Archive of Our Own ^beta

“You know what I think? I think it’s God.”

“That’s stupid. You sound like Laura Lee.”

Natalie held up her half-smoked cigarette and Jackie shook her head like a wet dog. She almost couldn't fathom hanging out with a burnout just to avoid seeing Jeff. Nat shrugged.

“What else would it be, then?” Jackie traced her fingertips along the rusted wire of the fence. The chill of early spring shocked her skin and she pulled away. Natalie looked at her bemusingly.

She tapped her cigarette and ashes twirled into the dewy grass. “Don’t you think it’s weird? That it’s always girls our age, from this town, just– up and leaving?”

Jackie furrowed her eyebrows. “What are you getting at?”

“Let’s face it: this place is shitty. The people here are shitty. They probably just skipped town, took the midnight bus or something. Got away from this pisspot.”

“But Mari said she saw–”

“Mari’s a liar,” Natalie retorted. “She just likes the attention.”

“Fine then,” Jackie’s lip curled. “If you hate it here so much, why don’t you leave?”

Natalie took a puff of smoke and glared directly in her direction, her eyes clouded with something unnamable. Jackie swallowed. Maybe she shouldn’t have said anything at all.

“Whatever.” Nat flicked her cigarette into the gravel path in front of her and stamped it out with her boot. “See you around,” she said, her voice a toxin, then she wandered in the other direction and left Jackie with the bluebirds as company.

Mari talked about Akilah to anyone who listened. “I was there when she went,” she said. Her eyes were wide and ecstatic. “We always walk to school together, so I thought it was weird that she wasn’t at her porch yet. So I went ‘round the back, and–”

“Did you see what happened?” Van pressed, practically entranced in Mari’s retelling. “Was it like they say? Voices of the archangels and the gates of heaven opening?”

“I’m getting to that,” Mari snapped. “Her window was wide open.” (Curtains flailing, aghast in the breeze.) “She was just… gone. No trace of her at all.” (The lingering scent of lilies).

Everyone groaned. Of course Mari had played it up. Jackie finally thought that they were getting somewhere.

It was always, without fail, the same story. On a rainy day in April, Rachel Goldman excused herself from soccer practice to go to the bathroom, and all she left was an empty stall and the rhythmic dripping of faucet water.

The entire town was in a frenzy. Missing posters on every lamppost, calls to the police station clogging up the telephone network. Eventually, a memorial—and everyone tried to move on. Until it happened again.

A dreary winter’s afternoon left Crystal’s footprints melded in the snow about a mile from the water tower. Misty came racing back down the hill, blubbering through sobs that Crystal was gone. She became a minor celebrity after this, until she herself left not twenty-four hours later and brought her fame with her.

The summer afterwards, Lottie nearly crashed into Laura Lee’s runaway bike while she was crossing the street. All that was left of her were the streamers flying free from her handlebars and bundles of lilies overflowing out of her wicker basket. In October it was Travis’ little brother Javi. The fluorescent lights flickered above him, carrying him like an electric current and leaving a carton of strawberries spilling down the fruit aisle of the grocery store.

And to add fuel to the fire, of course, there were the sightings.

“I saw Akilah in the parking lot during Algebra,” Mari exclaimed. Jackie dragged her cleats through the mud and tried desperately to stay above this discussion. Shauna sat on the other side of her, white-knuckling the metal bench, and Jackie wondered if she was into all of this stuff as well. Whatever this was.

“Sure you did, Mari.” Taissa tilted her head back and let water dribble down her chin. The others snickered as Mari gawked at her.

“I’m not lying!” Mari insisted. She clapped her hands on her hips, arms crooked like stray twigs. Girls bumped elbows and whispered petty nothings in each others’ ears, and eventually Mari cowered and took off towards the bleachers.

And sure, Jackie was as curious as anyone else was, but there were some people—like Van and Mari and maybe even Shauna—who were really into it. Keep your window open at night to let the angels in, scatter ashes around your bedroom. Dance barefoot in the forest. Take a knife to your palm and let the blood drip, drip, drip over the altar. Whatever will make it notice you.

Jackie remembered when this town wasn’t so full of anticipation. Was she supposed to just wait, give herself to this power and let her ordinary blood turn to rich red wine into divine, unbearable light?

Shauna, sweet Shauna, who Jackie knew couldn’t help but get caught up in all this, brushed her knee against Jackie’s. “How’d you like to go?” she asked, her voice so small Jackie barely registered it. So afraid, even.

“What?” Jackie lowered her water bottle and searched for ambivalence in Shauna’s pooled eyes.

“I mean, you’ve thought about it, right?” Shauna brushed her thumb against Jackie’s thigh, and Jackie couldn’t recall when she started holding her breath.

“Not really,” she exhaled. “What about you? Have you thought about it?”

