Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Natalie had not missed taking the bus home from school. 

The schoolbus smells like BO and sour milk, like twenty years worth of teenage angst has gotten under the plastic upholstery and festered like mildew. Making her way to the back, Natalie scans both sides of the bus for an empty seat, but she doesn’t spot any. What she does spot is a couple of sophomores trying to lick each other’s tonsils, a tuba player being shunted out of his seat by his own instrument, and a kid from her Trig class loading spit-soaked wads of their latest problem set into one of the spindly straws they stock in the cafeteria. In terms of viable seat partners, the outlook is pretty bleak—but what the fuck else is new?

Then Natalie spots, about three quarters of the way down the aisle, a distinctive head of red hair bent over a book, and the outlook goes from bleak to downright abysmal. 

It’s too late for Nat to turn around: her singular escape route is blocked by one of the many alarmingly beefy yet consistently mediocre members of the WHS wrestling team. His inertia, similar to that of a small planet, keeps her moving forward, and before she can seriously consider vaulting over seats like an Olympic sprinter or flinging herself out of the emergency window, she’s standing right in front of that red head of hair, and it’s tilting up to reveal a pale, freckled face wearing a faintly surprised expression.

“Hey, Nat,” Van says, with a lilt in her voice that turns the name into a sort of question. “Haven’t seen you around these parts in a while.”

Natalie tenses. “What’re you doing here?”

“Right now?” Van holds up the book in her hands. “Trying to get my head around this Catcher in the Rye stuff. I would love to stop doing that though. This Holden guy is a total twerp. Wanna sit?”

And the thing is, Nat does not wanna sit. She would actually rather lie down beneath the front wheels of the bus and take a nice long nap. But something tells her that’s not really an option. Van shifts her backpack to the floor, and Natalie reluctantly, agonizingly, finds herself sinking into the offered seat.

As the bus’ engine groans to life and they trundle out of the school parking lot, Nat takes care to leave as much space between her and Van as possible, so much so that one of her legs hangs out in the aisle, jogging up and down like a doped up racehorse. A loud silence gathers in the gap between them. It’s loud to Nat, at least—Van’s apparently able to tune it out enough to plow through a couple more pages of Sallinger. Natalie envies Van’s ability to ignore their surroundings; the bus is stuck at a red light across from the 7-Eleven for what feels to Nat like three months, and every second of it sinks another shovel into the pit of grisly shame in her stomach. Her bouncing leg starts to lose steam. As they finally pull away from the intersection, Natalie slumps forward against the back of the seat in front of them and silently begs for it all to just fucking end already.

“Have you done the reading yet?”

Warily, Natalie turns her head. Van makes a little gesture with The Catcher in the Rye, her expression still open and unassuming. And Nat doesn’t trust it, but there’s no escaping it either.

“Nah. Haven’t been able to get a copy of the book yet.”

“Did you ask your teacher about it?”

Natalie shakes her head. “She’s already pissed at me because I missed Thursday and Friday last week. I was just going to wait and see if one ends up in the Lost and Found or something.”

“I could loan you my copy,” Van offers.

“You need your copy.”

Van shrugs. “I meant we could share it.”

Natalie studies Van’s face for a moment, searching high and low for the catch. Eventually she has to give up, concede that maybe this isn’t all the convoluted set up for some sort of trap. She slouches back in the seat and draws her leg out of the aisle. 

“I’m all good, Van,” Nat says. “Don’t worry about it.”

At length, Van nods and leans down to put the book away.

“Bummer about you getting sick though,” she says offhandedly. “We missed you at practice. Lottie said you had the flu?”

Natalie fights, and fails, to not flinch at the sound of that name. Then, when she manages to actually process the rest of what Van said, a sour, dreadful taste fills her mouth. 

Because what’s it supposed to mean, that even after everything Nat did, Lottie’s still trying to cover for her? Natalie adds to her great and growing list of sins: 

Turned sweet, gentle, wonderful Lottie Matthews into a fucking liar.

“Yeah,” Nat says gruffly. “I felt like hot garbage. It totally sucked.” Given the baseline level of nausea she’s been dealing with since last Wednesday, it’s not even that far from the truth.

“Pretty lucky that Lottie didn’t catch it.”

“Mhmm, sure is.” Natalie clears her throat, trying to dislodge the railroad spike that seems to have embedded itself in her esophagus. Out of the corner of her eye, she shoots Van a cagey look. “Okay, but actually though—what are you doing here? You have a car.”

“She’s in the shop,” Van replies. “But don’t worry, the doctors are very optimistic that she will make a full recovery. I should be back to riding in style by the end of the week. Why are you taking the bus? Lottie’s car didn’t crap out, did it? That’d be a bit of a bummer after she spent half the Federal Reserve on it.”

Natalie looks off, tugging on one of her studs until her earlobe stings. 

“She had something to do after school today. Taking the bus was easier for me.”

“Really?” Van peers skeptically out the window. “Because I don’t think this bus goes to Lottie’s neighborhood. Unless she recently dropped multiple tax brackets that I’m unaware of.”

Natalie jerks her head around to face Van, her irritation compounded by the harsh sting of embarrassment. 

“Okay, what is this, a fucking ambush? Is your car even being repaired?”

Van responds evenly, “For your information, my engine is fucked because the last time someone changed the oil was before I was born. And I had no idea you’d be here.”

“Why are you grilling me then?”

“Why are you lying to me, Nat?” Van lowers her voice furtively. “You’re back at your mom’s place?”

Natalie slouches deep in her jacket, shoving her stiff fingers into her pockets. It’s fucking freezing outside, and the inside of the bus isn’t much better. Distractedly Natalie pokes at the holes in her jacket’s lining—holes that remind her of rats gnawing through cereal boxes, pavement shredding faded denim and then the thin skin beneath. Waste and carelessness, and their long lasting effects.

“Yeah, I’m back at home,” Nat grumbles. “So what?”

“So what?” Van asks, incredulous. “What happened to your room at the Hotel Matthews?”

“I overstayed my welcome.” Nat shrugs. “It was never supposed to be a permanent thing anyway.”

Van bites her lip before asking lightly, “Did you and Lottie have a fight?”

The bare, innocent concern in Van’s expression makes Natalie want to slam her own head into the seat in front of them until she goes unconscious. Rather than doing that—because despite how cheap the cushioning is, it’d probably still take a while to knock herself out—Natalie offers another shrug.

“Sure. Let’s call it a fight.”

It was really more of an emotional murder-suicide, but why bother with semantics?

Nat refuses to look in Van’s direction, so she doesn’t know exactly what reaction her confession is generating. But she can make a pretty good guess based on Van’s usual responses to unfortunate occurrences—lost soccer games, asshole boyfriends, soulless profit-motivated sequels to beloved movies, etc. The moment before Van says something is like the seconds before the person on the other side of the one way mirror throws the switch on the electric chair. Like Natalie’s just staring down her own reflection in that glass, intimately aware that, regardless of whose finger is on the button, this is all ultimately her fault.

“Damn. I’m sorry, dude.” Van sighs. “That blows.”

“It’s whatever,” Nat responds bluntly. “It was bound to happen anyway. Honestly, this oughta be your big ‘I told you so’ moment.”

Van furrows her brow. “What do you mean?”

“You know, that time at the team sleepover, when I told you about the whole thing.” In all honesty, Natalie knew Van would never use that conversation to kick her while she’s down, but she had assumed Van might at least remember that it happened. “You told me to be careful.”

“Oh,” Van says, recollection dawning on her face and quickly twisting into a frown. “That.”

“Yeah, that.” Nat crosses her arms with frankly unearned petulance. “What the hell was that supposed to mean, by the way?”

After a moment of thought, Van looks off, shaking her head. “I don’t know. I guess I just meant like… it’s a risky business, you know? Relying on other people that much. It seemed like you were sort of putting all your eggs in one basket. I was nervous for you. But honestly, I was just being jaded when I said that, I didn’t really think that…”

“What?” Nat asks. The pensive look on Van’s face is going to make her leg start jogging again, maybe until she tears a ligament this time.

“I just… I can’t believe Lottie kicked you out,” Van says finally. “I mean, that’s kinda fucked up, considering. And look, you might’ve done some dumb stuff before, but I don't know what could’ve happened that was bad enough to warrant throwing you out on the streets in the middle of December. I just never would’ve thought she’d be that cruel.”

Guilt plunges deep into Natalie’s stomach—it’s cold like swallowing ice cubes, cramping like the hunger pains that persist anyway.

“Hey, Lottie didn’t do shit, alright?” Nat snaps before she can think better of it. “She was a fucking saint, actually. She wanted me to stay even after we fought. I kicked myself out.”

Van goes from critical to outright confused. “Okay, you’re gonna have to walk me through this—what happened?”

Why Natalie doesn’t tell Van to go kick rocks and actually answers her question is anyone’s guess—it’s a distinctly uncharacteristic show of vulnerability on Nat’s part. Utterly characteristic though is the spin she puts on it: leaving out the bit about seeing her mom, trying to play up the part about the dress so that it might be reasonably interpreted as a insult and not just the kind-hearted gift it was clearly meant to be. She’s not surprised that Van doesn’t seem to be buying it. Since the haze of sickening adrenaline cleared from her mind in the immediate aftermath of leaving Lottie’s house, Nat has had a pretty hard time buying it herself.

By the time Natalie finishes the telling, Van’s face is in her hands. She looks up as Nat trails off into silence, her expression pure disbelief cut with a sizeable dose of exasperation.

“Natalie, what the fuck is your problem?”

“Hey—” Nat tries to protest, but Van carries on, heedless.

“You just completely blew up your relationship with Lottie—not to mention, you gave up living in her actual fucking mansion—and for what? Because she bought you a present? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“A lot of shit, okay?” Natalie bites back. “Fucking clearly. I know I fucked it all up—but that was always going to happen eventually. You were fucking right.”

“Oh, don’t put this on me,” Van says. “And don’t put it on some kind of inevitable, universal constant either. You made a really shitty decision—”

“I know, I’m a idiot—”

“You’re not dumb, you’re a dick,” Van interrupts. “Have you even seen Lottie since last week? She’s a complete wreck. I’ve never seen her like this.”

A sharp twinge of remorse ricochets through Nat’s chest. She actually hasn’t run into Lottie since last week, mostly because she’s gone to great lengths to make sure it doesn’t happen—never before has she had such a valid reason to skip class. Distractedly Natalie runs the pad of her thumb along her zipper, fixating on the feeling of cool metal teeth biting into her skin.

“She’ll be fine. She’s better off without me.”

Rather than yielding to that air-tight argument, that undeniable fact, Van has the audacity to roll her eyes. 

“Don’t make this about how tragic and messed up you are. You broke her heart.”

“I fucking know that, Van,” Natalie spits through gritted teeth. “What am I supposed to do about it now?”

“You could start by pulling your head out of your ass.”

Natalie rears up, fixing Van with the dirtiest look she’s capable of, which is pretty dirty, all things considered. 

“How about you get off your fucking high horse, huh? Stop acting like you’ve got me all figured out. You don’t know shit about what happened between me and Lottie.”

Van raises her eyebrows. “Are you sure about that?” 

Natalie opens her mouth to retort, but Van doesn’t let her get a word in.

“I bet,” Van says, “that the first time Lottie said she liked you—no, not even that, just the first time she implied she might not hate your company—I bet you couldn’t fucking believe it. First you thought she was full of shit, and then you thought she might just be kind of stupid, because it made no sense to you, how this amazing girl couldn’t see that you had no business even breathing the same air as her. When she had so much going for her, and in comparison you were just… nothing.”

“That’s not—”

 Van carries on, gaining steam. “You get closer to her, but that feeling of imbalance never goes away. Even in the best moments, when you’re happier than you’ve ever been, you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the day the fucking wool slips off her eyes and she sees that you’ve got nothing to offer her. Waiting for her to see you for what you really are.”

“What the f—”

“But the thing is, no matter what you do, she never does realize. If you had an ounce of common sense, you might figure out that there’s nothing for her to realize—she’s known who you are this whole time, known you better than you do really, and it’s never made a difference to her. But instead, you’re too distracted looking for cracks, looking for evidence that it’s all too good to be true: every good thing is a fluke, every slight stumble is fate telling you to throw in the towel, you’ve flown too close to the sun, you’re a fucking idiot. And how’s that supposed to make her feel, when eventually you’re acting like you don’t even want it to work out—”

“Shut the hell up,” Natalie interrupts, the cold fury in her tone finally breaking Van’s stride. “I wanted it to work, okay? I did everything I could. She—it was like the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I didn’t want to fuck it up, I just did. I didn’t want to hurt her like that.”

Van tilts her head, something like pity in her expression, her voice soft but cutting. 

“Didn’t you though? Because she cared about you, and it made you feel like you were worth something. And if you let that happen, then you might have to admit that maybe you aren’t a garbage human being. Not everything is wrong with you, not every bad thing that ever happened to you is your fault, inherently, because you’re such a terrible person.” Van’s voice loses its edge, rounding out into something like genuine compassion. “You’re not a terrible person, Natalie.”

Natalie blinks quickly to clear the burning from her eyes, her jaw clenching like a sprung bear trap. 

“I’m not?” she asks. “Why would I do all of that shit to her then? How is it not my fault that I spit in the face of a girl who’s been nothing but nice to me, broke her heart into a million pieces, and ran away like a fucking coward? I knew what I was doing, what was going to happen. No one made me do it. How does that not make me a terrible person?”

“You made a mistake,” Van says, with more gentleness than Nat’s ever warranted in her life. “You just have to own up to it. Blaming it all on your innate evilness is just another way of refusing to take responsibility for your actions.”

Natalie digs her fingers into her thighs, the ragged stubs of her fingernails catching on the thin material of her tights. “I fucking know that I’m responsible for it. I know I ruined everything. Why are you rubbing that in my face?”

“I’m not trying to rub it in your face. It’s just that you seem to think this is the end of it.”

“It is,” Natalie says gruffly. “I can’t get in a time machine and undo it.”

Van lets out a faint sigh, a sympathetic noise that makes Natalie’s hackles raise like a dog backed to the end of her chain, the metal tines of her collar digging into her neck.

“You’re still going to have to see her for the next six months,” Van says quietly. 

As if Natalie didn’t already know that. As if it isn’t just about the only thing she’s ever thinking about any more, about how she ended it, it’s over, but it isn’t really. Nat’s going to have to live with it, with herself, until the year ends, until Lottie goes off to college and then for the rest of her miserable stinking life. Just the thought of it makes her want to drop out of school altogether. What’s Nat going to do with a diploma anyway?

