just a warm body to hold

by resonatewithyou

Summary:

Melissa comes to the realisation that the title of 'greatest defensive midfielder on the WHS Yellowjackets' is being hogged by one annoyingly perfect Shauna Shipman. Around the same time, her brother starts to question her embarrassing lack of girlfriend. So, naturally, on comes the training arc... and a 'fake' relationship with her mentor that gets realer (and more co-dependent) by the day. What could possibly go wrong?

Chapter 1: fuck meatloaf all my homies hate meatloaf

Summary:

Gen swallows and sheepishly raises the bottle in the air. "To compulsive heterosexuality?"

"I am not fucking toasting to that."

- or -

Melissa braves the yearly family reunion, whilst Shauna grapples with her conflicting feelings for Jackie at a far more entertaining party.

It all starts around a dinner table, as most sophisticated business does.

The five Joneses, along with a couple additions that aren't quite family but might as well join it at this point, are crammed into their respective seats as they uphold the annual tradition of their reunion. It's the fabled night of the year that the walls of their suburban home in Wiskayok get dangerously close to rupturing.

Steve heads the table, or would be if he wasn't currently in the kitchen with his beloved wife Isabelle (she prefers Bella, insisting on keeping the 'cool mom' status by choosing a nickname despite her middling age) whilst she restocks the centrepiece of the classic Jones pasta bake. Their youngest son, Jayden, twelve years old and already devoid of all childhood zest, is twiddling his thumbs playing something-or-other on his Game Gear under the table and rolling his eyes at eldest sibling Matthew's passionate recounts of recent flight school endeavors. Matthew's new girlfriend looks just as uninterested from the seat by his side. They don't know her name. There's not really much reason to, because everybody knows that chair is occupied by a different girl every year.

Then there's Melissa, who isn't being that rude to her brother, because at least she has the grace and decorum to pretend she's listening to him.

In order to attend tonight, she'd skipped out on the Yellowjackets' usual summer blowout; the end-of-holiday catchup between varsity, JV, and whoever the fuck else wants to come staged in a blissfully empty Taylor household. The captain's parents have their own tradition of spending a lavish week or so alone in some country in the east they'd never heard of - why wouldn't they take that rare opportunity to tear the house down? They, referring to everyone besides Melissa Jones, who yet again is victim to her mother's incessant puppy eyes. The family dinner is the one time a year everyone is together. The Yellowjackets have parties at least once a month, and it was only bad luck that it'd fallen on the family reunion. It wouldn't happen again. So the answer was common sense, really.

But good God, does she wish she was chugging shitty vodka in the Taylors' massive garden, kissing girls that had been invited by a friend of a friend of a friend she's never met before. Her only saving grace is that somebody she does actually want to be around, believe it or not, has accompanied her to hell out of sheer pity.

Gen, her beloved best friend and designated +1 to shit like this she can never be bothered to attend alone, has devised an ingenious strategy to ignore Matthew that involves eating the entire contents of the supposedly shared salad bowl by herself. Her plate is loaded with various other bits of Bella's cooking that have been equally as ravished, a testament to how good the food is. Literally any other day of the year, Melissa knows she could match her appetite, double it, even. However, the annual Jones dinner is nothing more than a sinking stone in her gut, a dreaded corner of her calendar that she covers up with post-it notes in a futile attempt to forget it exists. Even if it's not coincidentally on the same day as a party she knows would be much more fun.

Because every single year without fail, Matthew's endless prattle reaches the topic of meeting his new girlfriend, and the moment he's finished gushing over a woman that very clearly does not return those same affections, his attention turns to Melissa. The question she's been feeling so apprehensive about slips out like it's nothing. Like it too has a designated seat at the table.

"Any chance you've got a girlfriend yet, Mel?"

There it is. Once again, the dinner is ruined.

She sighs far louder than she'd initially intended, prompting her brother to smile condescendingly at her in the way that she's certain he knows makes her blood boil. It pisses her off that for yet another year, he's going to get the answer he's expecting. Of course she doesn't. In fact, what a silly question, considering that her many experiences with the aforementioned girls at Yellowjackets parties that never spoke to her again after they sobered up don't count.

(She's been reminded many a time by the same straight girls that they don't, and telling Matthew it even happened in the first place would be a higher degree of social suicide than admitting she's bitchless.)

Before her grace and decorum manifests in the way she's about to gracefully tell her older brother to go fuck himself, Gen takes initiative and mumbles it for her through a mouthful of iceberg lettuce. "If she did, they'd last a hell of a lot longer than whatever you're doing."

A beat. Jayden looks up from under the table, smiling for the first time all evening. He's greatly anticipating the part of the family gathering where his siblings start throwing themselves at each other over the table.

Matthew runs a hand through short blonde hair. "I was just asking a question."

"Well, it's a stupid one," Gen fires back, and as much as Melissa appreciates having somebody in her corner for once, that response feels a little backhanded. "Focus more on your own love life. I mean, what did they even teach you over in Brooklyn? How to fly away from your shallow relationships and replace them every year with another woman—"

"Gen," Melissa urges her in a whisper.

Her best friend pauses, clears her throat, and goes back to eating the salad. Matthew opens his mouth, presumably to clap back, but Mr. and Mrs. Jones re-enter the room with a fresh tray of pasta bake before he can get any scathing words in. The tension across the table is stamped out in an instant. As much as they have their disagreements, there's an unspoken understanding to keep all the bad blood behind closed doors. Bella's already had enough trouble raising three kids – she doesn't need the added stress of knowing that they're in the middle of an intense civil war.

So Melissa seethes in silence as she shovels mini sausage rolls down her throat. Her parents sit back down at opposite ends of the table and she seethes even more at the love in their eyes as they gaze at each other and their 'beautiful' family. Their wonderful children, able to coexist without any friction, sharing a cordial meal before the eldest returns to New York to complete flight school after the summer.

…when in reality, Matthew's a pompous pain in the ass, Jayden clears Sonic the Hedgehog levels like they give him oxygen, and Melissa is gay with a capital G. Not just gay, but unsuccessfully gay, a girlfriend-less gay that gets painfully reminded of it every single year. It's terrible.

Quite frankly, they've failed as parents.

"Have you tried the meatloaf, girls?" Steve, closest on her left, addresses her and Gen as he nudges his daughter in the side. He's genuinely beaming, clearly extremely proud of said meatloaf. "I seasoned it all by myself. With salt and everything."

Melissa awkwardly smiles back at him. "Wow, Dad. Good job."

He's a great guy, really, but 'salt and everything' is not a reassuring description of the spice mix that makes her think it'll be a taste sensation. She doesn't get a chance to question the ethics of the meatloaf further, however, because Gen has already carved herself a hefty portion to put on her plate. The fork disappears into her mouth, taking a dubious pink chunk with it. She chews. Seemingly pauses to reconsider her life choices whilst doing so.

If the expression she gives after tasting the food is any indication, Melissa knows at once this was the side project her dad had been given to innovate while her mom cooked the actually edible parts. She'd rather have the hazard confined to a small section of the buffet than let him help with everything and risk ruining the entire meal. Which is fair enough, to be honest. He definitely would.

Gen loves her best friend's parents, though, arguably more than her own, and will not be caught dead disrespecting them. "Oh… wow, Mr. Jones. Oh, my God. I seriously… I've never tasted anything better. This is amazing."

The meatloaf is very obviously stashed in her cheeks like she's a squirrel storing acorns, but of course, Steve doesn't notice. He doesn't notice much apart from worn brake pads and excessive oil consumption in the cars he fixes at the local garage. "See, I knew I did it right. Make sure you save some for the others, okay?"

"Yeah, Matthew wants it," Melissa interjects, shoving the meatloaf in his general direction and reveling in the disgruntled look he gives it. "I'm gonna go get a drink."

"I'm coming too," chokes out Gen, who definitely needs one much more than her.

They dismiss themselves from the table. They are both much safer outside those doors.

✧

Anyone visiting the Jones household realises at once they don't fit there – not necessarily out of inhospitality, because it's common knowledge to the neighbourhood that they're good, upstanding people, but from a quite literal lack of space in the building. Every corner is crammed with something-or-other that should have probably been put away by one of the three children that lived there years ago. Trinkets and sentimental whatever-they-ares are so prideful in their placements on shelves with peeling paint that basically everything else has been demoted to the floor. But it's nice, meaningful. Well-kept memorabilia of five people in a manufactured home that couldn't even begin to contain their character.

Sure enough, they get drinks; a tropical punch for Gen, and a can of Pepsi for Melissa. The moment they reach the kitchen, Gen stumbles towards the trash can, wrenching the cabinet it's contained within wide open and spitting out the vast majority of the not-really-meatloaf in her mouth. She chugs the punch. Pours herself another glass and chugs that one at a similar pace. Melissa, meanwhile, is cackling away to herself at the shenanigans unfolding before her. She leans back against marble countertops with various foodstuffs strewn over them, ingredients her parents had forgotten to put away in their excitement.

The two of them are always far more excited for the family get-together than any of their children, and another reason the day sucks so much is that it's overshadowed by the guilt of not sharing their anticipation. Matthew coming home from New York is a momentous occasion to them every summer. She knows that they count down the days until they can celebrate his return, because he's achieved so much since flying the nest to fly his planes. The stupid fucking planes. She hates them. At the table, he takes every opportunity to describe them in excruciating detail; the many millions of potentially life-threatening levers on the console he'd sat at, textbooks detailing optimal flight altitude through complicated equations she couldn't even dream of ever being able to understand. Melissa has started to expect some of her hope for later life to slip away whenever he opens his mouth. 

But she also realises she kind of just gets pissed off at him for being proud of himself, and that's the worst part. He may be a dick with little consideration for the people around him, sure, but he's never intentionally hurt her feelings. It's not his fault that he's successful.

Maybe she just wants what he has, or wants to prove that she can reach the same heights. Not be the screw-up of the family, for once. Prove to herself she can do i—

"Jesus fucking Christ, Mel, what did your dad put in that thing?!"

She turns around to find Gen again, this time trying to scrape a particularly stubborn chunk of meat off of her tongue. Her dad's concoction of sauce seems to have acted as an adhesive between the indiscernible glob of… pork? beef? There's no way to be certain… and her taste buds. Knowing him, he'd probably prepared another batch of it to double as engine grease for tomorrow's shift at the garage.

"I'd hazard a guess at Gorilla glue." Melissa walks over to her side, picking up the jug of punch and preparing yet another glass for her. "Makes sense that Dad would get it mixed up with the ketchup."

Gen's brow furrows. Her voice is muffled as she attempts to talk with her tongue still sticking out. "They're two completely different colours."

"Yeah, I know." Melissa hands her the glass, chuckling lightly. "Drink this."

Her best friend gives her a grateful nod that highly contrasts the frantic way in which she snatches her third serving of Minute Maid, and after swishing it around her mouth, finds success when the meat is washed down her throat. The strength of the drink she's using evidently does no favours in concealing its sacrilegious taste, however. She hunches over the sink and sticks her whole head under the tap in a resort to save the last of the punch for their inevitable return to the dinner table.

A few seconds pass. Gen re-emerges with decidedly wet hair from where it had fallen over her shoulder into the water, and a piercing scowl that says all Melissa needs to know about her current thoughts and feelings.

"Mel, I love your parents and you know I'll have your back through anything, but I am seriously starting to regret skipping Jackie's party for this."

"I know," Melissa repeats, sighing and sipping lightly from the Pepsi can she almost forgot she was holding. Gen's near-death experience had completely taken her out of any thoughts she'd been having before it happened. "I didn't think things could get any worse than last year, but this has seriously proved me wrong."

(Strobing lights in the living room after the main meal, a drunken Bella Jones slow-dancing with her husband to I'd Do Anything For Love by Meat Loaf (why must it bring her so much pain?) and doing everything in her power to get the kids to join in. She'd seen the song on MTV a couple days before, and her brain chemistry had been irreversibly altered ever since. There was no other option for everyone else than to bear the consequences. Melissa and Gen had sat on the couch the whole time and awkwardly smiled, clapping along to crunchy music on a sketchy discounted CD Steve had picked up from the local Blockbuster. Matthew, meanwhile, was in the next room over with his girlfriend at the time, and Lord knows what they were doing in there but Jayden had waddled back into the chaos looking like he'd witnessed the second coming of Christ.

Melissa bonded with him more that year through shared trauma. She'd taken him upstairs to her bedroom with Gen and the three of them had squeezed onto her bed, trying their best to ignore Bella's 'youngster' mixtape blasting through the floorboards. They played a lot of Super Mario Kart that evening - Gen and Melissa took turns switching the Player 2 controller between them so Jayden could race every time. They haven't had a proper conversation since.)

"Okay, now that I think about it, last year was way worse, actually."

"Don't remind me," Gen groans. "Besides, we haven't got through the evening yet. We both know shit only gets worse from here."

"I really hate how educated you are on my life," Melissa laments to nobody in particular. She almost feels bad for forcing her best friend to come to every single one… until she remembers how much more terrible things would be without her there.

And she's expecting a snarky response to that, something along the lines of I wish I was failing my Jones family history classes or you need to start bringing some other JV player instead because I'm over this crap but what instead comes out is completely out of context and unexpected. "You need to stop letting your brothers walk all over you, you know?"

The room falls into an uncomfortable silence at that suggestion. 

Because no, actually, she doesn't. She tells them to shut up when their questions get a little too personal, has technically mastered the art of a well-placed curse word to humble them. She stopped making Jayden's bed for him ages ago. Sure, it's almost never made at all anymore, but she has her freedom in return for that. It's all a series of advancements towards a definitively not-letting-her-brothers-walk-all-over-her-as-her-beloved-best-friend-suggests Melissa. Their empty words don't get to her, and she's almost offended at the suggestion that they would. Gen's lucky that the undying platonic love she holds for her outweighs how annoyingly incorrect she can be sometimes.

…although in Matthew's case, 'fuck off' isn't as effective of a deterrent as she wishes it was. If anything, the teasing gets worse after she drops it. And in order to get Jayden to learn how to put some sheets onto a mattress, Melissa had bought out Walmart's entire stock of Push Pops to bribe him with. The moment she'd weaned him off of them, the bed-making had ground to an abrupt halt, now only attended to by her dad on the rare occasions Jayden is awake before he heads down to the garage. She may have also previously exaggerated the 'ages ago' part. This all happened last week.

Melissa, sweating slightly in a way she can only pray Gen doesn't notice, grabs her Pepsi and tries to take a swig before she's pressured into any more confessions. But of course she notices. Why wouldn't she? Determined to draw an answer out of her, Gen gestures for the can.

"No deflecting. We're talking about this."

Melissa groans, relenting and handing it over. "Do we have to?"