Shauna’s face contorted and for a split second, it looked like she’d been shot. Her jaw tensed and she dropped her hand. “Not really,” she said finally. And as always, that was that.

“Hey, Nat. How’d you like to go?”

As Jackie approached her from behind the dumpster, Natalie straightened and stamped her cigarette into the concrete. She uncoiled when that familiar form came into view.

She chuckled, “Are you gonna spend your summer thinking about that depressing shit?”

Jackie cringed. It was hard not to talk about angels because it was hard not to talk about dying, and she didn’t want to lie awake at night with a half-empty pine in her soul. “Are you gonna spend your summer chain-smoking behind a Trader Joe’s?”

Silence passed over them. Natalie kissed her teeth. Then, she muttered, “I wouldn’t.”

“You wouldn’t what?”

“I wouldn’t go. Me and–” Nat’s mouth snapped shut and she coughed into her fist, as if she was remembering who she was talking to. “I made a promise that I wouldn’t.”

Jackie kicked a pebble down the alleyway and it rolled into the vacant shadow near the building. “I don’t really think that’s a choice you get to make.”

“Says who?” Natalie challenged.

“I dunno. God?”

Nat pursed her lips and dug her hands into her pockets; Jackie wondered if she was doing so to keep herself from doing something she’d regret. “We are not talking about this,” she scowled, and the message hung clear as day.

An apology landed on Jackie’s tongue, but a shuffling noise in the distance beat her to it. Her and Nat whipped their heads around to find Lottie, standing like a deer in headlights, frozen mid-action in pasting some paper to an old power line. She faltered—before Jackie could call out to her, she ran like greased lightning and turned the corner into the busy sidewalk.

Really, Jackie couldn’t help but laugh, high-pitched and confused. “What the fuck?”

Natalie, however, narrowed her eyes and squeezed past Jackie to get a closer look at what Lottie left behind. Something wistful ensnared her and she stood suspended, her frown ever-growing. “She’s still doing this,” she whispered painfully.

“Doing what?” Jackie came up to Natalie’s side and squinted at the paper, and her immediate recognition ripped open a fresh ache in her stomach. A missing person’s poster, with Laura Lee’s beaming face plastered all over it. There was even a hefty reward at the bottom for anyone who might have found her.

Natalie’s gaze dropped to the ground as Jackie buffered, gesturing wildly. “I mean, she can’t possibly think–”

“She wants to believe,” Natalie interjected. “Just like how you want to, and I want to, but she knows there’s no hope.”

Jackie backed away from the post. She couldn’t bear to look at that photo any longer—it made her spine crawl. “I still think there’s hope.”

“For what?” Nat scoffed. “That they’ll come back? That they chose for this to happen to them? We both know that’s not true.”

“I just don’t get why–” Jackie choked; her eyes betrayed her as she took another glance towards Laura Lee’s loving reverie. “Why all of this had to–”

Natalie, peering upon her fragility, ached. Yet she said nothing, and Jackie took that as a threat. Your team is falling apart, Captain.

Wiping her stray tears with her sleeve, Jackie turned heel and sprinted down the side road, leaving a cloud of dust behind her.

August’s swollen sun eclipsed on the horizon, and the heat was sweltering even at nightfall. With nothing left to do this close to the school year, Mari decided to throw a party. It wasn’t that Jackie didn’t want to go—she just knew she’d run into one Shauna Shipman, backstabbing bitch who fucked her boyfriend and thought she’d get away with it.

She glanced out her window from her bedside table at the buzzing laughter down the street, dangerously drawn to the pulsing heart of Mari’s house. Jackie grumbled to herself, slipped into some head-turning dress and flew out the door. Aware of her degrading self-preservation, she wondered, languidly, if Natalie would be there too.

Jackie might have taken her rides to school and parties for granted. Her old bicycle let out wild screeches all the way down the road and her legs were littered with mosquito bites. Blistered hands quivered as she set her bike down in the grass; light glowed like a satellite onto the lawn and music thumped in tandem with her ears.

If the humidity outside was almost too much for her, then the house might as well have been unbearable. The air in the living room was still and moist, damp with drunken bodies pressed between each other and little room to breathe. Jackie made a beeline for the kitchen, where the noise dimmed and an irenic silence enveloped her like a blanket.

With shaking fingers she poured herself a cup of mystery punch. Jackie couldn’t help but feel like eyes were boring into her from all angles, a parable of the past, a canted smile in the dark—but when she checked behind her, nothing was there.

Then, a voice that struck clear over the faint clamor of the music. “..ckie? Jackie.” And a hand touched her shoulder like a knife through her lung.

She turned, and Shauna stared back at her with those pleading brown eyes. Jackie jumped out of her skin and nearly knocked her cup over, forgotten haphazardly on kitchen counter. She opened her mouth, probably to say something like, get the fuck away from me, but Shauna continued.