“I’m going to stay out of her way,” Natalie grits out. “That’s the only thing I can do for her now. I was never any good for her, Van. No amount of ‘taking responsibility’ is ever going to change that.” She shakes her head, furrowing her brow in disbelief. “Where are you even getting all this shit, huh? I know they can’t fit all that on a Snapple cap.”

The bus is slowing down, approaching a stop. Van cocks her head to the side.

“You’re not the first person to hate themselves, Nat. And you’re not the first person to do something stupid because of it.”

With a sound like a smoker’s cough, the bus comes to a stop. People clamber out of their seats, start making their way to the front. Natalie can’t face Van, bitterness pooling in the back of her throat. Her words come out soaked with it, weak as wet paper.

“You’re way off base, man. Fucking deranged, honestly. You have no idea what you’re talking about. What are you, a fucking life coach? Give me a break.” Natalie stands on faintly shaking legs, tugging her backpack over one shoulder. “Just leave me alone. Don’t act like you know me. You can take your bullshit psychoanalysis and shove it, alright? Leave me the fuck alone.”

Before Van can think up anymore clever responses, Natalie is brushing past the bus driver and stepping out onto an unfamiliar street. She lands in a shallow, dirty puddle, the mud on the side of the road sucking at the soles of her boots. The few students who also got off disperse quickly. Nat scowls at the bus’ back bumper until it’s little more than a smudge on the horizon, then resentfully shuffles down the road in it’s wake.

Honestly, at this point, it’s starting to feel like Natalie’s whole life is just one big, aimless walk that she could’ve avoided if she would only stop doing really dumb shit. Fat chance of that ever happening though. For now, she pauses briefly to dig her Walkman out of her bag, then she keeps going.

A half hour later she’s at the trailer park, a full 25 minutes later than she would have been if she’d just stuck out Van’s impromptu impersonation of an overeager guidance counselor. Arriving at the park barely feels better than being stranded on the side of the road. Under her jacket, Natalie’s shirt sticks uncomfortably to her skin, damp with icy sweat. She keeps nearly eating shit on the poorly maintained paths that lead the trailer, made even worse by the freezing rains they’ve been getting for the past few days. 

Despite the ache in her bones, the endless shivering that’s honestly starting feel chronic at this point, Natalie wishes it would just get colder already. At least when it snows, it looks sort of pretty—all the trailers covered in a soft white blanket, before it all melts down into dirty sludge. 

Which never takes very long. Pretty doesn’t last in places like this.

Nat wipes her boots on the mat before stepping inside the trailer, a gesture that quickly proves pointless when she walks into an overflowing trashbag in the entryway. Her mom is lying on the couch with her feet propped up on the coffee table and a cigarette smoking in her hand. Natalie makes a beeline for her room, but she hears Vera call out gruffly behind her.

“Trash needs to go out!”

Nat grimaces, her fingernails nipping into her palm. 

“I noticed!”

Vera’s barked reply is cut off when Natalie snaps the door to her bedroom shut. Letting her bag slip off her shoulders and onto the floor, Nat forces herself not to think about Van and her stupid therapizing, about Lottie and her—well, anything about Lottie, really, is a no fly zone. Nat walks over to her radio, desperate for anything—grunge, punk, fucking Mariah Carey if that’s what it takes—that’ll take her mind by the scruff of its neck and hold it facedown in a puddle until it stops squirming.

The first station she tunes into is playing “Uptown Girl” by Billy Joel. Poor Billy—he can’t even make it through a full line before Natalie shuts the radio off. Then she collapses in bed, pulling a pillow over her face and entirely giving up on ever feeling any better than she does right now. 

—

Natalie spends most of her winter break wondering if Lottie’s eating anything.

It’s such a dumb thing to worry about. Lottie’s the one with the personal chef. Lottie’s the one with the delivered groceries. Lottie’s the one with the pantry full of so much cereal she’s probably keeping entire acres of essential multigrains in business off of her bulk breakfast purchases alone. The farmers out in Iowa or wherever the fuck must love her.

But Lottie’s also the one who has to be reminded on the regular that her body actually needs sustenance, and can’t just run on wishes and the occasional Ring Pop bought on a whim from the 7-Eleven. Hunger will just slip Lottie’s mind like that; she misplaces her appetite the same way most people lose their sunglasses or their car keys. And you can find it for her, jangle it in front of her face, and she’ll grin and say, “Hey thanks, I was looking for that.” It just never seems to occur to her to go searching for it herself.

It had been Natalie’s job, for the better part of the past three months, to be that person, the one to remind Lottie that she’s a human being with needs and a growth spurt from eighth grade she still hasn’t fully compensated for. Nat didn’t mind it. It’s the best job she’d ever heard of that doesn’t require a high school diploma or CPR certification. All it took was shouting “Think fast!” and tossing an apple at Lottie’s face from across the living room, or trying out something interesting from one of the cookbooks posed on the shelves in the kitchen.

(The cookbooks, by the way, were clearly some interior decorator’s touch, since Martha did everything from memory and Lottie says she got her inability to so much as fry an egg from her mom. Natalie didn’t even bother to ask about Mr. Matthews. She tried fitting the stern, imposing man from the oil portrait above the stairs into a Kiss the Cook apron and nearly gave herself a brain hemorrhage.)

When things were good, it even seemed kind of funny, the way Lottie could forget all about eating until she stumbled in on Nat slicing tomatoes for a grilled cheese and then, bam! Magically, her knowledge of food was restored. Kind of endearing, how she seemed surprised by the discovery every time, how she’d dance around not wanting to ask Nat to make one for her. Kind of precious, how she’d gasp when Nat tipped the sandwich out onto a plate and wordlessly slid it across the counter to her before turning around to get started on a second one. 

Kind of life-affirming, how Lottie would come over and press a few dozen kisses to Natalie’s cheek before digging in, like lunch mattered approximately zero, wasn’t even worth remembering, but Natalie she could never dream of forgetting about.

Anyway, that was when things were good. Now that things are decidedly not good, Lottie’s carelessness about her calorie intake no longer seems like a charming quirk. Remembering it no longer brings to mind how Lottie would heap unending praise on Nat’s amateur attempts at haute cuisine, or how it felt like Pop Tarts were made especially for them, because there were two in there by default, like Kellogg knew their whole system and was making it easy for them.

Those images have been replaced with some downright dreary gothic shit. The ghost of a teenage girl haunting a big house on the other side of town, in a long raggedy nightgown maybe—not that Lottie owns any of those, seeing as she’s not from Charles Dickens times, but whatever—said teenage ghost looking like, as Van so gently put it, a complete wreck.

It’s not fair to act like she got that way from starvation though. What was it, that other thing Van said, about Natalie refusing to take responsibility? Well, fine.

Part of taking responsibility is being realistic about it, right? So scratch the long nightgown. Lottie’s probably in the pair of sweatpants she normally only wears when she’s on her period, doing a lot of staring miserably into space, being coaxed into eating at least two square meals a day by Martha, who was hired for essentially that exact purpose on top of keeping the house from burning down. Or maybe Lottie is sobbing into pints of ice cream, like the girls in the movies do when they get dumped, calling up everyone she knows on the phone so they can tell her Natalie’s a piece of shit who never deserved her anyway.

(If that’s what she’s after, honestly the first person she should call is Natalie herself. But then again, there’s a long, long list of people out there with a backlog of all sorts of nasty shit to say about Natalie Scatorccio, and Lottie probably wants talk to every single one of them more than she wants to talk to Nat right now.)

Another way to think of it is that Lottie’s totally fine. She’s had a good two weeks to get it out of her system, to come to her senses. Odds are, by the time January 2nd rolls around and Natalie has to drag her ass back to school or risk getting a truancy officer sicced on her, Lottie will be completely over it—their brief relationship gone with the wind, washed down the drain like spit-up toothpaste before it can stick to the porcelain.

Which of course makes Natalie the sad sack, spending her entire break moping over a mess she made all by her damn self.

In some ways, it’s nice to imagine that Lottie has moved on. If Lottie has moved on, that means maybe what Natalie did wasn’t so bad. That Lottie never really cared all that much, and Natalie completely overestimated her own importance, so all her attempts to hurt Lottie just sort of glanced off. Fell impotently to the floor, for Martha to pick up later before she vacuums. 

Picturing it that way never really works though. Maybe because it doesn’t hurt enough. 

Because when you get down to it, Natalie’s pretty used to not mattering all that much to people. Oh, it still feels like a kick to the ribs, but it’s a familiar blow. But this idea that she had actually mattered to someone, and she completely wasted it, and that inexplicable someone and her too-kind heart wound up collateral damage to Nat’s pathetic insecurities—that’s a whole new world of hurt. They need an entirely different pain chart to measure that kind of suffering. The smiley to frowny scale isn’t going to cut it.

In the last dreary weeks of December in Wiskayok, it finally starts snowing and doesn’t stop. The trailer park disappears beneath eight inches of thick white powder, drifts building up against the Fords on their cinderblocks, icicles hanging from the eaves like an anglerfish’s fucked-up needle teeth. (To be fair, not the worst dental situation Nat’s seen around these parts. Not even close.)

Sometimes, through the thin outer walls of her bedroom, Natalie hears kids screaming their lungs out as they roll around in the unplowed roads, making snowmen and knocking them down with shovels, pushing their friends off the top of big snow piles and laughing their heads off. Through the thin inner walls of her bedroom, Nat hears silence, mostly, punctuated every so often by the rattle of the fridge opening, the bland, wordless droning of the TV in the living room, the futile chugging of the generator trying to keep out the chill. Nat can only get warm when she’s in bed, buried beneath blankets, sheets pulled up to her chin.

That’s one excuse, at least, for why she spends her break almost exclusively horizontal, only getting up to go to the bathroom or fill the cup she keeps on her bedside table with tap water. 

(You know, before she lived with Lottie, “tap water” wasn’t really a thing. If you filled your glass up at the faucet, you just called that water, because where the fuck else were you supposed to fill it up? This being one of the more minor shifts in her perspective since she took her look-see at how the other half lives. But if that’s sticking around, what else is she never going to be able to look at the same way? Well, the mirror, for starters.)

Despite Natalie’s occasional trips to the sink, her new routine of crying on and off most hours of the day leaves her head pounding from dehydration more often then not. Sleeping isn’t doing much for her either. Natalie has this vague memory of Coach Scott standing at the front of their Health class, rattling off from his little info sheet that the average teenager needs seven to nine hours of sleep to feel completely rested. Never before has Nat been so sure that high school is a total fucking charade, because lately she’s been averaging at least twelve hours a day, easy, and she feels like total dogshit.

Her mom leaves her alone for the most part, other than the occasional grumble about dishes in the sink or shoveling that isn’t going to do itself. It’s all toothless. Vera’s not really the physical kind—she leaves the heavy lifting to the boyfriends, and luckily no one has yet come along to fill Pete’s beat-to-shit work boots. All of Vera’s power lives in her words, in how they can get right to the heart of you, drag you all the way down into the darkest recesses of yourself. 

But it’s not like Natalie can really be dragged any lower at this point, so. 

The snow will melt off their steps eventually. The dishes get done one way or another.

One thing about wallowing is that, at a certain point, it stops being cathartic or relieving and just becomes mechanical. It’s so dramatic that it comes back around to being boring, like a movie with a narcissistic director and an inexcusable run time—with Natalie trapped at the center of it, boxed in by the edges of the screen and basking in her own misery. It’s depressing, but it’s also so trite that even the artsy theater in New Brunswick wouldn’t play it. 

Another thing about wallowing is that it gets repetitive very quickly. There are only so many ways for Natalie to tear herself a new one, only so many moments that she can torture herself by revisiting. Nat replays herself walking out of Lottie’s house so many times the tape wears out, the memory warping, the details going fuzzy around the edges. The images of their good times—getting competitive over Civics flashcards, decanting a bottle of Mrs. Matthews’ wine to pair with their boxed mac and cheese, being so caught up in kissing they never find out if Bill Murray gets out of the time loop or not—end up smudged beyond recognition. They disappear beneath fingerprints and tear stains and scotch tape desperately trying to hold the torn pieces together.

The days bleed into one another. Christmas passes unremarked upon. On New Years Eve, someone a few trailers down sets off fireworks, and Natalie wakes up choking, her fingers cramping from their white-knuckle grip on a gun she hasn’t actually seen since the cops took it away as evidence. When she finally gets ahold of herself, collapsing on her mattress in a sweaty heap, Nat quickly glances over to make sure she hasn’t woken Lottie up with all the thrashing.

And yeah, it’s pretty devastating when she realizes. A banner start to the New Year for sure.

Natalie, in case anyone’s wondering, is eating anything she can get her hands on. Not for her, the carelessly skipped meals and “Oh, silly me”s. She’s starving all the goddamn time.

Maybe it’s because of her childhood—because isn’t fucking everything? That’s the sort of thing the shrinks on TV never stop harping about. You never escape your childhood. You’re always the little girl with the tanged hair, coming to realize that her daddy isn’t the same after he hits the bottle, that her mommy isn’t the same after Daddy hits her. You’re always the one taking the early bus for the free breakfast. You never have something in your lunchbox. You’re always going to be hungry.

And if you flip that idea—the way Natalie tries to when she’s feeling really bitter—maybe that’s why Lottie’s always forgetting to eat. Because she’s never known hunger like that. She’s never had to. Anything she’s ever wanted, it’s always been handed right to her, on a silver platter with pretty little toothpick stuck through it. And maybe that means that Lottie is actually a very bad person, the sort of person it’s easy to hate, the sort of person who it’s okay to yell at and lie to and treat like total shit.

An easy enough thing to believe about Lottie, if you only know about her big house, or her important parents, or her pretty clothes that come in shiny bags and cost a fortune. Without much effort, you could probably keep up this idea that Lottie Matthews is some kind of spoiled brat, stuck-up bitch, glossy soulless magazine ad come to life, just so long as you’ve never spent a single moment with her in your life.

But Natalie lived with her, for months. She can’t believe it, can’t keep it up for longer than a minute before it’s back to wallowing, back to randomly tearing up, back to hating every waking moment of every day. So it’s no wonder that she’s sleeping so goddamn much. It’s the closest she ever gets to forgetting. 

—

“Wanna go smoke?”

Kevyn’s brow furrows. “What?” 

