Chapter Text
jackie. - wiskayok, new jersey
It’s dead silent.
It’s past midnight in the suburbs, which means that it’s entirely empty outside. By now, all of the neighbors have locked their doors and flicked off their porch lights. If it weren’t for the tall, steel poles and their dim, orange glows, it would be pitch-black.
There is one sound that breaks through the eerie quiet—the repetitive, clomping stomp of Jackie Taylor’s tennis shoes scuffing angrily against the concrete pavement.
Shauna and Jeff.
Jeff and Shauna.
What the ever-loving fuck?
It disgusts her, the idea of them together. Imagining Jeff slobbering on top of Shauna the way he slobbers on top of Jackie stabs at her brain, poking at her cerebellum the way a child might poke at an agitated wasp’s nest.
She never should have touched that stupid fucking journal. Actually, no! She can take it even further. What she really shouldn’t have done is ever give Jeff Sadecki the time of day. How could he have embarrassed her like this? He was nobody, just some boy. For God’s sake—she only ever pretended to like him. All he’d ever been was a convenient way for her to fit in the world around her. That’s it. Just a clueless supporting actor.
And now he’s made a fool of her.
Is that why Shauna did it? Is that why she wanted him?
Did she want Jackie to feel this small? As small as she’s apparently been feeling for the last few years. Jackie remembers Shauna’s scrawled, bitter handwriting. The words float in the forefront of her mind, forming a swirling jumble of slights and scars that Jackie had no clue she’d even been inflicting. Those words begin to unravel in her memory, forming horrible sentences that cut and chop at the very center of her self-esteem.
“You’re such an idiot.” Jackie says to herself. It’s true. She must be the most naive girl to ever exist.
Jeff cheating on her is one thing, but Shauna is a different beast entirely. How could she not have noticed that her best friend grew to hate her so much that she would rip Jackie’s boyfriend out from underneath her feet?
There’s a part of Jackie, too-large of a part, that scrambles to find reason in this madness.
Maybe… maybe there is a purpose behind Shauna’s betrayal. If that were true, then maybe she could find a way to move past this. It’s possible, right? If Shauna is in love with Jeff, well—at least then she could comfort herself knowing that it wasn’t done solely to stab her in the back, even if the thought makes her shudder.
But, putting her personal disgust aside, it still doesn’t make any sense.
Shauna was always quick to remind Jackie of Jeff’s various pitfalls and shortcomings (of which there were many), and yeah, sure, that could just be Shauna masking her jealousy, a way for her to hide the fact that she’s been pining for Jeff all this time. It easily could have been a strategy to nudge Jackie away without nuking the friendship. That, Jackie thinks, would hurt even more than Shauna simply hating her all the way through.
Because, fuck, if Shauna wanted him so badly, if she’d ever told Jackie how dire the stakes were, then Jackie would have passed him over as easily one might give over a pencil to a forgetful student in school.
Jeff makes a suitable boyfriend, but it isn’t as if he’s the only option available. His biggest draw is that he’s convenient. His house is only two streets over from hers. He’s tall, strong, with white teeth and a pleasant smile. He plays baseball, and he comes from a good family. Those are all fine traits, but she just as easily could have made it work with another boy, if Shauna ever thought to talk to her.
Quite clearly, Shauna prefers to keep her secrets guarded. Jackie is no mind-reader, but she never thought that she needed to be. Wrong again.
Even with that in mind, she still finds it hard to believe that Shauna is in love with Jeff.
Painful as it may be to accept, there’s no getting around the words written in that journal. Shauna wanted to hurt her. She made a decision, and then she did it.
When Jackie started this miserable walk back home, she promised herself that she wouldn’t cry, but all the same, the tears bubble up; salty, steady, and entirely against her will. A gurgling sob pathetically follows.
How could she have been so clueless?
Here she is… content with the only friendship to ever make sense in her life, entirely unaware that it’s all just a farce. It isn’t right.
And it’s all Jeff’s fault.