“Please, Jax, I just wanna talk,” she urged.

Jackie ripped away from her grasp. “Oh, like how you talked with Jeff? Swallow this, Shauna. You–” Shauna reached for her again, and Jackie yanked her hand away. “Don’t fucking touch me!”

They were drawing attention, she could tell. She didn’t need their catfight broadcasted to a bunch of tipsy teenagers, so she shoved past Shauna and took to the hallway near the back. Of course, Shauna followed.

They met crossways at the sunroom. The backyard stretched into the dark mangrove lined with trees. Dusk plunged fig-blue overhead. Cicadas hummed between pockets of life and breath.

“You’re still my best friend,” Shauna said. “You know that, right?”

Jackie didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. Her mouth felt so dry, all of a sudden.

Shauna, despite being timid just a moment before, stood with her head held high. Nothing like the girl she grew up with. So distant, flesh and feather, white-lipped pale skin like she was cradled with heaven-yellow light.

A sweet scent punctured Jackie’s surroundings. Hard to make out at first, but soon it was strong enough to choke on. Lilies, she thought. It smelled like lilies.

“Shauna,” she whispered, just to check for life if anything. Shauna’s eyes traced her, but she looked foregone. It’s not as bad as you thought, is it?

Jackie felt a thousand capacities spring up within her. She couldn’t do it anymore. She barged out the back door, stumbled down the rotting wood stairs and crashed into someone coming the other way.

Her eyes adjusted to the dark of the night, and she made out the familiar face of her teammate through the fuzziness. “Lot?” she stammered. “Are you okay?”

Lottie was hyperventilating, sweat-soaked and eyes flitting with blindsided panic. Jackie trailed her thumb along Lottie’s skin and touched goosebumps. She latched onto Jackie’s arm desperately. The colour was drained from her face. It almost looked like she’d seen a–

“I saw her,” she hiccuped between sobs. “I– I saw her, just now. I saw her.”

“Who, Lottie?” Jackie asked. “Who did you see?”

“Laura Lee,” Lottie heaved, and Jackie’s heart dropped to her stomach.

“What–” Jackie swallowed weakly. “What’d she say to you? Where did you see her?”

Lottie gestured vaguely to the unfenced forest behind them. “She didn’t even say anything.”

As she crumpled under her weight, Lottie’s bare knees were sliced by the gravel path. She squeezed her lids shut, and then blinked rapidly as if falling out of a trance.

“She smiled at me,” Lottie sniffled, her glassy eyes locking with Jackie’s. “She looked… so happy.”

“So then, what? All of this is real?” Jackie pushed Lottie’s bangs out of her face, searching for some semblance of integrity in her expression. Did she really see Laura Lee, or was she just drunk and delirious?

“I don’t–” Lottie gasped. Her fists clenched into Jackie’s dress. “I don’t know. I’m just so glad I got to see her again.”

From inside came Taissa’s unyielding voice. “Has anyone seen Shauna?”

It reverberated through the house and into the backyard; silence like hallowed bones followed. Just a few feet away from them, the busted porch light flickered feverishly on and off with the faint hum of electricity.

Travis was gone. It happened three weeks into the first semester. Not that Jackie cared much, she barely knew the guy, but due to “unforeseen circumstances”, the girls’ season was moved to the start of the school year—and Natalie hadn’t shown up to practice.

“Where the fuck is she?” Taissa jogged over to the benches and put her soccer ball between the crook of her elbow. “This team is already falling apart, the last thing we need is people skipping out on practice.”

“I think something happened,” Lottie suggested.

Mari laughed, “Yeah, everyone knows that her and Travis were boning. That’s what happened.”

“No, I mean–” Lottie chewed absently on her bottom lip. “I don’t know. Forget it.”

Jackie, though it was so far away that she couldn’t place it, felt a thrum of irritation beneath her skin. Cheeks flushed and jaw set, she said to Lottie, “We can check up on her after practice, if you want.”

Lottie lifted an eyebrow. “You know where she lives?”

“Yeah. Kind of,” Jackie smiled sheepishly. It definitely wasn’t weird that she knew these things about Natalie—they just happened to run into each other more than occasionally. If Jackie had been so bold, they could’ve even been friends.

“Okay… sure.” Lottie’s lips pulled back in a grimace. Taissa, defacto team captain, clapped them out of the moment. Jackie shook her torsioned limbs and followed the low-spirited Yellowjackets to the field.

She waited for Lottie at the showers after practice, distracted herself with her stupid cuticles and hangnails and tried pathetically not to think about ridiculous misfortunes. They went past the gas station, past the church and the water tower; talked of everything and nothing at all just to avoid the fact that early September was eating them alive.

For all of the thirty minutes it took to bring them to the trailer park, Jackie’s body was screaming at her to bolt in the other direction. She thought she was going to burn up like wheat grass in the scorching sun. Next thing she knew, she was pounding at Natalie’s door.

