Chapter Text
“Oh, look what the cat dragged in!” Lottie chimed, grinning.
She sat on her bed in matching striped pajamas, her foot propped up on a textbook that Shauna was pretty sure she’d never seen her open, so that she could paint her nails an icy blue. Lottie was up way earlier than her usual. The sun was only just peeking through the window, but she was catching an early flight and cutting out before winter break technically began.
“What were you up to last night, hmm?”
“Oh…you know.” Shauna raised a brow playfully and let her far too fucking heavy backpack slide to the ground. Lottie leaned forward, surprise and intrigue flashing in her eyes. She’d probably let herself miss her plane, if Shauna had good enough gossip. “A long night of…writing my fucking final essay that I put off for way too long, Lot.”
Lottie sat back and clicked her tongue, waving her nail polish wand dismissively.
“I told you I was going to the library.” Shauna rolled her eyes. “I’m in sweats and lugging my backpack around, I don’t know what wild shit you expected me to be up to.”
Shauna crashed onto her bed. She was fucking exhausted, but she was done. No more essays to write, no more exams to take. All she had to do was catch some sleep and drive home, either tonight or tomorrow morning if she wanted. One sort-of-miserable term down, seven more to go.
Fuck.
“Did you finish it, at least?” Lottie asked.
She set the nail polish aside, precariously left open instead of twisted shut, because Lottie didn’t have to care if they got charged for a blue stain on the shitty carpet at the end of the year. (Shauna didn’t either, technically, because Mr. Matthews wouldn’t even look at the bill, but still. She was tired and a little pissy and it bugged her.)
“Yep,” Shauna sighed, rolling onto her back and crossing her arm over her eyes to shut out the light. “Home free. I need to crash, though. You leaving soon?”
“As soon as this dries. Are you picking Jackie up?”
“No,” Shauna tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “She’s going to Nag’s Head with the Sadeckis for the first week. Then she’s staying at mine for the second half. She told her parents she’s with Jeff the whole time, so she doesn’t have to see them. So if your parents ask—”
“Nag’s Head through and through,” Lottie said. “Got it. Not that they’ll even show face, honestly. Cannot believe she’s still with that boy.”
“That makes two of us,” Shauna mumbled. She shimmied under her covers, pulling her duvet up to her chin. “Do you…really think your parents will bail?”
Lottie laughed. Shauna opened her eyes and took her in—her messy curls held out of her face with an oversized clip and her expression carefully painted on. She always pretended that it didn’t bug her when her parents flaked, just like Jackie.
“I’m confident they’ll bail to the degree that I booked Nat a flight to the house at the Vineyard and managed to talk her into actually going,” Lottie smirked. “Which is, like, a total feat. So not worth it if I thought my parents were actually gonna be around.”
“God, I don’t know who would be more pissed,” Shauna snorted, “them or her.”
“Mmm, Nat. For fucking sure.” Lottie threw her legs over the side of the bed. “You sure you don’t wanna come? You and Jackie are more than welcome.”
You and Jackie. It was always the assumption, even now, that Shauna wouldn’t go anywhere without Jackie if she could help it. She used to hate the implications of that, but after a few months away from her…well, it felt different now. Shauna had never had the chance to miss her until they went their separate ways for school. She’d understood that she’d miss Jackie, intellectually. She’d been a little terrified of being away from her, even. But she’d had no fucking clue how much it would physically hurt.
They’d spent every moment of Thanksgiving break together, practically glued at the hip. Like, embarrassingly so. Sitting on the toilet while the other person showered levels of attachment. Shauna had driven to Rutgers twice, and each weekend Jackie’d had these grand aspirations to take her out and show her around, but they’d spent the entire time holed up on her twin bed. So Jackie deciding to spend ten days of their precious break hanging out with Jeff and his fucking family? That stung. And it was all the proof that Shauna needed to confirm what she’d been dreading—that Jackie must not be aching for her the same way that she ached for Jackie, because Shauna wouldn’t sacrifice a second of that time. And that was fucking pathetic of her, if she was being honest with herself.
“Shauna?” Lottie asked, waving a hand in front of her face.
“Fuck, sorry.” Shauna blinked her into focus. “No, we’re—I’m, uh, good. Miss my mom, and everything. Thanks, though.”
“Suit yourself,” Lottie shrugged. “It’s an open invitation, just call if you change your mind. You look like shit, so I’m hoping you're asleep by the time I leave.”
Lottie leaned down to hug Shauna and she wrapped an arm around her the best she could from the awkward angle.
“Thanks, asshole,” Shauna chuckled. “You’re right, though, I’m fucking wiped. Fly safe.”
