April 30: Tai & Shauna, Summer

[kinetic_elaboration]

Yet more if what if Shauna and Tai, post-rescue, 600 words, 20 minutes

*

After the rescue, she spent a while just... existing in Jersey. What everyone else—not the survivors—called recovery. Howard would take her for the Class of 2002 but the fall semester wouldn't start for months yet. She itched to go. And her parents told her, why are you so impatient, like they knew it would take them longer than a few months anyway to coax her back from being a ghost.

She fell out of touch almost immediately with everyone other than Shauna and Van. Something that felt like it should be a loss but it didn't. All that summer, she laid around in bed with Shauna, with the window open and the sheets unmade, eating junk food and watching MTV. They mostly hung out at the Turners' because they asked a lot of questions but Shauna hated being at home. And there was the TV. And they could eat and eat and eat.

Already a kind of thick haze was settling in over the past, like she'd closed her eyes for a moment, from the pain of some sudden and terrible injury, and when she'd opened them and blinked away the red, she was just home. Some indeterminate amount of time had passed. And the wound hadn't totally healed, but enough. And some days she wouldn't even notice it.

At first, they'd lie on opposite sides of the bed, not really touching, and eat popcorn out of the same large bowl, but eventually these afternoons became leftovers out of Tupperware containers, large candy bars, bags of chips, and one of them spread lazily over the other, in a way that wasn't friendly but wasn't too intimate either. Shauna with her head on Tai's shoulder. Tai splayed out across the middle of the bed, draped over Shauna's legs. Shauna curled up with her head in Tai's lap until Tai found herself stroking Shauna's hair.

She'd wondered sometimes how Jeff and Shauna had fallen into their affair, and figured it was because Shauna would fuck him and Jackie wouldn't. Maybe that was just part of it, though.

She couldn't remember anymore half the things they'd done just months ago.

People who live normal, boring lives in suburbia, they just don't do the sort of things that some part of her mind calmly and simply remembered having done.

"I don't like being at my house because Jeff's always calling me," Shauna confessed once, in the middle of a commercial, as she held up one of the barbecue chips she was eating, up to the light like she was trying to see through it.

"Tell him to leave you alone." And after another moment: "Does he want to talk about Jackie?"

Everyone wanted to talk about Jackie.

She carded her fingers through Shauna's hair. From their angle, she could not see her eyes, the expression in them, or on the rest of her face.

Shauna shrugged. "I think he wants to talk to me. But I mean, maybe he wouldn't, if she weren't dead."

"Hmmm." No one liked to say the word dead around them, and Tai had only started to notice it, how forbidden it had become on her own tongue.

"I mean everybody lost her," Shauna added, all of a sudden, and in response to nothing. Tai let her hand roam down, along Shauna's back. She was so closed off then, like she'd never known the intimacy of any touch, that it was like trying to gain comfort from a doll.

"Maybe you should tell him to leave you alone," she suggested.

And Shauna didn't answer, just reached for the remote—the show was back on—and turned the sound all the way up