"Yeah, we do, actually, because I'm your best friend and I care about you," Gen insists. "Mel, it clearly pisses you off. They're not gonna just magically stop trying to annoy you one day; that's just teenage boys. You've got to stand up for yourself at some point."

"Okay, but Matthew's not a teenager. He's basically my evil homophobic grandpa." He's only 24 years old. Coincidentally, not homophobic either. Gen doesn't need to know that for the purpose of effective shit talking.

But she takes her sarcastic remark the wrong way, brow furrowing again and stance tensing up like she's ready to tackle him. By the time Gen starts asking questions, she's already halfway out the door. "Wait, he's been homophobic to you? What did he say? Seriously, Mel, let me at him, I'm gonna kick his stupid, non-committal ass until he finally realises he's gay too—"

"Wait, wait, no. Kidding. Come back."

Her misunderstanding is charming, but also sparks a genuine concern that her brother is about to die at the hands of her aggressively supportive best friend. As much as she'd like to imagine he could take a high school junior in a fight as a grown man with multiple college degrees and a thin layer of stubble on his chin, Melissa lurches forward and grabs her arm before anyone gets seriously hurt. She's seen Gen in the mall when her favourite mascara is out of stock. If she lets her go, the consequential fallout would, without a doubt, make this the worst Jones family reunion yet. An extremely high bar to cross, by the way. One that she is not about to take her chances with.

Besides, it's not like she wants to have Matthew's blood on her hands. Sure, she'd handed him the meatloaf across the table earlier, but she wasn't trying to kill him, just mould his mouth shut through whatever the hell Gen ingested. That way, he wouldn't be able to remind her of her inherent failure as not only a student but also in her incessantly boring social life.

Melissa relents with a frustrated huff. Gen's going to pry a response from her tightly crossed arms either way. "It's a bit difficult to stand up for myself when I agree with everything he's implying."

"You shouldn't, by the way," comes her reassurance, a comforting response like clockwork.

"But I do." She should know those don't win out over self-deprecating thoughts anymore. "I've never had a real girlfriend before. I don't know what the hell I'm doing when it comes to even getting one. All I've ever done is read mixed signals like they actually mean something."

Gen blinks. "I mean, you had whatever the hell was going on with Georgia Robinson back in freshman year. Sounds like a girlfriend to me."

It's meant to be a helpful suggestion, if the meek shrug she gives her has anything to say about it. Unfortunately, it's at that point that Melissa gives up and reaches for the liquor cabinet to grab the rum. Snatching her Pepsi back, she dumps a gracious amount through the small opening.

Then after a deep swig, she shoots Gen the most deadpan are you serious right now look that she can. "We've been through this before. She was straight. She was just experimenting."

"There's nothing wrong with that, it makes for pretty hot situationships sometimes—"

"She was Catholic, Gen! Fucking Catholic!!"

'Uncomfortable silence' might as well be Melissa's middle name with how well she's become acquainted with them in the previous five or ten minutes.

This one wins, though, as her mind is flooded with unwelcome flashbacks of just how bad things had been back then – the crushing guilt and shame she'd been made to feel for wanting so much more, the imposing dread of something so much bigger forming an invisible wall between them. Something she just wasn't able to break down despite the clarity of the other side. Having to live with the knowledge that even if she had been able to, the person waiting for her there wouldn't have been able to see through the clouds of dust and rubble anyway. It was never invisible to her. She'd only wanted to take a tentative peek over the top of the gritty bricks.

That was the moment Melissa gave up on long-term relationships and resorted to the cheap release of being passed around like a blunt at parties. She likes to think she takes on her role as the 'token lesbian' like a champ — although Tai and Van are also quite clearly lezzing it up at every single one she attends, they're notably not as single and ready to mingle as her. And nobody else seems to be aware of the fact they sneak off every three seconds to make out in the bathroom. They get to share nice, loving kisses whilst good old Mel carries the burden of the straight girls that have been sadly brainwashed into thinking kissing with their teeth is normal.

So, yeah. Maybe Matthew's stupid passing comments hit a little harder than she'd initially let on.

The heartbreaking (and admittedly, kind of fucking pathetic) implications of the girl she'd finally found a real connection with ending up as a devout follower of Kill All Fags™ is the wake-up call Gen needs to the severity of the situation. Her face falls, and she opens her mouth as if to utter a brief apology, but quickly thinks better of it. She instead grabs the rum bottle Melissa had dumped in her can to dump a sizable measure down her throat in a similar fashion.

Gen swallows and sheepishly raises the bottle in the air. "To compulsive heterosexuality?"

"I am not fucking toasting to that."

"Whatever," she says before drinking some more. "All that shit is over now. And before you started being all doom and gloom, I was going to tell you that 1996 is our year, Mel. This semester, you're gonna be free from your brothers, you’re gonna get a girlfriend, and she's gonna be just as gay as you. We’ll go to States. Win it, then win Nationals too. And then you're going to be the coolest bitch in Wiskayok."

Okay, well, that is… asking a lot, actually.

There's much to unpack in that proposed statement, and Melissa isn't completely convinced by her words. She never is. Everything going right in her life tends to be an omen that impossibly more terrible events lie just around the corner, if she's learned anything from past years; past family gatherings where her dad was for some God-forsaken reason allowed back into the kitchen after making his usual abomination, past run-ins with her brothers in which she tried to be kind and a good sister and was rewarded for her efforts with plain cruelty.

But is she going to play along anyway, under a naïve assumption that at least attempting to believe what Gen is telling her gives it more of a chance of becoming a reality? Obviously. She's been doing it since the start of the decade, since they became friends, and it seems a little counterproductive to stop now.

"Not exactly sure if 'just as gay as me' is possible, but sure thing," she smiles.

And Gen smiles too when Melissa starts to match her energy. She gestures to her head, and it's only then that she notices the existence of her hat as something more than an extension of her body. "Yeah, you're right, actually. Only the gayest of the gay rob shitty pink snapbacks from the lockers of their sporting rivals. This girl is gonna have to be pretty unhinged to beat that—"

"I'm throwing you in the trash before my hat," Mel interrupts. "Besides, you were there!! You could have told me not to do it. Don't pretend that you didn't find it just as funny as I did."

She carries fond memories of stealing it from Rachel Goldman's locker last year, on the first day of team practice. The varsity team couldn't differentiate between them (or rather refused to, because as much as one was JV and the other wasn't, they both played just as bad as each other) so she made sure there was a difference… in ways far more complicated than they needed to be. A glimpse of a pretty cool hat she liked the look of among Rachel's belongings. A ten part plan to infiltrate the changing rooms after dark. A very willing getaway driver, or rather, runner, that laughed just as loud as her during their great escape down the darkened halls of Wiskayok High.

Now that it's hers, she can't part with it. Varsity might forget that she's far better than Rachel at midfielding and that they moved up the wrong player.

And maybe Gen does mean more to her as her lifelong best friend than petty acts of revenge against high school soccer rivals (especially those who didn't really do anything to wrong her now that she thinks about it), but she reasons the chances of everything Gen is saying actually happening are slim enough that she doesn't have to worry about being discarded any time soon.

No, Melissa. We're thinking positive this year. You're getting your shit together, and getting a girlfriend. Matthew is going to eat his words like that fucking meatloaf. He's going to hate it. You're going to be important.

She straightens the stolen hat. Gen lifts up the bottle of rum once more, but this time around her toast is something Melissa can get behind. 

"To proving your dumb brother wrong?"

"To proving my dumb brother wrong."

They don't clink the can and the bottle together, opting for the more mature option of emptying the remainder of the alcohol into said can and Gen's punch.

Step one of Melissa's plan is to survive the evening.

✧

Step one of Shauna's plan is to set fire to her most recent report card, hit her skull against a solid brick wall a couple hundred times, and pick up a baseball bat after her gender-affirming surgery to complete her transformation into one Jeff Sadecki. That seems to be the only feasible way in which Jackie Taylor will admit she has feelings for her.

It really puts into perspective how fucking disappointing her existence has become.

The party is exactly the same as every other party Jackie hosts – a strict 'no smoking inside' rule that gets broken within the first fifteen minutes of her letting guests inside, the living room ending up a haze of colourful rays, tobacco and (allegedly, Shauna can neither confirm nor deny) weed. Strobing lights in the living room after their main meal of alcohol a-la mode, Meat Loaf blasting through speakers that have no business being as loud as they are at 10:45PM on a Thursday night. The song? Shauna's best guess is that it was requested by some nerd with little to no relevance and an egregious music taste, which explains why the stragglers wistfully stare at wooden floorboards, cigarettes pressed lightly between chapped lips whilst everybody has fun playing Spin the Bottle outside. Meanwhile, the atmosphere inside the house has been beaten several times with a bat and left to die a terrible death. Even worse than usual, somehow. It makes sense considering she's overheard JV saying they're down a few people tonight.

It's not like queen bee Jackie's here to save them, because she's caught up with various other commitments, all of them evidently more important than Shauna. She's doing shit that matters with people that matter. Taking shots upon shots as she refuses to kiss anyone around the circle that isn't Jeff.

So Shauna is inside coping with whatever the hell the stoners have going on because there's no other choice. It's either let her brain leak out of the cavities in her skull from how mind-numbingly boring this whole charade is becoming or watch Jackie be irritatingly close to the most mediocre man she's ever had the displeasure of knowing, and the former is infinitely more attractive. Not that she's watching the latter through the kitchen window that conveniently faces the front garden, or anything. Why would she do that? That would be dumb, and only make her feel worse about herself. 

…but if, theoretically, she was staring, she imagines she'd be able see the loose braids Jackie asked for her to do earlier, shimmering slightly in streaming moonlight. They'd been sitting in her bedroom styling eachother hours before the party was actually scheduled to begin. Business as usual behind firmly closed doors – Shauna's hand resting on the curve of her waist, the other tangled up in a hair tie at the back of her head. Jackie, in her lap, leaning into her chest and soaking up the attention. The unspoken agreement that it was all platonic. The silent understanding that it couldn't be anything more.

That's what it felt like, anyway.

It's not that Jackie's oblivious; in fact, Shauna would argue that she knows exactly what she's doing and that she does it on purpose. There's no reason to risk her perfect life and make whatever they have more than what it is right now. Shauna would have to stand as her equal, would have to exist somewhere outside her orbit as her own person. It's not something she's ready for. Either of them. Her head hurts. She could be on the verge of collapse, or thinking too deeply about everything yet again. She still doesn't care. She's still not staring.

Outside. The circle's attention suddenly turns to Jackie, presumably her turn at their stupid game, and Shauna's eyes are fixated on the tempered glass as she glances over to Jeff. Nobody is shocked at what the bottle has foretold, since there's no reason for them to be. There's no drama surrounding what's about to happen. And it's difficult to place the expression clouding Jackie's features through the lanterns on the veranda reflecting off the window's surface, but there's a hint of discomfort that she gets worse at hiding the more she drinks. A moment passes and it's like it was never there, like it never was and never would have been. Then she kisses her stupid boyfriend. Then she pulls away.

Routine, tradition, the same fucking cowardice as always. 

Shauna bites her lip and slinks over to what remains of the liquor cabinet (she knows where the usual contents are hidden, unlike other partygoers, who are restricted to the crap Jackie had left out for them to get their paws on) to find the Malibu. She doesn't bother to get a glass, staggering over to the fridge and pouring the remainder of their milk into the bottle. Most of it ends up on the floor. She doesn't care. It's all cold glass as sweet release seeps down her throat, the familiar burn rising in her stomach once more.

Time slips away like sand without Jackie around to use it productively. She's facing the wall when the door cracks open, and whoever enters clearly doesn't notice she's there until they turn the light on. A high pitched scream resonates throughout the house; throughout the kitchen, even, because it seems highly unlikely anybody else will hear over the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack that has now somehow made its way onto the speakers.

"Who the fuck invited Misty?" Shauna asks the presence behind her. Her question goes unnoticed, however, due to the sheer degree at which she slurs her words.

Mari Ibarra's reply is breathless from the previous jumpscare. Shauna's hated her from the moment she joined varsity, for no particular reason other than her being an annoying junior with an annoying level of talent. In essence, a lesser Jackie on training wheels. She'll grow up big and strong to ruin the life of one of her many sidekicks. "No idea what you just said, but is there any reason why you're gatekeeping the kitchen, or are we allowed to come refill our drinks?"

She gestures to the corridor, and sure enough, a small number of her JV pals are lined up with their red Solo cups, looking at her slumped over the countertop like she's an alien species. From the very limited knowledge she cares to remember, Mari's in the same year as all of them and leads their clique as the token popular girl. It doesn't matter that she's varsity and they're not. Have they been friends since childhood? Were they fatefully seated by each others' sides in physics class, leading them to forge an irreplaceable bond? Again, Shauna seriously doesn't care, but they can't have made friends through soccer. Mari happens to be the only real exception she can name to the other rule of Jackie's parties – that the two teams should be stratospheres apart at any given moment.

Her best friend hadn't written that one down herself, had actually tried to die the martyr and involve everybody, but looking outside the window again it's pretty clear how that turned out. She's kissing Jeff again when she chances another look, and the Malibu she's drinking almost comes right back up. Shauna highly doubts the bottle picked her two turns in a row.

"Hey, gaywad, I'm talking to you. Are you going to let us through or what—"

"Fuck off, Mari."

A chorus of teasing 'ooo's from the JV players only serves to piss her off even more as she storms out of the kitchen with the bottle of Malibu still in her hand. 

Funnily enough, Shauna never got around to finding the kitchen roll under the sink to wipe down the droplets of milk that spilled over the rim, so her hand is sticky, and it smells dubiously like the Ghost of Pineapple Past. Her skin attaches itself to the Taylors' door handle when she tries to wrench it open. There's some muffled laughter from the new inhabitants of the kitchen at that, and frankly, they should be glad said door slams shut behind her without any further altercation. It takes a lot of self-restraint that would have been better off saved for later.

Outside is cold, uninviting, but poetically beautiful. The very second her sneakers make contact with hard stone, a bitter chill rocks its way through Shauna's spine, and she immediately regrets wearing jorts. Her flannel can only do so much to insulate when her legs are awkwardly jutting out from tattered fabric. There are other things to be occupied with, though; for a fleeting moment, she lets herself observe the buzz of the circle from the safe distance of the sun-bleached veranda. The lanterns that had been obscuring her vision back in the kitchen cast a steady glow over grass that should not appear as evenly mowed as it is, considering Jackie's deep seated hatred for chores and a stark lack of parents present to do them for her. The crescent moon is framed by the spindling branches of an apple grove that hasn't quite begun to bear fruit. Shauna catches her best friend leaning nonchalantly against the trunk of one as she raises another glass, subconsciously tries to tattoo the image of her energetic smile onto her brain. She seems much happier than she did before. They must have finished playing Spin the Bottle.

