When I Come Around
Shauna doesn’t remember the assignment. She doesn’t remember the bell. She doesn’t even remember what class came after. All she remembers is Jackie.
Jackie in that stupid cropped sweater, legs stretched like she owns the world, eyes flickering across the room like she’s hunting. For her. Always her.
It’s not fair. Jackie talks like she’s teasing, like she’s playing, like she doesn’t mean it—but her eyes say something else. Her eyes say stay, and Shauna listens, like an idiot. Every time. Because even if Jackie doesn’t mean it, Shauna does.
She means it so hard it feels like her chest is going to split open.
⸻
At home, she locks herself in the bathroom and stares at herself in the mirror. Her lips are chapped. Her eyes are tired. Her face is still hers, but barely. Jackie has touched everything. In the car. At the party. In chem class. With her voice. With her absence.
Shauna leans over the sink, presses her forehead to the cold tile, and whispers the words she never says out loud:
“I think I love you.”
It tastes like something rotten.
She spits in the sink. Rinses her mouth like it’ll help.
⸻
It’s not love the way people talk about it. It’s not warm or soft or red roses on Valentine’s. It’s sharp. It’s crawling. It’s ugly. It’s wanting to scream when Jackie flirts with someone else, and wanting to die when Jackie flirts with her.
It’s watching Jackie sleep on her couch after parties, mascara smudged, mouth slightly open, and thinking, if I kissed you right now, would you even wake up?
It’s knowing the answer. And never doing it. Because that would make it real.
⸻
They’re lying on Jackie’s bed, legs tangled, reading Seventeen magazine like it’s a sacred text. Jackie’s talking about prom. Shauna’s not listening.
“Do you think Jeff’s going to ask me?” Jackie says, tossing her hair like she’s not even thinking about it.
Shauna nods. Her heart is bleeding through her ribcage, staining her lungs.
Jackie turns her head, smirking. “You’d tell me if I looked desperate, right?”
Shauna’s mouth opens. She’s going to say it.
She’s going to say “You don’t need Jeff. You have me.”
She’s going to say “I love you.”
She swallows it like battery acid. Feels it burn all the way down.
“You’re fine,” she says instead.
Jackie beams. Shauna smiles too.
She feels like she’s just buried a body.
⸻
Later, alone in her room, she writes Jackie’s name on the corner of her notebook page and scribbles it out so hard the paper tears.
She stares at the hole.
She doesn’t sleep.
She dreams of snow.
She wakes up cold.