“Nat,” she called, glancing between the screen and Lottie’s forlorning face. “Lottie and I are here to check up on you. You didn’t… uh, show up to practice. You okay?”

No answer. Nausea crashed over her like a wave. She gripped her stomach with one hand—pounded on the door a little harder, called out a little louder. Still nothing.

“I think she’s okay, Jackie,” Lottie said finally. “I have a feeling.”

Jackie could hardly hold back her scorn. She had a feeling? Did she have a feeling about Shauna, or Laura Lee? “This was a waste of time,” she muttered, and started back down the broken stairs.

She tried to tune out the conversation on the way back. The drone of the neighbour’s mowing, a dog bark from three houses over, the crack of a twig. But Lottie’s words overpowered her, like the hymn of an angel: “Do you also have dreams?”

“I’m pretty sure everyone has dreams, Lot.”

“No, like–” Lottie possessed that usual look, like she was deep in thought. “I had a dream last night,” she started, “and you were in it. So was Laura Lee, and Shauna. So I thought… I don’t know what I thought.”

“I don’t remember my dreams,” Jackie lied. Truth was that she woke up in a cold sweat the night before, clutching the bird’s cage that surrounded her heart, mouthing Shauna? Shauna?

She had staggered to her bathroom with the light off, stared at her fractured reflection and swore she caught a glimpse of hollow brown eyes behind her shoulder.

“I think Laura Lee wanted to tell us something,” said Lottie ruefully. “She wanted to tell us that it’s okay. That we don’t have to be afraid. That it’s better than the alternative.”

“What’s the alternative?”

Lottie stopped in her tracks. She smiled sadly—beautifully, and replied, “Staying here.”

When Jackie walked her bike up to the gravel fenced road, Natalie was there, the flame from her cigarette alight through the dense fog. Jackie dropped her bicycle with the wheels still spinning as she jogged up to her, pointing a trembling finger. “I thought you were dead.”

Nat shook with laughter, which led to a coughing fit. “Why would I be dead?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jackie bubbled with rage. “Because you didn’t show up to practice?” The breeze lifted her hair. She squinted at Natalie through the mist. “Because I came to check up on you, and no one was home?”

Brows arched, Natalie’s lips parted into a smile. “You came over?”

“Yes, I–” Jackie’s ears burned. “That’s not even the point. Everyone was worried about you.” Maybe not everyone, but she couldn’t bear to say the actuality out loud.

As if she knew something—God, Jackie wasn’t sure if that made her angry or afraid—Natalie shook her head and took another drag. “All right. Well, here I am.”

“It’s good that you’re here,” Jackie said, voice wavering. “So I can tell you that I’m leaving.”

Natalie didn’t answer. Jackie continued, “I’m getting out of here. I can’t–” She sucked in a harrowing breath. “I can’t do this anymore. If this isn’t going to stop, then I’m just taking myself out of the equation.” Nat blew smoke through an ‘o’ shaped mouth.

“Come with me,” Jackie declared, and when Natalie still didn’t reply, she repeated, “Please, come with me.”

Finally, looking up at her through her mascara-smudged eyelashes, Nat said, “You know I can’t do that.”

“Sure you can!” Jackie’s voice raised an octave. “We could go to the city. To New York, or Long Island, or wherever the fuck you want. We could get away from here, together.”

“I have business here.”

“You could decide your own fate, somewhere else. Where this town can’t reach us.”

“My fate’s already been decided.” Natalie flicked her cigarette over the fence. It landed in the grass and the ashes curled towards each other, like they were huddling for the last trace of warmth.

“It’s Travis, isn’t it?” Jackie took a cautious step backwards. Her fist opened, and closed. Opened, closed. The wind had started to pick up.

“Yeah, I guess. Him and everyone else.” Then, “I’m sorry.”

Jackie swallowed the lump in her throat and those awful, awful words trapped beneath her lungs. “Okay,” she whimpered, and despite herself, slunk towards Natalie with her head hung low.

Her nerves shot all the way to her brain, and then her hands, which cupped Nat’s cheek. Jackie blinked fresh tears away, and pressed a ghost of a kiss to Natalie’s cigarette-stained lips. She didn’t look at her reaction. Didn’t want to. She pivoted the other way and picked up her bike by the handlebars.

It was weird, she thought as she started down the road, that the girls would think of her immortalized. She was taken, just like the others, engraved in those empty tombstones. Her taut legs pedaled, and pedaled—halfway a race, halfway a prayer. The wind, as if it knew what she was doing, tried to pull her back. But she persisted.

Jackie could fly behind daylight, foxed with air, and float up over the horizon, like an angel with wings. This thought comforted her as she cycled on, forward into the distinctly growing scent of lilies.