Chapter Text
Even with the blazing cabin warming their cheeks, the cold bites at them, stings them, and they huddle together in the snow.
The fire will give out eventually. Groups of them trek into the woods every day, shuddering with cold, and bring back as many sticks as their frostbitten fingers can hold to throw into the flames. It won’t be enough, Shauna thinks every time they come back. The fire will burn out.
She wonders, as she has so many times before, if Jackie, stubbornly curled up outside the cabin, knew at one point that she was dying. Maybe she was so petty that she wanted Shauna to find her the next morning and beg her to come back. Or maybe she knew that things were going to get much, much worse, that Coach Martinez impaled on a tree branch and Laura Lee exploding midair was incomparable to what was coming.
They’ll all know, soon enough, what it feels like to freeze to death.
“Do you think he hates us?”
Shauna looks up. There’s Mari, half sitting, half lying between Akilah and Gen’s sleeping forms. They’re all pressed against each other. There’s no such thing as personal space anymore, not when they’re more than a dozen people sharing half a dozen blankets. But was there really, even when they still had the safety of the cabin? Weren’t they all inching closer and closer together on the floor every night even then?
“Of course he hates us,” Shauna replies. “Why else would he have done this?” Natalie says Coach Scott is dead. She says there’s no way he could survive the cold on his own. As the flames tower over them, Shauna imagines what she would do to him if she found him. I just pressed play on a VHS tape, he’d said as blood gushed out of her in rivers. What would he think if she had the same indifference as he lay dying?
Mari’s eyes, like a deer staring down the barrel of a gun, peer at her through the darkness. “No, I mean Travis,” she says.
Travis, Natalie and Lottie slept up against each other on the floor of the cabin, usually ending up in some tangled knot in their sleep, and somehow they’d end up looking like a devil and an angel perched on the shoulders of the person between them. Now out in the snow, Natalie has a blanket to herself, courtesy of being crowned queen, and Shauna tastes bitterness that can’t be Javi’s flesh, and Lottie, curled up with her back to Taissa, mutters in her sleep, and Travis is as alone as the biting cold can allow him to be. Shauna hasn’t seen him sleep. He does his part to help keep the fire going, and when he isn’t doing that, he sits with his back to all of them, staring off into the woods. And he barely eats, as the rest of them gulp down what’s left of Javi’s too small corpse.
Shauna remembers his screams from outside the cabin as he clung to Javi’s corpse so tightly they worried he wouldn’t give it up. He didn’t sound like she did when she found Jackie. She had been begging Jackie to wake up, still holding onto hope that what was in front of her wasn’t real, but Travis hadn’t sounded like a boy, he hasn’t even sounded human.
“Shauna?” Mari’s still staring at her, shivering in that decrepit yellow hoodie.
Yes, Travis hates them. But he loves them, too. Can Mari’s pea-sized brain comprehend that?
“None of us hate each other,” Shauna responds, because they won’t make it through the last of winter if they acknowledge that deep down, in their dirtiest, darkest core, they all hate each other so much.
Mari throws the door open. “You guys came!” she says excitedly.
“Happy sixteenth!” Jackie says, pulling her into a hug. Shauna hugs her too, a little less tightly. She’s pretty sure Mari only invited her because they’re on the same soccer team and she’s best friends with Jackie. Jackie’s the one who gets the first invite to everything, and Shauna always feels like she’s tagging along.
The party’s already in full swing. Jackie said they had to be fashionably late. Shauna was worried they were being rude. She’d wondered on the ride here if Mari was gonna think they weren’t coming, which was stupid, because she’s not even very close with Mari, who mostly hangs out with the JV girls, Gen and that girl who’s always wearing a baseball cap, Shauna can’t remember her name for the life of her. But they’re teammates now, and Jackie likes her, so Shauna supposes she might as well befriend her, especially since they might actually go to Nationals this year.
She and Jackie walk in arm in arm, but all of a sudden Jeff comes and wrenches her away, and they’re kissing sloppily, tongues roaming each other’s mouths like they’re the only ones in the room. Shauna looks away, a strange feeling in her chest. “You smell so good, babe,” Jeff says. “Like strawberries.” Jackie giggles in that way she always does when guys compliment her, so far from what her actual laugh sounds like.
Shauna was the one who bought Jackie that perfume. It was a Christmas gift. Jackie had beamed when she’d ripped apart the wrapping paper because it was just the one she wanted. Jeff had gotten her some stupid bracelet that Jackie would never pick out for herself.
