whatever the fuck her mom was doing last night: the overturned glass pipe, and the residue of a powdery substance Nat thinks could be a number of things, almost all of them felonies. 

Maybe safety is relative.

She shrugs on her leather jacket and shoves a warmed Pop-Tart in one of its pockets, the other hanging from her mouth as she laces up her boots. She moves with purpose, not wanting to miss her ride. Natalie’s on thin ice after last semester, and she has enough sense to know that showing up late on the first day will not look good for her. She really can’t afford any more fuck-ups, and for as much as she’d like to tell Principal Calloway to go fuck himself, she really does care about soccer. Plus, while she’s never been under the illusion that she’s college material, even her parents finished high school. Nat doesn’t expect she’ll be any better than them, but she’s sure as hell not gonna be worse. 

Kevyn waits on the street outside the trailer park, idling in his dumbass Saturn. It was white when he bought it, but he thought it’d look cooler painted black. Nat doesn’t know if he ran out of paint halfway, or if he’s just really bad at painting, but the thing’s a monstrosity, like some kind of fucked-up zebra. He insists it’s punk-rock. She insists he’s a douchebag.

Case in point: Kevyn spots her and wolf-whistles, waggling his eyebrows suggestively as she wrenches open the passenger-side door. She gives him the most withering glare she can muster at 7:30 in the morning, but he just doubles over with laughter, and damn it, she’s weak—she can’t help but crack a smile. “I’m gonna kill you one of these days, you know.”

Kevyn snorts, eyes on the road as he merges into traffic. “But then who’d drive your sorry ass to school?” 

Nat kicks her feet up on the dashboard by way of response. “I’d just drive your car,” she says as she lights a cigarette.

“You’d steal my car?” He sounds genuinely scandalized.

“It’s not like you need it, you’re fucking dead!”

“Gimme that,” he mutters, reaching across Natalie’s body for her cigarette.

“Get your own,” she bickers, but doesn’t put up much of a fight, letting him wrest the thing from her fingers. She glares at him as he takes a gloating, dramatic puff. “Asshole.” 

“Bitch.”

They lapse into silence, Nat staring out the passenger-side window, Kevyn watching the road as they come up on the chaotic student parking lot. He’s the first to break (he always is), laughing and handing the cigarette back to Nat. “I’ll see you after third period, yeah?” 

“Goodbye,” she says with a long-suffering sigh (a yes, to those fluent in Natalie Scatorccio).

They break off in different directions, Nat spotting Jackie leaning against a column in the school’s front courtyard, an easy confidence in her posture.

Nat calls out as she approaches her. “Yo, Cap!” The moniker is a relic from freshman year, when Jackie was captain of the JV soccer team. She and Nat had moved on to varsity the next season, where they were small fry next to the upperclassmen, but Cap had stuck. To Natalie, and the rest of her Class of ‘97 teammates, Jackie Taylor was forever their captain, in spirit if not in name.

Jackie turns, and Natalie’s met with those mesmerizing hazel eyes of hers. They were the first thing she noticed about the other girl, back when they were twelve and sharing a sixth-grade math class. Nat used to wonder if the blonde girl had used those giant saucer eyes to hypnotize her somehow—it was, frankly, the only explanation she could come up with as to how the hell she had become friends with Jackie Taylor. Their friendship had felt like something that was done to her, rather than something in which she was a willing participant.

There was some truth to that: Jackie, force of nature that she was, had sucked Natalie into her orbit. But if Nat’s being honest with herself (something she’s not really in the habit of doing), she surrendered herself to the girl’s gravitational pull. Because the truth was, she relished the opportunity to play make-believe, to pretend to be something other than trailer trash with parents who didn’t love her. Jackie existed in a different world than Natalie, one where families ate dinner together and kids got Tooth Fairy money and dads never raised a hand against moms. And when she was with Jackie, Nat got to live in that world too, if only for a little while. 

(She knows now, all these years later, that families like Jackie’s aren’t without problems—you just have to look harder to spot them. Their bleeding is internal, while Nat’s life is a collection of gaping wounds.)

With Jackie turned to face her, Nat can now see the flannel-clad figure standing opposite the captain. Shauna’s eyes flash with the barest hint of irritation as they register Nat, or so Nat thinks—it’s hard to tell with Shauna, who exudes a near-constant air of quiet discontent. 

Jackie, on the other hand, lights up with excitement at Natalie’s arrival. She grabs Nat by the arm, quite literally dragging her into her conversation with Shauna. “Nat! Please tell Shauna she looks good in red.” Shauna crosses her arms, dour, clearly not enjoying whatever weird argument is happening here.