Meaning she has the perfect opportunity to swoop in and ruin any enjoyment she'd been previously having; another tradition they stick closely to at gatherings like these. If Shauna isn't precariously teetering on the verge of blackout drunk and making it her business to be a nuisance to anybody that comes across her, is it really a party?

Her footing is heavy as she approaches her best friend, still sitting under the tree. "Jax."

No response. Shauna feels like she's shouting her name from across the garden, but alcohol is a strange substance that means she isn't quite sure if she's just not being loud enough or if Jackie is purposely ignoring her. In the middle of the grass, she feels like she sticks out, shouldn't be there. Should be back inside with JV and the smokers (which, now that she thinks about it, doesn't make sense – why the hell are the smokers inside whilst the party is outside?) so varsity can tease her about her absence the moment they get back to practising after summer. The usual questions, the half-hearted 'where were you's and the 'you should have joined us' that nobody really means.

She tried. Dear fucking God, she tried, but no matter how hard Shauna forces herself to assimilate with them, the concerning thoughts she thinks and the impulsive actions she can't resist and the cruel way she treats them are all flashing indicators that she doesn't belong there. A quiet voice in the very back of her mind tells her to believe it. She's nothing more than Jackie's lapdog. If Jackie is with them, then by extension, so is Shauna.

She tries again, louder, stumbling closer. "Jax."

This time around, Shauna gives it a few seconds to make sure, but to nobody's surprise she's met with the same silence. The riveting conversation in the circle continues without interruption. Her teammates are cross-legged on the grass, smiling, laughing, without a care in the world. When has the ordinary ever been news?

Something within her snaps.

Shauna blinks, and Jackie's wrist is in her hand. Her grip is harsh and unforgiving as she tears her away from whatever facetious lies she'd been entertaining Jeff with. Jackie looks like she's about to protest for a second, but her eyes drift down to the bottle still clutched tightly in her other hand and she thinks better of it. A wordless shrug to her useless boyfriend whilst being dragged around the back of her house, through the gate that Shauna and her parents are the only other people with keys for, is all it takes to explain. Typical Shauna, right? The mere suggestion that this is something predictable only serves to make her angrier, fuel the disdain that's been building within her all evening.

Jeff clearly knows fucking nothing. And Jackie doesn't either, despite being her best friend her for so long, despite the backhanded comments she always makes at Shauna's expense. You'd think that said best friend would see the matching counterpart as more than an extension of herself. Shauna thought so, anyway, and she was repaid with what? The same self-centered crap about their future together? The same boredom of being treated as a lowly stagehand in the performance of Jackie's life, again and again and again?

Take this as predictable. They end up pressed against the splintering wood of Mrs Taylor's gardening shed.

"I bet…" Shauna chokes out after shoving her, literally, coughing at regular intervals from the burn of the Malibu against her throat. The index finger of her free hand is outstretched, a little limp and off its mark but pointing unmistakeably at Jackie. "…I bet you've been fucking waiting for this, haven't you? You've been out here with them waiting for me to come running back to you."

Her eyes are wide at the accusation, not scared, per se, but evidently thrown off. "Shipman, I don't—"

"Say it," she urges. "You don't have to be so ashamed of it, you know? Pretending you're so busy with Jeff. You don't even like him. You've never liked him, and I know it, and you can't lie to me because I can see right through all that crap."

"You're wasted," comes Jackie's weak response after a moment of hesitation.

And that moment of vulnerability is exactly what Shauna's been looking for. It's her opportunity to strike. "But I'm right, aren't I? You won, Jax. You won again, and you're gonna keep fucking winning. I'm here now, like you wanted. And I saved you from him."

Static electricity courses through the air between them. They're paralysed by it.

Something about the way Jackie stares right through her makes her a million times more desperate to hear an answer. Her best friend raises an eyebrow expectantly, and she only catches it because of the dim lighting (that neither of them planned or had the ability to, since although there's lanterns in the back garden as well as the front, the batteries evidently haven't been changed in a while) but it’s enough to give Shauna another endless list of bad ideas, all lined up neatly in her head to act upon one by one. Drunk actions are sober thoughts, right? She just hadn't been brave enough to carry them out without a bottle of coconut rum bubbling away uncomfortably in her gut. Then again, she could have sworn that it doesn't usually feel this potent. Everyone knows she doesn't hold her liquor well, but this is a feeling stronger than any vomiting fit she's had before.

It might just be the jealousy she's been harbouring since the night began, since Jackie opened the door for their earliest guests and Nat burst through with a bashfully smiling Lottie in tow and an unwavering resolve to pregame. Since she'd slipped off into the crowd under the guise of grabbing them drinks and got so caught up in the quote-unquote 'atmosphere' that she made a better one with all the cool kids and never came back. Since Shauna had come across her a couple hours later, although only through the lens of her kitchen window, tuning out the surroundings, wanting to go home, wishing she was close enough to reach out to, to lightly graze her shoulder, to bring her back. 

Jackie's hand grazes her shoulder in a similar fashion to the way she'd been fantasising about, brief but intentional. Her lips part slightly, as if to offer another half-hearted apology. Shauna's sick of those. She'd prefer it if she never tried to make things right at all.

It's her own fault that she's doesn't have the courage to tell her how she feels. "I'm gonna ask Jeff to take you home—"

Jackie never finishes her sentence, not that she needed to.

Shauna is kissing her. Hard.

It's rough, messy in a way that makes Jackie's accusations of her lack of sobriety seem entirely hypocritical. Shauna can feel her core tense under her palm as she drags it across the slightly toned skin. She can taste cheap vodka cranberry the moment her tongue hits her lips; sugary-sweet spit and sweat. She pulls away only to breathe before throwing herself back into it, and her touches grow progressively heavier until she’s groping Jackie's thighs through thin leggings she wishes were thinner. Jackie reciprocates with a low moan into her mouth. It's all she needs.

She also takes a second to appreciate the lack of working lanterns, because it's just enough for Shauna to be able to drink in Jackie's every feature as things intensify further - the way her mouth hangs slightly open whenever they seperate, barely satiated, keeps her chasing more. Her skin glows like it’s inviting further contact. Shauna's foot unintentionally kicks the Malibu bottle (that she didn't even notice she'd dropped into the grass) as she repositions, trying to make herself taller and shove Jackie impossibly further underneath her. To look down on her, to see what the view was like.

But then there's hands on her chest, frantically pushing her back. Shauna freezes, forced back into unsettling reality by a rush of cold air filling the void between them. Jackie looks mortified. Which doesn't really make sense, considering she'd been so fine with it until she'd tried to take control.

"Shit, Shauna, we can't. We seriously can't, okay?"

Her eyes have shot wide open, and despite Shauna's usual ability to size up exactly how she feels with a single glance, she probably fucking hates me now is the only definite conclusion she can draw from her best friend's current expression. The rest of it, she assumes, is uncertainty, conflict deep within her soul. Fear, even. She's backed up completely into the shed, so much so that the few metres between them feel like an impassable distance. Probably not the best idea. She could get splinters.

Even scarier is the fact that through her clouded judgement, Shauna can't find the side of herself that would care that the distance is there. Right now, it's freedom. A sick, twisted joke with a punchline that she doesn't quite understand, but one that she'll pretend to laugh at regardless.

"Oh, so now you don't want me here," she lazily grins, squatting to retrieve her Malibu and finishing the remainder before throwing it back on the Taylors' ridiculously perfect grass."Pick a fucking side, Jax. It's one thing or another."

"Shauna, you know it's not like that. I…"

Silence, again. It's starting to get colder outside as the crescent moon reaches its apex.

Jackie swallows thickly. "I think you should go home."

That's not it at all. They both know it, but Shauna's heard enough bullshit for one night. The last thing she wants to do is get in a car with Jeff Sadecki. She doesn't trust that she won't do something she'll regret later down the line.

Without another word, she shoots a sarcastic smile at Jackie, producing the keys to her side gate from the pocket of her jorts. She spins them around her finger as she walks away. Maybe she does miss the keyhole a couple times, drunken hand-eye coordination not doing her any favours to avoid shoving copper into sturdy oak, but eventually the gate swings open and she slips away into the darkness.

Her parting words are mumbled, almost inaudible as she struggles with the syllables. "See you at practice."

And Jackie's response, after a second of hesitation, is whispered in a similar fashion. It's unmistakably nervous, too little, too late, but it's there. She's still leaning against the shed expecting her best friend to hear it. Maybe even expecting her to come back. But Shauna is too focused on getting away from the party to properly hear what she says.

Weirdly enough, it turns out to be a beautiful gift from God that somebody invited Misty Quigley. Shauna ends up puking in the back of her mom's car after she was the only one willing to help her out with a ride home – sadly an apt consequence for somebody who had ruined the night of everyone else present, because word around the house after a few more drinks was that Jackie had been acting kind of strange since Shauna took her out back. Luckily for her, Misty has about seventeen bottles of water on hand for her to drink and a conveniently placed sick bucket that she has no idea where it could have possibly came from and she even serenades her with an emotional rendition of Somewhere from West Side Story, which actually doesn't help all that much but the rest is nice. Her mom, however, is decidedly not as helpful, giving her occasional judgemental looks through the rearview mirrors.

There's no need for her to do that. Shauna is completely aware that she's fucked up.

It's even more fucked up that despite everything, she thinks about Jackie all the way home, and the moment she gets through the door she pukes again in the downstairs toilet. 

It's even worse, because she could have sworn that her mouth still tasted like her spit.

✧

A mile or so down the road, Gen's mom arrives at the Jones household to pick her daughter up. Melissa's arm is around her shoulder for the whole walk down her driveway, keeping her movements stable – they haven't actually had that much to drink, considering her vow to do whatever it took to make it through the evening earlier, but the steps her best friend is taking seem a little unsteady and she doesn't want to risk anything. This iteration of the reunion could maybe even be considered a decent dinner, aside from Matthew's usual arrogant bullshit. A drunken Gen having to be rushed to the ER after falling and exploding her skull on their property? Not what she really envisions as a good ending.

So she escorts her all the way to the car, even helping her into the backseat. "Hey, are you sure you're good?"

"As of right now, yeah," Gen smiles lopsidedly. "But keep talking. The more you can convince my mom I'm going to be disgustingly hung over, the less chance I'll have of actually having to go to school on Monday."

Which is fair enough. Melissa also doesn't want to go to school on Monday. The looming threat of actually having to listen to Gen's advice and, for lack of better terms, get bitches, is keeping her adequately terrified for any further learning. Of course, she doesn't have to, but disappointing her (and disappointing anybody, for that matter) has always been something she's been terrified of. There are only so many 'our year's she can run away from. One more in the form of 1996, and Melissa fears that Gen might start trying to pimp her off to the highest bidder that looks as if they'll treat her nicely.

"I get that," she replies, acting as if it's for the same reasons. Her eyes stay fixed on Gen's, not letting anything slip. Melissa has always been great at pretending. It's a pretty useful skill, what with all the times she's had to pretend hookups at parties haven't meant anything to her, had to pretend that her parents fixating on Matthew's achievements all the time instead of hers doesn't upset her.

Then, the solution to her dilemma becomes clear.

Refusing yet another opportunity to turn things around bears the consequence of Gen feeling even more sorry for her, if that's possible. Giving the year her best shot, on the other hand, leaves her to wallow in a deep pit of despair when she is once again made aware that things will never work out for somebody so irrelevant.

But pretending she's succeeded, and that she already has everything she wants in the palm of her hand?

"Oh, one more question," Melissa quickly adds, tapping her foot rhythmically against the paving stones. She hears Gen's mom sigh from the driver's seat at the prospect of them leaving being delayed even further. "Do you happen to have any female friends in our year that aren't Mari?"

Gen raises an eyebrow. "Uh… yeah. Akilah."

"Not Akilah either."

"Oh, then no." She scratches her head. "There's a reason we bonded so quickly back in freshman year."

Melissa immediately knows that she's referring to the dark times they were consistently the last two picked in sports class, not shared characteristics or their complementary personalities. Both of them owe their lives to that Crystal girl. She'd transferred from a different school a couple weeks after the start of their first semester and saved them from any further shame – at least she gets picked last because she's actually bad at most sports and not just because people think she's weird.

In other news, Gen's lack of other real friends is tragic and decidedly not the response she wanted to hear. There's nobody Melissa can effectively lie about, or halfheartedly kiss whilst drunk at a party and act like it's the binding tie that will follow them to their eventual marriage… when it gets legalised, of course, but the sentiment is there. 

She'll have to innovate.

"Whatever. It was stupid anyway," Melissa replies, leaning casually against the car door in a way she knows will keep Gen thinking she's actually trying to get with people. Which she's not. She's using masterful emotional manipulation. "Have a safe drive. We have a history assignment due in first day back. Don't forget it, my little munchkin—"

"Mel, I'm not trying to be rude, but I seriously think my mom's gonna run you over if you stand here any longer."

"Fuck. Got it." She steps back so that her foot isn't at risk of being crushed by the car, waving awkwardly in apology to the unimpressed woman in the front window. "I'll see you on Monday?"

"No guarantees. I'm wasted."

The moment Melissa moves, Gen is snatched away from her. Her mom's Toyota speeds off into the distance at a pace that is almost certainly not legal for a residential zone; probably not legal for a main road, either. If she's honest, she isn't even quite sure how the battered old sedan is going that fast. Her dad had taught her a thing or two about mechanics down at the garage. That contraption should not have as much horsepower as it does.

She really admires her dedication to leaving, though. It's a poignant reminder that anything is possible if you put the effort in.

And honestly, she needs it, because Melissa isn't used to the prospect of big things lying ahead. There's four days until the summer ends, all of which she will be spending in her room listening to her Red Hot Chili Peppers CDs and brooding over the aforementioned history assignment. Despite so kindly reminding Gen it existed, she had actually also forgotten about it until she looked at her desk and noticed it looked strangely full.

As she walks back into the foyer and re-enters the house, she sees Jayden eating a Push Pop in the kitchen. Thinking nothing of it, Melissa runs up the stairs to her room and whips out a notebook. She draws some stick figures. The title at the top reads Hat (Allegedly) Gets Bitches. It’s time to scheme.

Monday marks the end of the world as she knows it.

Notes:

my silly ass forgot to put an end note. ermm uhhh follow me on twitter @meteorspulses for various shaunahat/jackieshauna musings and sapphic yearning

i don’t want to give too much away but there’s a lot in store for these guys (yes, all three of them)!! we’re definitely gonna be seeing some more characters as the plot progresses, too. who’s up for some marihat crumbs. some genlissa, perchance. and the yearning jackieshauna of it all… you’ll have to stick around i fear.

hope you’re just as excited for later chapters as i am to post them!! expect monthly-ish updates exams are kicking my ass

Chapter 2: charged for two counts of hat thievery

Summary:

Melissa dusts off her knees and stands up again. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Hat girl," Shauna shrugs, gesturing in her general direction.