Suddenly Mari’s at her side. “Come do shots!” she says.
“What about Jackie?” Shauna asks. She looks over at her best friend, still wrapped up in Jeff, performatively making out with him, almost like she’s going out of her way to make Shauna look at them.
Mari shrugs. “I wanna hang out with you.”
Okay. Weird. But Shauna goes with her into the kitchen, where various bottles of alcohol are displayed on the counter. The JV girls and some other kids Shauna doesn’t recognize are mixing what appears to be Malibu and milk, and Shauna’s a little intrigued by it.
“Hi, Shauna!” It’s the hat girl. “Want one?”
Shauna nods wordlessly, and someone pushes a glass of Malibu and milk into her hands. Hoping she won’t throw up from how disgusting this will undoubtably be, she downs it. It’s not as bad as she thought it was going to be, and everyone cheering for her makes it easier. Her cheeks flush as she’s handed another glass.
At the back of the kitchen is Coach Martinez’s son, an always glowering boy who looks like he’s never been to a party before, turning over a bottle of beer in his hands. Gen snickers. “What’s Flex doing here?”
Mari rolls her eyes. “My mom made me invite him. She’s like, best friends with Mrs. Martinez. Me and Travis were friends, I guess, when we were in kindergarten.”
“Travis and I,” Shauna corrects automatically, too used to doing that to annoy Jackie.
Mari flashes those bright brown eyes at her. “Oh yeah, you’re smart. Like, Ivy League smart.”
Shauna feels her cheeks heat. “Basic grammar skills doesn’t make me ‘Ivy League smart’.” She thinks of the essay for Brown she’s halfway through writing at home. They won’t accept her in a million years. She’ll never have to tell Jackie that she even thought about deterring from their perfectly laid post-secondary plans.
Mari shrugs. She takes a sip of her own glass, then exaggeratedly gags. “Hell no. I’m getting my parents’ wine.”
Winter stops just as quickly as it started. They wake up one morning, bleary-eyed and limbs tangled with one another’s and there is no longer snow falling from the sky.
“What do we do now?” Mari mumbles. They look at the burnt husk that was their home. No one says anything. Shauna chews on the what was once Javi’s ear until it turns to mush in her mouth.
They hole up in the remains of the plane. The others get busy. They are determined to survive. Misty rips the leather from the plane seats. She has all sorts of clothing ideas for it, she says. Taissa is the most useful. She says they won’t have to stay in the plane for long, and then she begins to collect sticks. They regret making fun of her for taking woodworking back when they were highschool students.
Shauna sleeps on the floor of the plane. When sunlight peers through the cracks, she dreams of burying her face in sweet, rose-scented skin and hair. But when she opens her eyes, the smell is gone, so is the soft skin and the hair because Jackie isn’t just dead, she’s gone. They ate her. Taissa ate her face and Shauna ate her heart and all that’s left are her bones that Natalie laid to rest.
“You okay?”
Shauna’s head snaps up, hackles raised, but it’s only Mari sitting across from her, fingering at the grass growing between the cracks in the floor. “I’m fine,” she mutters.
Natalie steps out of the plane and Misty bounds after her. “Can I do anything?” she asks. They don’t hear Natalie’s response as the two walk away.
Mari smirks, and she doesn’t look like a starving husk of a girl now, she looks like her old self, bitchy and funny at the same time. “Do you think she’s gonna drug Nat next?” she asks.
Shauna feels a matching smirk pulling at the corner of her mouth, but she doesn’t say anything.
The world tilts and the trees loom over them as Shauna tackles Mari, slamming her so hard into the ground that they’re both momentarily winded.
Then she grabs her, yanking her across the forest floor. Mari gives as good as she gets. “Fuck you!” she yells, and there’s something delicious about how she fights back, something that makes Shauna want to be even more aggressive. She holds Mari down, forcing her into the dirt, pressing their bodies together with so much force that Mari squirms and kicks even harder. “Get off me, gaywad!” she yelps, and Shauna, without really knowing why she does it, grabs a lock of Mari’s shiny hair and yanks, not so hard that it comes out, but hard enough that she forces Mari’s head up until she can feel the heat of her cheek against her chin for a moment.
They tussle for the piece of deer bone Mari has clutched in her fist until Shauna digs her teeth into Mari’s knuckles as hard as she can, tasting earth and sweat and slick, salty skin, and Mari, of course, screams like she’s being murdered until the others come and pull them apart.