Jackie grits her teeth and scrubs away the tears staining her cheeks. A cocktail of anger, betrayal, and bone-deep heartbreak spur her legs forward, acting as a catalyst to move her weary muscles through her nighttime town. She hasn’t made this trek in years, not since Shauna got her car, but the path is still engraved in her mind. Jackie moves on autopilot.
She doesn’t realize until she comes to a halt that she got her wires crossed.
This isn’t her house.
This is Jeff’s house.
Her arms—previously crossed tightly over her chest—fall to her sides, fingers coming to pinch at the belt loops on her jeans, as she stares forward at the front of a dark, quiet home. What the hell is she even doing here? She ought to leave. Nothing good can come from being outside her cheating boyfriend’s house this late at night. Jackie sucks her bottom lip between her teeth, squinting, debating, deciding, and then, finally, moving.
In this moment, Jackie doesn’t care that it’s almost one in the morning. She isn’t bothered at the thought of disturbing Mr. and Mrs. Sadecki in their sleep.
Let them know what he did to me, she thinks. The thought rings with bitter conviction. It’s Jeff that got in between them. It’s important that she remember that.
Jackie curls her fingers into a fist and stomps up the porch steps. As she slams it against the door, she notes that it’s freshly painted, gleaming with the glow of a new white coat that shimmers beneath the vibration of each pounding knock.
She waits.
Nobody answers. She knocks again, a little harder, but still, no one comes to the door.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” She mutters, shaking her head and rolling her eyes to the top of her head. “I swear to God, Jeff Sadecki, I could kill you right now...”
From inside the house comes a rattling crash—the sound of glass breaking.
Jackie freezes in the middle of her third knock. Then, suddenly aware of her impulsive actions, she retracts her arm and takes a sheepish step back. Her hands go clammy, blood rushes to her face. She’s ashamed. What if she scared his parents? This—this is stupid. What is she thinking? Her eyes flicker anxiously to the window, waiting for a light to turn on. But it never happens.
Okay. Maybe… maybe she can leave before anyone ever knows she was here.
She backs away and books it back down the porch steps. If she’s fast enough, she won’t have to explain her stupid self.
She isn’t fast enough.
A loud crash booms from behind, startling Jackie midway through her run across the lawn. She slips over her own feet and tumbles sideways into the wet, dewey grass, completely destroying one of the potted plants nestled along the pavement.
What the fuck was that?
Jackie looks over her shoulder and blinks.
There’s a window next to Jeff’s front door, also freshly painted, and masked by sheer, yellow curtains. Jackie looked through that window too many times to count, through both sides of the glass. It’s shattered now. Glass litters the porch surface, mixed in with soil and broken bits of ceramic, and… and blood, too.
She stares at the window’s jagged edges, the mess all over the porch, and still doesn’t understand what she’s seeing, until finally, she recognizes that there is a human body on the ground—and it’s staring at her, with blank, unseeing eyes.
Something, instinct maybe, overtakes her and she scrambles up to her feet, careening backwards without thought until the sharp press of the mailbox juts into the space between her shoulder blades. The jolt of pain this brings knocks some sense back into her frazzled mind, allowing her to see the situation more clearly. The person, whoever they are, rests unnaturally on the ground. Their neck is twisted too far to the side. It’s grotesque.
Broken, Jackie thinks, blinking in shock.
“What the…” She whispers. A cold dread overtakes her, pouring ice water down her body. She freezes, even though she doesn’t want to. Jackie recognizes that body. When she speaks, her voice is alien to her ears. “Mrs. Sadecki…”
Someone must have thrown her through the window, she realizes. After they killed her. And whoever did it must still be inside.
Jackie knows she needs to run and call for help, but the only movement her legs are able to muster are a liquid tremble. She grabs onto the mailbox and grips at it for dear life, desperate to stay upright. Run, Jackie, run. But her limbs will not move. They remain stiffly locked, holding her trapped in this terrible halting moment.
The curtain blows out from behind the shattered window. A shadow appears. It flings itself through the frame in one choppy movement and lands in a rough heap next to the body of Mrs. Sadecki. Jackie watches in horror as they slowly rise, limbs hanging eerily at their side.
It’s Jeff.