Nat blinks owlishly at the pair of them. She’s pretty sure there’s some kind of secret teenage girl subtext to the question, judging by the expectant way Jackie’s looking at her, but it is too goddamn early for this. Suddenly, she finds herself missing Kevyn’s stupid ass. Boys are so much fucking simpler.

She must take too long to answer, because Jackie groans in frustration. “My party next Friday, remember? Shauna was gonna show up in like, a flannel and jeans.” She names the articles of clothing like they’re swear words. “I told her she needs to wear that red dress I gave her—you know, the boob dress? There are gonna be boys there, Shauna!” She looks to Nat imploringly. “I need you to tell her how hot she looks in the boob dress, since apparently my opinion doesn’t count for anything.” Strangely, Nat thinks she catches a note of genuine hurt in Jackie’s voice. 

Again, Nat stares at Jackie blankly. “And you couldn’t ask, you know, literally anyone else?” She quickly backpedals when Jackie’s expression turns almost as stormy as Shauna’s. “Fine, fine! Uh, Shauna, you look hot in the...boob dress,” she chokes out, heat creeping up her neck. The shrill echo of the warning bell spares her from this conversation’s inevitably awkward conclusion. “Listen, I gotta go, I’ve got Mrs. Kates for homeroom this year.” 

Even Shauna winces sympathetically at the mention of Mrs. Kates, and Jackie gives Natalie a shove, eyes wide. “Jesus Nat, why didn’t you say so? You’d better run. We’ll find you at lunch,” she adds as Nat hurries away.

Natalie actually has Mr. Blanken for homeroom, and he notoriously doesn’t give a shit about tardiness (and he shouldn’t, homeroom’s not even a real fucking class), but she’s fairly confident Jackie won’t ever figure that out. It’s a lot harder to pull one over on Shauna, but something tells Nat she’d be sympathetic to the desire to flee from Jackie’s fashion tirade. If anything, she’d be pissed Nat didn’t take her with her.

She tries to shove Shauna from her mind as she pushes her way through the mass of students congregated in the courtyard. Because yes, Shauna does look hot in the boob dress—so fucking hot, in a way that Nat is most definitely not supposed to notice. Just like she isn’t supposed to notice the gentle slope of Van’s jaw, or the curve of Mari’s hips when they change in the locker room.

She doesn’t know when it started. Maybe it was always there: a mistake in her genetic wiring, some kind of cosmic fuck you, because being born a Scatorccio wasn’t punishment enough. She tried to chalk it up to an overabundance of pent-up horniness—when you’re starving, even foods you don’t like start to look good, right? So she fucked Bobby Farleigh in the back of his van, let drunk upperclassmen feel her up at parties, even made out with Kevyn a few times—anything to satiate the rotten craving slithering in her gut. It did nothing for her wandering eyes in the locker room, on the field, in the hallways. She continued to be tormented by Shauna’s callipygian figure, Tai’s sculpted calves.

The boob dress... Nat fights to repress the shiver of excitement she feels when thinking the words Shauna and boob together. Lost in her anxiously spiraling thoughts, she barrels into someone near the school’s glass double doors. “Fucking watch it,” she spits reflexively, knowing full well the collision was her own fault.

She straightens, fingers curling into fists at her sides, and takes in the figure before her. She’s tall and slender, but not in the awkward, gangly way that so many of Natalie’s male classmates are—her form exudes grace, like the lithe body of a ballerina. Thick, black hair cascades in waves down her back. 

It’s all Nat can do to keep her jaw from dropping as the girl turns to face her. Holy fuck, she thinks as she takes in the girl’s features, her eyes lingering just a heartbeat too long on her full, pink lips.

The girl blinks at Natalie, looking dazed. She mumbles an apology with a bashfulness that lights all of Nat’s nerve endings on fire. Oh no, oh fuck, oh shit oh no—

She can’t escape it. Why? Why is it not enough to be slutty, skanky Natalie Scatorccio, the burnout with the junkie, trailer-trash parents, with the dad who painted the walls with his brains? Why does she have to be a disgusting fucking pervert too?

She blinks, and she’s fifteen, cowering against her bedroom wall. The spittle flying from her dad’s mouth mixes with the tears on her cheeks. 

Are you a little dyke? What, it wasn’t enough to be a slut like your mother—you’ve gotta be a carpet-muncher too? There’s a thwack as his hand connects with her face, and she tastes copper.