He shoots Natalie a sideways glance, then goes back to sifting through the mess of books and papers cluttering up his locker. He pulls out a textbook, and the heap of crumpled homework assignments precariously stacked on top of it tumbles down like a cardboard house meeting a hurricane. Looking at the mess makes Nat feel all twitchy, so she doesn’t look. Instead she studies Kevyn’s profile, trying to figure out what’s up with him and his weirdly closed-off posture. 

“Do you want to smoke?” she repeats, shoving her hands into her jacket pockets. “I’ve got a joint. We can take it under the bleachers.”

Kevyn’s frown deepens. “It’s like 9 a.m.”

“I didn’t ask what time it is.”

“It’s January. If we smoke outside right now, I’m going to freeze my balls off.”

Natalie works her jaw, a surging tide of disappointment and resentment flooding her chest, lapping against all the other feelings jumbled up inside of her like one of those oil rig wrecks that kills baby ducks. She holds her expression steady. 

“So, is that a no, or?”

Kevyn’s eyes fall shut, his shoulders sinking, his jaw tight. Then he pastes on a wide smile, closes his locker and turns to Nat like he just noticed her standing there.

“Oh, hi, Nat. My winter break was great, thanks for asking. Happy New Year to you too.”

He can’t keep up the act for more than a few seconds. His expression caves in, crumbling into disarray like that heap in his locker. His mouth settles in a firm, disgruntled line. Natalie narrows her eyes.

“What was that?”

“That’s how a normal person has a conversation with someone. I thought maybe I should demonstrate, since you seem to have forgotten how to do it.”

“I don’t…” The raw bitterness in his tone catches Natalie off guard. “What, are you mad at me or something?”

“No,” Kevyn says, then seems to reconsider. “I mean, yeah, kinda. You haven’t talked to me in like a month, and now you’re asking me to cut class and smoke weed with you like an hour into our first day back. What’s going on with you?”

Natalie rankles, shrugging deeper into her jacket.

“None of your business. I’ve just been dealing with shit, okay? I don’t want to talk about it, I want to get fucking stoned. Is that a crime?”

“I mean, technically, yeah.”

Natalie doesn’t respond, just leans a shoulder against the wall and glares. The fastenings on her jacket clang jarringly on the lockers, metal on metal, cold and unyielding.

After a tense moment, Kevyn shrugs, frustration lining his face. “Look, I get you don’t want to talk about it. But I don’t want to just sit there smoking with you and acting like everything’s fine when you’re clearly not okay.”

“Wow,” Nat huffs. “Some fucking friend you are.”

Kevyn’s body slackens, his expression folding with remorse, and Nat has to swallow down the guilt that tries to bubble up in her throat.

“Come on, Nat,” Kevyn says. “Don’t be like that. You know I’m your friend.”

Natalie grits her teeth. “Then fucking act like it. Don’t act like my therapist.” 

She pauses, realizes her fingernails have been cutting deep furrows into her palms from how tightly she’s been clenching her fists. She takes a purposeful breath. She withdraws her hands from her pockets, letting them hang loose at her sides.

“I didn’t mean to stop talking to you, alright?” she says. “I just got… distracted by shit. But I do actually want to catch up.”

Kevyn studies her expression carefully, and Natalie tries to let him—tries to fight that constant urge to conceal everything, tries to just let how she honestly feels show on her face. God knows what Kevyn’s getting though. Nothing worth all this effort he’s putting in to decipher it, that’s for sure.

“Catch up?” he repeats doubtfully. “And by that you mean smoke a joint?”

“I mean, most of the time people like, talk to each other while catching up. But I guess we can also smoke. If you insist, you fucking burnout.” Natalie makes herself grin so he knows that it was a joke. After a moment, Kevyn returns the smile.

“Fine. I guess if you’re willing to pick me over one of your soccer buddies, I shouldn’t push my luck.”

Nat cuffs him lightly on the shoulder. “Hey, you’ve got ’em all beat, no contest. I mean, would any of them have been smart enough to point out that it’s cold outside in January? I doubt it.”

“Well, when you don’t have any balls that can freeze off, it’s easy to forget about that kind of stuff.” Kevyn slings his backpack over his shoulder. “How about we do the bathroom off the science hallway? We can crack the window.”

Natalie pushes off the lockers. “Lead the way, Einstein.”

They start off down the hall. Kevyn quickly launches into a compilation of all the epic moments Nat missed over break, mostly consisting of him and Rich getting stoned and him and Rich nearly getting busted by their parents for getting stoned. What a little hypocrite, acting like he’s too good to smoke weed at 9 a.m. Acting like there’s got to be something up with Nat if she’s trying to get high that early in the day.

Like, obviously there is something up with Nat. But in no way does she want to get into that. Not with Kevyn, not with anybody. Not now, not ever.

And she’s so close to getting away with it—they’re just down the hall from the girls’ bathroom past the Chem labs, which has been out of order for as long as anyone can remember and is thus the top spot for anyone looking to skip class or worse. She’s so close she can almost smell the stale pot smoke, feel the mediocre buzz of Randy Walsh’s ditchweed, sense her mind blissfully clearing of all thought beyond the almost-pleasant descent into bottom dollar oblivion.

Then she sees Lottie coming down the hall.

Natalie stops; Kevyn keeps walking, keeps yammering on about beating Super Metroid, unaware that his audience is frozen in place about ten steps back, rooted to the linoleum like a stubborn, stupid tree that picked just about the worst place to set up shop. A tree struck by lightning, smoldering from the inside, seconds away from splitting down the middle and toppling right over.

Lottie, also, keeps walking. She doesn’t seem aware that Natalie is standing there, but to be completely honest, she doesn’t seem aware of much of anything. 

The crowd parts around her, naturally—thankfully, really, because she is not looking where she’s going. Her eyes, darkened and nearly glazed over, are fixed on the ground. Her hair hangs limp, dull under the light like maybe it’s gone a bit too long without being washed. Her shirt is wrinkled. Her fingernails are bitten down to the quick. The way she’s slouching, holding her notebooks tight to her chest and bowing her head, makes her look about five inches shorter. Makes her look like a different person entirely.

Natalie feels an urge to run far, far away—maybe hop on an oceanliner, maybe get lost at sea and never be seen again. She feels another urge to dart forward, to cup Lottie’s jaw in her hands, to take her gently by the arm and lead her away from the eyes, maybe to a quiet place where they can talk about what’s going on with her. Not that Nat really needs to ask.

Not that gentleness is going to do any good now. Too little, too goddamn late.

Lottie passes by, oblivious, and disappears into her Bio classroom. Natalie’s heart sinks like someone loaded its pockets up with stones and nudged it into a river. In Lottie’s wake, whispers well up, the scattered crowd coming back together to murmur between themselves. Nat can guess what they’re talking about.

So Lottie is not fine. She’s not fine at all. She’s so not fine that it’s been over two weeks and she’s still wearing her misery like it’s one of Cosmo’s winter must-haves. She’s not even pretending to be fine, if only for the sake of stalling the high school rumor mill. It’s like she’s not even embarrassed about it. Or like it’s so awful she can’t even help it.

“Hey, you good?”

Natalie looks up. Kevyn is watching her with open concern. She swallows thickly.

“Nope,” she admits, her voice wavering. “Can’t say that I am.”

Kevyn bites his lip. 

“But you don’t want to talk about it, do you?”

Natalie shakes her head. He takes a deep, considerate breath, and nods once. 

They slip into the bathroom, and Kevyn pushes the trashcan in front of the door so that no one can come in after them. Natalie watches him do it, joint forgotten between her fingers. She thinks about piling so much else in front of the door that she never has to emerge from the girl’s bathroom past the science hall ever again. She thinks about the walls being engulfed in flames and the firefighters not being able to make it through in time.

That’s not really fair to Kevyn, though, that he’d end up trapped in here with her. She passes him the joint and the lighter and lets him take the first couple hits while she leans her head back against the cool tile wall. She splays her legs out on the ground in front of her, and she tries not to think about what she’s going to do when she finally does have to leave this room.

—

“You can’t skip another practice.”

Natalie stifles a groan, passing the receiver to her other hand so she can slump over the kitchen counter and bury her face in the crook of her elbow. She knew answering the phone was a dumbass idea. But if it kept on ringing someone was going to end up strangled with the cord, most likely Nat herself.

“Who is this?” she asks, just to be a dick.

“Get fucking real, Natalie,” Taissa responds.

“It’s not even actual practice. It’s winter conditioning. Who cares?”

“If you miss it again without a real excuse, you’re off the team.”

Natalie snorts derisively. “Oh, yeah? Says who?”

“Martinez.”

Nat bites down hard on the dead skin on her lip. “Really?” Realizing that it sounded for a moment there like she actually cared, Nat overcompensates by shrugging disaffectedly, even though Taissa cannot see her through the phone line. “I mean, whatever.”

“Natalie, what the fuck.”

Nat tightens her grip on the phone. She’s alone in the trailer, but she still can’t stand in the kitchen for this long without feeling eyes crawling up and down her back. Her every instinct tells her to flee to a safe warren, to make herself scarce so that the predators—lazy pieces of shit that they are—will get bored or find someone else to maul. But instead she’s standing around in plain sight, having this pointless conversation, like the stupidest squirrel on the planet.

“I’m sure Van told you about everything,” Nat mutters into the receiver. “Is that not a real enough fucking excuse? Have you asked Lottie if she wants me at practice?”

Theres a heavy silence on the other side of the line. Natalie braces herself for the response. She strains her ears to make sure she hears it. She tells herself she couldn’t care less. 

Taissa takes a measured inhale before saying, “She doesn’t want you to get kicked off the team.”

Bitterly, Natalie notes that that is not an answer to the question she asked. She huffs shortly, her breath sticking fast in her chest.

“Well, she should.”

“ Holy shit,” Taissa scoffs. “You’re coming to practice if I have to drag you there myself.”

“What the fuck ever, Tai. You’re not even captain. Give it a rest and let me rot, alright?”

“Nice try. Van told me to anticipate some low blows. I don’t give a shit what you say to me, Nat. If you’re so beholden to a captain’s authority all of a sudden, I’ll get Jackie on the line.”

Natalie pauses. “No, you wouldn't.”

When she hears dialing, Natalie slams the phone back into its hook on the wall. She watches it for a moment, like it might burst into flames—and it doesn’t, to be clear, which is just too bad. If it’s windy enough outside, they might have been able to take out the whole trailer park—scorch the Earth, dump some Morton on it, call it a day. 

Natalie lingers for a moment, tapping her thumb on the countertop, staring determinedly into space. Then she hears a creak on the steps outside, and quickly snatches a granola bar before darting back into her room.

—

When Natalie shows up to the next practice, the gym is buzzing with an odd energy—like a worn old sweater that’s been generating static, just waiting to zap the shit out of the first idiot that touches a doorknob or brushes up against another person. And sure, maybe some of that weird vibe is Nat’s fault, because she refuses to make eye contact with anyone or play along with their jokes or interact with her teammates in any way other than receiving the ball when it’s passed to her and kicking it away as quickly as possible. Maybe that’s adding a bit to the tension. 

But in her defense, no one else is acting normal either.

Taissa, despite all that effort she put into her scary phonecall, couldn’t seem less excited to see Natalie when she walks into the locker room. A look of stern disapproval freezes on her face at the start of practice and doesn’t thaw for the next two hours. Even when one of the lacrosse players that likes to cut through the gym to gawk at the team takes a soccer ball straight to the dick, Tai’s expression doesn’t crack. She just glares at his friends until they pass her ball back to her.

Van stands in the pop up goal under the basketball hoop, taking every chance between wind sprints and agility drills to send searching looks Nat’s way. Nat, for her part, avoids those looks like they’re foam footballs in one of the pointless games the P.E. teachers have been making up ever since dodgeball got banned in the county. (A kid in Lawrence township got put in a coma. It was a whole thing.) And the longer Natalie ignores her, the more frustrated Van gets, until she and Taissa are wearing matching expressions of pure, hardly-repressed fury. How embarrassing for them. Somebody’s gonna have to change.

Even the people who have no idea about the whole thing have picked up on the obvious weirdness. There’s a lot of confused glancing around, furrowed brows, whispers behind cupped hands. Jackie’s trying to rally, but not even her unceasing pep can persuade the team to deny the painful awkwardness unfolding right in front of their faces. Eventually she caves and starts whispering to Shauna, her big eyes scoping out the scene like a noir detective in a Prom Princess’ body. Martinez has to blow his whistle three times to get their attention after water break, but even when they’re all quiet, it’s pretty clear they aren’t listening to him.

As they line up for a shooting drill, Natalie watches Laura Lee, her mouth folded into the purest little frown, walk up to Lottie and mumble something to her—presumably something along the lines of “What the fuck happened?” but in more god fearing language. Lottie bites her lip and mumbles something back, and Natalie looks away, her ears burning, more sure than ever that she’s going to hell.

In general, Natalie’s really trying not to look at Lottie, but that’s just where her eyes drift, you know? Like that’s where they want to be. On the firm set of Lottie’s shoulders, the smooth cut of her jaw, the scuffs on the toes of her shoes. Nat’s got no right to look, she knows that. Honestly she’s got no right to be here. If there was any justice at all in the world, Nat would’ve been scraped off the windshield a good while ago.

Lottie has this uncanny ability to know when Nat’s looking at her. When Lottie returns the look, her eyes are big and dark and they ask so many questions that Natalie doesn’t understand, let alone know any of the answers to. So Nat looks away and tells herself she’s just got to keep her head down, until she finds herself, minutes later, inevitably looking back. And thus they chase each other around in these little, awful circles, and it’s more draining then any drill the coaches have ever come up with.

Nobody on the team really says anything about it though. They might all be murmuring to each other, wondering why half the seniors have been replaced by increasingly edgy clones of themselves, but it seems they all crunched the numbers and concluded that any pros there might be to getting everything out in the open are outweighed by the one gigantic con of the entire team imploding on the spot the second they try to talk about anything real. 

Mounting tension, the team has wordlessly decided, is better than picking smoking chunks of a promising season out of their hair. 

So everyone recognizes that there’s something up, but they all choose, tactfully, to keep it to their goddamn selves. Most of them, anyway. Everyone who isn’t the actual fucking worst.

—

“No, practice has been like, so weird lately. And like I have no idea what’s going on with all of them. They’re acting crazy.”

Natalie looks up from her Civics textbook as a distinctive voice flares up in the tentative silence of the school library. 

“What, are they all synced up or something?” another, maler voice asks, sniggering.

Girlish, irritating giggling. “I mean, maybe.”

