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“Yellowjackets are aggressive,” Coach had always told her. “They identify a threat. They chase. And they don’t hesitate to sting.”
Truth be told, Jackie’s always felt more like a honeybee than a yellowjacket.
She’s never considered herself a particularly abrasive person. Sure, she can be snappy sometimes; when you bear the burden of leading a dozen other teenage girls to a national championship, constantly being reminded that they’re all better than you, things get tense. But she is never needlessly unkind. And not much threatens her, so she has no reason to chase, and no reason to sting.
No, Jackie sees herself as the gentle pollinator, sprinkling encouragement and advice onto every teammate she touches. She has a job, structure, a purpose to serve, a role to fill in her hive. A honeybee. That’s the way she likes it. That’s the only way she knows how to live.
-
Jackie spends most of the plane ride to Nationals with her head to one side, watching Shauna while she sleeps. She studies her best friend’s profile as if she hasn’t already memorized every curve and angle. There’s an ache deep in her stomach that flutters when Shauna shifts, unconscious, to face her.
Wanting for something is not a sensation that’s overly familiar to Jackie Taylor. She bristles at the word spoiled, but rarely is she denied any object of her affections. The perfect clothes, the perfect boyfriend, the perfect reputation: she has it all. But she wants Shauna Shipman. And she’s never been quite sure what to do about that.
Her eyes drift down to Shauna’s chest where her necklace sits, jostling ever so slightly each time the plane hits some turbulence. She keeps giving Shauna her heart in so many little ways, yet she’s still too uncertain to bare it completely, unafraid.
Sighing, Jackie turns to face the window and resolves to shake it off and take a nap herself. The team has a game to win, and they need a leader. She can’t be worrying about this right now.
-
When she wakes all she sees is fire, and blood, and Shauna. She has to save Shauna.
-
Something changes after the crash. The hierarchy shifts. In the blink of an eye, there is no structure, there are no roles. All that’s left is survival.
Jackie isn’t quite sure where she fits in when it comes down to it.
The longer they spend in the woods, the more she feels herself losing her grip. She lashes out at her teammates. She tries desperately to hold onto any semblance of order, only to have it ripped away by people who are adapting much faster than her to this new normal.
She feels Shauna slipping away.
If Jackie’s being honest, she’s felt Shauna drifting for a while. Short of sewing the two of them together, she’s made every desperate attempt she can to keep things the way they’ve always been. She had planned a future for them together, starting with Rutgers and ending with two quaint little houses on the shore where they could watch their children play together, their respective husbands by their sides. She knows it’s the closest she can ever get to what she really dreams about at night.
Shauna had always played along. But the older they got, the more things began to feel strained. Out here in the wilderness the distance between the two girls has only widened. It’s only a matter of time before something shatters, and Jackie worries that it will be too broken to force the pieces back together.
She isn’t needed anymore. She feels it. She wonders if Shauna feels it, too.
-
The smell of burning meat wafts into the cabin, causing Jackie to gag and Natalie to give her an eyeroll. They’ve been here for just over two months now. A routine has set in: hunt, cook, try not to kill each other, wait for rescue. They all know it isn’t coming, but it helps no one to acknowledge it out loud.
Glancing across the cabin, Jackie spots Shauna huddled in a corner, writing feverishly in her notebook. A small smile graces her face. She’s always found Shauna’s journaling habit to be quite cute. Fleetingly, she wonders if there’s anything about herself written in there. God knows her own diary has more than enough secret confessions in it.
Her smile falls when she sees Taissa sit down beside Shauna and the two begin to whisper about something Jackie can’t quite pick up. A lump forms in her throat, growing larger by the second until she feels she might suffocate.
For the first time, Jackie feels threatened. She wonders if she’s meant to be a yellowjacket after all.
“Hey guys,” Van calls out from the kitchen, “we’re running low on water. Can one or two of you bring some up from the lake?”
“Any particular reason you can’t do it?” Travis spits.
“I did it last time, asshole. Maybe someone else should pull their weight.”
Jackie locks eyes with Shauna, and decides a little manual labor is worth getting some coveted alone time with her. She makes her way over and holds a hand out to help the other girl up, speaking before anyone has a chance to protest.
“Shauna and I can go!”
Van looks at Jackie, narrowing her eyes at the sudden enthusiasm before darting them over to Shauna. She just nods.