- or -

Back to school for the Yellowjackets. Melissa comes to terms with her inherent failure. Gen's favourite milkshake flavour is out of stock.

Regrettably, it's Monday, and with it comes the dawn of a brand new semester. The halls are jam-packed with students that long to be anywhere but Wiskayok High in the present moment. And who can blame them?

Despite their best wishes and continued prayers, the school hasn't become any more impressive over the summer – the blue paint on their lockers is still chipped and allegedly 'well-loved', whilst the notorious third toilet stall in the girls' bathrooms continues to spurt water like a forbidden fountain. Juniors and seniors remain entertained by the simple pleasure of shoving freshmen into various walls and demanding their lunch money, much to this years' newcomers' dismay. The bleachers are, well, bleached, with the sun's merciless gaze bearing down on them. Everything is depressing and affected by the school's frequent budget cuts and if America really was a free country, the building would have been labeled a nuclear hazard decades ago.

Alas, it has not. The world is flawed. Society repeats the same cycle. The younger generation is doomed to waste away in substandard public schools – classes run as always, and Melissa is in final period Biology trying to do cool tricks with her pencil whilst she manifests the fire alarm going off to someone's cigarette. 

Over the course of the last three years, she's learned how to do some pretty awesome stuff. In freshman year, she mastered the art of balancing the pencil on her pinky and using the forces of gravity to spin it. By sophomore year, she discovered she could make it levitate. The 18th century literature she was supposed to be analysing for her exam at the time must have etched some crazy runes into her brain matter upon first reading.

Determined to do anything that isn't draw the lock and key model in her textbook, Melissa attempts the trick, flicking her right wrist up to suspend the writing utensil into the air. Throwing it is the first step. Once it's in the air, she simply thinks really hard about it floating.

…which somehow goes catastrophically wrong, because the pencil not only crashes flatly back to the wooden desk, but whilst trying to pick it up, the baggy sleeve of her denim jacket sweeps it onto the floor. Then, one of her classmates is walking back to his desk. He kicks it. It goes far. And after that, somebody spots a free pencil on the floor. They don't hesitate to pick it up.

She watches through the gaps under her desk as their hand makes contact, and then her beloved pencil is gone forever.

Her head falls into her hands. "Are you kidding me? Not again," she whispers to herself.

But then, another voice. "You're so fucking weird."

Oh, yeah, and she sits next to Mari in Bio. Not consensually, because if she had any semblance of a choice in the matter she'd be next to Gen, but Melissa pays far too little attention to be in the same class as her best friend. Instead, she gets to watch all hell break loose as one greying, underpaid teacher tries to wrangle thirty failing imbeciles that do far more chemistry making their sack lunches in the morning than whilst actually in his classroom.

Which brings her back to her desk buddy, who had been forcefully moved into the free seat next to Melissa after her far-more-public-than-it-really-should-have-been breakup with Danny Mears from the football team. The two of them had claimed seats next to each other at the beginning of the year as junior year's resident sweethearts. Everyone was going to be invited to their wedding, and everyone was probably going to throw away the invite at the first given opportunity… except to the whole student body's disbelief, that moment never came. Danny had eyes for Mari's cousin the entire time they were together. It was scandalous, WHS gossip that would go down in the history books.

Even more significant to the story is the ending, of course, and boy, was it spectacular – Mari got her own back the second she found out by picking up his entire desk, pencilcase and all, and smashing it over his thick skull.

He didn't come to school for the following semester, or even the semester after that; the rumors surrounding his disappearance ranged from theorising he was concussed, to simply hiding from his crazy ex, to quite literally deceased. Biology would never again be an interesting class with the shadow of what had transpired looming over it. Not that it was interesting in the first place.

Either way, Teach didn't like that one. Hence the new seating arrangements, and hence Danny Mears' exile on a distant workbench.

"What's the answer to question B?" Mari asks, leaning inconspicuously over Melissa's shoulder to stare at her workbook. "Help a girl out."

"You do realise there's nothing in my book to copy, right?"

"Then just, like, write something. Chances are you know a hell of a lot more than I do—"

"Keep telling yourself that, but I haven't listened in biology since they talked about boobs in fifth grade," Melissa deadpans. "You're telling me you wanna put your trust in my knowledge?"

Mari glances to the side, her expression sour. "I'd be asking Akilah or Gen, but they're too smart to be here."

"Yeah, well, I'm too stupid to be here, but there's no lower classes. So it looks like we're both gonna fail finals."

And at that comment, she leans less inconspicuously away from Melissa's shoulder. "…Right. Whatever."

They fall silent, with no other words to exchange. 

For a blissful second, it's almost as if they're paying attention to the whiteboard and the stout man in front of it, but the illusion shatters when Mari turns around to talk to somebody more interesting on the desk behind them. As much as they're teammates when varsity needs an extra bench warmer, Melissa knows that their relationship outside of that consists only of her being known as 'the girl with the hat from JV that my shopping bestie Gen is currently studying under a microscope'.

She doesn't even know that the hat didn't belong to her earlier in the year. Their relationship is a completely clean slate, which, thinking back to events that had transpired the night before, could be fantastic news.

Melissa taps her shoulder as their professor descends into a convoluted rant about digestive enzymes. "Psst."

"Yeah, and I was there when Alyssa Bender showed up," Mari continues to the dark-haired girl on the desk behind them, evidently ignoring Melissa on purpose. "I don't even know how she got there, but, Yellowjackets party, y'know? Anyway, she barfed again. You didn't hear it from me, but there's no fucking way Jackie isn't leaving those gummy bears out for her on purpose now—"

"Erm, I said psst," Melissa tries again.

She is rewarded for her bravery with the cold stare she's become accustomed to when she interrupts conversations too important for her.

The bit that pisses her off most is that it's not just from Mari, who she'd completely expect to treat her that way in any given scenario. Her newfound companion thinks that she holds the same power. 

Ironic, considering Melissa could have sworn she spawned into the classroom within the last thirty minutes. She has never seen them talk before in her life and is quite frankly terrified by Mari's ability to strike up conversation with random strangers.

But she gets a response either way. Mari exhales heavily, gesturing a quick hold on a second to the girl behind them and turning back to face their desk. "Don't ask me to fill you in on the party, too. You should have been there, JV."

"Oh, it's not that." Although that would be nice to know too.

Mari tilts her head slightly. "Then what?"

And now her question sounds extremely stupid, and Melissa has second, third, fourth thoughts about dropping it. But Gen's words flash back in her mind. 1996 is her year. Like, actually this time.

"I was—" Jesus fucking Christ, this is difficult. "Is there any chance that you… like, I don't know. Are you looking for…"

It's a really great start. Or, at least, that's what Melissa tells herself in her mind to ignore that this conversation could not get any more awkward.

Mari sits through the helpless stuttering with a dissatisfied expression. She's mere milliseconds away from giving up on Melissa and inserting herself back into whatever gossip she'd been sharing to the no-name behind them when the words finally crash out.

"Do you want to be my girlfriend?"

Nothing happens. No sparks go off in her chest, and no naked babies with angel wings and trumpets fly around her head as she's struck with the all-seeing arrow of love and adoration. She knows she doesn't actually want to date Mari. In fact, she probably doesn't even want to be her friend, but the unfortunate seating arrangements and their connections through soccer mean she's forced to be amicable to a certain degree.

That doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt a little when she hears the answer she was expecting. She even thought she'd prepared for the disgust in her tone… but no, that cuts just as deep as it would have in a setting where it meant something to her. 

"Ew. No. I don't."

Heaven be damned, Isabelle Jones didn't raise a quitter. 

The need for somebody to take to next year's family dinner far outweighs any possible humilation that could come from this. If all else fails, it's a six-months-late April Fool's joke.

"Boyfriend?" Melissa offers sheepishly.

"Do I look like a man to you?" Mari's tone is pointed at first, but after sitting in agitated silence for a couple seconds, she realises the implications of her words and quickly double-takes. "Actually, no, don't answer that. I don't hate that you're gay or whatever. I just think you're ugly."

Ouch.

The worst part is that Mari notices when her face falls, and immediately takes it upon herself to do damage control. Things somehow get even more awkward as she scrambles to correct anything she could have possilbly said wrong. "No offense, no offense. You're… not my type? Is that better?"

"No, it's really not," Melissa sighs. "It's fine, though; I just figured you'd relate to the general cause of feminism. My dick brother keeps laughing at me because I can't pull."

"…Again, no offense, but maybe it's because you can't—"

The bell rings, clear, loud, thankfully interrupting any further slander. College prep Biology are free… until tomorrow, that is, but ignoring the existence of their least favourite class until they are physically forced to confront it comforts many of the students.

Melissa can relate. It makes no sense to her that Rutgers have at least one science on their entry requirements – Bio was the only one that seemed interesting when she was given the options, but her wrinkly asswipe of a teacher effectively killed that within the first week. Slightly irritated but trying her best to act nonchalant, she shoves her textbooks in her bag and pushes her stool under the desk. It creaks as she moves it. So much for the pretense that it's not two classes or so away from collapsing under her body weight.

Yet another tragic event for her to worry about. She'd make a list, but she used up the last page of her notebook on the shitty plan she's already lost all hope in. 

And there's only been one rejection so far. Only God knows how she'll handle more.

She ignores Mari whilst rushing to leave the classroom; Mari, unsurprisingly, ignores her too, because she's already congregating with a group of girls that Melissa could never even imagine interacting with in the corner (the opposite one to where Danny Mears is currently picking his nose and wiping it on the underside of the table). Initially, Melissa is ecstatic at the prospect of going home. Jayden might have grown up into the most unpleasant little by ever conceived, and chances are that the moment she gets through the front door she'll be forced into an uneventful video call with Matthew pretending to care about how her day went, but above all, she yearns for her bed.

Her brothers suck. There's probably an endless list of chores that she's the only person in the house trustworthy enough to do. None of that matters in the face of closing her eyes and being able to temporarily forget her failure.

She practically bursts into full sprint down the corridor, down to her locker to retrieve anything she'd left there throughout the day. When she opens it, Melissa expects maybe a couple similarly empty textbooks to her Biology one. An unfinished packet of gum, if she's lucky. Her jacket is stored from earlier on in the day – to say it's supposed to be autumn, today has been… unnervingly warm.

She pushes it out of the way. Consequently, she notices her sports kit, previously concealed by a wall of denim but now glaring at her menacingly from the very back of the locker.

The first Yellowjackets practice of the semester is next up on her schedule. It brings her nothing but despair.

"Are you kidding me?" Melissa whispers for the second time today to nobody in particular. 

And also for the second time today, it summons someone she didn't mean it to; although instead of Mari, she's greeted by Gen, who looks equally as disappointed as Melissa as she retrieves her own jersey and boots from the neighbouring locker. The frown plaguing her features reminds Melissa of days gone by in which they'd shared nothing but a couple polite words whilst organising textbooks. Nowadays, they basically share a soul.

Gen pushes the locker door shut once it's empty (grimacing as the rusted metal makes a loud grinding noise), then produces her keys. They're about 5% actual keys. The rest is made up of various single-use plastic charms that would have undoubtedly contributed to climate change in a landfill somewhere if not adopted by Melissa's best friend.

Melissa doesn't get why they're so trendy. That's why Gen has so many. "Bets on us blowing off of practice and heading to the liquor store instead?"

"They wouldn't serve us," Gen laughs.

"Not with that attitude, they wouldn't."

Melissa finger-guns. Gen rolls her eyes, grabs her wrist, and starts dragging her down the hallway in the direction of the Yellowjackets changing rooms.

✧

Soccer is a wonderful game. It consists of two teams kicking a ball. Usually ten players a side, everybody works together to get the ball they're kicking into a net in order to score points, and the team with the most points at the end wins. There are so many positions to play – you could be a striker, kicking the ball into the net like charming captain and beacon of light Jackie Taylor. Or maybe defense is more your style, and you'd rather be Laura Lee Allen on the left wing, kicking the ball away from your net.

Personally, Melissa is drawn to midfield. Melissa actually knows how to play midfield, more specifically central, and if she does say so herself then she plays it pretty well. Melissa is the sort of girl that kicks the ball around the pitch. She kicks it to her teammates. If it's a really good day, then the opposing team are stupid enough to leave their defense wide open, and then she kicks it into their goal.

…Or, at least, that's what she's supposed to do. It's what she'd like to do, because Gen is on the right wing calling out for her to pass. Rachel Goldman is also there. Rachel Goldman sucks straight ass at soccer and Melissa has no idea how she made it onto varsity and the moment she gets this ball in possession, JV have a clear shot.

But Shauna Shipman from the varsity team is like an immovable fucking wall.

Her brow is furrowed as she stares Melissa down, intense concentration, something dangerous. The ball follows her every movement like they're tethered together, and it's almost impossible to find an opening to tackle it away. Every skirmish they have ends in the same fashion – if Melissa tries to break their defense for her strikers, she's turned around in an instant. If she tries to keep JV's side steady, she'll blink, and the ball has been expertly tapped through her legs to Jackie or Taissa waiting on the other side. Varsity score again, an inevitable fate.

And somehow, with every flawless play she sets up, the strands of hair loose from her ponytail perfectly frame her features. The quiet but headstrong determination in those glossy brown eyes commands, controls the pitch. Controls Melissa. There's no conceivable way around it.

Shauna is, quite simply, better than her.

When the scrimmage hits half-time, the majority of her teammates are huddling and discussing tactics at the side of the pitch. From the very faint conversation she can overhear, their plans all involve staying as far away from central midfield as humanly possible.

Meanwhile, Melissa stands by the goal with Robin, the only other outlier, and sips angrily from her water bottle. To absolutely nobody's surprise, the goalie's been crying; she likes to stay away from people so she can keep up the pretense that things are absolutely fine. Despite everybody knowing that they're not, and that she ridiculously overreacts to every minor inconvenience.

Although this time around, the reasoning behind it is a little easier to understand, because Melissa has also realised her irrelevance in the wake of her varsity counterpart. But it can be excused, since she's only a junior – Robin, in theory, should be the varsity counterpart of JV's goalie.

Key words – in theory.

"Vanessa is so much better than me," she chokes out, and for a second, Melissa has no fucking clue who she's talking about. Then, against her own will, she remembers that not everyone is aware of Van's inherent butch-ness. 