Jackie’s cover was fully fucking blown.
She would pivot. She would figure something out. She would do some goddamn soul searching and decide how she wanted to approach this whole thing, but she’d really been banking on postponing that until the summer after Freshman year, at the earliest. But fine. It was fine.
Handjobs and blowies had an expiration date, and apparently that date was four months into college. She’d thought about just making herself have sex with Jeff, but she was already pushing it with the things she did let him do. Everytime he shoved his fingers inside her or pushed his dick past her lips, Jackie wanted to die a little. And she’d thought, yeah. That was a thing. Older girls had always talked about it being uncomfortable or weird. Her mom refused to even share a bed with her dad, unless they had company and she wanted to give the proper impression. Women just…didn’t like sex. That was all.
Well.
Turns out that wasn’t all. Turns out that some women did like sex with men. Turns out Jackie’s obsession with movies like Moulin Rouge and Bend it Like Beckham and Bring It On and her posters of Britney Spears and Destiny’s Child and her total inability to understand why anyone even cared enough about NSYNC or the Backstreet Boys to argue about them all had a common denominator.
It was the same reason she didn’t feel a single thing when Jeff kissed her or felt her up or rubbed at her clit like he was trying to start a fire. Why they always had to use spit, because she was never, ever wet for him. Why she had to brush her teeth three times after she blew him and showered in water so hot it burned after he touched her.
It was also why Jackie felt her stomach swoop when pretty girls touched her. Why no matter how hard she tried to think about fucking Orlando Bloom or Justin Timberlake when she touched herself, she always landed on flashes of women. Soft thighs and hips and full breasts and pretty eyes and pouty lips and long hair that she could tangle her fingers in. And, worst of all, it was why her pulse thudded between her legs when Shauna—why, God, of all the women on this fucking hellhole of a planet, did it have to be Shauna—pressed against her in bed.
Jackie Taylor was a lesbian.
So, yeah, her parents would probably disown her and she would probably have to face endless shit-talk from all the kids who went straight from Wiskayok to Rutgers. But Jackie already hated her parents and they’d always find reasons to be disappointed in her. She just needed to keep them in the dark long enough to finish paying for college, because really, she felt like they owed her that much for all the years of shit she’d taken from them and all the nights she’d spent caring for her drunk-ass, benzo-popping mother.
And when Jackie caught dirty looks or passive-aggressive comments of “wow, you’re so progressive for rooming with a lesbian,” she wanted to punch those fucking idiots in the mouth. Okay, not punch per-se, but only because she wasn’t hands-on like that. But she’d for sure wanted to tell them off or make them drop off the face of the earth, because Van was her friend. And Van being a lesbian was nowhere on the list of considerations Jackie’d had when deciding to room with her. It’d been can we make our different decor tastes work and how often is Taissa going to visit and sexile me? Even back when Jackie hadn’t been totally sure about herself—when she’d kept it locked in that place in her mind where it stayed gray and fuzzy—she had never once cared that Van was a lesbian, beyond being pissed that the world treated her like shit for it.
Jackie could drive to Massechusetts tomorrow and marry a fucking woman if she wanted to. New Jersey had just approved same-sex civil unions. There were lesbians on television, for fuck’s sake—Jackie sneakily watched The L Word every single week, her jaw on the floor the entire hour. So Jackie figured, with some hard work, she could bring that energy for herself one day. She’d just expected the one day in question to be a far away problem. Or at least a middle distance problem.
Because Jackie had a lot going on and everything was hard and new as it was and it was easy to stay Jeff’s girlfriend and not have to reckon with anything. She was fucking homesick. Well no, not homesick. Of course not homesick. Sick for Shauna. She missed their other friends and their usual routines and their stupid movie theater and bowling alley, but mostly Jackie fucking missed Shauna so much that she didn’t have time to think about anything else. And, on the Shauna note, Shauna didn’t care about people being gay. She was artsy and chill and never batted an eye at Taissa or Van and Jackie was pretty sure she’d made gay friends at Brown already. So really, Jackie didn’t think that Shauna would actually care very much if Jackie told her she was a lesbian.
Except for the fact that knowing that about Jackie would probably put a lot of things in perspective for Shauna, because before Jackie had even known that she liked girls, she’d been pushing, pushing, pushing to be closer to Shauna than a normal girl would’ve. Telling Shauna that she liked girls meant risking Shauna realizing that Jackie liked her, in particular, like a lot. And Jackie had kept that from her. She’d been dishonest and a shitty fucking friend and Shauna couldn’t know that because Jackie couldn’t lose Shauna.
So, square one.