In the school hallway, Nat touches her fingers to her lips, expecting them to come away bloodied, and accidentally meets the eyes of the girl she crashed into. The taller girl’s stare is eerily penetrating, like she can see right through Natalie. Nat’s not sure if she wants to flee, or punch this girl in her perfect lips (There are a few other things she’d like to do with those lips, she muses, before hurriedly pushing away the thought).

Nat shoots the girl a defiant look, straightening her spine, puffing out her chest in an effort to make herself imposing. She clenches her fists to hide the tremor in her hands. “Whatever,” she huffs, laughing humorlessly in a way she hopes sounds cold and unbothered. Before the girl can reply, Nat turns on her heel and slinks away, nausea curdling in her stomach.

Tell her how hot she looks in the boob dress.

Are you a little dyke?

She disappears into the mass of students, eyes hard, daring someone to try her. She catches a shrimpy little freshman stealing glances at her, and hits him with a glare that could melt stone. She swears she can see his prepubescent balls crawl back into his body as he practically trips over himself to get away.

Yeah. That’s what she fucking thought.

“I don’t know what that is, but it’s not food,” Nat deadpans as Jackie slides onto the bench across from her. “You’re a junior, dude. You should really know better at this point."

“You can have half of my sandwich,” Shauna says softly, doe eyes locked earnestly on Jackie.

Jackie wrinkles her nose at the contents of her tray. “It was supposed to be better this year! ‘New distributor’, my ass.” Shauna silently hands her half a bologna sandwich, earning a grateful smile from Jackie. “Thanks. God, what would I do without you, Shipman?”

“Oh, you’d definitely starve,” Nat interjects with a grin. Jackie flips her off, making Shauna laugh. 

Nat’s eyes wander the bustling cafeteria. All around the room, freshmen stare at their lunch trays in dismay, hesitantly sticking their forks into what is sure to be a horrifying adventure in diarrhea. Her gaze lands on a familiar figure across the room. It’s the girl from this morning, standing with someone equally statuesque and expensive-looking. She laughs effortlessly, like it costs her nothing, and Natalie can’t help the twinge of resentment that shoots through her. 

Look, she’s basically hardwired to hate girls like that—girls who grow up having everything handed to them, whose biggest struggle in life is picking a color for their mani pedi. And yes, she’s aware she’s currently sitting with one such girl, but just because she has Stockholm syndrome with Jackie doesn’t mean she has to tolerate the rest of her kind.

Jackie and Shauna’s conversation fades in and out of Nat’s awareness as she broods over the tall, hot stranger, their words evaporating like smoke around her, until Jackie says something that catches her attention. “Did you hear Lottie Matthews is back?”

Intrigued, Nat’s eyes flit to Jackie, attention sharpening. Matthews... She recognizes the name, of course; the Matthews family is practically mythological in this town. They’re the kind of rich that makes Jackie look poor—a concept that still boggles Nat’s mind.

Shauna raises her eyebrows. “Really? I always liked her. She was on my soccer team in fifth grade. She basically dropped off the face of the Earth like halfway through the season, nobody knew why. There were all sorts of crazy rumors about her dad selling her off to some foreign prince as part of a business deal.”

Nat cringes. “As a fifth grader? Jesus, that’s fucked.” For all his faults (and there were many), at least her dad had never tried that.

“I’m, like, 99% sure that rumor isn’t true,” Jackie says through a mouthful of bologna sandwich. “Otherwise my mom definitely would’ve let something slip while wine-drunk.”

Natalie frowns at that. “Why would your mom know about the Matthews’ shady business deals?”

“All the rich people in this town know each other,” Shauna scoffs. “And the rich moms know everybody’s secrets. They’re like CIA agents. It’s actually kind of terrifying.”

“Thank God my mom’s poor,” Nat says dryly. Jackie flinches, her fragile sensibilities rocked by Nat’s bluntness. Nat’ll never understand why the other girl dances around the “p” word like it’s a slur, like Nat doesn’t know what she is—like she hasn’t known since before she even knew her own fucking name. 

Shauna huffs out a silent laugh, the corners of her mouth tugging upward, but her eyes are sad. It makes Natalie’s ears burn. She thinks of clipboards and pitying smiles and we’re here to help, Natalie. 

“You know, having the Matthews girl here could be the best thing that ever happened to this shithole,” Nat says, careful to inject her words with an air of casual indifference. “Maybe her daddy will buy us a new gym.”

“Or better cafeteria food,” Jackie says glumly. Shauna gives her a placating pat on the back, locking eyes with Natalie as Jackie stares at her untouched tray with dismay.

