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“Look!” Jackie squeals, kneeling in front of her Shauna’s bookshelf, pulling out the slim book, holding it up so Shauna can see the cover, the monster resting, almost as tall as the trees around it. Jackie runs her fingers over the cover, her touch light.
“I totally forgot about this book,” Jackie says, smiling, “I loved it when I was little.”
“The night Max wore his wolf suit…” Shauna begins. The book had been one of her favorites. There had been something about it – the way he had commanded the monsters, the strangeness of the monsters themselves (roaring their terrible roars, rolling their terrible eyes, showing their terrible claws). It had appealed to something in her.
Jackie opens the book, flips through it, stops on the page where Max is leaving the monsters.
“Oh please don’t go,” she reads aloud, and her eyes flick to Shauna, something bright and unknowable in them, “we’ll eat you up, we love you so.”
Shauna smiles and something in her stomach flips. She turns her hands into claws and attempts a roar, which probably isn’t very funny, but Jackie laughs anyway.
She’s a good friend, in that way.
“I read somewhere,” Shauna says, when Jackie’s closed the book, slipped it back on the shelf, “that the author once got a card from a little boy with a drawing that he loved. He sent the little boy a card back with a drawing of a Wild Thing on it. Then one day, he got a letter back from the boy’s mother saying, ‘He loved your card so much he ate it.’ He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
“Boys are weird,” Jackie says, “but can’t live without them, right?”
“Right,” Shauna agrees.
***
Shauna doesn’t mean for Jeff to happen. But he kisses her, and she lets him and there is something sweet on his lips and she wonders if it’s a hint of Jackie’s Chapstick. That should make it worse, right? It should make it a million times worse that he might still taste like Jackie. That Jackie is still so close to the surface.
Instead, she climbs into his lap and kisses him like she might devour him and eventually that sweet taste is gone, but they keep going.
After they do it the first time Shauna goes home and lays in bed. She feels an ache between her legs, unfinished desire, slips her hand into her shorts to take care of it. She means to think of Jeff, but her thoughts keep turning to Jackie, slipping back and forth, everything mixing together.
Shauna and Jeff, Jackie and Jeff, Shauna and Jackie, all trading places in this blurry fantasy, and Shauna isn’t sure who she’s actually thinking of when she comes.
***
They’re going to Nationals. Motherfucking Nationals. Shauna should be thrilled but instead she’s too drunk watching Jeff and Jackie dance in the firelight. She’s jealous but she doesn’t know of who anymore. She pulls her jacket tighter around her. Jeff leans down and kisses Jackie.
Shauna shouldn’t have worn this fucking red dress. She thinks she’s going to be sick.
***
Shauna tries, briefly, to be a Catholic. She goes to mass and takes communion, a wafer that melts on her tongue and a sip of lukewarm grape juice. She tries to feel something as the priest speaks - take, eat; this is my body - but mostly she’s just trying not to cough. The wafer had been dry, and the sip of grape juice not nearly enough to wash it down.
She lapses not long after, another in a long line of teenage attempts at identity. She keeps a few things, tokens from her foray into it.
Jackie brings it up again when they’re in Shauna’s room, drinking cheap wine that Jackie managed to sweet-talk a boy into buying. Jackie’s fingers fiddle with Shauna’s rosary. She does that a lot – shift through Shauna’s things.
In Jackie’s room, though, Shauna doesn’t touch a thing.
“This is like communion, right?” Jackie lifts the bottle, drinks straight out of it, hands it to Shauna.
“I think the grape juice tasted better,” Shauna says, even as she grabs the bottle, takes a drink. It’s disgusting but she keeps her face neutral.
Jackie rummages through her backpack, holds something in her hand.
“Open up,” she says, and Shauna does.
“Something something…my body…” Jackie murmurs, and there’s the noise of tearing paper, and then Shauna feels something soft pressing into her lips, Jackie’s fingers lingering there, and this, somehow, makes Shauna feel more holy than church ever had.