But not, because Jeff was out of the picture now. One ten minute argument about whether she’d fuck him in Nag’s Head before his parents got there had been the end of them. Again. And Jackie didn’t see this end as temporary, because there were plenty of girls around for Jeff to sleep with now. It was a big campus and Jackie was one small fish and Jeff was nothing if not persistent.
She’d table the whole lesbian thing for now, just like she always did, but Jackie needed to figure out how to stop this from blowing up her carefully crafted spend time with Shauna plan. Her parents would never go for her spending three weeks straight at Shauna’s house, but they’d accepted it when she’d fudged the truth and told them that she was spending the entire time with the Sadeckis, because apparently her spending time with a boyfriend was okay, but a best friend wasn’t. Jackie needed to call Shauna and make sure she could send the whole break there, then she needed to craft a perfect text to Jeff to reiterate that he needed to keep his big mouth shut about their canceled plans.
At least she didn’t have to spend ten days swatting Jeff’s hands away and pretending to enjoy North Carolina.
Buzz, buzz, buzz.
“Ughhh,” Shauna groaned. She’d been dead asleep. There was drool drying on her cheek and her eyes were blurry. She swung her arm out, patting her nightstand blindly.
Buzz, buzz, buzz.
“Fuck, okay, okay.” Shauna snagged her cell and flipped it open without checking the caller ID. “Hello?”
“Oh, shit.” Jackie sounded a little off, but Shauna couldn’t tell if she was actually stressed or if this sleep-induced haze was distorting things. “You were asleep, weren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Shauna yawned. “S’okay. What’s up?”
“God, sorry. I figured you’d be up by now.”
Shauna rolled onto her back and rubbed her eyes. “All-nighter. Procrastinated on that essay I was telling you about, like, big time. What time is it?”
“It’s almost one,” Jackie answered softly, as though speaking quietly could un-wake Shauna up. There’d been plenty of times when that little habit of hers had annoyed Shauna—premature wake up calls before practice, when Shauna could’ve slept another twenty minutes, and requests to go to the mall on Saturday mornings—but right now she just found it…cute. It was cute and endearing and so very Jackie. Shauna grinned and stretched her free arm above her head. Jackie hummed a little on the line. “So…did you finish it in time?”
“Mhmm. What’s up, Jax? Everything okay? You sound a little—”
“Jeff broke up with me,” Jackie huffed out.
Shauna bolted upright. She was fucking thrilled. She wanted to jump on her bed and squeal, because finally. Finally there had been a real breakup—a college breakup—and they’d all sort of assumed that once Jackie and Jeff broke up in the real world, that would be the final, actual end. Shauna wanted to dance around her room and text Lottie and—
And Jackie was crying. Not a lot, just enough of a sniffle for Shauna to hear it on the line.
Fuck.
“Oh, Jackie,” Shauna tried to put on her most sympathetic tone, even though she’d done this song and dance a dozen times before. “I’m so sorry. What, um…what happened?”
Jackie cleared her throat. “He wanted to…well, it doesn’t really matter. It was bound to happen, right?”
Shauna was keenly aware that it seemed like she was a bitch for being happy about something that was hurting Jackie. But she’d watched Jackie get wrecked over and over by Jeff fuckface Sadecki and she knew that he was a piece of trash who didn’t deserve her because…because she’d had sex with him plenty of times in high school. So…okay, Shauna was still the bitch. Nothing new there. Just…as twisted as she was, as shitty of a friend and as dishonest and two-faced as Shauna was, she really, truly just wanted Jackie to be happy. And Jeff was never going to make Jackie happy.
“I’ll tell you when I see you, yeah?” Jackie said, her voice cracking just a little. Every time Jeff made her voice break, Shauna felt fucking sick, like it was tearing away a chunk of her, too. “Which…well, I called to ask—since we’re broken up, obviously I’m not going to—”
“Stay with me,” Shauna said quickly. “I mean, if you want. Just…stay with me the whole time. My mom’ll be fucking thrilled and…yeah, I just—I miss you. It’d be nice to, um, have you longer.”
Smooth, Shauna, she thought. Not pathetic at all. Really the epitome of the chill, well-adjusted, high-school best friend, who’s excited but not overly-eager, that she was going for. Jesus fucking Christ.
“Are you sure?” Jackie was smiling. Shauna could hear it. She knew every tone, every blink, every pull of Jackie’s lips. “I wouldn’t wanna impose on—”
“Impose?” Shauna laughed. “What’s with the formality? We’re only one term in, I’m not ready to give up my best friend status yet.” Shauna tried to sound relaxed. A joke. It was just a joke. A joke so ha-ha funny it made her want to fucking puke, drop out of Brown, and apply to Rutgers as a transfer student, in that order. “There’s no imposing with us, right?”