“Sure, whatever. Here, take a bucket.”
-
Twenty minutes of silence have passed and they’re halfway to the lake when Jackie decides enough is enough.
“When did you stop wanting me to be your best friend?”
Shauna stops in her tracks and turns to look at Jackie with a mix of bewilderment and guilt. “What are you talking about?”
“You said all that stuff the other day about me giving you confidence, and making you who you are, but you’re keeping things from me, Shauna. It’s fucking lonely enough out here. I can’t lose you, too.”
Jackie slumps against a tree and holds her head in her hands. She didn’t realize just how much it had been hurting her until she let it out. Tears well in her eyes as Shauna steps over and gently pulls her hands away from her face.
“Look at me. You’re not gonna lose me. Okay? I don’t think you could even if you wanted to.”
“Then what are you hiding from me?” Jackie asks quietly.
An intake of breath, and then— “I’m pregnant.”
Jackie’s jaw drops open, every emotion vying for her attention. She’s angry that Shauna hadn’t told her. She's jealous that she probably told Taissa first. She’s worried when she sees the nauseous look on Shauna’s face.
And stupidly, she’s devastated that Shauna had slept with someone who wasn’t her.
She knew it was going to happen eventually. It’s not like she actually expected that the other girl wanted Jackie the way that Jackie wanted her. She just thought perhaps because Shauna never seemed to be interested in the guys she tried to set her up with, then…well…
It was never supposed to hurt this badly.
Shauna drops down to sit on a log, trying her best and failing to school her expression into something close to neutral. Jackie pulls her attention back to the conversation at hand.
“How—who—and when?”
“Does it matter, Jackie? I’m probably going to die soon, and if I don’t, I have to worry about taking care of a fucking baby alone out here.”
At the mere mention of Shauna dying, Jackie’s heart clenches. She tries to picture a life without her by her side and can’t. It isn’t an option. “You’re not going to die.”
Shauna lets out a dry laugh. “That’s all you took from that?”
“You’re not going to die,” Jackie repeats, sitting down next to her, “because I won’t let you. And I won’t let you take care of a baby alone.” She grabs Shauna’s hand and holds it in her own. “We’ll just have to do it together.”
Shauna’s eyes widen. “Jackie, what? I don’t—“
Jackie cuts her off. “Come on. It’ll be fun. I can even think of baby names with you, because I know whatever you’ve been coming up with has to be godawful.” Her grip tightens around Shauna’s hand. “I love you, Shauna Shipman. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, you know that? We’re in this together.”
Looking at Shauna, Jackie knows she means every word out of her mouth. She finds herself breathless and lost in the depths of dark, thoughtful eyes that she’s never quite been able to read completely. Even now, Shauna seems to be working through a problem that Jackie has resigned herself to not knowing. That’s always been part of her allure, Jackie supposes: that she can sneak long glances at Shauna, and spend all her time with Shauna, and share the most sacred of moments with Shauna, yet still never know her completely. There’s an intimacy that comes with always having more you’re desperate to learn.
Jackie feels a shift on the log, and before she can ask what’s happening, Shauna’s kissing her.
It's almost instinct, the way she just starts kissing back. Shauna's lips are warm, and surprisingly soft considering their circumstances, though the faint metallic taste of blood lingers on them. Jackie shoves her tongue into the other girl’s mouth perhaps a bit rougher than she should have. Honestly, she doesn’t care. She fumbles to move her hand to Shauna's back, trying desperately to pull her in closer.
Jackie thinks about the first time they met, splitting a brownie at the snack table on the first day of first grade. The time in middle school when Shauna shoved Andrew Mitchell onto his ass because he called Jackie a prude. Freshman year, signing up for soccer tryouts and convincing Shauna to do it with her. Shauna in her soccer uniform. Shauna in the red dress.
She kisses her harder.
It feels like a cheesy romcom moment, Jackie muses, when the two who were meant to be all along finally get their shit together and kiss with a background montage of all their finest moments. She smiles slightly into Shauna’s lips. She’s always been there for her, always loved her. Maybe she even loves her back in just the way she wants.
As warmth overtakes her, Jackie feels for the first time in a long time that she has a place in the hive again.
-
The weather gets chillier, and so does the air between Jackie and Shauna.