Without thinking—because when has she ever thought before doing something reckless?—Nat shuts her book and stands out of her chair, putting about as much effort into being stealthy as she’d just been putting into her homework, which is to say, the absolute bare minimum. 

It doesn’t matter. Allie’s too busy leaning against the shelves and twirling her hair for two freshman jagoffs to notice Nat coming around the corner. 

“It’s just like, I don’t get it. What’s their deal, you know?” Allie asks.

Nat lingers at the end of the row, barely pretending to scan the shelves. One of the freshmen scratches the back of his head.

“So you don’t know what’s going on with Lottie Matthews then?”

Natalie’s pulse shoots to the moon. Allie shakes her head. “Do you know her?”

“I mean, I’d like to know her.” 

The guy raises his eyebrows suggestively. Allie giggles again, noticeably more forced this time. Natalie only just keeps herself from punching the spine of a medical dictionary.

“No, I mean, she’s been walking around like a zombie for like, weeks now,” Allie says. “It’s freaky as hell. And I’m pretty sure she isn’t brushing her hair. She looks like she escaped from an institution or something.”

The guys’ expressions crease with vague disgust, which in turn makes Allie beam like she was just elected to Homecoming court. Natalie takes a deep breath. Then another. 

Then she marches down the row, her jaw tight, her nails digging into her palms.

“Hey, Allie—would it kill you to stop being a cunt for five minutes? Like would it put you in the hospital?”

The freshman guys see her first; they take reflexive steps back, their hands coming out defensively in front of them. Allie turns quickly, her eyes widening when they land on Nat.

“Natalie,” Allie says, her voice high and breathy. “I didn’t know you were standing there.”

“Yeah, you don’t know shit. That’s sort of your whole problem.” Natalie stares her down, unflinching. “You’ve got no idea what Lottie’s dealing with. Shut your fucking mouth.”

Allie lets out a little choked noise. “God… I, I didn’t think you even liked her.”

Natalie’s throat tries to close up. Past the tightness, she rasps out, “She’s our teammate. We’re supposed to look out for each other, not spread desperate gossip to impress limp dicks on the baseball team.” The limp dicks in question seem to be a bit offended, but Natalie really isn’t worried about them right now. “You know, I don’t have to like Lottie to be a decent person.”

Allie’s expression sours like milk left in the sun. 

“I actually don’t need you to teach me about decency, thanks.”

Her prissiness is so exaggerated, Natalie could laugh, if she wasn’t too busy trying not to give the Stevens’ an excuse to press charges. “Allie,” she says bluntly. “I don’t give shit what you think about me. Keep Lottie’s name out of your mouth, or I’ll make sure you’re benched for all of playoffs.”

“Coach isn’t going to take me out just because you tattle on me,” Allie says.

Natalie raises her eyebrows. “Who said anything about Coach taking you out?”

As she catches on to Natalie’s meaning, Allie’s mouth falls open. Then she huffs and looks off, crossing her arms petulantly.

“Jesus,” Allie mutters. “Does Lottie know that you’ve got some psycho obsession with her? Maybe you should be in a institution instead.”

Natalie sneers, rolling her eyes and opening her mouth to bite back, but then Allie goes ghost white, staring at something over Natalie’s shoulder. 

“Okay, Allie, I think that’s enough—”

Nat doesn’t need to turn around to know who it is. Even if she hadn’t heard the voice, she’d recognize that cherry blossom scent anywhere.

“Oh my god, Lottie.” Allie’s voice has reached new peaks of high pitched. “I swear, I didn’t mean—I was just kidding, it wasn’t serious—”

Lottie says something that cuts Allie off, but Natalie can’t entirely make it out through the thunder of blood in her ears. She feels held in place, like the soles of her boots are melting into the fuzzy plastic carpeting. The freshman guys flee like their Levi’s are on fire, and after another moment Allie follows them, stammering excuses all the way down the row until she disappears around the corner.

At some point, after what feels like an eternity of blind breathing, Lottie seems to realize that Nat isn’t going to turn around. So she takes the few steps forward, coming into focus like a spirit, like some fucking Marian apparition—Our Lady of Boundless Sorrow and Big Brown Eyes. Lottie opens her mouth like she’s going to speak.

And Natalie bolts. 

Like an idiot, like a coward, like a fucking asshole—she just looks at the ground and makes for the end of the row. She accidently brushes Lottie’s shoulder on the way. The touch burns through her body like a spark eating tinder. 

Natalie doesn’t stop walking until she’s out of the building. Some part of her feels like she should never stop—she’ll hit the end of the world eventually, right, and then she can just peacefully tip over the edge. Who’d notice? Who’d care? What’s the fucking point of any of it anyway?

—

When Natalie gets called into the guidance counselor’s office a few days later, she’s pretty sure it’s because Allie ran crying to Mommy, so she spends the walk to the office practicing her “I’m sorry” face and counting out many detention periods there are left in the year, just to get an idea of the upper bound for her possible punishment. 

Then again, they could just expel her. The sky’s really the limit here.

But when she sits down in the creaky leather chair, twisting back and forth on the swivel—but it’s not like she’s nervous or anything—Ms. Djokovic doesn’t mention detentions, or any kind of punishment, or even bring up Allie at all. She’s got Natalie’s most recent Trig test sitting on her desk in front of her. A spiky red D stares them both in the face. 

Natalie considers telling on herself just to change the subject.

Djokovic’s whole subsequent spiel is just absolutely typical. What happened? You were doing so well. Is there something going on at home? This is really disappointing. I know you’re capable for more than this, Natalie. It’s okay to ask for help if you need it, Natalie. You had a good thing going and you’re fucking it all up, Natalie.

It all feels hollow, rehashed: microwaved leftovers burning your mouth on the first bite but freezing and soggy at the center. All it really tells her is that when you get down to it, apparently grades are fucking bogus. If the same student can go from barely scraping by to encroaching on honor roll territory then back down to plumbing the absolute depths of inadequacy in less than a semester—that shit is the system’s fault. They all might as well draw their GPAs out of a fucking top hat.

And, at the same time, it hurts. It curdles in the pit of her stomach and burns behind her eyes. Because Natalie’s never had this talk before. Because this is the kind of talk they give the kids with potential, the kids who could do something with their lives but for whatever dumbass reason they’re throwing it all away. The lost causes don’t get a talk. So clearly the line between potential and lost cause is some kind of bullshit too.

But like, why is it that no one ever thought Nat could do this before? How come it never occurred to anybody that Nat could have been getting as good of grades as anyone if this whole time she’d been living in a big clean mansion with a housekeeper and no asshole parents? Hasn’t anybody else ever noticed how much easier it is to study without the shouting in the background, without the neverending growling in your stomach? Does it even matter that Natalie spent the first 18 years of her life convinced she was just plain dumb, nothing more nothing less, only to discover she’s actually a perfectly average student if you just give her a fucking chance?

And yeah, did she blow that chance to bits? Totally. The point still stands.

Natalie doesn’t respond to the spiel with anything more than shrugs and noncommittal mumbling, and after a good twenty minutes of that, Djokovic finally seems to give up. She sends Nat out of the office with an earnest plea that she not waste all the opportunities she’s been given and just apply herself a little harder. Natalie slams the door behind her and only kind of feels bad for scaring the little old receptionist sharpening her pencils outside.

She comes out of the front office and walks in the direction of her History class, thinking that by the time she gets back they’ll probably be onto a whole new World War so there probably isn’t any point in trying to catch up now. As she rounds a corner, Natalie spots a girl sitting on the floor against the lockers and twiddling her thumbs, golden brown hair falling over a face blank with boredom. Natalie groans inwardly. Jackie lifts her head and spots her.

“Oh, hey!” Jackie perks up, calling Nat over with a wave of her dainty hand. Natalie idles for a moment, then gives in. Right now, she feels like nothing so much as a lemon with a corroding battery and tank full of Dr. Pepper—even she, stubborn as she is, knows when it’s time to just pull over already.

Nat keeps her distance though, standing a good ten feet away to give herself a headstart in case she needs to peel out of there fast. “Hey, Jackie…”

Jackie’s smile brightens like the director of a toothpaste commercial just called action. Then her brow creases, her mouth folding into a suspicious frown. 

“Wait, are you cutting class?” She glances up and down the hallway like she’s waiting for a police cruiser to tear through the building. Nat’s too drained to be as offended as she probably should be.

“No,” she says dully. “Are you?”

At least Jackie has the decency to look chastised. “Oh, no. I have a free period.”

“You spend all your free periods hanging out in the middle of empty hallways?”

Jackie shakes her head; Nat can’t tell if she’s pretending not to understand the sarcasm or if her earnestness just really doesn't come with an off switch. 

“I’m waiting for Shauna.” Jackie nods towards a door down the hall. “She’s talking to Mr. Davis about an essay.”

“Let me guess,” Nat says. “She wants him to extend the page limit by a few dozen?”

Jackie giggles. Okay, so that’s a “sometimes” on the sarcasm.

“Yeah, something like that,” Jackie says. “I think she’s stressed about her thesis statement. I don’t know why though. It sounded perfectly good to me.”

“Well,” Natalie says, “if it sounded good to you…” Jackie rolls her eyes. 

“Okay, I know I’m not like, Captain English or anything, but you know what I mean. Shauna’s good at everything. She’s going to ace it easy.”

Natalie shrugs. “I mean, yeah, you’re probably right.”

“It’s really kind of you to admit that that’s possible.”

Jackie’s lips curve into another grin, this one less Colgate and more Cheshire. Natalie returns the smile warily.

“You know me. Captain Kindness.”

They hover there for a moment in a kind of uncharted territory, neither one of them knowing what they’re supposed to do next. Well, Nat knows what she’s supposed to do, and it involves going back to class and building a diorama of the RMS Lusitania out of tissue boxes. 

It’s kind of wild, actually, that carrying on this chat with Jackie Taylor is seeming like a pretty attractive way to spend her afternoon.

Before Nat can make a move either way, Jackie smooths her hands along her pleated skirt and stands up from the floor, leaning back against the lockers with faux nonchalance. She crosses her arms, studying Natalie like there’s a math equation scrawled across her face.

“Hey, so I’ve been meaning to ask…” Jackie says carefully. “You’ve seemed off recently.”
Nat takes back everything good she ever thought about chatting with Jackie Taylor. Her eyes dart to the other side of the hall, trailing evasively over the flaking paint and misspelled graffiti that covers the opposite locker bank. 

“Damn,” Nat says, her voice gruff. “You really do suck at English. Because that was definitely not a question, and basic sentence structures are like third grade shit.”

Jackie tips her head back, exasperated. “Fine. I’ve been meaning to make a declarative statement to you. You’ve seemed off recently.”

Natalie’s eyes flick to the floor; she grinds her heel against the streaky linoleum and finds it frustratingly solid. 

“Have I?”

“Yeah, you have.” Jackie uncrosses her arms, setting her shoulders. “Okay, here comes the question. Don’t bite my head off, please.”

“No promises.”

“Did something happen between you and Lottie?”

All of Natalie’s muscles tense. She keeps a tight grip on her facial expression, slowly lifting her head. 

“What do you mean by that?”

Jackie carries on, entirely unassuming. “Just that I know you two were getting kind of close there for a second. Like I know she was driving you home from practice—”

“You knew about that?”

“Yeah, I mean,” Jackie shrugs, “it wasn’t hard to know about. I saw you two at the 7-Eleven one time.”

“When?”

“Like, November? Early December? I don’t know. I didn’t write it down in my diary or anything.”

“But you never told anyone about it?”

“No?” Jackie furrows her brow. “Why would I? I mean, not to be rude or whatever, but why would anyone care? You’re teammates sharing a ride. I don’t call the papers every time Mari and Akilah split a protein bar.”

“Okay, I get it.” Natalie scowls. “Nobody gives a fuck. It was insanely insignificant. Hearing you loud and clear.”

“Yeah, but like, did something happen?” Jackie’s wearing this concerned expression now, the face she probably pulls when she sees dead rabbits on the side of the road. “Because you seemed like really good friends, but now you don’t even really look at each other? And you both seem like, majorly bummed out all the time? And Allie told me that you kind of snapped at her last week—and to be clear, I’m not trying to criticize you for that, it seemed like she totally deserved it. But I just wanted to check in with you, you know, about how you’re feeling.”

Natalie purses her lips. She can feel her heartbeat faintly in her throat, like her jugular’s wrapped itself anaconda-style around her airways.

“…Have you asked Lottie about it?”

Jackie groans, peevishly tucking her hair behind her ear. “No. Recently talking to her has been like trying to talk to a brick wall. Or like, an abstract painting or something. Like I can say whatever I want, but I’m really not getting anything useful from her.”

“Whereas I’m known for being so open and communicative all the time,” Nat says drily. Jackie shrugs. 

“Well, I figured that at least if you yelled at me or cussed me out or whatever, that’d give me some kind of information.”

Natalie bites down on her tongue. Her mouth tastes like salt. She studies Jackie, the frankness of her posture, the lack of pretext, and she remembers words mumbled in a bathroom at party months ago. Nat finds that she agrees with Shauna: Jackie, for all her faults, is unrelentingly honest. And maybe Natalie gets it. Maybe it’s easier to just say it sometimes, instead wasting all this time burying your feelings in the backyard like you don’t trust the banks. 

“Alright, well.” Natalie lets out a deep exhale. “I’ll be up front with you, Jackie. I’m feeling like absolute shit. Is that valuable information?”

“Yes, it is! I mean—” Jackie arranges her expression into something a little more sober, a little less ecstatic. “I mean, why do you feel that way? Because something happened with Lottie?”

“Yeah,” Nat mutters. “Something with Lottie. We… had a fight.”

“About what?”

“Uh…” 

Natalie furrows her brow. She has a choice to make here: she can either come up with some half-baked lie and flounder through this conversation like a kid at the Y doing doggy paddle, or she can go full ham and spill it all, dive right into the deep end with no water wings.

“A scarf,” Natalie says. “We fought about a scarf.”

(There’s no shame in doggy paddle, alright? Or water wings. You’re still fucking swimming.)

Jackie narrows her eyes. “A scarf…?”

“Yep.” Natalie nods, probably too vigorously. “I, uh, I borrowed a scarf from her and then I just… I ruined it. Ripped it to shreds. Completely trashed.”

“Okay…” Jackie tries to nod along. “So you ruined Lottie’s scarf and now she’s angry at you?”