“Never, Shipman,” Jackie promised. “And I literally never wanna hear you talk about losing your best friend status ever again. That was the deal, bitch. You go to Brown, but we don’t fucking drift apart or whatever. I’m not letting you back out, sorry!”
“Okay, okay. I’m just keeping you on your toes, y’know,” Shauna joked. The sting in her chest died down to a pin-point of pain, the smallest it could be when she wasn’t with Jackie. “You done with finals?”
“Just finished,” Jackie sighed. “Jeff had shit timing, as usual. Literally half an hour before my exam, I was worried I wasn’t gonna make it in time.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Shauna swung her legs over the side of the bed and yanked her suitcase out from beneath it. “Start packing, I’ll be there in like…four or five hours, depending on how long it takes me to find some fucking caffeine.”
They were coming up to Jackie’s favorite part of the movie. The scene that she liked to rewind and rewatch over and over when she was on her own. Ruth and Idgie, in the kitchen, smearing food on each other’s faces and down each other’s clothes and laughing and being so fucking happy and not caring about—
“Do you think you’ll get back with him?” Shauna asked suddenly. “If he wanted to, would you? Or…or are you, like, done done?”
Oh my God.
Why would Shauna ask her about Jeff right now? Like, they’d been on break for a week already and they’d spent plenty of time just talking. But right now, Jackie was curled into Shauna’s side as they laid on her couch. Shauna had her arm around Jackie’s shoulders and Jackie had a leg draped across hers and an arm around her waist and her head on her chest. They’d had a few glasses of wine and they were watching Fried Green Tomatoes and everything was fucking perfect. So why would Shauna wait until this blissful fucking moment to drop a Jeff bomb?
The answer was obvious, of course. To Shauna, this wasn’t some kind of divinely perfect moment. This was just them, hanging out, watching a movie they’d seen a million times.
“Will you pause it?” Jackie sighed, pushing herself up on her elbow.
“Pause it?” Shauna shot her a confused look. “We’ve seen it, like, a hundred times. You can quote the whole—”
“Please, just—” Jackie groaned. Weird. It was weird for her to act this way about this movie, especially considering how often she talked straight through the shit they watched together. “Never mind.”
“I mean…I can if you—”
“No,” Jackie snapped, a little too forcefully. She lightened her tone. “No, it’s fine. I, um…I haven’t really thought about it.”
On the screen, Ruth laughed that sweet little laugh, as she told Idgie that her fried green tomatoes were terrible.
“About?”
“About Jeff. I haven’t thought about whether I’d…get back together with him. So…I don’t really have an answer for you, I guess. Because I don’t…particularly…know.”
“That’s such fucking bullshit,” Shauna muttered under her breath.
She snaked her arm out from under Jackie and ran it through her hair. Still flat on her back, Jackie’s leg still propped over hers. Her face twisted and pinched. Mad as hell.
“What the fuck, Shipman?” Jackie sat up all the way, pushing herself to the other side of the couch to stare at her incredulously. “What’s your problem? Why does it matter if—”
“It matters—” Shauna pulled herself up. She sat leaning against the opposite arm of the sofa. Where there’d been not a centimeter between them just moments ago, there were feet. “—because I’m…I’m fucking sick of it, Jackie. This back and forth shit. I don’t get it! You don’t even like him!”
Idgie slung her arm around Ruth and splashed a full glass of water in her face.
Jackie’s heart thudded. You don’t even like him. You don’t even like him, Shauna’d said. What the fuck did that mean? Was it possible that she…could Shauna know how Jackie felt? Could she tell that she wasn’t into men? That she liked women? That she wanted—
“You don’t know what I like!” Tears pricked behind Jackie’s eyes. She knew her lip was quivering. She was probably coming across more pitiful puppy, than anything else, but she couldn't help it. “Why are you…fucking mad at me, Shauna? All I said is I don’t know! It’s not even happening right now, so why can’t we just—”
“I just don’t think he’s good for you, Jax.” Shauna furrowed her brow. She was softening. Jackie exhaled. Shauna took a deep breath in. “He’s not—he’s an asshole. And I wish you’d see that. That’s all.”
Ruth sent water flying at Idgie’s back in retaliation.
“It’s just complicated,” Jackie said softly. “Like…if I’m not with him, I don’t think another guy is gonna…want me, really.”
Jackie tugged the sleeve of Shauna’s Brown sweatshirt, which she’d worn almost all week and definitely planned on sneaking back to Rutgers, over her hand, rubbing the material between her fingers nervously. This was moving into dangerous territory.