"There, there," Melissa sighs, half-jokingly, half-genuinely concerned that her temporary teammate has actually sustained serious mental damage. "It'll be over in forty-five minutes. You'll go back to bench warming for varsity like nothing ever happened, I promise."

Robin tries to reply, bless her, but the way she blubbers through frantic tears is not a language Melissa is too familiar with.

"What was that?"

More incoherent noises. Melissa cannot understand a single word.

She can, however, hand her a tissue through the awkward silence that follows. "You're doing great, anyway. We're only…"

It's then that she notices Misty enthusiastically holding up a clipboard from the bleachers. Coach Scott sits by her side looking far from amused, and whether that's at the JV side's pitiful performance as varsity's warmup or general annoyance at the bundle of joy next to him, Melissa is unsure. Their performance is, in fact, pitiful. The moment she squints over at the current score to fact-check her attempt at reassuring Robin, her face falls.

"…we're only 0-6."

Admittedly, not the greatest form of comfort. Having to come to terms with how much she sucks only makes Robin cry even harder. 

That makes Melissa think a little more thoroughly about the do you want to be my girlfriend or my boyfriend or pretend to be my girlfriend in the name of feminism that she was planning on casually dropping into their conversation. Coming to the conclusion that it would maybe be just a little insensitive, she takes back her tissue with an awkward smile, shoves it in the pocket of her shorts, and slips away. Starts running back to her usual position on the pitch as Coach blows the whistle to signify the end of their water break.

Or, at least, she tries to. However, the aforementioned immovable wall from the first half of their soccer game has apparently learned how to move within the last fifteen minutes just so Melissa walks into her.

Yellowjackets fans have no need to fear, because Shauna is still pretty fucking immovable, and she remains firmly on both feet. Melissa, on the other hand, is not so lucky; caught off guard by the sudden force of a relatively well-built soccer player a year or two older smashing into her, she's thrown to the ground with an embarrassingly loud yelp.

Thump.

It all happens so quickly. Her elbows sting on impact against hard dirt, and her head suddenly feels worryingly exposed, although she can't place exactly why. Her eyes dart up to find the perpetrator, who doesn't at all seem concerned with Melissa's wellbeing. That's fine. Whatever. Knocking people over must be common courtesy nowadays, which doesn't exactly bother her, but it would have been nice if she'd been informed in a different fashion—

"Sorry," mumbles Shauna. "Who are you again?"

It's only then she notices her hat has fallen off throughout the commotion. She snatches it from a nearby patch of overgrown grass and plants it firmly atop her head. Things feel better in an instant… and less woozy.

"Oh, right."

Melissa dusts off her knees and stands up again. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Hat girl," Shauna shrugs, gesturing in her general direction. It's better than her thinking she's the same person as Rachel Goldman, though, so Melissa figures she'll let the vaguely dehumanising nickname slide for now. "Didn't mean to shove you. Sorry."

She settles on the repetition of that word, the S one, and the way in which both times Shauna utters it sound decisively not sorry at all. She must think saying it is some kind of courtesy. It kind of reminds her of Jayden, and how he always storms off after realising he's in the wrong in an argument, but still refuses to admit it. Sorry holds no weight.

However, their brief interaction also leads her to notice that Shauna is a cutie pie. She has big brown eyes, and they kind of remind her of the little balls in the milk tea that she orders from Gen's family café to look like she's cool and individual. Her hair looks really shiny, as well. Which could just be sweat, considering they've been playing soccer for the last hour, but it's not like she'll have had to work very hard to keep up with the JV players.

She wouldn't have had to work very hard. She's just better.

That's exactly what she needs.

The idea flashes in Melissa's mind like a sudden bolt of thunder through stagnant darkness; it's two birds with one stone, or two flexes on one Matthew, in literal terms. A partner and a personal soccer coach. One that actually plays her position, as well. It's gold. It's perfect. It's exactly what she needs, again, to throw both her annoying fucking brother off of her trail, and to keep Gen thinking she's not a complete and utter failure of a human being.

And thank god that Mari had turned her down earlier, otherwise this amazing brainstorm would have been cheating, and as much as lying to everyone around her is part of the plan, infidelity is not something she feels she is exactly comfortable with at this point in time.

"I don't care. You can shove me again if you want. Do you want to be my girlfriend?"

…is what Melissa likely would have said, assuming Shauna didn't walk away as quickly as she crashed into her life.

Then, sooner than she could steal another hat from Rachel's locker, they're playing soccer again. And Shauna doesn't get distracted by Melissa's charm as she fears she would have liked her to, instead proceeding to run more circles around her for a good forty-five minutes until Misty's faraway clipboard reads 0-15 in shaky handwriting. She's convinced that Coach Martinez blows the whistle early to end JV's suffering, and because it's not even been a productive session for the varsity players crushing them. By the end, they hadn't even put up a fight. The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.

By that logic, the big Yellowjackets being able to beat the little Yellowjackets (and Robin, who is one cry away from getting thrown back down to them) is negative glory, and chances are that something like this won't happen again until the junior team get their shit together.

When they all gather to hear pointers, it really looks like that's what Coach wants to say; unspecified, because Martinez is decidedly pissed off whilst Scott is considering a better paying career in watching paint dry. After the various lectures (Melissa is told for the billionth time that the hat makes her less aerodynamic) Laura Lee leads them all in prayer, helps them all thank the Holy Spirit for blessing their balls or whatever, and then they start to make their way back to their seperate locker rooms. It's been a terrible day for everybody. Nobody wants anything more than to go home, or go get drunk in a field with their friends and forget any of it ever happened.

Except Melissa, who from previous events now feels a burning determination within her soul to get the girl.

…metaphorically, of course.

She changes from her kit into a humble hoodie and some ripped jeans that weren't ripped when she'd stolen them from Matthew's closet. As much as it fucking sucks that they feel they have to put her there, being exiled in the corner as the token lesbian has its benefits; one of them being her power to leave unnoticed, but that might just be because she's excluded from most of the discussion about hanging out after practice. She's getting her stuff together and preparing to make another early departure when Gen comes over, also ready. That's the one exception.

"Hey," her best friend smiles, warm and welcoming as always. "Me, Mari and Akilah were going to head out to get some shakes. Wanna join us?"

"Save me one. I'm doing edgework today. Playing the field."

It's clear that, at first, Gen thinks she's kidding, because she usually is. Flirting does not come easy to her unless there are a couple hundred pounds of weed in her system, or the equivalent water weight in shitty vodka. That's why her life only ever gets interesting at parties.

Those are the kinds of stories Gen is used to Melissa sharing with her, but the lack of laughter following her statement leads a realisation that for once, she's not all talk.

This semester, you're gonna get a girlfriend, and she's gonna be just as gay as you, and we're gonna be on the team that qualifies for States. And then you're going to be the coolest bitch in Wiskayok.

"Please don't tell me you're gonna get back with Georgia."

Melissa cackles at that one. "Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Do you really have that little faith in me?"

"I was just checking!! It's like every second I take my eyes off of you, you're in another unhealthy situationship."

"Well, no, you'll be happy to know I'm not," Melissa continues, a smug smile on her face. "I have my sights set on yonder lady. Only time will tell."

"All I'm saying is that it better be good if you're blowing off shakes," Gen mutters under her breath, but Melissa's known her long enough to pick up on the fact that she's not mad at all. She hugs Melissa close, then pulls away and looks her in the eyes. "I have no idea what you're doing, and to be honest, that is scary as hell. But I trust you'll fill me in if anything happens, right?

"Obviously," Melissa replies. 

"And you won't let her walk all over you?"

"Okay, there's no guarantees on that one," Melissa replies again, tone weary as if she's being checked up on by a concerned parent. "But I'll try my best."

Gen smiles, satisfied enough. "You better."

At that moment, Akilah emerges from around the corner to come and get her. They leave for the varsity changing room to go wait for Mari, but not before Gen waves one last time, mouthing a final few words that would have the general public thinking Melissa was about to enter an active warzone.

Good luck.

Either way, it's much appreciated.

She's grateful for her best friend's blessing, thankful that Gen is somebody that she can fall back on in the worst case scenario. In all honesty, she is probably going to fucking need it, considering she's dealing with Shauna 'insert scathing yet painfully true nickname that sums up how she's erratic and unpredictable' Shipman.

Rumour has it she pissed on a girl's pillow at a party last semester. And as much as that is kind of wicked to Melissa, she would like to avoid her mom questioning any yellow stains on her bedsheets when they go in the wash.

That may explain the single cold bead of sweat that drips down her forehead as she waits outside on the field. 

Gen and her friends are long gone – she'd waited a little longer on purpose, solely so that her best friend didn't see exactly who she was trying to talk to. It takes Shauna a good couple minutes to leave, and when she eventually does, she's by herself. Which is weird, because usually she's tied by the hip to captain Jackie. Had something happened between them over the holidays? 

…now that she thinks about it a little more, she hadn't seen the two of them talk throughout the entirety of practice, but initially she'd chalked it up to the deep depression everyone had been feeling. But there's a certain weariness in Shauna's eyes that, as much as Melissa has never cared for her interpersonal relationships or even the team drama, has her feeling a little sorry for her.

Jackie's absence also makes for a fantastic excuse to talk to her. She makes a mental note that she owes her one.

"Hey, Shipman," Melissa calls out, and Shauna snaps right around. She seems happy at first but the moment they make eye contact, her face falls. "Uh… you were great today. Really… kicked those balls. Good job."

She smiles awkwardly, acutely aware that this is not quite going the way she planned. Shauna just stares at her, unimpressed.

"That's not really why I wanted to talk to you, though, so... I mean— well, technically, it is. I was just wondering if you and me could… like, I really like the way you play. You're really amazing, and you know me, I also want to be amazing, or whatever. I am… very hardworking, I can assure you."

"Yeah, I'm sure," Shauna deadpans. She starts to walk away.

Shit. "No, wait, wait!!"

Melissa bolts after her in a way that is almost certainly far too dramatic to be suitable in the current situation. Her hand grips Shauna's wrist firmly for a couple seconds, and time seems to slow down. Shauna makes and holds eye contact, completely unreadable. Melissa feels something melt inside of her and suddenly forgets how to move or speak or do anything at all. 

Until she realises that is not at all appropriate.

She quickly lets go, slightly horrified but trying her best to hide it. Shauna just sighs like weird blonde girls chasing after her is an everyday occurence.

"Look, this is… cute, but I don't have time for it," she says, rolling her eyes to make her point clear. "Can you just do us all a favour and get to the point?"

At least using fewer words makes it harder to mess up and look like a fucking idiot. Melissa is petrified that she'll somehow manage it anyway. "Right. I trust you're aware the JV team suck."

"Everyone is," Shauna replies without stuttering.

"Yeah, so, I'm kind of tired of that. I need you to coach me."

If Wiskayok High School's football pitch was a desert, Melissa knows she would have seen a tumbleweed slowly roll past in the silence that follows. Unfortunately, it's not, and she simply sits in anticipation for a response that takes much less time than she'd have liked it to.

"I admire your determination, but no," comes Shauna's answer, clear and simple. She hoists her kit over her shoulder as if to make the statement that their conversation is over and starts to walk away again.

But heaven be damned, Isabelle Jones didn't raise a quitter.

Melissa doesn't run this time, and it's probably for the best, considering how many years of her lifespan the following embarrassment had taken off. She doesn't even follow Shauna. She calls after her with words that hopefully sound more coherent out loud than they did in her head – this is a solution that could fix everything.

"I'll seriously do anything. I'll clean your locker every day. I'll always buy your drinks from the vending machine. I'll… like, take the hat off, or whatever."

A beat. Shauna stops moving.

Somehow, unexplainably, miraculously, the suggestion that she'd remove her pink cap is what interests Shauna Shipman.

"It is pretty ugly," she mutters, quiet enough so that she thinks Melissa doesn't hear. Usually, she'd be offended, but there's not much room to let emotion cloud her judgement in this evidently life-or-death situation.

So she agrees. "You know what, I do not even know why I started wearing it. I think I might have come out of the womb with it on my head. That's crazy, right?"

"Crazy," Shauna echoes. Not a single inch of her tone sounds interested, despite the fact she's turned around again and is proceeding to walk closer.

"So is that a yes? Genuinely, I will never wear it again if you coach my midfield. I will burn that stupid hat, Shauna, I'm telling you—"

Melissa doesn't even have to take it off herself, because Shauna does it for her, suddenly all up in her personal space. She takes a second to study something in Melissa's expression after the hat is firmly away, and whatever it is, it must be pretty good. The corners of her mouth turn up slightly, not quite a smile, but something of amusement.

"What?"

Shauna seems to think for a second before she replies, completely in contrast to the way she'd shot Melissa down not even a minute prior. "Nothing. You just… look like someone."

Melissa is very confused. Goes along with it regardless, without asking any further questions. "Cool."

Rational thoughts in her head say hey, maybe that was a little weird and we have just signed up for something we shouldn't have, but her heart is pounding enough to affirm that she can work with this.

It'd be a slight deviation from her initial plan, but a little adjustment to the theory never hurt any of the greatest scientists. In fact, it helped smooth things out. Answer their hypothesis. Keep prying brothers and best friends off of their asses about whether they'd solved the mysteries of space and time or whatever.

She's so preoccupied giving herself a mental fistbump that she doesn't even notice Shauna getting away. With her hat. It's still grasped firmly in her right hand.

"Hey! Wait, can I have that back?"

"You said you'd never wear it again," Shauna calls back teasingly. "I'm just doing you a favour. You owe me."

And then she's gone, disappearing into the bleachers, leaving Melissa standing alone on the pitch. Her head feels ominously exposed to the cruelty of the world.

Luckily, she has a closet of at least fifteen spares she'd bought in the midst of an identity crisis, all of them looking exactly the same, but that one was her favourite. The authentic original. Rachel Goldman's, stolen from her locker, starting their year-long, violently intense, admittedly one-sided rivalry. Nothing can even come close.

"Hello?" Melissa calls out, like Shauna will respond. "Shauna? Are you… are we going to practice together?"

Silence.

"Can I have my hat back, please?"

More silence.

"Oh, for fuck's sake."

✧

"You know what? I never thought I'd say this, but Mel's probably having a way better time than me."

The shake shop are out of strawberry.

Three friends wait patiently in line, waiting for their orders – or at least, one does, whilst the other two sit happily at their bar stools and sip away. Having just been informed that hit Wiskayok milkshake joint Fender Blender have somehow exhausted their supply of one of the most popular flavours, Gen finds herself in a deep state of grief; a rock bottom she hadn't expected to hit on such an uneventful Monday. It's a tragic loss that she fears she will never recover from.

She has to ask the worker for vanilla instead. And who orders vanilla? Boring, basic white bitches that are unable to comprehend the joy of flavour? Middle-aged soccer moms? Has she already hit her prime in life?