Shauna can still taste her after. Jackie watches her through the trees. She doesn’t say anything, but she gives a small, knowing smile.
The snow is heavier than usual. It piles up on the windowsill on the other side of the cabin window. Shauna is bundled in one of Dead Cabin Guy’s jackets, he must have been a large man because it fits her swollen frame. The cold is seeping through the walls. It creeps under the door. Was it Taissa that warned them early on that dying would soon feel like falling asleep? It makes Shauna wonder if Jackie lay dreaming outside as the cold took her.
It’s too cold outside for Lottie’s little cult today. They sit around in a circle on the floor, more devout to the wilderness than even Laura Lee was to God. Shauna ignores them. Lottie leads a prayer for her baby, and anger flickers inside her. None of them have any right to her baby.
When the cult disperses, Mari suddenly appears beside her on the couch, like a fly Shauna can’t get rid of. “You should talk to Akilah,” she says. “Her sister had a baby.”
Shauna snorts. “Wow, we sure have a lot in common.”
“Hey, do you really want Misty Quigley to be the sole deliverer of your baby?” Mari asks. “She’d probably give you a C-section as an experiment.”
The image of one of the rusty kitchen knives sinking into her belly makes Shauna feel queasy. “Don’t,” she snaps.
To her surprise, Mari gives her an apologetic smile. Mari, who thinks she’s always right. “Look, you shouldn’t be scared, okay?” she says. “Women have given birth in, like, way worse conditions. The wilderness won’t let anything-”
“Really?” Shauna interrupts. She’s tired of hearing about what ‘the wilderness’ will and won’t do. “Then why did it let Jackie die?”
Mari goes quiet for a moment. Jackie is a touchy subject. They all try to avoid saying her name, especially around Shauna. “For us,” she says finally. “For you, I guess. So you wouldn’t starve.”
“I know you’re dumb, Mar,” Shauna starts, and Mari knits her eyebrows together, offended. “But you’re not dumb, are you? You really think there’s anything in the woods that cares what happens to us? Just because Lottie says so?”
“It’s not just because Lottie says so!” Mari insists. “I can feel it. You’d be able to feel it too, if you let yourself.”
“Fine, maybe,” Shauna replies, just so Mari will shut her mouth. She doesn’t believe in any of it, and seeing the other girls fall at Lottie’s feet like she’s Jesus only makes her more determined not to. But still, envy prickles in her stomach at the way Lottie commands them in her soft, placid way.
Shauna will never feel want like she felt for Jackie again. She wanted Jackie in every way she could have her, but more than that, she wanted to be her. She wanted to look like her, smell like her, talk like her, she wanted Jackie’s bedroom and Jackie’s clothes and Jackie’s boyfriend and Jackie’s influence. There was nothing as cathartic in the world as eating her, stripping her flesh from her bones and almost choking on her.
Mari prances around their camp like she owns it, just as Jackie pranced around the halls of Wiskayok High. She’d offer Shauna a soft, blink and you miss it type of smile from time to time when they were holed up in the cabin and the baby making her stomach churn, like she wanted to befriend Shauna, but Shauna had ignored her because she had Taissa and didn’t need anyone else, and Mari was too wrapped up in Lottie’s prophecies for Shauna to take her seriously. Mari doesn’t do that anymore. She has a snide comment to make every time she sees Shauna, seemingly begging for Natalie’s attention, yearning to be coveted by their leaders.
That’s what Shauna expects when she spits in Mari’s bowl of deer-broth soup, thinking of how Mari played her for a fool that day in the woods, she expects the other girl to complain to Natalie like she always does and be brushed off like she always is.
Mari looks up at Shauna, her slim body draped in plane seat leather, her dark hair blanketing her face, and something comes alight in her eyes, something that replaces what was triumph a moment ago. She looks angry and humiliated for a second, and it makes Shauna’s nerves buzz with excitement, but then Mari steels her shoulders and sets her jaw and takes a long gulp of the soup.
Shauna freezes. This was the last thing she expected. A strange feeling washes over her, something she hasn’t felt since she stood over Jackie’s charred body, knife at the ready. Mari looks back up at her, the picture of innocence. “Something bothering you, Shipman?”
“No,” Shauna responds after a moment, because she can feel eyes beginning to settle on them. “Bon appétit.”
“Thank you,” Mari says sweetly. “It’s delicious.”