Idgie slammed a handful of blackberries across Ruth’s face, rubbing them in playfully and getting so close it looked like they might kiss. (They wouldn’t, of course.)
“Okay, well we both know that’s not true.” Shauna shook her head. The anger had slipped away. Her brown eyes were wide and kind and her perfect lips were pulled down into a frown and Jackie’s head was killing her all of a sudden. “But even if it was, could it really hurt to be…single for once?”
Ruth went for the flour, tossing it so that it clung to the juice on Idgie’s face.
“I just—I—” Jackie couldn’t explain it. There was no reasonable rationalization for it beyond the truth, and Jackie couldn’t fucking tell Shauna the truth.
“You’re right,” Jackie conceded. She’d figure it out later. None of it mattered. She just wanted to go back to how they’d been five minutes ago. Everything else could wait. “I’m sorry. I’m just…I don’t know. Emotional, I guess. But…you’re right.”
Ruth and Idgie slid all the way to the floor, covered in food from head to toe, laughing like they were truly fucking happy.
Shauna sighed and shook her head. “I didn’t mean to be a bitch. I just…worry about you.”
“Well, you don’t need to worry about that,” Jackie said, forcing a smile. “All you need to worry about is letting me get comfy again.”
Shauna smiled and laid back down. She opened her arm and Jackie slid into place, her heart beating far too fast.
“Comfy?” Shauna asked.
Jackie pulled the blanket off of the back of the couch and tossed it over them. “Comfy.” She nodded against Shauna’s chest.
Wordlessly, Shauna picked up the remote and rewound to the beginning of the scene.
“I don’t even want to actually date a guy right now,” Jackie groaned. “I just want, like…confirmation that I could if I did want to. Does that make sense?”
Shauna switched her phone to her left hand, so that she could scroll through Lottie’s photos on her laptop with her right. They’d only been back from break for a few days, but Lottie had already posted, like, fifty pictures from her vacation on Myspace.
“Yeah, Jax,” Shauna sighed. “But I’ve told you a thousand times, you could have any guy you wanted.”
The words tasted a little bitter on the way out. Shauna was sick of doing this constantly—promising Jackie that she was pretty and funny and hot so many times the words lost meaning. But she’d do whatever she had to, as long as it meant keeping Jeff out of their lives. He was this ever-present fucking wedge between them. This constant reminder of Shauna’s betrayal. She needed Jackie to be done with him for good.
“You’re, like, the sweetest ever,” Jackie practically purred on the line. “Have I told you that lately?”
Good, it was working.
“Mmm, you’ve mentioned it once or twice.” Shauna scrolled through her feed mindlessly. “Not nearly enough, considering the sheer output of sweet on my end, though.”
“Oh, really? So I need to step it up, then?” Jackie laughed, high and light. “Okay, I’ll get right on that. So sorry to leave you hanging.”
“Just…if you think you’re gonna text him or whatever, call me,” Shauna suggested cautiously. “You know, talk it through first.”
Jackie giggled. “So…run it by you for approval?”
“If you wanna think about it like that, yeah,” Shauna chuckled. “I’ve got the official seal. Red tape, bureaucratic whatever. Just don’t do anything impulsive.”
Shauna paused on a video Jackie had posted the night before. Just over two minutes of her singing. She was actually obnoxiously good. Natural talent, of course. Usually the comments were all from their friends or were attached to names that Shauna recognized from Jackie’s stories about school, but there were a few random ones on this post. Accolades from what looked like total strangers.
“Okay, well in that case, yes ma’am,” Jackie snorted. “No sudden movements, I promise.”
“Good,” Shauna said. “Hey, you got a lot of comments on this video. The one from last night. Do you know them or—”
“Oh!” Jackie said brightly. “No, sometimes I get random people saying they like my voice. A few messages here and there. I know it’s dumb but, I don’t know…feels nice, I guess.”
A few messages here and there.
Jackie just needed to know that she could date a guy, if she wanted to. That was all she needed to finally ditch Jeff for good. And she liked to post these videos of herself singing every once in a while, which prompted strangers to message her and compliment her and she liked that feeling. She’d tried to sound casual, but Shauna had heard the excitement in her voice. So…if a guy happened to message Jackie on Myspace, maybe a guy who lived out of state, and they started chatting and he made her feel wanted, that would be enough to keep her away from Jeff.
It was a little weird, Shauna thought, as she opened a new browser. Okay, maybe more than a little. But…sending a few questionable messages, in exchange for a lifetime free of Jeff Sadecki? That seemed like a really fucking sweet deal.
“That’s not dumb at all,” Shauna insisted, as she clicked create new profile. “I think that’s really great, Jackie.”