Rich
“Miss Matthews?” The blonde woman smiles. She is about ten years younger than Lottie. “I’m Detective Fawkes. I’m investigating the death of Natalie Scatorccio. Mind if I sit?”
Lottie blinks. The detective sits anyway.
“Natalie overdosed,” Lottie says. It’s what she’s been told to say. It isn’t technically a lie. Natalie did die of an overdose, it just wasn’t administered by the person everyone is assuming it was. Natalie did die of overdose, because this was set into motion by what she said to Travis while overdosing years ago. Natalie did die of an overdose, because she had too much love for Lisa and too much hate for herself.
“I’m interested in how exactly that came about,” Fawkes says. She looks like a serious woman, not without her trauma. With time and work, Fawkes could be very happy at the compound. “See, we make it a point not to accept these things too lightly. And the death of Miss Scatorccio, while tragic, was not isolated. Were you aware of the other death that took place on your compound that day?”
Lottie’s heart stops. Not one of her followers, surely? “No, I – Somebody else died?”
“You didn’t know?”
Lottie shakes her head wildly. Fawkes pretends to check her notes.
“One Kevin Tan? I believe you went to high school together.”
“That was a long time ago,” Lottie says slowly. How did Kevin die? When did Kevin die? Was it at the same time as Nat? Was it connected?
“Were Miss Scatorccio and Mr Tan romantically or sexually involved?”
“I haven’t seen them in recent years,” Lottie justifies. “I wouldn’t know.”
“It seems quite the coincidence that both Scatorccio and Tan came all this way to such an obscure location, along with your former teammates and the family of one of your teammates. How was it that everyone came to be at the same place?”
“I didn’t know that Kevin was even here,” Lottie tells her, which is true. “Maybe he followed her.”
Maybe he did. He must have done. Either that or he was guided, brought over by the same thing the rest of them were.
Either way, she can’t find out from this woman.
Lottie speaks slow, measured. “Camp Green Pine is my compound, that I run, to promote healing and spiritual growth. I believed that my friend Natalie was distressed. She has a history of substance abuse. I invited her to come and stay with me. I wanted to keep an eye on her. She told the others where she was and they decided to come as well, because it had been so long since we had all been together. This year was a big anniversary. We wanted to remember the fallen. Shauna brought her daughter. Anything else that happened was out of my control.”
Anything else that happened was due to the control she ceded to the Wilderness.
“Hm,” Fawkes says. Lottie wonders if the name is significant. Fawkes, burning. The ritual. “Well, I can’t share details of the investigation right now, but rest assured we are doing all we can to ensure that the truth is found and justice is served. I’ve left my number with the nurses. If you remember anything else, don’t hesitate to get in touch.”
--
How to plan for killing your high school coach after he tried to kill all of you (maybe)(probably)?
You let the new leader take the reins.
“Are we really gonna do this?” Gen asks. “Kill the coach?”
“He was only the assistant coach,” Melissa mutters.
“We don’t have a choice,” Natalie says. “It’s him or us.”
Natalie has drawn up a plan which is eerily similar to the tactics a soccer player might employ to win a game. It involves an ambush, outnumbering, all the works. Misty even calls it The Scrimmage, a name which catches on.
“I think it’s a bad idea,” Shauna says. Shauna has been looking very evil lately. Today is no exception. “How do we know that he’ll be where you think he is? If we mess this up, he’ll know we’re coming for him!”
“We won’t mess it up,” Natalie says. Her voice is carefully bored, but Lottie can hear the cracks. “He’s on crutches and it’s snowing. How far can he go?”
“His prints will be distinctive,” Taissa contributes.
An argument begins to brew, but Van asks: “What do you think, Lottie?”
Everyone looks at Lottie. The argument fades.
This isn’t supposed to happen. Lottie says: “I think that the Wilderness has chosen Natalie. What she says is what we do.”
And so it’s decided. Lottie hopes that they will stop consulting her soon. That’s why she gave away the burden, after all.
As everyone disperses to prepare, Shauna catches Nat’s arm. “You better hope we catch him.”
--
On Lottie’s second day in the psych ward, Van visits alone. Lottie explains what happened with the cop. Van has not been questioned; not because they don’t want to question Van, but because Van has gone off the radar.