Time moves in slow motion as he turns around to face her. His expression is glazed over in a look of blanket absence, the muscles in his cheeks go slack, and his mouth hangs open.
He must be in shock. Jackie would know, she’s in shock, too. She blinks again, slow and torturous. They need to get moving—they need to get away from this place, before… before… she doesn’t know what.
Jeff takes a lumbering step forward, moving like his legs weigh twice as much as normal. Is he hurt? The possibility is enough to inject some warmth into her limbs, jolting her out of her frozen fear. Feeling returns to her legs, and she uses her reclaimed mobility to push off of the mailbox. She lifts her arm and waves him down.
“J-Jeff!” Her voice shakes. It’s more squeak than shout, but it works to get his attention. His eyes drag over. “Jeff! Let’s go, we—we need to leave! C’mon, we’ll get help!”
He groans. It’s a horrible sound that rattles her bones, raising goosebumps on her arms with its terrible gurgle. He must be hurt, she decides. Has he been shot, or something? There’s blood all over him, she notices it right now, but she can’t tell if it belongs to him, or to someone else. This is all so messed up. Jackie’s confused. But then, she shakes her head and tries to snap herself out of it. She can worry about his potential wounds later. They’ve got to get to safety first.
“Jeff, please!” She tries again. It’s a true yell now, echoing in the night around her. “Jeff, come here, let’s go! We need to—we need to find help. It’s… it’s going to be okay.”
He takes a step. Okay, good, he can hear her. That means they can get out of here, away from the killer still lurking in his house. She takes a weak step away from the mailbox and holds out her hand for him to take.
Jeff takes another step, then another, and then another, quickening his pace until he’s coming at her in a dead sprint. Jackie’s eyes go wide. Why is he running at her? By the time she thinks to spin and run away herself, he’s already too close, bearing down on her like a professional linebacker.
“What are you—wait, stop!”
Jackie has just enough time to throw out her arm before he crashes into her, smashing her like a boulder dropped above a wilted flower. The stretch of time between first impact and her body hitting the ground lasts forever. She watches the world spin, losing the air in her lungs. What the fuck is happening?
“Why are you—“ Jackie can’t get the words out. She has to dodge away from Jeff’s literal, chomping teeth. “What the fuck! Get—get off of me!”
Years and years of grueling soccer practices have shaped Jackie into an athlete, but this is no game, and there are no rules for her to follow. She’s never fought anybody before, not for real. Wrestling with her teammates back in middle school did not prepare her to fend off an attack from a boy twice her size.
Gripping her wrist with a hand, Jackie pushes up with her forearms, attempting to make a box sturdy enough to prevent Jeff from taking a bite from her face. She screams the entire time.
Jackie doesn’t understand why this is happening, or what is happening. This has to be a nightmare. It’s the only thing that makes sense, the only thing that can explain why Jeff is on top of her, snapping and snarling like a rabid dog. Only, this isn’t a nightmare, or at least not a sleeping one.
This is real. This is happening, and Jackie is going to die, eaten to death, or something equally awful, by her cheating, idiot boyfriend. As the thought flits on by, she can’t help but wonder… What is Shauna going to think about this?
She screams again. It’s a shredding slice up the back of her throat, ripping apart her vocal chords. It doesn’t accomplish anything. Jeff keeps on thrashing, getting closer and closer to ripping a bite from her neck, and she’s powerless to stop it. Stuck, about to die a painful death.
Until—
A gunshot blasts, roaring through the air with a booming bang, hitting Jeff in the chest with a squishing, explosive impact.
A second gunshot. This time, it hits him in the side of the head.
Blood and brains spew all over her face, painting her skin red with Jeff’s meaty spray. A split-second later, he falls on top of her with all one hundred and eighty pounds of dead weight.
“Jackie, can you hear me?” Natalie Scatorccio’s scream is an angel's song. “Jackie Taylor, get the fuck up, right now!”
She realizes that she’s no longer screaming, but sobbing now; great, heaving bursts of snot and tears that threaten to choke her as she pushes and pushes against the dead body of the boy she’d spent the last four years standing beside. He’s too heavy. She can’t do it, and she’s so fucking tired.