Nat chuckles, glancing back in the direction of the mesmerizing stranger, who is now nowhere to be seen. Maybe she ate the mystery meat. Not that it matters—Nat doesn’t have any feelings about the girl’s absence, and she certainly doesn’t spend the remainder of her lunch period keeping an eye out for her. That would be weird.

All Nat’s life, her dad’s presence was like a dark shroud hanging over their trailer. He was a writhing void of hate and misery that infected everything in its vicinity. Nat—desperately afraid that one day, she’d be sucked into the black hole, never to be seen again—learned early how to make herself scarce. She haunted the school after-hours, wandered the streets, anything to not be home. She was more specter than flesh-and-blood girl: if you looked long enough, you could see right through her.

Everything changed when she met Jackie.

The thing about Jackie Taylor is that she’s the Main Character. She’s the prom queen, the team captain, the one who gets all the boys, and any other girl in her proximity is inevitably sidelined, reduced to a supporting character in her story. Nat understood this from the start, and it never bothered her. It was simply the natural order of things.

Being Jackie’s sidekick meant going along with whatever she wanted to do, and in the summer before seventh grade, that was soccer. Nat—a firm believer that running was created by the Devil, and anyone who willingly subjected themself to it was sick in the head—was more than a little reluctant to participate. So when she started to actually give a shit about what offsides meant, and the difference between a goal kick and a free kick, no one was more surprised than her.

Eventually, Jackie started bringing others: Taissa, who took herself far too seriously, but outmatched Nat on the field in a way that thrilled her to the bone, and Shauna, who was moody and secretive, but always cracked a smile at Nat’s jokes—even the ones that weren’t all that funny. Weeks melted into months, and Nat found herself voluntarily spending time with them off the field—sharing milkshakes at the 50s-themed diner downtown, floating lazily in Jackie’s in-ground pool (holy shit, Jackie had an in-ground pool), huddled together in fear watching The Exorcist in Shauna’s living room. Nat didn’t invite them over to hers, and they didn’t ask why. Some skeletons were better left in the closet.

By the time seventh grade rolled around, Natalie was hit with two realizations: First, these girls had somehow become her friends. She hadn’t meant for that to happen—in fact, it was a potentiality she had been actively trying to avoid. Friends meant expectations. Questions. Ones Nat couldn’t—or wouldn’t—answer.

 Second, Nat was good at soccer. Like, really fucking good. She might not have had fancy cleats or parents who paid for soccer camp, but she was fast, she was scrappy, and perhaps most importantly, she had a lot of fucking time to kill. The other girls had piano lessons after school, beach vacations over breaks, family dinners and curfews and fucking church on Sundays. Nat’s complete lack of parental supervision and burning desire to be literally anywhere but home meant she’d arrive at the rec field hours before the others, and stay long after they went home. She’d clip her Walkman to her waistband and practice juggling the ball with Nirvana blaring in her ears, set up empty beer bottles like cones and dribble between them until she could do it with her eyes closed. She’d sprint down the field and pretend she was running far, far away from this town.

Soccer was sacred. It was hers. 

Sometimes, climbing through her bedroom window late at night, muscles burning with exhaustion, Nat wondered if Jackie saved her life the day she introduced her to soccer.

Today, Nat fucks around on the school field until sunset. Misty gives her the key to the equipment shed on the condition that she locks everything up when she’s done. She even makes Nat pinky promise, with a solemnity that has Nat biting her cheek to keep from laughing.

It’s just her today—no Jackie, no Van. It limits her options, but she doesn’t mind the solitude. She slips on her headphones and dribbles between haphazardly-placed cones, happy to pass the hours with Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder as her only company.

She plays for as long as she’s physically able, her body’s need for food and water eventually surpassing her desire to avoid her mother. After ensuring all the equipment is returned to its rightful place (You’re welcome, Misty), she begins the long trek home.

The trailer park Natalie calls home has a permanent stench of cigarettes and piss. It hangs in the air so thick you can practically touch it. Sometimes when Nat’s high, she laughs at how fitting it is—like the universe itself pissing on their shitty little community.

It’s twilight by the time she makes her way to her family’s single-wide, the last vestiges of sunlight near fading. Her mom sits on the steps, a half-drunk beer bottle in hand. “Fuck’ve you been?” she says, her words slurring slightly.

Nat stares at the older woman, her face blank. “School.” Her tone is clipped, her jaw clenched as she steps around her mom to reach the door. 

“Thought it was summer,” her mom grunts, fishing a pack of Camels from her back pocket.