Nat tilts her head, her conviction wavering. “I don’t think angry is really the right word.” Her voice is wavering a bit too, and she swallows to force some strength into it. “I guess, she seems more like, sad, about it.”

“Was it a special scarf, or?”

“I guess so.”All of a sudden it feels someone filled Nat’s lungs with asbestos. “I didn’t know that. I didn’t know how much it mattered to her. Or maybe I did, but it was just easier to convince myself that it wasn’t important. Especially after I’d fucked it up so bad.”

“Well, was it an accident?” Jackie asks.

Natalie cringes, biting her lip. 

“Not really.”

She averts her eyes, hoping not to see the moment where all the sympathy drains out of Jackie’s expression. Nat’s become strangely attached to that sympathy over the past few minutes—and honestly it’s kinda weirding her out. It’s like getting addicted to huffing Expo markers or something. Like really? You get to pick your poison, and that’s your choice? It makes heroin seem classy. At least you can’t buy dope at a fucking Staples.

But Jackie doesn’t pull away, doesn’t call Nat out for being a callous scarf-shredding monster. She just leans forward a bit, gently prompting Nat to continue. 

“Why’d you do it then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you like the scarf?” Jackie asks.

Natalie scratches her jaw. Her nails are blunt, her fingertips freezing. 

“Yeah, I mean, it was everything I could ask for really. In a scarf. It was soft and warm and like…” She cuts herself off before she chokes, blinking away the tears trying to pool in her eyes. “Yeah, it was like a really nice scarf.”

Natalie sniffs, wiping shamefully at her nose. This is the moment when Jackie should start laughing, should call her out for being a soupy little loser who cries about scarves. But again, Jackie Taylor defies the odds.

  “Okay, so like, objectively, it was good,” Jackie says, very matter-of-fact. “But did you like it?”

Natalie frowns. “What’s the difference?”

“Well like…” Jackie purses her lips. “When I go shopping, right, I see clothes all the time that objectively I know they’re cute. But then I try them on, and they just feel wrong. Like they don’t work for me, even though I feel like they should. And it can be really frustrating, you know?” She scowls deeply. “Like I actually get kind of pissed off about it.” 

Jackie looks up like she just realized the hallway isn’t empty. She clears her throat with a little cough, pasting on a smile.

“So, um, is that what it was like for you?”

Natalie crosses her arms, leaning back against the lockers to think about it.

“You know, maybe a little bit, yeah. I don’t know. When Lottie wore it, it looked so good. But I don’t think I was really pulling it off.”

“How did Lottie think you looked in it?” Jackie asks.

“She, uh…” 

Nat’s face burns. Her water wings have sprung a leak. She’s sinking fast. 

“Lottie said I looked beautiful,” she admits to scrunched insides of her eyelids.

Jackie, thank Christ, doesn’t notice Nat’s humiliation. She’s off on her own thing again.

“God, yeah, I mean. That’s tough,” Jackie says. “That’s really tough, when you think one thing about an outfit but your friend thinks something entirely different. I have that argument with Shauna constantly. I’ll tell her she looks so good, like drop-dead gorgeous, because that’s what I think, you know? And it’s like she thinks I’m making fun of her or something. And she doesn’t get how I feel about clothes at all.”

Natalie watches Jackie carefully, and it’s one of the only times Nat has looked at Jackie and suspected they might actually be the same species.

“That sounds really rough, Jackie,” Natalie says honestly. Jackie shrugs it off. 

“I mean, that’s friendship.”

“I guess.” Natalie looks away, narrowing her eyes. “I don’t know. That’s not really what the fight with Lottie was about though. Like I guess we disagreed about the scarf, but the reason she’s upset is because I ruined it.”

“So, does she want you to buy her a new one, or?”

Natalie leans her head back against the lockers, feeling the frigid, unyielding metal against the base of her skull.

“I’ve got no idea what she wants.”

“Well, if she wants you to buy a new one, call me crazy but I think that’s kind of petty of her,” Jackie says. “She could buy out a whole Burberry store if she wanted, but it’s not like you can—I mean, it would just be kind of stupid, that’s all.”

Jackie cringes, clearly apologetic, but Nat almost wants to tell her not to worry about it. They’re all adults here, with functioning eyes. They all know the score.

“Yeah,” Nat says. “Lottie could have any scarf in the world. I don’t really get why she’s so hung up on this one.”

Jackie tilts her chin, thinking deeply. “Well, I guess if it had sentimental value or something…” Her eyes light up like Christmas decorations on a timer. “You know, maybe you should try to fix it.”

Natalie raises her eyebrows skeptically. “The scarf?”

“Yeah! Can you sew or anything?”

“Uh… I’ve never tried.” Nat shakes her head bitterly. “I bet I’d be shit at it.”

“You can’t know until you give it a shot,” Jackie says. “That’s what I do, with Shauna, I mean. Sometimes she gets mad at me and I don’t even know what I did, and she won’t tell me, so I just keep trying stuff until I fix it. I don’t always get it right—I mean, honestly sometimes I think I’ve never gotten it right. But it’s the effort that really counts at the end of the day. I mean, can you make the scarf any worse?”

Natalie lets out a slow, heavy breath. “No, the scarf is… fucked as is.”

“So it can’t hurt,” Jackie says. “I’m sure Lottie will appreciate the gesture. And then you can be friends again.”

Natalie snorts derisively. “Like we’re on the fucking playground in first grade?”

“It’s not childish to have friends, Nat. Tons of mature adults have friends.”

“Do your parents have friends?” Nat asks. Jackie thinks about it for a second.

“My dad has golf buddies. And my mom’s a frigid bitch who’s tranqed out of her mind half the time. She doesn’t count.”

Natalie smiles wryly, looking off along the linoleum. When Jackie sees her expression, she misinterprets it, rolling her eyes defensively.

“Oh, hardy har har. I get it. The frigid bitch apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Natalie looks up. “No, that’s not—” She pauses, back pedaling for honesty’s sake. “Okay, yeah, I think you’re kinda uptight. But I was laughing more because like…” She shrugs. “I’m a bitch. I’ve been known to do a drug or two. Maybe I don’t count either.”

“Oh, you’re nothing like my mother,” Jackie says. “For one thing, if she heard any of the music you like, her head would explode. And I mean, you’re so far from judgmental. You know, you don’t try to make people feel bad just for being who they are. It’s like the coolest thing about you.”

Natalie’s stomach squirms uneasily—like a little kid in a too-tight turtleneck, listening to the priest going on for hours about how all the little kids who can’t sit still in church are going to Hell. 

“That and your bitchin’ leather jacket,” Jackie adds.

Nat raises her eyebrows. “Bitchin’?”

“Yeah,” Jackie says. She’s got a cocky little grin on her face. “Bitchin’.”

Before Natalie can find the words to respond to that, the door down the hall opens and Jackie whips her head around like a cocker spaniel who just heard the special whistle. Shauna comes towards them wearing an expression of faint confusion.

“Hey…” she says.

“Hi!” Jackie pushes off the lockers. “How’d it go?”

“Uh, good, I think.” Shauna looks down at the folder in her hands, picking at one of the corners. “I’m feeling a lot more confident about my paragraph transitions, so…”

Jackie beams in a way that makes it very obvious she doesn’t know why paragraph transitions matter or why anyone would ever lack confidence about them. “Awesome.”

Shauna looks past Jackie’s shoulder and waves awkwardly. “Hey, Natalie.”

Natalie returns the wave, also awkward. Jackie looks between the two of them, saying, “Oh, Nat and I were just chatting—”

“But we’re done with that,” Natalie interrupts. “I’m definitely cutting class now.” She tucks her hands into her pockets, starting to drift away down the hall.

“Okay, well, we’ll see you around then,” Jackie says. She adds: “And my mom has a sewing machine if you want to borrow it some time.”

Nat quirks her brow. “Are you sure you want to let me borrow something of yours, given my track record?”

“Everyone makes mistakes,” Jackie replies brightly. “I mean, I killed Shauna’s tamagotchi one time and she totally forgave me eventually.”

The sour look in Shauna’s eye tells a different story, one that does not inspire much confidence. Nat nods slowly.

“Right… Well, see you around. And uh.” She clears her throat. “Thanks.”

“No problem!” Jackie breezes.

Natalie turns around and walks off down the hall, her mind swinging like a bell in a church tower. When she gets back to History, she slips her teacher the note from the office and he doesn’t look to closely at the time on it, just hands her some cardboard and tells her to get gluing. And it’s amazing that she’s able to turn out anything remotely boat-like by the end of the period, given how distracted she is by the words of Jackie Taylor, of all people, ringing in her ears.

—

Mobile homes do not have very large kitchens. Natalie knows this. She knew it before visiting the Tan household and discovering that you can stack one oven on top of another and call that a “double oven” and not an “insane fire hazard.” She knew it before living for three months in a mansion with a marble-topped island big enough to get stranded on. Nat’s always known that her kitchen is small, but it’s normally enough space for whatever she needs to do in it, and she doesn’t spend all that much time in there, so she doesn’t really notice its size all that often. 

But the size of your fucking minuscule kitchen starts to become really damn noticeable when you’ve been pacing in circles around it for a good half hour. 

Natalie braces herself against the fridge, shooting an evasive glance at the phone mounted on the wall. It lingers in her line of sight like a flash of movement in the periphery of a predator, turning her head, drawing on all of her instincts. Except instead of pouncing on it, Nat’s like a wolf with a wittle toothache or some shit, too wimpy to just pick up the receiver and dial.

In a cowardly attempt at distraction, she fills a glass with water at the sink and downs it, setting it on the counter with enough force to break it if it were actually glass. She briefly considers stealing a beer or six from the fridge, then decides against it. She stares at the phone again, for what feels like years but what the microwave clock tells her is actually less than a minute. She groans.

Natalie drags herself, kicking and screaming, over to the phone and punches in the number before she can lose her nerve again. It rings for another few years (probably like four times max). Then the line clicks as it connects.

“Matthews’ Residence.”

Natalie wets her lips, her mouth suddenly unbearably dry.

“Hey, Martha. It’s Natalie.”

Martha’s voice is light and warm, like a cookie fresh out of the oven—not that Nat has extensive experience with freshly baked cookies, but she can imagine. 

“Oh, Natalie, it’s so good to hear from you. It’s been too long. How’s school going?”

“It’s, uh, it’s good. I built a really cool model ship in History the other day,” Nat says, really hamming it up. Martha coos appreciatively.

“That sounds like something Ricky would love.”

“Yeah,” Natalie says. “How’s he doing, by the way? How’s basketball?”

“Basketball is very bad. All the other boys are too tall for him. But he’s thinking about switching to soccer in the spring. I said you can give him some tips, yes?”

Natalie bites down hard on her bottom lip. “That’s, that’s really cool. For sure, I could give him some pointers.”

“Would you like to talk to Charlotte?”

“Uh, yeah,” Natalie clears her throat, “if she’s willing to talk to me.”

“She’s just in the parlor, I’ll bring you to her.”

There are faint sounds of footsteps on the other side of the line, tapping out a smooth rhythm to contrast the erratic beating of Nat’s heart. Crumbling under the weight of the silence, Nat leans against the counter, hiding her eyes with one hand.

“Wait, um, Martha, before you hand over the phone. I should tell you something.”

Martha hums. Natalie scrubs roughly at her forehead, goading the words out of her mouth.

“I, uh, I spilled nail polish on the chair in my—in the guest room.”

There’s a moment of quiet, and then: 

“Oh, you mean a couple of months ago? I already knew about that, sweetie.”

Natalie looks up, staring blankly out the window above the sink. There’s a kid and a dog out there, tussling in the dirty snow.

“Really? You already knew?”

“Yes, of course. Do you think I know nothing that goes on in this house?”

“But you never said anything.”

“Well, there was no harm done. I sent the cover to the dry cleaners and they got it out. There was no reason to embarrass you.”

“Oh.” Nat’s chest loosens, like someone forgot to the shut the door tight enough and the A/C is leaking out. “That’s good, I mean. I thought it was totally ruined.”

“There are very few things that can’t be fixed if you’re willing to put in the effort.”

It feels a bit pointed, the way she says it. 

“Yeah… yeah, sure. Well, thanks.”

“Of course, Natalie.”

In the background on Martha’s end, Nat starts to hear classical music playing—something slow on the piano, somber and heavy. It’s getting steadily louder, steadily sadder, until:

“Phone for you, Miss Charlotte. It’s Natalie.”

The music stops abruptly. 

There’s some muffled noise as Martha hands over the phone, and then, for the longest time, only silence. Natalie feels like she’s sinking underwater, holding her breath, painful pressure building on top of her. Then—

“Hello?”

Natalie surfaces, sucking in a deep breath.

“Hey,” she says. “Were you—were you playing the piano just now?”

Silence again, then Lottie says: 

“Yeah. Chopin, Ballade No. 4.”

“Oh, I, uh, I love that one.” Natalie cringes, rubbing her temple. “...So how’re you doing?”

“...I’m fine. How are you?”

“I’m good.” 

Nat trails her fingers over the countertop, scratching absentmindedly at an unidentifiable stain. 

“Hey, I hope the whole thing with Allie hasn’t been weighing on your mind too much. She was just being pissy because all the freshman boys think you’re hotter than she is. You shouldn’t take anything she says seriously.”

“I haven’t really thought about it since it happened to be honest. It was nice of you to stand up for me though.”

Natalie swallows thickly. “Sure. Anyway, it’s good you haven’t been thinking about it. And it seems like you’ve been doing better anyway.”

(A little over a week ago, Natalie noticed that Lottie had stopped wearing the same sweatshirt to school every day and started wearing lip gloss again. Apparently other people noticed too, because she heard some guys in study hall whispering about it, about how it looked like, finally, Lottie Matthews was done being weird and gross and back to being hot! Their obvious relief really pissed Nat the fuck off, but she kept herself from chucking a textbook at their heads by reasoning to herself that, if the reversion to form actually indicated that Lottie was starting to recover, that’d be a net good, right?)

There’s a long pause on the other side of the line. 

“Yeah, well. My parents are back.”

“Oh.” 

Nat presses a fist to her forehead. She should’ve remembered that. She should’ve remembered because the Matthews’ inevitable return to the roost sometime in January had for months hung over her head, like a knife poised to sever her tenuous connection to comfort and safety and premium cable—and that’s memorable. Nat should’ve remembered, and she should’ve kept her big mouth shut about how Lottie was doing, because she knows Lottie has her own reasons to dread the day her parents remember that they pay property taxes in New Jersey and decide to make a guest appearance at their own house.