No matter. Gen trudges back to the table Mari and Akilah have chosen out, utterly defeated.

"Look at what they did to me," she groans, gesturing to the glass in her hand. Mari laughs, whilst Akilah shakes her head with a small smile. "I've been excited for this thing all day, and this is how they repay me. This is my karma. Are you serious?"

"I fear the world is a fucked up place," Mari says with a (clearly mocking) solemn expression, pulling out the chair by her side for Gen to sit.

It's a cute chair – a stool with the pink and blue colour scheme that's admittedly straight out of the 50's, but endearing in its own way. The joint itself is tucked nicely away in the corner of the mall that they frequent, making it the perfect setting for their weekly gossip session. Fun. Unassuming. Just three girls and their frozen milk.

The venom they spit at that table is anything but. It's always the same table, and with some of the vile comments it's been witness to over the last year of them being friends, Gen is genuinely surprised it hasn't spontaneously exploded.

Mari starts the conversation, as she often does. She's objectively the most popular out of the three of them, and hence, has the most to talk about. "So, Gen, you weren't at the party last week."

"That's a good thing, by the way," Akilah assures her, lightly patting her shoulder. "It was fun for about three seconds, but Jackie and Shauna started fighting again, apparently. She told everyone to leave before midnight."

"Coward. At one of my parties, I'd be setting up a ring and fighting Shauna in front of everyone—"

Gen laughs, interrupting her. "Slow down. Why do you hate her, again?"

"She's an ass, Gen!! Nobody fucking sees it, but I'm telling you, under that academic bullshit she shows to everyone, she's horrible." Mari takes a loud, angry slurp of her rocky road milkshake to illustrate her point. "She won't let anyone get close to Jackie; you'd think she's, like, a feral guard dog, but she's just jealous of everything and everyone for no apparent reason. She's fucking evil."

"Language," calls some random old man from across the room, presumably the janitor judging by the mop in his hand.

"God, shut up, this is serious."

He is effectively silenced (or rather, he walks away to continue with the job he's being paid to do).

"Anyway, yeah," Mari continues. "What a dick."

The space in their conversation is filled with the quiet hum of people around them. As if common understanding within the group, they all pause momentarily to drink – Gen only remembers the milkshake in her cup is vanilla when the sickly sweetness hits the back of her throat. It's not even bad, which annoys her even more. She'd spent so much time denouncing without even trying it that now, the mere suggestion it might be an okay drink is out of the question.

But they have put a copious amount of the wafers she likes in it, and upon swirling the straw around she uncovers some little pink marshmallows at the bottom. Way to get to a girl's heart, Fender Blender. They have mastered the medium of blended ice cream and things that are far too sugary for a junior varsity soccer player to be consuming in this level of excess.

Akilah must catch her giving it a multitude of both dirty looks and nods of recognition, because she bursts out into a fit of quiet giggles whilst contently sipping her own. Mint chocolate. A classic flavour, although Gen doesn't really get the hype.

"Are you gonna just stare at that thing, or what?"

Gen blinks, suddenly acutely aware of the strange behaviour she is displaying towards this sweet treat. "Sorry. I just… not my usual, y'know? Mel usually gets this crap."

"Explains a lot," Mari quips.

"Stop that," Gen responds sharply. She likes the clique thing they have going on, sure, but getting more popular means people don't take too kindly to her 'weird girl' best friend. "She might be boneheaded, but she's really sweet when you get to know her…"

But Mari doesn't seem so convinced, and takes the opportunity to segue into her next piece of gossip for the afternoon. "Hey, you're supposed to be her bestie. Did you know she had a crush on me?"

The table falls silent. Usually a professional at witty responses and well-placed sarcasm, Gen finds herself suddenly unable to change the topic.

She didn't know, actually. The last time she checked on Melissa (literally a couple hours ago, as she left the changing rooms with the very friends she now shares milkshakes and other peoples' secrets with) she'd picked up on the implications she was going to see another girl, but not that it was… Mari. And now that she thinks about it, Mari is here with her. They can't be on a date, or anything. Had Melissa lied about shooting her shot? She never lies about anything.

Why would she lie to Gen now, having literally seen Mari leaving with her? It doesn't make any sense.

Isn't Mari straight? Isn't that a well known fact within the Wiskayok community, after her nuclear fallout with the klutz she used to date from the varsity football squad? She's not homophobic in any way, thank God, but still…

Just to be sure, Gen pushes her chair back. She checks under the table.

Melissa isn't there.

She resurfaces, half glad that her best friend hasn't lost it enough to stalk them, half extremely confused at the current situation. They know everything about eachother, and it seems weirdly out-of-character for them to stop now. Gen knows that Melissa is subservient to her little brother after losing the Great Push Pop Wars of 1996. Melissa knows that Gen used to bum her dad's cigarettes and smoke them under the porch.

"I did not know that, actually," Gen confesses. It's just like what she'd said earlier as a throwaway joke with an uncomfortable amount of truth behind it – every time I take my eyes off of you, you're in another unhealthy situationship. Or trying to seek one out, apparently.

Mari's eyes light up, as if she's finally found a reason to complain about Gen's unlikely companionship with the girl with the hat.

"Consider yourself informed," she grins. "Jones asked me out in last period Bio today. Could have been why she was so distracted at practice, I was playing so good on that right wing, she just couldn't take her eyes off of me—"

"Mari, JV got sick of playing after varsity scored goal 2," Akilah points out, deadpan. "Not everything is about you."

"I only take constructive criticism," Mari counters.

Akilah pauses for a second, then rephrases. "I think you should open your mind to other people."

"I tried that already. He cheated on me with my own cousin."

"Huh. Touché."

Gen is clocked out by then, too busy within her own mind trying to decode why Melissa would ask out Mari, of all people. Now that she thinks about it, Melissa doesn't like her at all. Whenever Gen tries to rope her into the group's plans, she oscillates awkwardly between her and Akilah. Shares nothing but uncertain glances with Mari.

Surely that means Mari is lying. Melissa has been Gen's best friend since freshman year; ever since the dark days where she, too, lay deceased at the bottom of the social hierarchy. They'd forged an unbreakable companionship and she isn't about to forget that over some stupid drama.

But everything Mari's previously shared at this table has been the brutal, honest truth – Gen knows all the dirt about the Yellowjackets’ equipment manager and her morbid obsession with death, and she knows she could recount the legendary tale of Flex off the top of her head to her eventual grandchildren. Mari thrives off of airing out people's dirty laundry. She's fiercely loyal to those she considers friends, and even if Gen isn't actually part of this group in the way she thinks she is, the fact she's also told Akilah says it all.

The only conceivable answer is that this happened.

But why? Literally, why?

Mari and Akilah are still playfighting over something pointless as she stands up from the table, drinking her actually-not-as-gross-as-she'd-initially-thought vanilla milkshake down in one swift gulp and leaving the glass in her place. She's got some major work to do. There's no time to leave Melissa unattended any longer; she'll have to swing by the Jones's place and hang out, ask her about it all.

Before Apollo strikes with the gift of prophecy, and her throwaway comment about Melissa going back to their Catholic queen Georgia Robinson earlier on becomes a shockingly horrific reality.

"What's up?" Akilah asks, always attuned to people's emotions. Mari notices she's leaving too at that point, and seems to open her mouth in protest. Like she still has a whole book of gossip to keep going through.

Which wouldn't be completely inconceivable. There has to be some way in which she keeps track of it.

No matter. Gen picks up her kit bag from under the table. "My mom wanted me home early today, and I completely forgot. Dishes. Sorry."

"Dishes," Mari repeats. "I'm sure the sink won't hurt them if they stay there a little longer—"

Akilah stops her. "Let her go."

It's only then that Mari grumbles and concedes, burying herself back in milkshake. Akilah waves politely as Gen starts to walk away; she thanks her with a small smile as she leaves the sacred haven of Fender Blender.

She's straight on course for her best friend's house.

She sincerely hopes and prays to whatever higher power may be up there that she doesn't walk in on anything she shouldn't.

✧

24TH AUGUST, 1996. 2:37AM.

If I didn't hate myself before, I think Jackie is currently despising me enough for both of us.

Honestly, I couldn't tell you what happened last night. Mostly because I threw up all over Misty Quigley's mom's car and then blacked out the moment I got home, which may have been the most humbling moment of my substandard life, but also I don't even think I want to tell you (which is a little ridiculous, considering this is my own journal, and nobody's ever gonna read it apart from me). The gist of it is that I went to another party with the Yellowjackets, the one we do every summer. I got really fucking drunk, the way I do every summer. But I was sick of everybody and everything and Jackie pissed off into the garden with varsity expecting me to follow her like a lapdog, so unlike the usual seething in silence I politely carry out every summer, this time I took matters into my own hands.

Because I'm done with her bullshit!! I don't know why she thinks that my entire being hinges on her every decision. She just thinks she can do whatever the hell she wants and leave me to struggle with the consequences – like, I'm sorry I didn't believe the obvious fucking lie that you were so desperate to get into Jeff Sadecki's pants, but even if I did it shouldn't be my duty to clean up his skid marks for you. I don't want to have to be by her side at any given moment. It's not like she wants to be by mine. She's stuck in such a rut of denial and egoism that there's no way to get through to her thick fucking head unless you force your words in.

So I did. I kissed her, I think. Maybe? This might have been after I blacked out. I hope it was.

No, who am I kidding? I definitely kissed her, because she scratched my sides with her long ass nails, and it's been 2 hours and the red marks haven't gone away. The audacity of her to mark me like that makes me feel more sick than I did whilst puking my guts out earlier. She says that we can't, that Jeff is hers and she's his, like everything we've done together means nothing. But I've seen the way she reacts to me. You can't tell me Jeff makes her arch her back against her mom's shitty little gardening shed, or moan his name into his mouth, or carve her DNA into him like a fucking tree. All this is platonic between us, apparently.

Why? For somebody that talks so much about being connected by first times and the inherent prophecy of kisses bringing people together, she's the complete opposite when it comes to me. Why should I have to deal with her inconsistencies? Why should I have to dissect every single little piece of her character to know how she's feeling?

Jackie is my best friend, but it's starting to feel more like I'm hers as a status symbol. When we get back to school, we'll be back to her parading me around. She told me to go home earlier because I've finally broken free from her instruction. I'm not going to dance around for her like some circus animal anymore; I'm going to live for myself and have something for myself. First step is ignoring her at practice next week.

…which is, unfortunately, much more difficult than it sounds. She’s left a mark on me that I can’t seem to get rid of, both physically (seriously, fuck you, Jackie), and mentally.

It only makes me want to love her even more.

Notes:

hello!! nice to see you all again (and nice to see i actually got a chapter out within the time scheme i wanted to lmao). really hope you enjoyed... the plot is starting to plot. i did just think i'd clarify that the excerpt from shauna's journal refers to the events of the previous chapter. it'll continue this way until the epilogue of the fic, serving as the majority of her perspective throughout it all

i am also currently looking for a beta reader for this thing who is insane as i am. plugging my twitter again @meteorspulses feel free to shoot me a dm if youre interested :) always looking to yap with some new people!!

again, monthly updates because of exam season. see you soon

Chapter 3: the amazing adventures of push pop girl

Summary:

“Well, it is, I just…” Melissa trails off, “...why did you lie to her?”

Shauna responds quickly, effortlessly, straight to the point. “I don’t know. Why did you?”

-or-

Jayden Jones dabbles in the art of extortion. A hat-less Melissa pays the price.

Melissa doesn't run home, per se, because that would be incredibly humbling and she knows she'd look like a total idiot to any unfortunate bystanders.

Instead, she walks the three blocks down the road from Wiskayok High at a… brisk pace.

All whilst exposed. Embarrassed. Far more upset over this minor inconvenience than she should logically be.

Rachel Goldman's— no, her hat has been unrightfully stolen, snatched from under her nose (or from on top of her head) by one cruelly calculated Shauna Shipman. She'd been so preoccupied with getting what she wanted out of their brief interaction that she'd completely let her guard down, let her get too close. She'd trusted Shauna. She'd trusted her even after her beloved trophy was within her grasp, thinking the whole thing was a funny haha joke until she actually left with it and she never saw it again.

And what was it she even wanted? A shitty fucking soccer companion, when as a member of the literal junior varsity squad, there are plenty of qualified coaches around her that could definitely do a better job at saving her game? To eventually start a budding romance with this girl, whether real or fake or ridiculously one-sided, with the girl who had shoved her to the ground not even an hour prior? It sounds so stupid when Melissa puts it all together in her head.

Maybe disappointing Gen with her inherent mediocrity is predetermined fate, a Groundhog Day she can't change the ending of, no matter how hard she tries.

Maybe she was meant to be alone.

Melissa would, however, pat herself on the back for one decision she'd made throughout this entire ordeal. If her arm could extend past the apex of her awkwardly wide shoulders, she'd congratulate past Melissa for knowing better than to outright ask her out on a date. She is acutely aware that she wouldn't have just left the soccer pitch without her most prized possession, but also without any form of dignity. Or try without an arm. Shauna may had a gun.

…okay, Shauna may not have had a gun, but over her high school years Melissa has learned to prepare for the worst. In some other universe, she might have done. Better safe than sorry. Meaning it was, overall, a fantastic idea to not drop the girlfriend proposal.

She also still doesn't exactly know whether Shauna's answer was yes to the coaching question.

Which brings us to the current moment.

The door is unlocked, for some godforsaken reason, but home security is the least of her concerns. She doesn't bother to change that before shooting up the stairs, rushing into her disgustingly messy bedroom like it'll offer any respite and not just make her feel worse. Her notepad is still open on the desk from when she'd last written in it, and the ‘ allegedly’ in her mind map's title suddenly holds a greater weight. She was right. There's no conceivable way in which anyone would ever seriously want her.

And that shouldn't really be a surprise considering the childish way she tried to go about it, or the way people have treated her as something to experiment with her whole life, but it hurts Melissa all the same. She slams the book shut and throws it across the room. It lands in some uncharted corner behind her bed.

Then, seeking the warmth that only a hat can provide, she storms over to her closet, struggling with the rusted handles for a moment until it inches open.

Melissa prides herself on preparing for the worst. Better safe than sorry. That's why she owns at least eight, maybe ten of the same hat – researched the brand and everything, although her backups don't exactly fit the same as the original. They're only in case of emergency. They don't have the same meaningful story behind them.

She's expecting to see rows upon rows of comfortingly familiar baby pink fitted caps, bleached from neon (because they didn't have the right colour at wholesale) and adorned with just the right amount of dirt to be a strikingly perfect replica of their predecessor. Melissa is prepared to feel her troubles melt away as she takes hold of the fabric. Ready for the hat to sit atop her head, not exactly one size fits all but close enough to pretend it's hers, and osmosis all self-deprecating thoughts from her brain through the membrane of her skull.