Black boots descend upon her vision. The wet grass squishes underneath. It’s Nat reaching down to help Jackie, to save Jackie. When he’s pulled off of her, she gasps for air and flips onto her stomach, before clumsily trying to stand to her feet. If it weren’t for the steadying grip of Nat’s hand on her elbow, she would have collapsed all over again.
“Natalie—“ She sobs, whirling around in search of anything that makes sense. “Nat, what’s happening? I don’t—you shot him, I—but he—he…”
Her voice trails off with the wind as she catches sight of Jeff. He’s flopped onto his back with dead, empty eyes staring up at the sky, blue and unseeing, atop a face still twisted in that awful last grimace.
She clutches her stomach and gags, crying still.
“Jackie.” Nat grabs her by the arm. “We have to go. Right now.”
Clutched in Nat’s other hand is a shotgun. Jackie stares at it. “You killed him.”
Nat’s fingers dig into Jackie’s skin, staining themselves on Jeff’s blood. “Jackie, listen to me. Get in the truck. We have to go.”
“I don’t understand.” She says, weakly. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”
This is an out of body moment. Jackie’s voice is so faint, so conversational, as if she were merely requesting pepperoni on her pizza, and not trying to understand what the fuck just happened here.
“Get in the fucking truck, Jackie!” Nat looks anxiously over her shoulder and moves to grip the gun with both hands. Even in this distant hazy state, Jackie can see her trembling.
Jackie doesn’t move, she can’t, and so Nat makes the first move and gives her a rough shove forward.
Another pitiful cry blithers from between Jackie’s lips as she stumbles towards the still-running truck parked at the end of Jeff’s driveway. She still isn’t convinced this isn’t some twisted nightmare. Jeff, the twisted sneer on his face, the sickly smell of his breath, his mother… it can’t be real.
Her fingers slip against the rusted metal door handle, still wet with blood. Nat knocks her out of the way and yanks it open herself.
“Get in.” Nat grunts, half-shoving, half-lifting Jackie up onto the seat.
The sound of the door slamming shut echoes in her ear.
shauna. - wiskayok, new jersey
It’s dead silent.
Tomorrow is Tuesday, which means that her mom has a shift early in the morning—only a couple of hours from now, actually. That means she’ll have to keep the noise to a minimum, so she doesn’t disturb her mom’s much needed rest. That’s not a problem. She’s got a lot on her mind tonight.
Shauna slides her key into the lock and turns it slowly. She opens the door at a snail's pace, inch-by-inch, to prevent the hinges from making their loud, high-pitched squeaks. When she steps inside, her eyes snap instinctively to the staircase. For a fleeting second, she’s tempted to walk upstairs to her mother’s room and wake her up.
She’s having one of those horrible, awful moments where all she wants is to climb into her mother’s arms.
But, at the same time, Shauna cannot bear the thought of telling Deb everything that went wrong tonight. She does not want to see the shame and disappointment that will surely warp her expression. She wants comfort, but knows she doesn’t deserve it, and worries she might not be offered it in the first place.
Deb can find out tomorrow, but for now, Shauna will let her sleep.
The house is as dark as it is silent. She slides her hand along the wall, flipping on the lights as she goes; first entryway, then hallway, and finally the kitchen. Taped to the fridge are a series of pictures that hurt so much to look at, she considers turning the light back off. It’s Jackie, all over, everywhere, every age, at zoo trips and birthday parties, and eighth grade dances. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, trying to ignore the taunting pictures and their pinning magnets.
So far, she hasn’t cried about it.
That isn’t going to last. She knows it.
Tears will arrive within the hour, after she is resting in bed with nothing but darkness standing between her mind and the memory of Jackie’s shattered expression.
It is going to rip her to pieces.
Which—that’s ridiculous, right? This is a disaster, yes, but it is one of her own creation. Shauna set fire to her life on purpose, she is aware of that, so what right does she have to wallow and cry over it?
Lo and behold, after deciding to scorch her personal earth, she’s ended up burned.
