Chapter Text
"Shit!" Jackie exclaimed as she searched through her bag for the notebook she'd been sporadically keeping all her class notes in. Her fingers brush the inside lining of her bag again, slower this time, as though if she moves carefully enough something might appear that wasn’t there before. Lip gloss, keys, a folded flyer from some party Nat dragged her to last weekend. Still, she comes up empty.
She leans back in her chair, looking around her lecture hall and huffing out a breath. Fucking perfect, she thought, it was just like her to forget the one semblance of organisation she'd managed to pull together these past few months.
She stares at the empty space on her desk where the notebook should be. Her mind can't help but wander into dangerous territory, berating her with thoughts like this is the kind of thing Shauna would’ve caught.
Jackie's heart started to pound, she tried to tune into the lecturer's voice, but all she can think of is how Shauna would’ve noticed before they even left the dorm. She would’ve said, Jackie, your bag’s open, or Jackie, you didn’t pack your notes, or just handed them over without making a thing out of it.
Jackie presses her lips together and tries her best to listen once again. She hears her lecturer talk about how since it's November, their essays will be due at the end of the month.
The concept of it being November already hit Jackie like a bus. That meant it was five months since the Yellowjackets lost Nationals, five months since she read Shauna's diary, five months since she'd spoken to her best friend of fifteen years.
She doesn’t know what Shauna’s doing right now. Brown is… what, two hours away? Less? She could get there if she wanted to. The idea flickers around in the halls of her brain. She imagines it for a second what it would be like getting on a train, showing up, not calling ahead. Shauna opening the door. The look on her face. Jackie stops herself there, because she doesn’t know what that look would be.
Instead, her mind goes to the last time she saw Shauna's face at all. It was August and Jackie was lying in her bed tired out after packing up her car in preparation for college all day. It wasn't how she'd imagined, she'd thought it would be Shauna's car and their shared boxes, Jackie getting to watch Shauna get sweaty carrying her stuff.
She remembers staring up at the ceiling, not even bothering to turn on the lamp. The room looked wrong, half-empty, pieces of her missing from it already. There had been a tightness in her chest that whole day, honestly it had been there since her fight with Shauna in the night before Nationals in May.
She was broken out of her melancholy by a soft knock on her bedroom window. Jackie had sat up slowly, heart already racing before she even moved to the noise. For a second she just stood there, looking at the outline of the closest person in her life who was now a complete stranger.
When Jackie slid the window open, Shauna climbed in without asking, like she’d done a hundred times before. It was awkward, they didn't hug, Shauna could barely look her in the eye.
"Van told me you're leaving tomorrow," Shauna muttered, still looking at the floor.
Jackie let out a short, humourless laugh. "Yeah. That’s kind of how college works. I don't how how you ivy league people do it but us normal folk move into our dorms the week before the semester begins."
Shauna’s mouth pressed into a thin line. "Yeah, I guess it's just that you didn’t tell me it was this early. I thought it wasn't until the first week of September."
Jackie shrugged, turning away like it didn’t matter, like any of it didn’t matter. "Didn’t think you’d care."
Shauna's face turned from guilt to annoyance in an instant. Jackie savoured what might be her last ever classic Shipman eye roll.
"Right," Shauna said, her jaw tightening. "Because I don’t care about anything, right? That’s what you think?"
"I think you didn’t say anything," Jackie shot back. "Which is pretty much the same thing."
Silence dropped between them, heavy and immediate. There were a hundred things sitting underneath it, things Jackie could feel pressing at the back of her throat, things she knew Shauna could say if she wanted to.
Shauna crossed her arms, defensive, familiar. "What did you want me to say, Jackie?"
"I don’t know," Jackie said, exasperated. "Literally fucking anything resembling a reason or, I don't know, an apology."
Shauna let out a breath, shaking her head slightly, like she couldn’t believe they were here again. "You already decided what it meant. There’s no point."
Jackie felt that flare of anger again, hot and immediate, covering everything else. "Yeah, because you wrote it down, Shauna. You made it pretty clear."
"It's not like you weren’t supposed to read it," Shauna said, quieter now.
Jackie laughed again, harsher this time. "Well, I did."
They stood there, staring at each other, on opposite sides of something neither of them knew how to cross anymore.