That moment never comes. Her bedroom falls eerily quiet, aside from the reluctant creak of rotting wood.

And it shouldn't be, and something is definitely wrong, if it wasn't obvious before.

But the closet is empty.

Melissa blinks hard. She reaches a hand into thedepths, feeling around despite the room already being well-lit, but her hats have not suddenly turned invisible.

The rosewood backboard sneers at her, hooks completely bare. They're gone.

There has been a serious hat abduction.

A hat-napping, if you will.

It's then that bedroom door introduces another cliché, like there's a director standing just aside of the Jones household with a clipboard signalling the perpetrator onstage to mock Melissa's hopelessness. She's still dumbfounded by her tragic loss, the grief rushing through her bloodstream and her ears. Her skull is pounding, threatening to split clean down the middle. There's no only-just-too-tight fitted caps to hold it together. It means she misses the signal of the cautious footsteps down the hall.

Just as she's about to burst into hysterical tears, there's a tap on her shoulder. As she rapidly whips around, Melissa almost smacks him in the face.

"Okay, so you might be wondering what's happening here."

The dry voice is recognisable almost immediately.

Melissa is basically hyperventilating . Cold sweat rolls down her forehead; with no hat to hide behind, the shame seeps through her skin and she's scared she looks like an idiot again. One hand continues to twitch uncomfortably inside the closet whilst the other rests just inches away from her younger brother's jaw in a tight fist.

Jayden Jones simply stares back at her, pushing away the dangerously positioned hand, scratching at a particularly troubled pimple on his chin. They'd told him to stop doing that. They'd told him to stop doing a lot of things, actually, but he'd never listened to them.

"Dad's refusing to give me pocket money because I pissed him off," he starts, like that explains anything.

It doesn't.

"You're— you're telling me you fucking sold them." How foolish of her to think that things couldn't get any worse; it's only natural that Melissa jumps to the worst possible conclusion. "Like, you took them to the fucking flea market. With the fleas. Jayden, you can't have— what?!"

He tries to protest. "No, wait, I didn't—"

But Melissa's already lashing out at him. "You have no idea how important those hats were," she says. "I can't function without them, Jayden. I can never go outside again."

"Dude, let me explain—"

"I'm killing myself. My life is over."

Okay, a little drastic.

" Melissa! "

Jayden seems just as distressed as her, and the rare concern in his eyes is what eventually prompts her to take some deep breaths. Having had enough of lingering awkwardly in her face, he steps back to give her some space.

It takes a couple moments. In and out. In and out.

The fact that she's currently attempting to regulate a panic attack over a couple shitty hats makes her every effort feel incredibly stupid.

"Are you done?" Jayden asks.

Melissa blinks, her chest still pumping at a worryingly fast rate. "Not particularly, no."

"Are you going to let me finish explaining myself?"

"I don't think I want to."

But nobody ever really listens to her in this household, not even her parents when she complains about the tyranny of her siblings, so Jayden continues to speak anyway. "Dad took away my pocket money," he says. "I have none left."

"Didn't I tell you to start saving?" Melissa asks with an eyebrow raised, conveniently ignoring the fact that she's a total hypocrite and she too, is broke.

"Well… yeah, but that's not the point. I'm out of Push Pops. And I can't really get anymore unless I steal them, but Will tried that a couple weeks back and he got caught, and it was bad. So, like…"

Buy them for me goes unspoken. Glancing back at her closet, Melissa figures that from Jayden's point of view, dabbling in some light extortion must have been the lesser of the two crimes. And she has to think for a second: is he serious? Between that and shoplifting? How hard could it fucking be to take a little plastic cylinder off of a shelf?

Well, whatever. The mere mention of hit confectionery brand Push Pops sends her back into a state of shell-shock.

The Great Push Pop War of 1996 had claimed numerous victims, the scraps of her pride within the family among them. Melissa remembers sleepless nights in which she feared the warmth of the sheets rather than yearned for it, because her cruel, monstrous, preteen little brother had made sure she'd never want to touch a bed again. Every morning, it was 'make it for me'. Every morning, Melissa would wordlessly do as he said.

She told herself she was just being a good sister, that anyone in her position would do the same. That Jayden was just going through a lot with middle school (because Christ, middle school was an absolute hellscape whilst she was there) and one day, he'd thank her and be able to shoulder the burden himself.

But that day never came. Melissa continued to relentlessly plump pillows. Melissa made sure every corner of his duvet was perfectly tucked in every morning for an entire month, as well as her own, and was consistently late to wherever she needed to go that day as a result.

Nobody noticed she was doing it.

Until her beloved Gen, her miraculous saviour; albeit simply sick of the empty seat next to her in homeroom, she was the first person to ask what was going on. And, yes, she'd laughed her ass off upon being informed of her best friend's subservience to her twelve year old sibling, but she'd given the advice she always gives regarding Melissa's problems – you have to start standing up for yourself.

Between fight, flight, and fawn, there's only one that she really knows how to use. So Melissa's solution, although decidedly not perfect, was to spend all of her money on Jayden's strange addiction. She didn't know they made hard drugs in so many different flavours. He made the bed.

"My favourite is watermelon, remember?"

Melissa just looks at him, horrified.

The room is dead silent. They can hear the electricity crackle through the walls, through wires that are definitely not safe.

"Did you get that?"

"Yes, of course I got that. You never shut up about it," she groans. "Seriously, dude, why couldn't you extort Matthew instead?"

"He's in Brooklyn again," Jayden points out.

It's annoying how that makes… a lot of sense. "Oh, whatever. When do I start? When do I get my fucking hats back?"

As much as Jayden tries to pretend he's much older than he really is, his eyes light up the moment she concedes. "Well, after we go to Walmart, obviously. I want a couple boxes. Enough to keep me stocked until Dad stops being a bitch."

"Language," Melissa says halfheartedly.

"You just swore."

"I'm a grown woman," she argues back, flipping him the bird and trudging in the direction of her bedroom door.

It's going to be a really long afternoon.

Melissa is watching Jayden attempt to tie his shoelaces at the bottom of the stairwell when three swift knocks sound from behind her. They scare her half to death, and her internal organs may or may not do a couple backflips in her chest from the sudden visitor, but forever a slave to human etiquette she turns to open it anyway. It'd be rude to leave whoever waits on their shitty porch in the unforgiving New Jersey heat. They'd never had enough money to afford the veranda their mom had always wanted.

Squinting through frosted glass, she sees black hair. She hesitates a little — it's never too late to duck out of sight and delegate human interaction duty to her far more capable little brother.

Another three knocks.

And then the door just… opens.

And her beloved best friend, her miraculous saviour, Gen strolls into her home like it's nothing.

There's a brief silence. A car rumbles past, louder than usual thanks to the now breached security of their house. Melissa blinks, incredulous in the same way as before. But this time, Jayden hasn't caused it, because he's incredulously blinking with her.

Gen takes a second to glance around the Jones' hallway. "You know, it's really not safe to leave your front doors unlocked like that, guys. Some crazy person might walk in and steal everything— wait, Mel, where's your hat?"

Because, yes, that is obviously the most disturbing thing about this entire situation. Melissa shrinks in on herself when she's reminded there's nothing covering her cranium. She tries to hide behind the bannister of the stairs, beginning to feel her internal organs shutting down again, but there's no escape from the shame.

"Did you invite her?" Jayden asks, staring directly at Melissa, seemingly terrified his plan is in jeopardy.

If she'd have known the first thing that would happen to her after getting home from school would be an intense captive scenario in which her hats were at the mercy of a prepubescent young boy, maybe she would have. It would have been a pretty smart move to ensure no crimes were committed. A bargaining chip, blackmail to wave around in his face like if this takes a turn for the worse, Genevieve over here will not hesitate to inform the authorities of your location.

Alas, nobody had really informed her about the active hostage situation until she stumbled across it herself. Now Gen's stumbled across it too, complete chance… unless she's also in on the kidnapping.

This bitch better not be in on the kidnapping, Melissa thinks to herself, shooting a questioning side-eye over at Gen.

"I think I forgot to lock the door," she explains to Jayden.

"Wait, it's fine, I just wanted to hang out," Gen says, hands up in mock surrender as the two present Jones siblings try to disintegrate her with their eyes. "Catch up with Mel, or whatever. I can leave if you're in the middle of something."

"Yeah, thanks, we are, actually—"

"Not at all," Melissa interrupts the moment she threatens to leave, immediately forgetting all of her suspicions. "Jayden, wouldn't it be super cool and awesome if Gen came with us? You haven't seen her in ages. Don't you wanna talk to her?"

"The family reunion was only a week ago," Jayden grumbles.

"And I really don't want to talk to him, Mel," Gen deadpans. Taking no offense, Jayden nods in agreement. He continues struggling with his laces on the stairs.

"Well… uh… we could… hold so much more stuff. Like, double capacity, right here. We'll take turns pushing you. In the cart, or whatever. Think of how many more we could buy!”

Silence.

Everything Melissa has said recently seems to encourage tumbleweeds, and she seriously has no idea why.

Ultimately, however, Jayden submits, throwing his hands up in surrender and letting out an exasperated sigh. "Jesus, fine! Gen can come with us." It's also at that point that he gives up with his shoelaces. The dirty Converse are angrily pushed aside in favour of some fluorescent green Crocs that do not at all match the dollar store hoodie he's wearing.

"Thanks," Melissa says. Then, seizing the opportunity with the most shit-eating grin she can muster, she adds, "but your outfit is still super ugly."

"I know!" he sulks, angrily shoving the Crocs aside as well.

Gen just looks around, confused. "Uh, I hate to interrupt… whatever's going on here, but where are we actually going?"

✧

They never end up telling her. They just pull up to the Walmart parking lot in the run-down sedan Melissa's dad had restored from scrap back at his garage, and then Gen gains a decent enough understanding of what's going on.

The car is a relic of the past, to say the very least. The body is littered with numerous scratches of varying severity, ranging from deep gashes to minimal dents in the outdated cobalt paint job. The back door on the right side is completely missing a handle, making for some interesting situations when the whole family tries to bum a ride; Matthew purposely sits in the seat on the side that opens as soon as he can so that Jayden and Melissa have to climb over him to get in. 

It’s Melissa's car. They just don’t let her drive it, because it's basically public property at this point.

Steve has something a little more technical, a truck, but more an amalgamation of parts that he takes great pride in. Melissa's car, with all its imperfections, is somehow safer.

It's hers , though. That's what matters.

Gen had been banished from riding shotgun since Melissa got her learner's permit – it hadn't taken her long at all to discover that her best friend is a fiend for pressing random buttons whilst she's trying to reach her destination in one piece. Melissa walks around the back of the car to let her out first… before realising she's on the left.

She jokingly pounds on the window from the inside. "Mel, get me out of here. I'm getting gassed by your brother's Lip Smackers."

Jayden looks over, unimpressed. "It's Gautier, actually."

It's not. Melissa has seen the small plastic bottle on his chest of drawers numerous times. Peach blossom, picked up for a couple dollars at the local Bath & Body Works when something a little more tasteful was out of their budget.

Jayden clearly doesn't want to admit to that, though, climbing out of the car and crossing his arms with a mildly offended expression. Gen follows shortly after. She keeps a couple feet of distance between them, and Melissa understands why as she comes around the front. He has a pretty distinct scent to him.

One that definitely isn't designer perfume.

"So, are we going in or what?" Melissa asks Jayden, spinning the car keys around her finger.

"Yeah, I was getting there, if you'd give me a second. We need a shopping cart."

Gen smiles. "Oh, cool. What are we buying?"

"Push Pops."

Her face falls immediately. Her eyes dart straight to Melissa in disbelief. The car keys are still spinning but she soon loses concentration and drops them.

Gen doesn't look… disappointed. Just a little upset that once again, her best friend has fallen into serving her little brother thanks to her inability to say no. She’s slightly concerned for the dynamics within the Jones family and that once again, Melissa is taking the fall for whatever the hell is going on in there.

Melissa feels bad. She knows that she'll feel even worse when Gen inevitably finds out this is about her hats.

"Is this why your hat's missing?"

Fuck.

She doesn't reply, too ashamed to casually admit that yes, I am so hopeless without a shitty pink cap on my head that I accidentally became susceptible to the exploitation of my strangely conniving younger brother. 

Instead, she begins to put one foot in front of the other and make her way to where the carts are. Melissa figures that the faster this is over, the easier it'll be to come to terms with.

Jayden follows shortly after, clearly not as mature as he likes to believe he is, jumping into the front of their cart at the first opportunity and sitting cross legged like the captain of a pirate's ship. He beckons them forward with a point. The automatic doors slide open.

Walmart awaits for the unlikely trio. The American dream, the poetic joy of endlessly stretching aisles, of budget produce and broken promises.

The only thing that Melissa can hear is crying babies. She considers picking up some drinks for herself and Gen, partly to apologise for dragging her into whatever this is, but fears for the divine retribution if Jayden catches her slipping anything that isn't his ransom into the cart.

It rattles on unstable wheels down to the candy aisle. The moment they arrive, Jayden doesn't hesitate to dismount his perch and stuff as many Push Pops as he can into the pocket of his hoodie. Once that's filled up (it doesn't take long with the rate at which he's attacking the display) he proceeds to bundle them up in his arms. Then, he waddles back, and dumps his loot.

"Don't even think about going anywhere," he threatens as the cart fills, and this suddenly seems a lot less like Melissa's unfortunate life story. Perhaps try emotional torture. "I'm not done yet."

"I thought you said a couple boxes," Melissa says, gazing down in horror at the several fuck tons of sugar.

"And I thought you said that I could buy more because Gen was here."

Jayden doesn't wait for a response. He walks away again with an evil smirk, readying himself for another round.

She takes her head out of where it has instinctively fallen into her hands to find Gen giving her a concerned once-over, "You can't seriously be letting this happen."

"Whoops," she replies unenthusiastically, brow furrowed as she watches Jayden's arms fill yet again.

"Come on , Mel. What did we say about this?"

"I shouldn't let my brothers walk all over me," Melissa quotes. "But what choice do I have?"

"I don't know, maybe put your foot down?" Gen suggests, gesturing wildly at nothing in particular. "That is a twelve year old boy. Did he steal your hat?"

Melissa groans. "No. Shauna Shipman did."

"Yeah, well— wait, Shauna fucking Shipman ?"

The babies over in what Melissa can only assume is the freezer aisle stop crying, convenient and perfectly timed so that the full extent of Gen's disbelief can hit her like a freight train. A similar force to the one Shauna had thrown her to the ground with the previous day.