The thing is… she didn’t mean for it to happen this way. It was all supposed to go down differently. First, she would break the news about Brown, eventually. And then (once she was already away at said college) she would begin to silently distance herself from Jackie, disappearing from her life one missed call, one canceled visit at a time.
The stuff with Jeff was never supposed to come out. It never was supposed to happen in the first place. Only… it did. But even after he inserted himself into both Shauna, and the situation at hand, she still never planned for Jackie to find out.
She also never planned for Jackie to read her journal.
Shauna couldn’t even express her anger over that, because what she did was worse. And that sucks, because she’s really, really angry over it. But what is a little invasion of privacy in comparison to betrayal, cheating, and boyfriend-stealing? She watched that exact understanding pass along the faces of the others watching: Taissa, Mari, Lottie, Nat, and all the rest. She watched them judge her, too, felt it like dozens of pinching fingers grabbing at the fleshy parts of her arm, all too happy to look on as the worst of her is exposed.
Fuck them, and fuck Jackie, too.
Soon enough, she would leave this place for something better, something good for her. No more following Jackie around at parties, no more having to watch Jeff slobber all over her face, and no more twisting spasms in her chest every time Jackie is standing a little too close.
That thought brings her comfort as she goes to make herself dinner.
There isn’t much in the way of ingredients in the pantry, and there wouldn’t be for a couple more days, not until her mom receives her next check, but there is enough for her to make something meager. Fine by her. She doesn’t have much of an appetite anyway.
With a box of Kraft mac-and-cheese in hand, Shauna starts the stove. Jackie’s still hot on her mind. No surprise there.
Confusingly, Shauna is equal parts relieved, equal parts devastated. On one hand, a burden is lifted from her shoulders, and no matter the collateral damage left in her wake, that feels good. It’s over with. Done. There are no more secrets. Jackie knows.
But on the other hand, Jackie knows.
Jackie is finally aware of just how low Shauna is able to go, how awful she truly is, both in her actions, and her thoughts, too. She was able to read the bitter words and resentful slanders scrawled onto the pages of the journal.
I don’t even know who you are, Jackie said, and maybe that’s been true for much longer than either of them realized.
But not anymore.
Now… Jackie knows Shauna completely, entirely, in all of her fucked up glory.
How rare is that? How vulnerable? To know that one single person sees every ugly, beautiful part of you?
It is also gone.
The one person to know her now hates her. And for good reason.
Shauna flexes her fingers as she stirs around the pasta noodles. Repressed energy tingles in her knuckles. She desperately needs to write in her journal. That, or she needs to punch something. She also wants to go to sleep and never wake up. More contradictions for her to ruminate over.
Ten minutes later, she makes her way to the living room with dinner in hand. The brown leather couch is cold under her legs as she curls up beside the arm. There’s a throw blanket only two feet away, folded atop the footrest of her mother’s armchair. Rather than reaching for it, Shauna forces herself to sit there and shiver. It’s only right that she add a physical component to her misery.
The silence, however, is too much to bear.
She doesn’t care to watch any television, but she turns it on anyway.
It’s set to the news, some local station that her Mom enjoys watching in the mornings. Two newscasters greet her on screen, gesturing behind them to a shot of a burning car. RIOTS ERUPT ALL OVER NYC, reads the chyron.
Shauna makes a face and changes the channel.
Time continues to drag on.
She settles on a late-night infomercial that is both corny and boring at the same time. Her macaroni is under-cooked. It’s cold in the living room. She’s still thinking about Jackie.
Try as she might, Shauna just can’t help herself. Where else are her thoughts supposed to go?
When she finishes up with dinner, she wastes no time in carrying her bowl to the kitchen. As she goes, she doesn’t bother with turning the television off.
Because she’s been a shitty enough person today already, Shauna resists the impulse to leave her dirty dish sitting unattended in the sink. Instead, she turns the knob and reaches for the sponge. The warm water brings her comfort as it runs down her skin.
From down the hall, she hears footsteps.
“Is that you, Mom?” She calls out. No answer. Shauna continues washing the dish, thinking nothing of the silence. “I’m sorry if I woke you up, I was trying to be quiet.”