Jackie presses in further, and Shauna bites down, syrupy sweetness popping in her mouth, and she laughs, looks at Jackie.
“Was that a fucking Fruit Gusher?”
Jackie is laughing too hard to answer.
That night, she replays it again and again, how Jackie’s fingers had felt on her lips. That feeling of holiness, of salvation. And she thinks of that book, the one buried somewhere in her bookshelf.
We’ll eat you up, we love you so.
He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.
***
(Decades later, and Shauna’s standing in the snack aisle at the grocery store, holding a box of gushers in her hand. She stares at them for too long, and is surprised at how vividly she can recall the taste of it, corn syrup and Jackie’s fingers on her lips and her whole body feeling alight with something Shauna couldn’t name.
She buys the box but when she gets home she can’t bring herself to eat any. She puts them away and forgets about them and when she finally remembers and looks again, the box is gone.)
***
Shauna is the one to volunteer to skin the deer. She doesn’t know what made her volunteer. As horrible as it is out here, as horrible as everything is, she feels something budding inside her, something new and strange and powerful.
(It’s not the baby. If there is even a baby. She’s probably just being paranoid.)
She follows Coach’s directions, plunging the knife in, blood spilling over her hands. She thought she’d be more disgusted, but she looks down at her hands, now red almost to the wrist, and Shauna feels powerful.
This, too, feels almost holy.
She learns to prepare other animals, too. Birds and squirrels and rabbits, whatever they can trap or shoot. Shauna is good at this. She has a knack for knowing where to put the knife even without instruction, skilled at skinning the creatures without puncturing any organs.
Who needs Brown, Shauna thinks, pulling the skin from her carefully prepared rabbit in one fell swoop, when I was meant to be a butcher, all along?
***
Of everything terrible in the wild, the hunger is the most pervasive. It seems like there’s never enough – too many days when the traps come up empty, when Travis and Natalie return with nothing, when all there is to eat is a handful of greens deemed edible. Shauna feels empty, hollowed out, and when they sit around the fire, trying to pretend they aren’t starving, Shauna looks at the girls, looks at Jackie – her eyes always end up on Jackie – and she thinks about those old cartoons, where the starving character starts to see others as a walking pork chop or something else delicious.
Jackie’s eyes catch Shauna’s and she smiles, and Shauna feels another ache in her stomach, this one entirely unrelated to hunger.
(Well. A different kind of hunger, maybe.)
***
“Doesn’t it gross you out?” Jackie asks, watching as Shauna removes the organs from a rabbit. They save everything. Shauna has learned not to let any meat go to waste.
“No,” Shauna says, dropping a kidney into the bowl at her side, “it’s just meat.”
She is irritated and doesn’t know why. She wants Jackie to help. She wants Jackie to take the knife and feel it, the power you can wield. She wants to impress Jackie. She doesn’t know what she wants.
“More power to you,” Jackie says, wiping her hands on her pants, even though she hadn’t touched a thing, “I could never.”
Jackie steps away, shaking her head, as if she won’t gulp down whatever’s made tonight with as much fervor as the rest of them. Jackie is good at pretending. So is Shauna. She is still irritated and so, briefly, when she cuts out the rabbit’s heart, she pretends it is Jackie’s, instead.
I’ll eat you up, I love you so.
***
When the time comes, Shauna is the one to pull the knife across the pale expanse of the girl’s throat. That’s her role, here. Her hand is steady even if her heart isn’t.
It’s just meat.
***
Around the fire, Shauna’s fingers pull at the meat. It’s almost hot enough to burn, but she doesn’t care. What’s a little pain, out here?
She places a piece on her tongue, closes her eyes and savors the taste of it. She thinks take, eat; this is my body.
Maybe she should have tried to stay a Catholic. As if her faith could have somehow tipped the scale and kept the plane aloft. Maybe this was all her fault.
She swallows. She keeps her eyes closed. She remembers the taste of candy on her tongue, the burn of the cheap wine, the feel of Jackie’s fingers on her lips. The knife going in. Those holy feelings.
She saw, she loved, she ate.