“How’s that going?” Natalie asks, tentative.

“Could be worse.”

Nat can’t think of a response to that. She hums noncommittally, and Lottie hums back in noncommittal agreement. They linger for a moment.

“Is this why you called?” Lottie asks. “Just to talk about how I’m doing?”

“No, I, um.” God, a response to that is almost harder to come up with. “I was going ask if—I just, uh…I left some stuff at your house.”

Lottie breathes out. “Yeah. Martha put it all in a box for you.”

“That was nice of her,” Natalie says, like an idiot. “So I was wondering if I could swing by to pick it up?”

And what she’s going to do at that point, Nat hasn’t really figured out yet, but it’s a start, she’s trying to do something here, so if Lottie will just agree to—

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”  

Natalie’s stomach sinks like a cinderblock.

“I just mean, with my parents,” Lottie clarifies. “They don’t really like it when I have friends over.”

“Oh, sure,” Nat says. “Okay then. Um…”

“I could bring it to school on Monday.”

Natalie’s staring out the window again. The kid and the dog are gone, presumably moved on to less slushy pastures. The sky is overcast. On the trailer across the way, the icicles hanging of the porch are growing thinner by the day, dripping slowly into the mud. A small gust of wind tugs at the sodden flag hanging out over the neighbor’s scrap of lawn—some kind of family crest, for whatever that’s worth. A squirrel clambers along their porch railing then jumps onto the back of an adirondack chair, skittering then to the ground and across the yard. Natalie watches it until it vanishes behind the next trailer.

“Um… How about you bring the stuff to my place?”

“Really?”

Lottie sounds about as surprised as Nat feels, hearing those words come out of her mouth. Natalie swallows, squeezing her eyes shut tight.

“Yeah. I mean, if that’s cool with you. If you’re fine with making the drive.”

Nat’s foot starts tapping she waits for an answer. After a long moment, Lottie takes a breath in.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Nat asks. “Cool.” She figures they should get this over with as quickly as possible. “Can you come later today?” 

“I have a doctor’s appointment,” Lottie says.

“Oh.”

“But I could do tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Nat says. “Great. Noon?”

“Noon works.”

“Cool. I’ll see you then.”

The hand holding the phone has started to shake faintly. Natalie grips the receiver tight, preparing to slam it back into the cradle the second Lottie says bye, but before she can—

“Wait, Nat?”

“Yeah?”

“I need…” Lottie pauses. “What’s your address?”

Natalie leans back against the fridge. The handle pokes painfully at her ribs. Her voice comes out a gravelly, wry murmur.

“You know where I live, Lottie.”

She says it because it’s true. Because it’s always been true. Because no matter how much Natalie likes to pretend she could hide it, everyone knows, and Lottie, who seems to know most things, has definitely been entirely aware this whole time of the wretched stretch of dirt Nat calls home. It was nice of her to let Nat pretend for a while though. She’s always been so goddamn nice.

“Yeah, but I don’t know like, which one is yours.”

Nat rattles off the lot number, sketches out some brief instructions for navigating the park. She hears Lottie scribbling it down, pictures her tongue trapped between her teeth, a frown spreading across her face. A pit of dread growing in her stomach as she realizes what she’s agreed to.

“Alright, great.”

There’s no dread in Lottie’s voice, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Nat.”

“See you tomorrow, Lottie.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

Natalie waits until she hears the line click. Then she waits a bit longer, holding the phone up to her ear with both hands. Finally she puts it back on the hook and stares at it for as long as she can stand it.

When she loses the staring contest with the phone, Natalie is forced to look around the trailer. Her eyes graze over the cigarette burns on the arms of the couch; the towers of old newspapers spilling out of the hall closet; the dirty dishes stacked high in the sink; the rotten miserable state of the carpet.

She rubs at her eyes and heads to her room to take a nap. She’s exhausted.

—

At 11:30 the next day, the trailer looks more or less exactly the same as it did the day before. No woodland creatures spruced the place up while Nat was sleeping, no fairy godmother whacked her over the head with a magic wand and transformed her doublewide pumpkin into even a modest starter carriage. Natalie took the trash out and got maybe halfway through the dishes before giving up—it’s not so much that there were too many dishes, more so that there was no point. A clean pumpkin is still a pumpkin. No one at the ball is going to respect you more because the gourd you rode in on has been very shoddily vacuumed.

At 11:45, while Natalie is bouncing her knee on the couch and weighing the benefits of committing arson and fleeing the country, her mom comes out in a bathrobe. She scrounges around for the remote, then slumps down on the couch as the Price is Right theme crackles out of the TV. While some women in shiny dresses pose in front of skiing equipment, Vera shoots a sideways glance at her daughter.

“Are you sick? You look like you’re going to hurl.”

Natalie turns her face away.

“I’m fine. You ever considered putting real clothes on?”

“This is what I get for showing some concern.” Vera scoffs. “What, is the Queen of England coming for tea? Where are you going?”

“My room,” Natalie grunts, already halfway down the hall.

“I thought we were going to watch this together.”

“Don’t know what gave you that idea.”

Nat sits down on the edge of her bed and lets her knee start bouncing again. Maybe she should’ve tried to clean her room—made the bed or something, at least—but she feels like somehow the pretense would be obvious. Like it’d be just so evident, inherently, that this bed never gets made and that she’d only done it because Lottie might see it. In that sense, making the bed would be not just a lie, but a really embarrassing, pitiful, transparent lie. 

But Natalie’s straightening the pillows, trying to figure out that plumping thing she used to watch Martha do, when she hears the knock on the trailer’s door.

Nat stands up feeling like there’s syrup pumping through her veins instead of blood. She pads across the floor on socked feet, her pinkie toe hanging out in the cool air, and tries her best to ignore her mom sitting in the living room. Maybe it’s a good thing she’s there though. Vera’s presence is probably the only thing that keeps Nat from cowering behind the door like an anxious dog for two minutes before building up the bravery to open it. Because her mother is sitting right there, Nat has to pretend she’s brave from the get go. 

The door knob is cold, or maybe Nat’s hand is just really clammy. The hinges scream, like a killer’s chasing them through the woods, as the door swings open.

Lottie’s cheeks are pink from the chill. Her hair hangs in dark, choppy waves on either side of her face. She’s made a half-hearted attempt at bundling up, like some concerned party reminded her to put on layers and she’s trying to respect their wishes even if she really doesn’t see what the big deal is. Her coat is unzipped, its fur-lined hood pushed down around her shoulders. She’s cradling a cardboard box in both arms. 

Her eyes lock on to Nat’s face like she’s been searching for it for ages, and that makes Nat feel like a dick. An unworthy, lightheaded dick.

“Hi,” Lottie says. Her voice is so even, as unwavering as her gaze.

“Hi…”

It takes everything in Natalie not to reach out and touch her. Just to make sure she’s actually there. After a moment, Lottie thrusts the box out, and it lands in Natalie’s arms solid and sure.

“Your stuff,” Lottie says haltingly.

“Right.” Natalie readjusts her grip on the cardboard. “Thanks. 

The box is lighter than she expected it to be. Not that she remembered leaving all that much at Lottie’s house, but there was something in the way Lottie was holding the box—like it was a burden, like it was weighing her down. Though she’s sort of looked like that for weeks now. And she doesn’t really look any better now, having handed the box over.

Natalie opens her mouth. Before she can say anymore nothing, there’s a call from the living room.

“Natty, what the hell do you think you’re doing, letting the heat out? Who’s at the door?”

Lottie’s head turns, following the sound. 

“Should I come in?”

Natalie’s mouth—already in motion, too late to stop it—says, “Uh, if you want, yeah.” 

Her legs, stiff and brittle as campfire kindling, move to the side so Lottie can come into the trailer. She watches Lottie delicately wipe her feet on the mat, feeling all the while like a ghost hovering above her own mud splattered body.

“Should I take my shoes off?” Lottie asks.

“It really doesn’t matter,” Nat responds. It’s a small space; Vera can scowl at them without even lifting her head from the arm of the couch. 

“Who are you?” Vera demands.

“Mom—” Natalie tries to head her off, but Lottie doesn’t balk.

“I’m Lottie,” she says brightly. “I’m one of Nat’s friends on the soccer team.”

Vera narrows her eyes.

“You’re pretty.” She hurls it like an accusation. 

Lottie takes it like a champ. “Thank you.”

At least Nat’s mom isn’t smoking, though she looks like she’s jonesing for it, her lips pursed and her jaw tight. She looks Lottie up and down.

“Nat’s friend, huh?” she asks. “How come you’ve never come ’round before then, hmm?”

Lottie’s eyes widen fractionally. “Oh. I–”

Natalie interjects, “You don’t have to answer—”

“I was starting to think Natty was lying about having any friends at school,” Vera says. “But she just never brings them home ’cause she’s embarrassed. She thinks she’s better than the rest of us here—”

Natalie cuts her mom off by interrupting loudly. “Do you want to go for a walk?” 

Lottie looks between Nat and Vera a few times, then nods once. “Yeah, sure.”

Ripping her winter coat off the hook by the door, Nat plunges out of the trailer without another word, leaving the cardboard box on the ground by the door. Lottie follows behind. Vera, thank fucking Christ, says nothing, does nothing, just turns her eyes back to Bob Barker.

“You can just ignore everything she said.” Natalie turns her face away from the wind, cutting a random beeline away from the trailer. “She just likes making noise sometimes. You shouldn’t listen to it.”

“Sure.” 

Natalie swallows thickly. She settles on a path, not caring where they’re headed so long as it’s away from that fucking living room. Lottie keeps up with her—Natalie’s hastiest walk is nothing to those legs, probably. They listen to the gravel crunching, the wind whistling for a good while before Nat remembers she was probably supposed to have something to say on this walk, or else what are they freezing their tits off for? 

She forces herself to slow down, to breathe more steadily, to come up with anything to say. She’s still chewing on it when Lottie’s shoulder brushes lightly against her own, stopping her dead in her tracks.

“Hey,” Lottie says quietly. “There’s actually something else I need to give you. It came last week, but I wasn’t sure how to get it to you.”

Natalie stares blankly. Lottie produces from within her jacket a large white envelope, like the kind spies are always trading in movies, but the formal crest on its front spoils the mystery a bit.

“Oh.” Natalie runs her thumb over the Rutgers logo, her stomach roiling. “That’s dumb, that I put your address down.” Lottie shrugs silently. 

Natalie stares at the envelope, wonders whether she’s supposed to open it now or if Lottie will spare her the embarrassment. It’s not even that she’s sure she’s going to get rejected; she just can’t bear the idea of anyone watching her want something like that. 

She must be standing there motionless for a bit, because Lottie nudges her again, like she’s tapping on the monitor of a computer that’s on the fritz. “Congrats.” 

Natalie looks up. “What, did you open it already?” 

Shaking her head, Lottie says, “They only send big envelopes when you got in.”

Nat looks back to the envelope. Blinking, she taps her thumb against the surface of it, turns it over and back. Scrutinizes the logo, the seam where the adhesive holds the whole thing together.

“This what your Stanford one looked like?”

After a second, Lottie nods. “More or less, yeah.”

The envelope bends, the paper buckling under Nat’s fingers. There’s a lump swelling in her throat like an allergic reaction.

“Thanks for bringing it,” Natalie says.

“Yeah, of course.”

Natalie breathes out. Finally she tucks the envelope under her arm, nodding towards a bench a little ways down the path. “Do you want to maybe sit down?”

Following her gaze, Lottie nods. “Yeah, sure.”

The seat of the bench is cold, but not as cold as Natalie expected. She shoves the envelope inside of her coat, the thickness of it pressing against her torso like body armor, then zips up again, balling both hands in her pockets.

“So…” Nat says.

“So.” 

For a moment Lottie just studies Nat’s face, almost forlornly, like she’s searching for something—like when you’re looking all over for something you lost and you keep coming back, again and again, to the place where it normally is. Because sure, it hasn’t been there the last ten times you checked, but maybe if you just look again. Maybe if you give it one last chance to wise up. Maybe then whatever you lost might just pop back into existence in its proper place.

“Why’d you call me, Nat?” Lottie asks.

Natalie’s chin falls to her chest. The cold nips at her ears, burns her eyes.

“I wanted to talk to you,” she says gruffly.

“Really? ’Cause you haven’t wanted to talk to me for like the last month.”

Frustration lingers on the fringes of Lottie’s voice. Natalie takes it, lets the teeth of it sink into her skin. She deserves worse.

“I know. I was being a dick. And I thought maybe I should… stop doing that.”

Lottie sniffs. “And what inspired your change of heart?” Natalie shrugs. 

“I’ve just been thinking about it a lot. What I did, I mean, and what I said.” Nat frowns. “And then I had this weird ass conversation with Jackie—”

“Is that why she’s been acting all strange lately?” Lottie asks. “’Cause yesterday she asked me if I’d ‘gotten my scarf back yet,’ and when I told her I didn’t know she was talking about, she gave me this really pointed wink. I just thought it was one of her new euphemisms for sex.”

“Yeah, she didn’t really know what the conversation we were having was about,” Natalie says. “...But it was helpful, you know? It got me to think about things differently than I had been.”

“Really?” Lottie asks. “What sage advice did Jackie give you?”

Natalie scratches at the back of her neck. “Well, she did think we were talking about a scarf the whole time. But if you sort of break down the metaphor, essentially she told me that I should try to make things right with you, instead of just… hating myself for what I did.”

Lottie purses her lips. Her eyes roam out over the trailer park, passing over the clotheslines and the pickups and the grime that’s seeping through the snow, that coats every inch of it. Natalie tries not to feel like she’s on an operating table, her sedative deciding not to kick in, watching someone fish around in her organs searching for defects.

“Who knew Jackie was capable of such emotional intelligence?” Lottie asks the air.

Natalie tries for a joke. “I know, right? Honestly, it kind of scared the shit out of me. Maybe she can only do it if it’s fashion related.”

“Yeah, maybe.” The joke didn’t work; the solemn frown on Lottie’s face hasn’t budged. “So this is you making things right then?” 

“Yeah, I guess.” A gust of wind sweeps past them, biting through the worn-out lining of Natalie’s winter coat. She shakes her head bitterly, looking away. “I know I’m fucking it up.”

“Fucking it up? You haven’t even done anything yet.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Nat mumbles, her throat tight.

“Well, you could apologize.”

When Natalie looks up, Lottie is watching her impassively, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. 

“Really?” Nat asks.