Still, nothing.
Shauna turns off the water and frowns. Maybe she’s just hearing something from the television in the other room.
But, then: a muffled thump, like something heavy being dropped down the stairs.
It’s just unusual enough to send a fleeting rush of anxiety through her body. Great. An intruder? Just what she needs, right? (Tomorrow, she’ll wish that’s all it was.)
“Mom?” Shauna says, striding to the hallway. “Are you okay?”
The lights are still on from her arrival. Shauna rounds the corner, peering into the entryway. Standing at the foot stairs, just beside the front door, is Deb. She’s facing away from Shauna, head craned upwards towards the photos hanging on the wall. She’s still wearing her scrubs from the night before; another thing out of place.
What is she doing? Shauna tilts her head, bewildered. “Mom?”
Deb Shipman isn’t a perfect mother, but she’s pretty damn close.
Yeah, she works too much, and she doesn’t check in on Shauna as often as she should, and when they get into fights, she always makes sure that she’s yelling the loudest. But—she is also Shauna’s greatest, most fierce defender, one of the funniest and friendliest people she knows, and she’s never once made Shauna feel anything but entirely loved.
They’re close, the two of them, with eyes that match and an identical sense of humor.
On Tuesday evenings, after her mom is back from her early shift, they watch Silent Witness with a bowl of popcorn cycling between them. On Sundays, they grocery shop together, never bickering over what snacks to get, because they share the same favorites. Every day in between, they talk and they laugh and they live.
She thought she knew every expression that Deb could make, but she does not know this one.
Deb turns around to face her. Her eyes are shut tight, but her mouth hangs wide open.
“Uh—“ Shauna halts in place, taken aback by the sight. A shivering trickle of fear winds up the back of her neck; dozens of tickling spiders. “Are you okay? What’s going on?”
“Unghhh…” The rattle that slips from between her mom’s lips is grotesque, wrong, and viscerally upsetting in a way that nothing has ever been before.
“Mom? What’s wrong? Can you talk to me?”
Deb groans again and takes a step closer.
“I…I—I’m going—I’m going to call for help,” she stammers, backing up. Her hands are shaking. So are her legs. Shauna swallows, and rubs her hand across her forehead. “Just stay right here, okay? I’ll be right back.”
Okay. Whatever this is, it’s serious. Time to get it together, Shauna.
She spins on her feet and takes off for the phone at a run. If she were more aware of her surroundings, she would have noticed that Deb is following behind. She’s too laser-focused, however, and doesn’t hear a thing.
So enormous is her terror that she nearly drops the phone after grabbing it off the receiver, only managing to catch it when it falls against her chest. With her free hand, she stabs at the numbers: 9-1-1.
If anyone picks up on the other line, Shauna isn’t able to hear it.
Something slams into her from behind.
The force of the crash is so great that it knocks her forward onto the counter. Her body folds over the surface, splaying out flat and knocking the wind from her lungs. The phone tumbles to the ground.
Before she’s able to get her bearings, a pair of hands descend onto her shoulders and yank hard, sliding her back across the counter.
Look, Shauna’s been in a couple of fights before, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that instinct takes over. Without thinking, she bucks her body and swings out her arm.
The back of her hand makes contact against her mother’s face. Shauna shrieks in surprise, yanking her arm back as if she’d placed it atop a hot stove. “Mom, I’m sorry, I didn’t—“
She isn’t able to finish her sentence.
Her mom stares not at her, but straight through her. Her eyes are wide; pupils entirely dilated. Another disturbing groan escapes her open mouth, but this time it’s high-pitched, almost a mourning sound.
They stare at one another, and then Deb lunges.
Shauna has just enough reaction time to dodge out of the way.
She slips underneath her mom’s outstretched arms to make an escape, but she only makes it three steps until they’re crashing into each other again, a mess of swinging limbs and grabbing fingers.
“Mom, stop it!” It’s not so much of a scream as it is a cracking splinter. Her throat is too dry.