“The cops have been blowing it up,” Van says, flipping her phone in her hand. “That’s what I get for keeping the number. I would’ve left this thing at the compound, but, you know. Cancer. Or not cancer, as the case may be." Van forces a smile, which wobbles. “God, Lottie. I used to get so freaked out knowing that you were still alive. I wished you well, but to me you were…everything that happened back there. Sometimes it was easier to act like you died, because then that didn’t mean you were still somewhere, still spreading gospel or trapped in your own head like a vegetable. I didn’t wanna know if you still believed in it. Because if you didn’t, the guilt would crush you. But if you did, then I’d have to believe in it, too.”
Lottie manages a smile. There is water for her to drink, but she has her fingers dipped in it instead. It’s grounding, and not weird. “I can feel guilty and believe at the same time.”
“I guess.”
“You’re lonely,” Lottie says. Van barely looks at her.
“What makes you say that?”
“You’re talking a lot. More than you did by the end.”
“That was twenty-five years ago, Lot, on the tail end of the worst fucking years of my life. And you’re one to talk, I mean, I don’t think I heard you speak for two months straight. You were, like, catatonic.”
“I was overwhelmed,” Lottie admits. “And you’re changing the subject. You feel alone, yet you could reach out to anyone around you. People in your town, people who come to the store, people online, or the Yellowjackets. You and I haven’t been included in what’s happened recently, and only one of us was completely off the grid. Why didn’t Tai contact you before this week?”
“Ask her,” Van dismisses. “I don’t know. We didn’t…part on good terms, all those decades ago. Maybe she felt like I did. I miss when we were all just normal friends. I know it’s obvious to say that I wish the crash never happened, but there’s so many reasons beyond the obvious. I remember being friends with you, normal friends, without any of this Wilderness stuff. Now I can’t imagine talking to you without that baggage. Any of you. It’s all I can think about when I see you guys.”
“Of course it is,” Lottie agrees. “It’s what we’re bound by. We can never go back.”
Van says nothing to this, but it is clear that she agrees.
They sit. A clock ticks. It was a sound she missed in the Wilderness; the ticking of a clock. Lottie feels that in the Wilderness she fell into a liminal space, unable to see the seconds pass. Everyone on the other end must have been the complete opposite. So conscious.
“I want you to live with me, Lottie,” Van says, clearing her throat. “I want you to come back to my place when they release you.”
The words are unexpected. A far cry from the this is just not for me that Van showed up here with.
“My place is at Camp Green Pine,” Lottie says. “They need me.”
“Do they? ‘Cause they seemed fine without you when I left. Maybe living without you for a little while is a challenge that they need.”
“You could come and stay,” Lottie tries, an attempt to decline Van’s offer. “You seem like you could use the company.”
“Couldn’t we all,” Van mutters. Then: “Think about it.”
--
“Is this The Wickerman?” Coach asks, incredulous, head lolling. “You’re all insane.”
“Says the guy who tried to kill us all,” Van scathes.
“How could you?” Nat demands. She seems betrayed in a way the rest of them don’t, not even Misty, maybe excepting Travis. “How could you take the lodge when it was the only thing keeping us alive?”
“You have cannibalism for that, now,” Coach laughs. He is so out of it. Maybe he’s been mushroom-spiked again.
“How else are we supposed to survive?” Taissa demands.
“We’ve only eaten people already dead,” Misty jumps in. “Other than you, but, you deserve it for trying to burn us. And for lying to me about liking me!”
“Seriously?” Coach asks. Lottie does have to agree that Misty is being insane, but, still:
Lottie says nothing. This isn’t her scene to run.
“Laura Lee wouldn’t have let Jackie sleep outside,” Coach slurs. Who knows what point he’s trying to make, really, considering it was Laura Lee who defied him way before Lottie ever did. But his words still hurt Lottie’s heart, because they’re true.
“Maybe,” Shauna says. “But Jackie was stubborn. Laura Lee might’ve gone after her, but she wouldn’t have come inside.”
“Laura Lee would’ve slept out there with her,” Van says. These words seem even more true. “She’d be gone either way.”
Coach’s last words are to say: “I bet you’re all mad you never got to eat her.” It is Van who finishes him off. It is the first act of deliberate homicide the Yellowjackets commit. It is not the last.
--
Mad as in angry, or mad as in crazy?
--
Truthfully, Lottie doesn’t know whether Laura Lee living would have saved them all or not. She’s inclined to think so. If the small plane hadn’t worked, then they might not have had Doomcoming when they did. The mushrooms incident wouldn’t have happened, the divide between Jackie and the group wouldn’t have widened on the night it did, and by the next day they all would’ve known just how deadly sleeping outside would be.