Jackie became acutely aware of everything, of how close Shauna was standing, of the way her hands flexed slightly at her sides, of the way her breathing had gone uneven. Of how easy it would be to just lean in and...
"So, you’re really going," Shauna said, and this time it wasn’t a question.
Jackie swallowed. "Yeah."
Shauna looked at her the way she did sometimes when she forgot to do the thing where she made her face neutral, like she wanted to commit Jackie's face to memory.
"I didn’t want to lose you," Shauna said, quiet and factual.
Jackie’s chest did something inconvenient, as it had been lately. "Yeah, well, you should have thought about that."
"I know, Jackie," Shauna sighed.
The room was very still. Half Jackie's life was already in boxes and Shauna was standing close enough that she could see the particular way her mouth did that thing where she was about to say something and then didn’t. Jackie was aware, with the specific miserable clarity of someone who has been aware of this for longer than she’s admitted, of the exact distance between them.
Eight months ago that distance would have been nothing. She would have grabbed Shauna’s sleeve or knocked her shoulder or just leaned into her because that was just how they existed in space, always slightly overlapping, always taking up each other’s room. But now, she didn’t move.
Shauna’s hand came up and her fingers brushed Jackie’s wrist. Light, barely there, like she was trying to see if it was still allowed, asking a question she hadn’t put words to.
Shauna was close, and the room was dark. It would have been so easy to lean in, was the thing, and that was almost the worst part, how easy it would have been, how natural, how it almost made sense in the particular awful way that things make sense at 11pm in August when you’ve spent fifteen years circling something and finally you’re standing right at the centre of it and you could just go for it.
But Jackie stepped back, and Shauna’s hand fell, the distance was back and Jackie heard herself say, "You should probably go."
Shauna’s expression cycled through a million emotions that Jackie didn’t let herself look at long enough to read. Her hand went back to her side. She nodded once, a small private nod, confirming something she already knew.
She went back out the window without another word. She didn’t say goodbye. Jackie stood in the middle of her room and listened to Shauna’s footsteps going down the driveway and told herself she was glad.
She wasn’t glad and now she hadn’t been glad for months.
The lecturer said something about primary sources and Jackie blinked back into the lecture hall. The overhead lights were aggressively fluorescent. The girl two seats over was writing so aggressively Jackie could almost feel it. She stared at her empty desk and pressed the heel of her hand flat against the laminate surface like the solidity of it was useful information.
Five months. It kept landing with that same specific weight, like the number itself was the problem. Five months was long enough that she should be done with this by now. She was done with this. She was in college, she had friends, she had a class schedule and a dining hall table she liked and a roommate who was fine and a whole new life she was building very competently, thank you, and she did not spend time thinking about Shauna Shipman standing in her dark bedroom reaching for her wrist.
Nat was outside the building when she got out, leaning against the wall in her jacket with her hands in her pockets, squinting into the weak November sun.
"How was it," she said, wringing her hands awkwardly and pushing herself off the wall to start their walk to the dorms.
"I forgot my notebook." Jackie fell into step beside her, "So."
Nat looked at her sideways. "The one that’s been on your desk for three weeks."
"I’m aware of where I left it." Jackie said sardonically.
The path back to the dorms went alongside the quad, which was mostly empty today, a few people cutting across with their hoods up against the cold. The trees had given up entirely. Jackie kept her hands in her pockets and didn’t look at any of it in particular.
"You eat yet?" Nat said.
"No," Jackie found meals harder to do when it meant heading to the dining room for breakfast alone. She found everything harder to do alone, especially when she'd had her own personal shadow her entire life.
"Uh, the dining hall has tomato soup today, your favourite," Nat said in the same way she said everything, flat and unadorned, but Jackie knew it was an offering.
Jackie exhaled, the cold air of early winter made it visible, "Okay, yeah."
Nat nodded and they headed for the dining hall without making a thing of it. They joined soup line and Nat grabbed two bowls without asking, which was just how it worked with her. She didn’t check, she just handed things over, and she was always right.
They found a table by the window. Outside two guys were throwing a frisbee on the quad with the conviction of people who had decided it wasn’t too cold for this and were going to see it through. Jackie ate her soup. It was good, thick and actually tomato flavoured rather than tomato adjacent, just how she liked.