Deb doesn’t listen, does not even seem to hear her, if the way she’s digging her nails into Shauna’s shoulder is any indication. Instead, she barrels forward, and they both go tumbling to the ground.
They roll around on the floor, kicking at each other. Ending up on her back, Shauna tries to shove Deb away and climb back to her feet. She gasps for air, clawing for traction at the edge of the counter, but then a hand comes to grab at her ankle.
“Mom, please!” Shauna screams, tries to hop away, but Deb has a vice grip that is supernaturally strong, and her foot remains stuck in place.
What happens next will haunt her for years to come.
Just barely, she is able to maintain her grip on the counter, which stops her from falling back to the floor. As she looks down, she sees her mom craning her neck and leaning in, as if to… bite her? Shauna cries out again as her mom bares her teeth, snapping them together as she gets closer and closer to the side of Shauna’s leg.
Shauna kicks her in the face.
Deb’s nose cracks with the force, maybe her jaw too, and Shauna feels each staggering break, every splinter of sinew and skin in the heart of her body. A sob bursts from her lips as she runs, blindly, to the other side of the kitchen.
She doesn’t understand what is going on. She just kicked her mom in the face. Her mom.
Shauna turns around, hoping against all odds that the strength of her kick was enough to keep Deb down. If she’s knocked out and unconscious, then Shauna can try calling 911 again. Someone will come, and they can help. What could possibly be the cause of this? Rabies? Some kind of… who fucking knows… brain cancer, or whatever? Surely it must be neurological. What else could explain it?
But, to her horror, Deb is not still and she is not staying down.
Instead, like a zombie from the horror movies she loved to make Jackie watch, Deb rises from the ground and charges at her all over again.
The ensuing two minutes can only be described as an all-out brawl.
There is an island counter in the center of the room that acts as a barrier between them. As her mom tries to hustle around one side, Shauna sprints around the other. But then, after a single lap, Deb pivots and vaults herself over its surface.
Shauna, who has never seen her mother move so athletically in her entire life, is frozen in place at the sight.
A mistake.
Deb crashes into her.
Shauna hits her, a full-on punch to the throat. But beyond a single wet gurgle, it does nothing to slow her assault.
Shauna hits her again, and again. Her knuckles bruise. After the fourth punch, they bleed.
Nothing works.
It is that moment that she comes to the horrifying realization that her mom is going to kill her. Her too-loud, very loving, quick-with-a-joke mother is going to murder her. Viciously, using her own teeth by the looks of it.
Shauna’s mind does not belong to her anymore, not in that moment. Something primal and animalistic rises up from deep within her innermost self. She is being attacked. Someone is trying to kill her. That cannot happen.
She doesn’t remember how the knife ends up in her hand.
It’s brand new, only a month old. One of those door-to-door knives salesmen came around, and Deb, being on her third glass of wine at that point of the night, was feeling friendlier than usual. She took pity on the pimply twenty year old and his pathetic little sales pitch. Shauna wanted to shoo him away, they already had a perfectly good set, but she’s since come around.
It’s a high quality knife.
Definitely worth the money.
“Please,” she wails, kicking Deb away from her one last time, “I don’t want to do this, please don’t make me do this.”
But all she gets as a response is a feral growl and another attempted bite.
When she shoves the knife into her mother’s gut, nothing happens. Well, nothing aside from tearing flesh and ripped muscle, followed by a gush of warm red blood. It doesn’t seem to phase her. She continues with a second wild lunge.
Sobbing, Shauna yanks out the knife, and stabs again.
One day, when asked about this night, she will refuse to answer. All the same, the question will bring her right back to this spot in her mother’s kitchen—to the terrible violence, to the monstrous gleam in Deb’s eyes, to the choking fear that fuels each desperate swipe of this brand new kitchen knife.
Deb doesn’t stop until Shauna drives the knife through her eye, and then she collapses to the ground in a bloodied, shredded heap.
Shauna remains standing. Her chest heaves. Her ears ring. Her veins pound. The adrenaline coursing through her body leaves her blind with exhaustion.
Her fingers twitch around the handle of the knife, stained with the blood of them both: mother and daughter.
She doesn’t drop it.