Nat doesn’t react, but scoffs internally as she pushes her way inside. What a fucking joke. She stops in the kitchen on the way to her room, sloppily slathering peanut butter onto their last slice of bread. She grabs a beer from the fridge, hesitates, then takes another. Her mom won’t notice they’re missing—and besides, she doesn’t get to lecture Nat. If she can leave her crack pipe lying in the living room, Natalie can have a fucking drink.

She flops onto her worn-out mattress with her shoes still on, sliding a new tape into her Walkman and closing her eyes. She tries to rid her mind of her father, something she can never seem to do these days. Apparently not even death can stop him from making Nat’s life hell.

She had always thought everything would be different without him around. The clouds would part, sunlight finally seeping in through cracked windows. His poison would drain from the walls, from Natalie and her mother’s veins, and they’d be happy.

She can’t believe she was ever that naive. 

After he died last spring, it quickly became clear that his rot ran deeper than she ever could’ve foreseen. She couldn’t just open the windows and air the place out, couldn’t scrub him from her psyche like she scrubbed his blood from the carpet. 

He was in the fucking foundation.

She wonders what Jackie’s doing right now—if she’s sitting at her perfectly-polished dining table eating home-cooked lasagna while Nat washes down peanut butter with Miller Lite in her hundred-square-foot bedroom; if she’s rolling her eyes as her mom asks about her new teachers, because it’s such a burden having a parent who gives half a shit.

Nat turns up the music in her headphones until it hurts.

“Are you a little dyke?” He grabs Nat by the wrist, wrenching her arm so violently she swears she can feel her bones start to crack. She lets out something halfway between a sob and a retch as she tries to twist away. He just sneers, slamming her against the wall with enough force that the plaster cracks, raining down around her like snow.

Nat looks at him pleadingly, her blood running cold as she registers the pure malice written on his face. The Scatorccios were always half-hearted Catholics; Natalie never put much stock in the concept of Heaven and Hell. In this moment, though, she swears she sees the Devil looking back at her.

“Please—I don’t know what you—” The air is knocked from her lungs as he throws her to the floor.

“Why is it I had to find out from Bobby fucking Mazzola, huh? You run around town licking pussy for everyone to see? You let ‘em watch? I bet you do, you little whore.” He punctuates his words with a kick to Natalie’s midsection, his work boot sending her sprawling onto her stomach, blood burbling from her mouth.

Her breath comes in ragged gasps, her vision going black around the edges. He’s still yelling, but he sounds distant—muffled, like Nat’s underwater.

He kicks her again, his boot meeting her ribs with a heavy thud.

She’s going to die here. This dingy fucking trailer and his awful fucking sneer are the last things she’s ever going to see.

Thud.

She hopes the team can find another winger before playoffs.

Thud.

She feels the cold, hard touch of metal against her fingertips, and she sees it, through blurred vision. A shotgun. His shotgun. The one he keeps next to his bed when he sleeps. The one he points at Nat and her mom, trembling and wild-eyed, when he takes too many uppers.

Her body moves on its own, the searing pain in her ribs suddenly distant as she lifts the barrel in his direction. A finger—her finger?—pulls the trigger. A bomb goes off. He hits the floor. She can’t tell which blood is hers and which is his.

She staggers to her feet, ears ringing, the walls pulsing around her. She reaches the front door, wrapping her hand around the doorknob. She needs to get out of here. She needs to—

The door swings open, and Nat stops breathing.

Standing across the threshold is her dad—or, what’s left of him. The entire left side of his head is gone, a gaping mess of gore and viscera. His left ear hangs from his head. Brain matter leaks from the cavernous hole where his eye used to be. 

“Oh, Natty. You can’t get rid of me,” he purrs, mouth curling into an almost pitying smile. She looks down to see the barrel of the shotgun pressed against her chest. How did he—It was just in her hand—

She tries to turn her head away, but he cups her chin, forcing her to behold his mutilated visage. He brushes a finger across her lip, making her stomach churn. It comes away crimson. Without breaking eye contact, he slides it into his mouth, licking it clean. “I live in your blood, baby girl.”

He pulls the trigger.

The world goes dark.

Natalie shoots up in bed, gasping for air. She rips off her headphones and flings them to the ground, her eyes darting frantically around the room. She lifts her shirt, sticky with sweat, and touches her ribs gingerly, bracing for that searing pain. It doesn’t come.

The clock reads 3:39. She pushes it face-down; the blinking red numbers are the same color as her dad's insides.

She doesn’t go back to sleep that night.