"Van’s coming down next weekend," Nat said.
Jackie pulled herself back. "Yeah?"
"She wants to go out. Said she needs to see you living your best newly single life." Nat tore a piece of bread in half. "Her words."
"Well, I've been single, so I don't know what she's implying," Jackie retorts. Nat gives her a knowing look but just takes a sip of her water in lieu of comment.
--
The party was in a house off College Avenue that smelled like spilled beer and one ambitious but misguided attempt at mulled wine. Van arrived Friday afternoon in a good mood, the energy that came off escaping your own campus for a night, and kept squeezing Jackie’s arm at intervals that didn’t correspond to anything in particular. Jackie let her, mostly because it was easier than asking her to stop and partly because it was Van, who had been squeezing her arm since the sixth grade and wasn’t going to stop now.
The living room was packed by ten, the music loud enough to make actual conversation aspirational. Jackie got a drink and found a spot near the wall and let the party move around her for a bit, which was something she’d gotten better at since September, not needing to be in the middle of everything, being able to just stand somewhere and watch. It wasn’t the same as being antisocial. It was more like learning to be comfortable in her own company in a room full of people, which was apparently a skill you could develop and not just something you either had or didn’t.
The girl’s name was Maya. She was a sophomore, biology, from Philadelphia, and she ended up next to Jackie reaching for the same spot on the drinks table and they started talking and then kept talking, moving out of the flow of traffic into the corner of the room where it was marginally quieter. She had a dry sense of humour and strong opinions and didn’t agree with Jackie about a film that had come out earlier that year, and Jackie pushed back on her and she pushed back harder..
At some point Van materialised at Jackie’s shoulder, said "hi, I’m Van" to Maya with the particular brightness that meant she approved, accepted a reply, and then dissolved back into the party. Maya watched her go. "Friend of yours?"
"Yeah, since forever," Jackie said, which was the only accurate way to describe any of the Yellowjackets.
Later, in the front hallway getting their coats, Maya wrote her number on the inside of Jackie’s palm and Jackie walked home with Van and Nat through the cold with something light sitting in her chest.
Van waited until they were nearly back before she said, with as much of a casual tone as she could muster, "So, have you talked to Shauna?"
Jackie looked straight ahead at the path, she'd been bracing herself for this. "No."
"I know Lottie called her last week," Lottie and Tai had been some of the only teammates that Shauna kept in contact with, Jackie 'won' most of the others in the 'break up', "She asked about you."
Jackie rolled her eyes at this, typical Shipman, asking around instead of being direct, "What did you tell her?"
"That you were good, y'know, that you seemed settled." Van glanced at her sideways. "Are you?"
Jackie thought about it, which she didn’t always do when people asked her things. The cold was sharp and the streetlights made orange pools on the pavement and her hand had Maya’s number on it. "Getting there," she said, which was true enough.
Van seemed to accept that. She linked her arm through Jackie’s and they walked the rest of the way back without pushing it further.
She didn’t call Maya that week, but she thought about it. She would, probably. There’d been something real in the conversation, something unperformed on both sides, and that was rarer than it should have been. She’d call. Just not yet.
What occupied her more, in the quiet of Sunday night with her roommate gone home for the weekend and the rain finally making good on its threat against the window, was the thought of December. Six weeks. She’d go home to Wiskayok, do Christmas with her parents, see the people she’d been mostly succeeding at not thinking about. She wondered if Shauna would be home for break or if she’d stay in Providence. She wondered what her room looked like, whether she’d made friends, whether Brown had turned out to be everything she’d decided it would be back when she was filling out applications behind Jackie's back last year. She wondered whether it was worth it to Shauna.
She turned her lamp off and lay in the dark listening to the rain and told herself she’d figure it out when she got home. She’d been figuring things out all semester, quietly, without anyone noticing how much work it was. She was getting pretty good at it. December would be fine. She’d walk back into that town and it would smell like it always did and she would be fine, and if she ran into Shauna she’d deal with it, and if she didn’t then she’d deal with that too.
She was almost asleep when she remembered she still hadn’t written anything in the notebook for her essay. She thought about it for approximately four seconds and then didn’t move.
It could wait until Monday.