“I mean, that’s what people normally do when they’re sorry about something they did,” Lottie says. “I’m not trying to trick you here.”

The ground beneath the bench is bare and damp, soaked by melted snow. Natalie sinks the heel of her boot into the earth, summoning up all her will, and her voice leaves her mouth like a convict escaping Alcatraz.

“I’m… I’m so fucking sorry, Lottie. I shouldn’t have said any of that shit. I didn’t mean any of it, even as I was saying it. I was just having a really fucked up day. I came back here, to the trailer, for some stupid reason, it doesn’t matter. And my mom said some stuff that really pissed me off and honestly made me feel like shit about myself, but then I took it out on you, and I really shouldn’t have done that. ’Cause you were trying to do something nice and I was a total asshole. I fucked up. So bad. And I’m so sorry.”

When she’s done, Natalie can’t look up. Her eyes stay firmly rooted in the dirt. Which means she’s watching closely, her brow slowly creasing, as Lottie’s Doc Marten sneaks closer and closer, almost unconsciously, until the edges of their soles are nearly touching.

“There you go,” Lottie murmurs. She swallows, then says, “I forgive you.” Instinctively, Natalie scoffs.

“Oh, fuck off.”

Lottie frowns. “Excuse me?” Natalie slides down the bench away from her, scowling at the ground. 

“You can’t just forgive me.”
“But you apologized.”

Natalie grunts. “I only did it ’cause you told me to.”

“Do you feel bad about what you did?” Lottie asks.

“Yeah,” Nat says. “Yeah, I feel horrible. But that doesn’t matter.”

“Why not?”

“It—it just doesn’t.”

“Do you just want me to hate you forever then?”

Natalie’s breath freezes in her chest, but she forces past it. 

“What I want doesn’t matter either.”

“You’re fucking impossible, you know that?” Lottie shakes her head, looking out again over the trailer park. “Well, okay, what about what I want then, huh?” she asks. “What if I want to forgive you, Natalie, because I really like you and I think we had something really special? You made a mistake. That’s fine—everyone does. I mean, so did I, right?”

Lottie’s cheeks are flushed, and her voice comes out ragged and insistent, like a tattered old flag still snapping in the wind.

  “I know I shouldn’t have gotten you that dress,” she says. “I always assumed you probably wouldn’t want me getting you gifts, that you’d find it patronizing or whatever, and I get it—my parents have been buying me shit my entire life, and I know that it doesn’t always feel like love. I guess I thought maybe we were at a point in our relationship where it wouldn’t be so bad, or I just got carried away and I wasn’t thinking about it at all, but I should’ve asked. We should’ve talked about it. I’m really sorry about that.”

“You don’t have to apologize for anything, Lottie,” Natalie interjects. “I was being ungrateful. The dress was so nice. It was so damn nice. And I bet you spent a ton of money on it, and—”

“I stole it.”

Natalie’s mouth freezes mid sentence. The generator on the trailer nearest them switches off, dropping them into silence.

“What?” Nat asks.

“I do that sometimes. Steal stuff,” Lottie mumbles to her lap. “Mainly it’s stuff I don’t even I want. Most of the time I just end up returning all of it anyway.”

“Why would you do that?” 

Lottie throws her hands up helplessly. “I don’t know. I get bored? I get lonely, in my stupid huge house with all its empty rooms? I want the thrill, I want attention, I want… whatever . But that’s not what you were to me. You have to believe me.” Lottie reaches out, placing a beseeching hand on Natalie’s shoulder. “You weren’t a distraction or project or anything like that. When I stole that dress, it wasn’t for the adrenaline rush—I really just thought you’d look good in it. And I wanted to get you something that my dad’s money didn’t pay for. I wanted it to just be from me.”

Lottie withdraws her hand, wiping furiously at her eyes with the heel of her palm.

“But I don’t have money to spend that isn’t his,” she says. “I don’t have anything of my own. Jesus Christ, poor little rich girl, huh?” 

Lottie tries to smile, but before long it crumbles, tumbling away like a cliff-face sliding off into the sea. In the place where her hand used to rest on Natalie’s arm, there’s a feeling like blood seeping through bandages, hot and cold and dire.

“It was really nice to feel like I had you though, Nat,” Lottie says. “Not that I like owned you or anything. It was just nice having you around. You know, when I could hear you watching TV, or taking a shower, or humming along to the radio in the kitchen. I liked getting to just be with you. And I liked getting to take care of you, when you let me. But I wasn’t trying to belittle you or anything.”

“I know, I know you weren’t,” Natalie says. “I know you were just being nice.”

Lottie shakes her head firmly. “No, I wasn’t just being nice. I did because I wanted to. It was entirely selfish.”

“Yeah, well…” Natalie sighs, completely at a loss. “Selfish looks a lot better on you then it does on most people.”

Nat’s eyes fall on a rocking chair that’s tipped over in front of one of her neighbor’s trailers. It looks like it’s been there for a long time, maybe for months. One of the rockers is completely sunk into the ground.

“I just don’t want you to waste your time,” Natalie says. “I know you say you want to do it now, but after long enough you’re going to get sick of it. And that’s not your fault, okay, it’s not because you’re not a good person. It’s just, it’s pointless.” 

Natalie works the toe of her boot into the mud. Her throat feels like a clogged-up gutter, brittle plastic choked with wet leaves, rotting from neglect.

“You’re never gonna be able to fix me, Lottie.”

Now Nat’s embarrassed, and she’s pretty sure she’s about to start crying and she’d honestly rather impale herself on one of the rusty fenceposts that lines the trailer park. She blinks fast, not wanting to look up but knowing that she has to. When she does look ip, she sees that Lottie’s frowning, staring down at their shoes in the dirt.

“I know that,” Lottie says. “You’re not… broken. And you know, being with you—sometimes it felt like maybe I wasn’t broken either.”

Natalie squeezes her eyes shut, her chest seizing. She sits with the pain for a moment, trying to shoulder it, telling herself that she deserves it, telling herself that it’s nothing compared to how Lottie must have felt.

“I really shouldn’t have called you psycho,” Nat mumbles. “It’s not true.”

“Yeah…” Lottie says. “I mean, I’m schizo. It’s a whole other thing.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s my fucked-up brain. Can’t I have a sense of humor about it?”

Natalie bites her lip, shrugging. She doesn’t know what to say to that. She honestly feels like it might be better if she never says anything ever again.

“I’ll be honest,” Lottie starts, after a moment. “It really hurt when you said that, Nat. And I think you knew it would, and that’s why you said it. You say you didn’t mean any of it and I believe you, but in the moment I really couldn’t tell what you meant and what you were just saying to make me upset. I felt so confused, and I thought… Like, when you said I’d been taking advantage of you, it made me wonder if…” She shrugs. “Maybe I made it all up, you know? I couldn’t tell—if you’d ever actually liked me, or if you just felt like you had to go along with it or I’d…”

Lottie’s voice falters. She’s blinking fast, her eyelashes fluttering like the panicked wingbeats of a dove fleeing from a hawk.

“Like… you know, maybe you only kissed me back because you thought I’d evict you if you didn’t.”

“No,” Natalie says firmly. “No way, that’s not—”

“I know it sounds ridiculous and insane and like, pathetically insecure,” Lottie says, “but I couldn’t help it. I just didn’t know. If I’d been delusional the whole time.”

“You weren’t. I liked you, Lottie. I like you.” Natalie shakes her head, regret weighing down her shoulders. “I was just shit at showing it.”

“Not always,” Lottie says. “We were really happy there for a while, I think. For most of it, really, it was good.”

“Yeah.” Natalie nods slowly. “Sure was…”

The cold of the bench has seeped through the seat of Nat’s pants, biting her in the ass and chilling her to the bone. And Lottie’s so warm, she’s right there and Nat’s so aware of her, but she might as well be back at her house on the other side of town for all that Nat’s going to do anything about it.

“What did you think was going to happen, once we talked?” Lottie asks. “What did you want out of this?”

Natalie shrugs, mumbles, “I don’t know…”

“Did you just want to clear the air? Did you want to get back together, or did you want to have one last chat and then, ‘See you never?’”

“I don’t know what I wanted. I mean, I’d never assume that you’d want to…” 

Natalie cuts herself off, putting her head in her hands and raking all her thoughts together into a big pile, trying to find something coherent in the mess. 

“It’s just that you looked so sad every time I saw you,” she says finally. “And I knew it was my fault, and I thought that if there was anything I could do to make it better, I had to try.”

Lottie seems to sit with that for a moment, mulling it over. 

“Well, you know what might make it better?”

“What?”

Taking a deep breath, Lottie bows her head and screws up her face, like she’s staring down the opposing goalie and lining up a last-ditch shot. 

“If you would just, fucking… talk to me again?” 

And then it’s like a dam has burst somewhere inside of her. Natalie watches, dumbstruck, as Lottie stands and starts pacing in front of the bench, gravel crunching under her feet, her expression lined with frustration, with determination.

“I’m not going to make move back in with me. I guess that always had a time limit. But will you wave at me in the hallway? Partner up with me at practice sometimes?”

Belatedly, Natalie realizes that she’s being asked a question. She gives a hesitant nod. 

“I mean, if that’s really what you want… then, sure.”

“And will you tell me if you’re not safe,” Lottie continues, “and if there’s something I could do to help? Will you let me help you? You can still whine about it all you want, but just take it. Listen to me, when I say you don’t owe me anything for caring about you.”

Natalie swallows thickly. “Fine.” Lottie rounds on Nat, her hands balled up at her sides. 

“And while I’m making demands—will you start coming to parties again? They suck without you.”

It’s almost a joke, but there’s something so genuine in it that catches Natalie off guard. In spite of herself, Nat lets a smile sneak out on to her lips. 

“I’ll see if I can swing that.”

“Good,” Lottie says. “Thank you. I’ll, um, I’ll walk you back to your door, okay?”

Her little speech has left her out of breath. Natalie stands, and Lottie spins around, walking briskly back in the direction of the trailer. She doesn’t need Nat to guide her, which is good, because Nat’s in no condition to do so. There’s this feeling swelling up inside of her, filling her head and her stomach and her chest. She barely recognizes it—there’s a humming, like the snores of a bear contentedly hibernating inside of her, and when she tries to poke at it, it just turns over in its sleep and refuses to wake up. Eventually Nat gives in and decides to let it lie.

When they reach the trailer, they stand on the stoop for a moment, neither of them seeming particularly eager to leave. “Thanks for calling,” Lottie says finally. “I’m glad you did.”

“Yeah,” Natalie replies. “Me too. Thanks for bringing me my stuff.” She swallows. “Actually, there’s something I wanted to give you too.”

Lottie furrows her brow, puzzled. Nat leaves her on the stoop and darts into the trailer, ignoring her mom passed out on the couch and ducking into her bedroom. She scrounges around underneath her bed, and after a moment she finds what she was looking for, holds it out in front of her and brushes off some of the dust out of its fur.

Slipping out the front door again, Natalie shoves the purple teddy bear into Lottie’s arms before she can lose her nerve. Lottie’s eyes widen with recognition.

“Is this the—from the bowling alley—”

“It’s an ugly piece of junk is what it is,” Natalie interrupts reflexively, shoving her hands into her pockets. “You know, it’s actually, uh, why I came back here in the first place. I had some dumb idea about giving it to you at our dinner…” She shrugs. “I know it’s a little late, and I mean, compared to the dress it’s not much, but—”

“I love it.” Lottie hugs the bear to her chest, smiling broadly. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, I mean, it’s whatever—”

Lottie leans forward and presses a kiss to Natalie’s cheek. Nat’s heart stalls out for a second, then revs back to life, like someone cranked the key in the ignition and stepped on the gas.

“I’ll see you at school, okay?” Lottie says.

“Okay. See you,” Natalie breathes.

Natalie keeps watching Lottie as she walks away until she’s entirely out of sight, and then she must stand outside for another fifteen minutes at least, just reeling from it all. The cold doesn’t bother her anymore. Her cheeks are glowing. She’s never felt warmer in her life. 

—

When Natalie gets to the party, most of her friends are already there. 

She’s kind of late—like, long past fashionably, bordering on totally-last-season late—because she spent the first part of the evening braving the public transit system and bucking up her courage. The party seems to have gotten on well enough without her though. Jackie’s dancing in the middle of the living room with Jeff and a few of his friends, putting on the flirty show she always does for them. Some of the other soccer players are scattered around—Mari and Akilah chatting by the sound system, Laura Lee and Rachel sitting on the stairs. 

Nat doesn’t try to hide from them, but she isn’t desperate to talk either. She’s past the point of lying to herself, pretending she didn’t come to this party with one very specific person in mind. But while Nat’s wandering into the house, scanning the crowd for the reason she came, she finds herself intercepted.

“Do mine eyes deceive me?” Van asks in an exaggerated British accent, emerging from the crowd with a drink in hand. “Has Natalie Scatorccio finally deigned to grace us poor peasants with her presence?”

“Ignore her,” Tai says, coming up from behind. “We watched Monty Python last night and now’s she’s going through a phase.”

Nat shrugs, a grin slipping quietly onto her face. “I barely noticed a difference to be honest.”

Van drops the accent. “What’re you doing here?”

“What’s it look like I’m doing?” 

Brow bent, Van takes a step back to survey Nat up and down.

“Trying not to throw up?” she offers.

Natalie cuffs her on the shoulder. “I’m here to party, just like the rest of you. What’s so weird about that?”

Van quirks an eyebrow. “You’re kidding, right?”

“It’s cute when you play coy,” Taissa says.

“Watch it, Turner.”

“Yeah, Tai, you better be careful.” Van looks around furtively. “What if Lottie gets wind of you calling her cute?”

Tai rolls her eyes. “I’m pretty sure I can take Lottie.”

“What’s Lottie gotta do with any of this?” Nat asks, a bit desperate. She may be past lying to herself, but she is still very much in the thick of lying to others.

“See?” Tai says. “That’s adorable. Like we’re supposed to think it’s just some random coincidence that the first party you show up to since your little blue period is also the first party Lottie’s thrown in months.”

“Wow.” Natalie rolls her eyes. “You’re so smart, Taissa. They oughta put you in the gifted and talented program.”

“Oh, they did,” Tai says. “So did you and Lottie make up or what?” Natalie looks off sheepishly. 

“Yeah, we talked it out.”

“Oh, thank God,” Van says. “You apologized for being a dick?” Natalie nods begrudgingly, and Van lays a solemn hand on her shoulder. “I’m proud of you, young padawan.”