It’s been weird ever since the trip to the lake. They’ve started sleeping next to each other in the attic, with Jackie pressed up against Shauna’s back, chin tucked against her shoulder and arms holding them close. Jackie thought the distance might start to close between them. But Shauna keeps looking at her with that same guilt-ridden puppy expression on her face. And Jackie’s still bothered by Shauna sleeping with someone else.
She doesn’t want to be bothered. She wants to relish in her closeness to the person she’s desired for so long. It’s just—some part of her needs to know who was able to capture Shauna’s attention, what she’d privately been hoping to do since before they even knew what sex meant.
When Shauna goes downstairs to help with butchering the remaining cache of meat (which she’s becoming frighteningly good at, and she reminds herself to ask what the fuck that was all about later), Jackie decides to do the unthinkable: read Shauna’s notebook. Surely, it was bound to ease her mind. There would be entries about how excited she was to go away to college and live together, pages of fond memories between the two of them. Gushing about what a great friend Jackie is, or about how much she wishes they had lost their virginity together instead. Because it had definitely been to some loser like Randy Walsh who meant nothing. Right?
But when she swipes the book from its hiding spot and curls up in a corner to flip through the pages, everything around her seems to darken. Shauna isn’t going to Rutgers. Shauna got into Brown. She feels like she’s been held under Jackie’s thumb all this time. There aren’t loving recollections of all their time together, just frustration and blame and hurt and secrets.
Not to mention, Shauna’s been fucking her goddamn boyfriend.
-
It takes a lot to get a honeybee on the attack.
Jackie stops eating. The sight of food makes her stomach start to turn. She gives her portions to Shauna, because despite the hurt she harbors, Jackie promised that they were in this together.
She tries to make her jealous, telling her again and again that she was going to fuck Travis. Shauna doesn’t bite, so Jackie follows through. She doesn’t really know why; nothing about it feels right. For years, she talked about losing her virginity to someone that she would hold in her heart for the rest of her life. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. All she wants afterwards, dress stained and ego broken, is to find Shauna.
Then her friends lock her in a closet and Shauna almost slits Travis’s throat in some weird psycho cult ritual, her eyes dark with bloodlust instead of thought this time around. Javi’s missing, everyone’s lost their fucking minds and won’t admit it, and her own body feels foreign to her now. Jackie’s had enough.
So she stings, and she stings hard. She calls them all crazy, she laughs at their stupid, stupid dinnertime thanks. She tries to hit Shauna where it hurts the most, weeks of pent up betrayal and confusion tumbling out in accusation after accusation. Did she remember that she was about to kill Travis last night? Did she care? Did she care about anything? About soccer, college, about fucking her boyfriend? About keeping their sanity out here?
Do you even care about ME, though that remains a silent scream echoing on a loop.
What Jackie doesn’t expect is for Shauna to sting back. And unlike her, Jackie learns, Shauna is a true born yellowjacket.
She stings again. And again. And again, as if she’s been waiting for the opportunity. She calls Jackie tragic, and boring, and insecure, each word like a slash on what little of her soul Jackie has left out here. She doesn’t recognize the Shauna standing in front of her anymore. Her eyes plead for her friend to come back, for them to talk about this. But Shauna keeps going.
“Fuck you,” is all she can offer in return. Strangled, defeated. Heartbroken.
You get everything you want, Shauna had yelled. But that isn’t true. Jackie never had her. She realizes now that she never will.
-
When Shauna brings Jackie back inside, she feels the familiarity of home.
Her hive embraces her. They tell her they love her. She wonders what caused the change of heart, but tries not to question it. She feels the structure returning, the safety and purpose that she needs to survive.
Shauna wraps a blanket around her shoulders. “I love you, Jackie,” she smiles.
Jackie looks at her. It’s her Shauna this time, she knows it. The girl in front of her is the one she’s spent her whole life loving. She tugs on her flannel and pulls her into a hug. Shauna returns it with all the care in the world.
“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. You know that, right?” Shauna says, parroting back what Jackie has always told her. She leans in for a kiss, gracing Jackie’s lips with the only thing that can make the world stop shaking.
“It isn’t as bad as you thought, is it?”
Jackie pulls away from Shauna and snaps her head to the left, faced with Laura Lee’s gentle, pitying look.
And she remembers what happens to honeybees when they finally decide to sting.