Is it really that big of a problem? Obviously, it hadn't been intentional, but Gen had been the majority of the reason she'd even started interacting with Shauna in the first place.

Bile tasting like something all too close to bitterness rises in her gut.

Why is she being so judgemental? Gen is the one that told her to get a girlfriend. Gen is the one that indirectly told her to start doing better.

And no, things hadn't exactly gone according to plan in her quest to do so, but the moment she does, why is it suddenly wrong?

Melissa doesn't air any of these thoughts out loud, because her whole gimmick is blind compliance and suffering in silence. She does, however, roll her eyes. Her stance becomes slightly more tense as the questioning begins. Subtle rebellion.

"I thought you liked Mari," Gen mumbles, and Melissa is immediately taken aback again. Seeing her sudden reaction, she quickly backtracks, "Wait, no, I know you don't. But she told me that you asked her out, and it's not like you to… are you trying to get with Shauna?"

"What, do you think I couldn't?" Melissa accuses with a scoff.

"That is not at all what I'm saying and you know it," Gen sighs. "I'm just worried. You don't ask people out, Mel. If you like someone, you let them do whatever the hell they want."

"When I hate someone, I let them do whatever the hell they want, too. Your logic is flawed."

As if to prove her point, Jayden returns to the shopping cart at that moment with another motherload of Push Pops. It's practically bursting at the metal seams when he drops them in, and the shelf appears to be bare from the distance they're observing it at, but he still menacingly tells them to stay put and marches towards the nearest employee.

Gen notices she's referring to her brothers, and she looks at her, unconvinced, leaning precariously against the soda fridge Melissa doesn't dare to touch. "You don't hate them. You wouldn't entertain this shit if you really hated them."

"They'd find a way to make me entertain it," Melissa complains with her head low, kicking the cart, immediately wincing.

"Well, whatever," Gen digresses. She's not keen to let her best friend escape this conversation, as always – it makes Melissa wonder if that was why she'd been so desperate to 'hang out' earlier. "Shauna's varsity, Mel. The big leagues. We're extras in their stupid, more-important-than-ours lives. You realize that, right?"

"And yet, you're the person who said we'd be the important ones this year," Melissa counters, "so when I try to make it happen, I'm the problem? I'm out of my depth?"

"Mel, I don't want her to treat you like shit like literally every other girl you've dated."

"She won't. She asked me out first, anyway."

Her world freezes. Jayden drops a Push Pop against blue and yellow tiled flooring and it cuts through the awkward silence like an extinction-inducing meteorite colliding with the Earth.

No, she didn't. Why the hell would she have done that?

There was no asking out, anywhere at all, in the brief conversation they'd shared. Shauna hadn't really even acknowledged that she existed.

That information doesn't necessarily calculate to Melissa in the heat of the moment, and the words slip from her loose lips, in her desperation for something, anything to hold over Gen's head.

And it works, and as much as there's an incessant pool of guilt starting to form in her gut Gen doesn't have time to reply, or even to process, before Jayden returns to where they're standing with an unamused retail worker. The box in his hands says it all – literally, in a yellow sticky label plastered onto its wilting cardboard.

‘Push Pops. Assorted flavours. 10lbs. Not fragile. We don't care if you store it upright or not, just make sure you fit as many as you can into this cramped shelving unit, or we'll lose out on profits.’

"A couple boxes," Jayden smirks, echoing his earlier words.

Melissa is left wondering where her life went wrong whilst she trudges defeatedly over to the register. Their apocalypse ration is far too heavy for self-checkout, so they have to make their way to the only free register. It's open, of course, but there are suspiciously long lines at every other conveyor belt that make her think people are purposely avoiding it.

But she's never backed down from a challenge. Anything to get out of here quicker; Gen clearly shares the same sentiment, steering them in its general direction with a perpetually confused expression. How could this experience possibly get any worse?

"Hi, welcome to Walmart— Jesus fucking Christ ."

A worryingly employed Shauna Shipman stares down in horror at their cart.

That's how.

In the politest way possible, she's never looked worse, or at least that's the conclusion Melissa can draw from their two interactions and brief glances exchanged across the soccer field. The eye-wateringly blue jacket sticks out like a sore thumb against the tattered red flannel underneath it. Emblazoned across her chest in radiant yellow are the words ‘ How may I help you?’ with the you capitalised, almost creating the visage of someone approachable. Perhaps it fools the average customer, because she's relatively put together. Twitching a little at the hand, but present. Could probably direct you towards the freezer aisle.

Anyone who is anyone, however, knows that Shauna is anything but approachable. It turns out that being stationed behind a cash register with eyebags spanning the width of the known universe doesn't make her any more personable.

With a frown so sharp it could cut through diamond, she steps out and begins to help them unload. Her paycheck must not cover customer service; she takes as little care with it as possible, wrestling the cardboard box the warehouse had bestowed upon them from a reluctant Jayden and dropping it onto the conveyor.

Gen also does her part with transferring their haul. Melissa is frozen in place. Shauna is unamused, clutching another couple handfuls of Push Pops. She gives her a sharp jab in the ribs to make the dissatisfaction clear.

"Are you gonna help me, or do I have to do everything around here?"

"Uh… yeah, sorry," Melissa says, suddenly springing into action. Shauna hits hard, she thinks, as if she didn't find that out yesterday. "I just didn't think you'd be here. I mean, not a bad thing, I don't mind— not that I would mind, y'know…"

"Hey, could you be a bit more careful?" Jayden interrupts whatever monologue his hopeless sister is about to devolve into to shout at the minimum wage employee, and thank God for that. "You're getting paid for this."

Shauna disregards everything he's saying. She catapults another box of Push Pops out of the way. "Am I?"

It’s a pretty sad social commentary.

Soon enough, everything is ready to check out, although no real progress has been made. Shauna is behind her counter again, scanning through each individual piece of candy at a snail's pace. She doesn't even look as she's doing it. Her hands limply grasp around for the next one, unenthusiastically bring it to the sensor, barcode over the glass, saying nothing.

Each beep brings with it the expectation of small talk, or a friendly interrogation about the Jones family's lack of a Walmart membership card, but no such conversation ever comes. Gen looks over at Melissa, and Melissa looks away.

Gen then looks at Shauna. Studies her for a moment, to which she receives a half-glare, half-uninterested eye roll.

The Wiskayok Walmart has never been more tense. Gen, clearly not satisfied with the answers she's been given, must have her doubts. And Melissa doesn't really blame her, because best friends lying and keeping secrets tends to elicit that reaction.

The part she's concerned about is that Gen doesn't usually press. They've trusted each other with everything since they were nervous teens in freshman year. Ever since they were picked last for the soccer team, despite not actually being that bad at the sport. Since nobody wanted to fill the seat next to them in class, so they filled it for each other. To make sure the other wasn't alone. From day one, their friendship had been built on that trust.

Trust that they wouldn't have to struggle again, and trust that they'd always be there.

A mutual understanding that even if they didn't know everything, even if they couldn't tell you the other's favourite colour, or their middle name, or trivial things that other best friends probably could, it would turn out okay in the end.

When Gen speaks, it's exactly the question Melissa is expecting, aimed at Shauna. "Are you two a thing now?"

Melissa stays silent.

At least things aren't going to spiral out of proportion. As much as she’d been desperate to prove that she wasn't as washed up as everyone loves to imply, forcing Gen to fill in the gaps herself isn't a path she wants to stray down. Her brothers are a whole other problem, one that probably won't even be solved if she does sort her life out. They're going to keep annoying her, anyway. So maybe the truth coming out now isn't all that bad.

Does a lie become greater the longer you let it fester?

In that case, it can't hurt that much to rip the bandage off a couple minutes after she's applied it. Being called a freak in the locker room is something Melissa has countless experience in. Shauna can't hurt her. Sure, she has a temper when Jackie isn't around, but aside from that she seems pretty understanding and well-mannered. Quiet. If she's lucky, she might not tell anyone.

They'll just never talk again, as is standard for every other relationship Melissa has ever had. Only this time, it slipped out of her sticky fingers in record time.

Shauna glances over at her, not quite disgusted, not quite satisfied. The corners of her mouth twitch slightly. If Melissa didn't know any better, she'd think it was a smirk.

Her lips part slowly, like she's still considering her words. Her tone is dry, but so, so saturated, "And if we were?"

Gen raises an eyebrow in acknowledgement. She shrugs and continues loading Push Pops into Jayden's lap.

Meanwhile, Melissa forgets how to breathe.

It's the absolute last thing she expects her to say.

Well, not quite. She doesn't expect her to say it at all, or anything, really. She expects her to stand up, call her a filthy dyke under her breath, and evacuate the building. Put as much distance between them as possible.

But Shauna stays. Yes, she's bound by workplace regulations and the yellow lanyard tight around her neck. What can't be explained by Walmart's employee code, however, is the way in which she keeps her gaze trained directly on Melissa as she completes the other fifty percent of her half-hearted lie.

She smirks. They're holding eye contact; it’s like staring into the earth. Like it’s nothing, "That'll be four hundred and sixty dollars, eighteen cents.”

Shit. She’d almost forgotten about that.

Melissa glances over to the figure displayed on the register, and sure enough, it’s just as astronomical as Shauna suggests. To be quite honest, she has no idea if the savings on her card will even begin to cover what she owes – it’s all money her dad had transferred over for helping out at the garage. Months of work. Gone in an instant, if the payment goes through.

Reluctantly, she produces a faux leather wallet from the back pocket of her jorts. The card follows shortly after. Her hand is shaking a little as she inserts it into the reader, and even Jayden behind her seems a little worried that the sheer volume of Push Pops in his arms will be taken away.

To Melissa’s relief, nothing like that happens. She’s silent as the payment goes through. Her heart is pounding like it’s trying to break out of her ribcage.

Something is telling her that it’s not because she was scared she was broke.

“Thank you for shopping with us,” Shauna smiles, suddenly seeming a lot less worn down by the woes of retail work. The candy has been loaded into a multitude of flimsy plastic bags, which Gen trundles along to the exit with as Melissa lingers by the counter. “See you tomorrow, hat girl.”

“Tomorrow,” Melissa repeats under her breath. Her eyes dart between where Jayden and Gen are now standing out in the parking lot, and the way Shauna casually leans against the counter, fingers rhythmically tapping the conveyor to her right.

“Yeah, that’s what you wanted, right? Out on the field.”

“Well, it is, I just…” Melissa trails off, “...why did you lie to her?”

Shauna responds quickly, effortlessly, straight to the point. “I don’t know. Why did you ?”

It’s a reasonable question. Unfortunately, it’s also one that Melissa is too hesitant to answer. She doesn’t owe Shauna a thing.

If anything, Shauna owes her a hat.

Swallowing the lump in her throat, Melissa turns to leave. Keeping Jayden waiting is like signing her own death warrant. She can’t check the balance on her card without taking a trip to the bank down in the main village, but she has a sneaking suspicion that it’s definitely not enough to sustain another of these trips.

Shauna’s not going to let her get away that easily, though. A hand clasps around Melissa’s arm just as she begins to walk away, not tight or uncomfortable, but demanding.

“Do you want them to believe you?” Shauna asks, leaning over the counter.

Melissa freezes.

Shauna kisses her.

It’s only a light brush of her lips against her cheek, but it’s enough to force her brain into a state of overdrive. Her hands twitch limply by her sides, not knowing what to do with themselves, or where the boundary lies. It doesn’t help that it’s over just as suddenly as Shauna initiated it.

She wasn’t prepared for this. She nervously looks over at her brother and her best friend. They’re looking back at her. They saw.

They saw.

They think this is real.

There’s no coming back from this.

“Have a great day,” Shauna whispers as she pulls away.

Melissa doesn’t say anything in return. She steps out through the sliding glass door, makes her way to her car in silence, and drives everyone home.

✧

2ND SEPTEMBER, 1996. 4:43PM.

I did it. Whenever me and Jackie fight, there's a 50/50 chance that I gain my independence for a short period of time or I come desperately running back to her, and this time I won out. It was weird, though. Without her I have a lot of spare time on my hands, and that resulted in some strange sidequests after practice.

Usually, people stay the hell away from me when they notice Jackie and I aren't talking, or that we've had an argument. I don't blame them. I snap at any unfortunate victim who approaches me, I get angry when someone crosses the ball to me and I mess up my pass, I sit and I seethe. The massive chunk of my heart that she normally occupies festers when she's not around to fill it. Which is, of course, my own fault. Maybe the reason I'm always on edge is because freedom comes with a price.

Don't get me wrong, I want that freedom. I crave it more than anything.

But I'll always complain when she's not there; I miss her. Isn't that ironic?

Anyway, it was the first day back at school today. Things were as usual – Tai and Van chuntering to themselves in some distant corner of the changing room about what happened at the party, Lottie pulling those stupid fucking tarot cards to predict when we're going to make up this time. Nobody came close to me. I didn't want them to, but I did.

God clearly saw I was suffering, and sent me a bumbling fucking idiot to shove a square peg in a round hole. I was sulking at half-time even though we were fifteen points up, as you do when you're winning, and this random girl (the JV with the hat? Melinda?) decides to walk into me. I really wasn't in the mood for it. She was trying to propose some kind of business deal. Wanted me to help her be less terrible at soccer, which would have been great for my ego if not for the gigantic self-esteem deficit I'm in from last week.

You don't really pay much attention to those kinds of people until they try to interact with you. Honestly, I get it – nobody in school really knows anything about me aside from 'Jackie's best friend'. I didn't even know this bitch could speak until around an hour ago. She was 'hat girl' to me.

And, yes, she still is 'hat girl' to me. Or try 'hat girl with no sense of spatial awareness'. But under the hat, there was something about her. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. That same awkward smile when I say something a little too harsh.

This could be really fucking dangerous.

I guess I'll humour her for now; I accidentally took the hat away without even really realising what I was doing, ended up driving home with it propped up on my dashboard, and now I have a crappy fitted cap in the very back of my closet that I'll probably never touch again. I guess me doing that was some kind of subconscious acceptance.

I'm involved with her now, and hell, if I teach her a thing or two about setting up the ball properly for her unimpressive teammates then practice might become slightly less of an utter fucking waste of my time.

Well, whatever. I'll keep this updated. It just might end up being a little later tomorrow because of my shift.

Notes:

and that is the final opening chapter of this fic!! we're getting into the real extent of the plot now. how will jackie react? what the hell is up with shauna shipman? is melissa going to survive?

probably not. plugging my twitter again @meteorspulses because if i don't do that every chapter i'll die

an extra special thanks to jude for beta reading this. i now have an american person on board with production here. sorry for my dubious portrayal of the united states as a british person i can do better now i promise

glad you enjoyed (or not), and i'll see you in the next chapter!!