“Ah, gimme a break.” Nat pushes Van’s hand off her, but there’s not much force behind it. It’s more like kittens playfighting, or something similar but less sickeningly adorable. 

“Last I saw Lottie, she was headed to the kitchen for a drink,” Tai says. Natalie’s eyes dart in that direction, past the crowd of rowdy teenagers and towards the golden square of light spilling out of the kitchen doorway.

“You know, a drink doesn’t sound half bad right about now.”

Tai gives her a wary look. “Do yourself a favor and skip the booze. Maybe drink some water. You do look like you’re ready to pass out.”

“Noted.” Natalie pulls her attention back to them. “And uh, look, Van, I actually had something I wanted to say—”

Van presses a hand to her chest, swelling up self-importantly. “Oh my. Have we finally come to my stop on the Great Natalie Scatorccio Apology Tour of 1996?”

“Not if you’re gonna be an asshole about it.” Natalie scowls. “Maybe I’m not sorry for being a dick to you.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Van brushes it all off with a wave of her hand. “You were in a rough place. Water under the bridge. Go find Lottie, alright?”

Natalie nods, looking off again. “Yeah, on it. Thanks.”

Sticking to the fringes of the party, Natalie edges towards the door to the kitchen. On her way she passes Jeff and his baseball buddies standing in a circle and cheering loudly around Randy, who’s chugging a Coors Lite with all the grit and determination of an athlete at Olympic trials. Jackie lingers just behind them, the blankness of her expression suggesting a boredom bordering on discomfort, but when she spots Natalie, she perks up. It’s like the lights have come up on her one woman show—she gives little wave and rolls her eyes like “Boys, am I right?”, all breezy and casual and not at all wishing for death. Natalie does her the courtesy of pretending to buy it, gives her a nod, and keeps going.

The kitchen is less crowded than the living room, the music a bit quieter. The island is covered in bottles, booze and mixers and olive oil, which might be some drunk teenagers idea of a clever prank. A girl wearing a flannel shirt over a red minidress is standing in front of the open fridge, balancing a carton of milk, a bottle of Malibu, and a solo cup.

“Yo, Shauna,” Nat says. Shauna turns around, closing the fridge with her shoulder. She looks a bit like a juggler pushed out on stage before she was ready.

“Nat,” Shauna says. “It’s good to see you.”

“It is?” Nat’s brow furrows. “Why?”

After spending a good couple seconds trying to come up with a response, Shauna shrugs, dropping everything in her arms onto the counter. “I don’t know. It felt like what you’re supposed to say.” She twists the top off the rum. “Welcome back, I guess.”

“Thanks. Happy to be here.”

Pouring about four shots into her cup, Shauna asks, “You patch things up with Lottie then?” 

Nat groans.  “Oh Jesus, you knew about that too? So that makes you, Jackie, Tai, Van—I mean, did anyone remember to loop Laura Lee in? I wouldn’t want her to feel left out.”

“Sorry,” Shauna says, and it seems genuine. “Jackie just told me you guys had a falling out. I didn’t know it was a secret.”

“Not a very good one, clearly.” Nat leans back against the counter, resting her elbows on the marble. “It’s fine. I guess by telling her I was sorta making sure you’d hear about it.”

“Yeah…” Shauna busies herself uncapping the carton and splashing milk into her cup—definitely not enough to cut the burn of the alcohol, but she doesn’t seem too concerned about that. She downs half the drink in two swallows, and her lack of embarrassment about that would seem to imply this isn’t her first drink of the night. Far be it from Nat to judge though.

“Hey,” Nat says, drilling her fingers on the countertop, “do you happen to remember that conversation we had a while back? In your bathroom, after we beat Holmdel?”

“Yeah…” Shauna sets her cup down, frowning severely. "I think about it a lot actually. That talk kinda messed me up.”

“Oh.” Natalie pauses awkwardly. “That wasn’t… what I was going for.” 

“I mean, whatever.” Shauna takes another deep sip. “Why do you bring it up?”

“Well, I was gonna try and pick your brain some more. If that’s cool with you.”

Shauna gestures broadly, the remains of her drink swirling in her cup. “Ask away.” Natalie bites her lip. 

“When you and Jackie fight, is it ever the same after? Like even when you say you’ve made up and everything, does the fight ever really go away?”

Shauna’s lips purse as she considers the question. 

“I mean, I’m not sure it’s really supposed to go away. You’re supposed to change at least a little bit. Like whatever caused the fight, that should change, right?”

“So you think a fight can change things for the better?” Nat asks doubtfully.

“Yeah, like, ideally. I mean, I’m sure it can also, you know, destroy a relationship beyond repair and haunt you for the rest of your life.” Shauna’s eyes trail off evasively, her posture stiff. “But Jackie and I have never had a fight like that.”

“Lucky you,” Nat says. “Okay then, new question: do you think that if you and Jackie were to split up—not ’cause of a fight or anything, but because you’re going to different schools or something—”

“That’s—I didn’t—We aren’t—” Shauna stammers. “We’re—we’re going to the same school.”

Nat rolls her eyes. “Play pretend with me here for a second. If you and her went in different directions, what are the chances you’d stay friends?” Shauna crosses her arms tight in front of her chest, her eyes far away.

“I don’t know. They say long distance never works, but I feel like if both people are committed to making it happen, to staying in each other’s lives, there’s no reason why we’d have to stop being friends just because we don’t live in the same place anymore.”

“So you think it can work then?”

“I mean, I hope it can work.” Shauna’s hundred yard stare darts back to Nat. “You know, for the sake of all those hypothetical long distance friends out there.”

“Yeah, those poor hypothetical schmucks.” Natalie shakes her head in faux sympathy. “Okay, last question for you.”

“Should I refill my drink before you ask it?”

Nat thinks for a second. “Honestly, yeah, you might want to do that.”

Shauna splashes more Malibu and milk into her cup and takes a long swig. 

“Okay. Shoot.”

Scratching at the corner of her eyebrow, Natalie weighs the words before she says them, hoping they’ll come out casual and nonchalant and not at all insecure.

“Do you feel like you understand why Jackie likes you?” 

In a second, Shauna breathes out all the air in her chest, her body slumping back against the fridge. She stares into the depths of her cup for a while, swirls the contents around but doesn’t drink anything. Finally she looks up, something desperate, something defeated in her eyes.

“Honestly?” Shauna shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t get it at all.”

Natalie nods slowly. She doesn’t know if that’s the answer she wanted, but there’s a certain amount relief in hearing it.

“Okay. Good talk, Shauna. You happen to know where our hostess has gotten off to?”

“Last time I spoke to her, I think she said something about outside.”

Natalie frowns. “It’s like 20 degrees outside.”  Shauna just shrugs. “Alright, whatever. Thanks. Jackie’s in the living room by the way.”

Shauna nods sullenly. “I know.”

“Jeff kind of left her high and dry. I think she’d appreciate the company.”

Shauna’s eyes flash towards the living room. They haven’t lost their desperation. “Okay… Thanks.”

The two of them go their separate ways, Shauna heading for the party proper and Natalie peering through the darkened kitchen windows, trying to spot anyone outside. A flicker of light on the patio catches her attention—the little flame on the end of a lighter.

When Natalie slides the glass door closed, Lottie turns around, her cigarette poised between her lips. After a moment, she withdraws it and breathes out, a plume of smoke spilling from her mouth.

“You came,” Lottie says.

“I told you I would.” Natalie takes a few tentative steps forward, hands in her pockets. “Do you, uh, regret asking me to?

“No.” Lottie shakes her head. “If you didn’t show, I would’ve regretted throwing this party.” Hesitantly, Natalie tries out a smirk. 

“You saying you threw it just for me?”

“Yeah. Obviously.”

The bare honesty in Lottie’s voice knocks the breath of Natalie’s chest. She coughs. “Jesus, Lot.”

“What?”

Natalie studies her for a moment, then shakes her head. 

“Nothing. What’re you doing out here? It’s fucking freezing.”

“Looking at the moon.” Lottie glances upwards. “Care to join me?”

Even though she was just bitching about the cold, Natalie steps further out onto the patio, coming up to stand next to Lottie by the railing and tilting her head back. “Damn. That’s something.” The moon is full, a shiny quarter in the sky, tails-up in a sparse field of stars.

“You know what it reminds me of?” Lottie asks, leaning conspiratorially into Nat’s side.

“What?”

“The LEGO Death Star.”

Natalie snorts, elbowing Lottie in the ribs. “Shut up.”

“No, really,” Lottie insists, grinning widely. “You know, I actually thought about getting you that for our dinner.”

Natalie fiddles with her rings, sending her eyes back up to space, where it is much safer to look, looming planet-killers notwithstanding. 

“Pretty hard to shoplift four thousand pieces.”

“Yeah, couldn’t exactly shove it down my shirt. I’m sure I could figure it out though—I’m kind of really good at shoplifting.”

Nat smiles to herself. “You are a woman of many talents, Lot.”

“Why, thank you,” Lottie says. “Since you’re so nice to me, maybe I’ll get the LEGOs for you at our next dinner.”

Natalie blinks, clearing her throat. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

There’s still that frankness, that honesty in her voice. Natalie can feel Lottie’s eyes on the side of her face, and it brings a warmth into her cheeks that hopefully the darkness can do her a favor and hide. After a moment, Lottie nudges Nat gently on the arm.

“What are you thinking about?”

Exhaling deeply, Natalie finally turns back to Earth. Lottie’s eyes are brighter than the stars, than the moon, than the burning end of her cigarette. Her lips look so soft, like candy that could just melt in your mouth

“I’m thinking about how in six months you’re going to be at Stanford,” Nat says, “and I’m still gonna be in New Jersey.”

“They have phones at Stanford,” Lottie counters. “Pretty sure they have them at Rutgers too.” She takes a drag, watching Natalie closely. “Do you think you’re gonna go?”

Natalie looks off again, staring down the shadow of a pop-up goal covered in snow across the lawn. “Yeah, I’m going.”

“I’m so proud of you.”

“What for? It’s your fault I applied anyway.” When Natalie turns back, Lottie is still watching her. “What are you thinking about?”

“You’re so beautiful, Natalie.”

Nat clears her throat again, staring down at her pale, cold hands. “Lots of pretty girls in California.”

“I’m not thinking about them.”

“You’re gonna be really busy, getting your degree and everything. I’m just going to distract you.”

“I think you’re going to distract me either way.” Lottie stubs out her cigarette on the porch railing. “And you know I don’t care about my degree.”

“You should. I’ve heard education is very important.” Natalie swallows. “What about timezones?”

“What about them? It’s a three hour difference.”

“We don’t know the difference that three hours could make.”

Lottie leans back, propping her elbow on the railing. “I’m not hearing a real argument, Nat.” Natalie breathes out slowly.

“Yeah.” She shrugs, her voice gruff. “Guess I don’t really have one.”

“So maybe you should just stop arguing.”

Natalie bites her lip. “You think so?”

“Yeah, I do.”

It’s Natalie that initiates the kiss, which feels important, but Lottie welcomes it, sliding her hands beneath Natalie’s jacket and holding her waist, her grip warm and determined. The first brush of their lips feels like the first plants shooting up in the spring—natural, remarkable, inevitable. The end of a long, hard winter. The beginning of something beautiful, maybe, if the conditions are right and everyone does what they’re supposed to. 

When they pull apart, Nat is already thinking about the next chance she’ll get to kiss Lottie again. Promising herself that she’s not going to waste it. 

“You know,” Lottie says, almost against Nat’s lips, “my parents are in Europe.”

Nat draws back to study her face. Their quick breaths freeze in little clouds of fog in the air between them. “Really? Just like that?”

Lottie nods. “That’s how they work. Dad has a conference in Germany, Mom’s at a spa in Spain.”

“Damn…” Natalie shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Lot.”

“I’m not. And that’s not why I told you anyway.” Lottie lightly cards her fingers through the ends of Nat’s hair. “They’re not here… The house is empty…”

Nat looks over her shoulder at the sights of the party flashing through the back windows. “Doesn’t look empty to me.” It’s half a joke, half a redirection so she won’t have to confront the insistent, nervous, wanting feeling in her stomach. But when she turns back, Lottie hasn’t taken the bait. Her face is still close, still achingly open and sincere. 

“You could stay over tonight,” Lottie offers. Natalie wets her lips.

“Just tonight?” she asks.

“I mean, as long as you want.”

Natalie takes a deep breath, studying Lottie’s face, her lips, her cheeks, her eyes. There’s a hope there in her eyes, a stifled anticipation of Nat’s answer, and Natalie feels a little bit like she’s been handed a pop quiz that’s going to determine how happy she is for the rest of her life. But more than that, in Lottie’s eyes there’s just this insane patience, this contentment—like there’s no right answer, like Nat could say anything and Lottie would be happy with it because it’s Nat that said it, and that’s all Lottie wants. To hear what Nat has to say. 

Natalie’s never had someone look at her like that before. Like she’s just enough by herself. Like she’s an instant A, no matter what.

“Just tonight,” Nat says finally. “Then we’ll see.” 

A grin spreads across Lottie’s face, gleeful and giddy and brilliant. “Okay.” 

Nat lets Lottie pull her into her arms, buries her nose in the collar of Lottie’s sweater and breathes deep, hiding her own smile against soft, sweet-smelling wool. 

“Do you think I should join Debate?” Lottie asks.

“What?”

“I mean, clearly I’m a master of persuasion. I bet I’d be so good at it.”

Natalie huffs, indignant. “It’s pretty easy to persuade someone to do a thing they already wanted to do.”

“You’re saying you don’t think I’d be a valuable asset to the debate team?”

Before Nat can respond, a loud whoop goes up from inside the house, making them both turn their heads. Over the din, they hear a number of voices joined in chorus:

“ Here I go, here I go, here I go again–Girls, what’s my weakness?”

Natalie cracks up, leaning her forehead against Lottie’s shoulder.

“You’ve already got a team, Lot.”

“Yeah,” Lottie says, stifling her own laughter. “We sure do.” She runs her hands up and down Natalie’s arms. “We should join in, right?”

Nat’s torn. It’s cold out here, but it’s so warm at the same time, and she doesn’t want to go inside or pull away or do anything other than sit on this patio and share another cigarette with Lottie under the night sky. But yeah—they should join in. They’re seniors now. It’s probably time to start like, caring or whatever.

“Let’s do it,” Natalie says. Lottie beams sharply, giggling as she takes Nat by both hands and leads her back into the house.