Lottie truly believes that the wilderness took Jackie, because the poor luck of the cold snap after months of outside being relatively snap is atrocious. She wonders if it would’ve been a bear if it hadn’t been the cold, or a wolf. If the wilderness chose Jackie on purpose, to save the rest of them. It didn’t want Laura Lee to leave, and it knew the winter was coming, so it acted when Jackie was alone.
“I don’t know their surnames,” Akilah says in that two months between the cold snap and eating Jackie. They’re all starving and freezing and Akilah seems like she’s admitting something. “Laura Lee and Jackie. It got too awkward to ask anyone else.”
Lottie smiles at her. “Jackie Taylor. And you do know Laura Lee’s surname. It’s Lee.”
“Laura Lee…Lee?”
“One Lee. There was another Laura on the team last year, Laura Pines, so we started calling them by their full names. Laura Pines graduated, but we were in the habit of calling Laura Lee ‘Laura Lee’, and she liked it. When Coach Scott first started he thought she was called Lauralei, like, all one word. She said she gets that a lot.”
Akilah makes a face.
“What?” Lottie asks. Akilah gets shifty.
“Nothing, just…” Akilah peeps through her fingers. “Up until you said that, I thought she was called Lauralei.”
Lottie thinks back on her inflection, the way Lauralei and Jackie and Lauralei…Lee? flowed a little more than they should have, and smiles at the plane window.
“She wouldn’t have minded,” Lottie says. She can feel a warmth, like there’s a third person sitting with them. “Would you?”
--
Lottie’s father died when she was a year out of Switzerland. She hadn’t seen him in that time; not because she’d been locked up, but because he didn’t like her and she didn’t like him.
She didn’t know it was going to happen. Her maternal grandfather dies when she’s in the wilderness, and she already knows when she gets back, and her maternal grandmother dies while she’s a wash of a daze in her second psych ward, and she knows then, too, like it’s already happened before it does. But her father came as a surprise. She didn’t expect it at all. For such an unyielding presence to be so fallible, to end with such a whimper.
“Fuck you,” she hissed. His body did not reply.
It was the first dead body she had seen since she had left that place. The dirt and the ritual and the fire were absent from the sterile scene of her father, suspended in a plain coffin, clean as before a business meeting.
Leaving the small room, Lottie composed herself. She was here as a stereotype: the crazy daughter, locked away, hidden from public gaze, but not forgotten. No one could forget the daughter who almost died.
She refused to give a speech. She refused to drink the free booze. She refused to eat the free food.
Not that she needed it to be free. The only thing she had received from her father: money. Lots and lots and lots of money.
“Charlotte?” she was prompted. She blinked at her father’s associates, all crowded around. “What do you think?”
“About what?” Lottie asked.
“About investing.”
Hm.
“I don’t care for my father’s business,” Lottie said. They were smiling, until she said. “His fortune can provide for those in need.”
“Well, we are in need -” one of them tried.
“I have spent quite a lot of time in psych wards,” Lottie informed them, rubbing her ring. “I’ve seen those in need. Those with nothing else. They are who the money can help. They are who I will provide for.”
She looked around the room. She didn’t know anyone here. Her mother had elected to stay at home. The other one hadn’t come at all.
“I aim to prevent people’s families doing to them what that man did to me,” Lottie said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m tired. Enjoy the rest of the wake.”
--
Shauna glares at Natalie across the campfire. Natalie gives a cool look back.
Everyone looks to Lottie for permission to eat. She gives it.
--
In Lottie’s final few hours in the psych ward, the television is on. She sits at a craft table, and designs a deck of cards.
“Are you saying that you ate your teammates?” an interviewer’s voice says, echoed through the speakers.
Slowly, Lottie’s head turns. There is a woman on the screen, looking very serious. Smallish, clothes smart-casual. In her forties.
--
When they do the séance, Javi asks if they are all going to die in the wilderness. The pointer gives an answer that looks like an infinity, to most people in the circle. To Lottie, sitting at the pointer’s left, the answer looks like an eight.
Lottie is too caught up in getting possessed to think about it, at the time, and for a while after. About what the pointer might have actually meant, about how they are about to start dropping like flies, about how the initial crash leaves sixteen survivors, about who asked and got the answer, about the reporters’ echoing words of only eight.
--
“Yes, that’s right,” Akilah answers.