Wildflowers // Yellowjackets

Aster

TWs: Verbal abuse, implied child abuse

The lake

Fall, 1994 (11th grade)

Natalie Scatorccio loved the cold.

She had done since she was small when she realised how, if her skin was numb, it was far easier not to feel, not to ache at every harsh impact her skin would face.

It was all too often that she was forced to spend the night outdoors. It got to well below freezing at night in winter Wiskayok when the sky was clear and robbed of its insulating blanket of cloud. And yet all that mattered to Nat was the stars.

She could stare for hours, count them, make patterns in her head as she longed to reach out and touch them. To travel to the moon or Venus or Mars or, preferably, Pluto. So far out of reach that she could call herself free.

She dreamt she was an astronaut every night until she was twelve.

But as she grew older, Natalie found Pluto to be a large lake about a mile from her trailer unknown by her father or mother where she could swim and smile and breathe.

So that was where she would stay.

*****

For Natalie, summer had been a miserable combination of evading her parents at home and sitting alone after running until she dropped to her knees from exhaustion.

It could be worse, she would remind herself. It could always be worse.

Natalie had come to realise how little she should expect of the world she survived in, how, no matter how hard she may try to be perfect, she would still feel every ounce of pain she had been born into. As she sat summer long, kicking water on the surface of her lake, she would survey her sanctuary, stained by the few tourists and locals who would come, not to hide like her but to expose themselves to all who was watching.

She came here often to think and rest, to exist without bothering the world. It was the only place she was safe, tucked away into the woods where she could fool herself into thinking she belonged somewhere. During the heat of July and August, some took fondly to her peaceful spot and swarmed like bees to capture any remaining space along the banks of the deep water. She would have nowhere to hide nor rest but in the reeds, trying to evade watchful eyes.

So, like always, when the small town of Wiskayok would die out during the months of Fall and Winter as rain came and school restarted, the people would leave. The town would be buried in its bed, all tourists gone. And this year, Natalie could not wait to lie alongside it.

*****

11th grade was the year things began to shift dangerously close to the edge for Natalie Scatorccio when she decided to join her Highschool girl's soccer team. Well, 'decided' might be misleading. It was just, when Vanessa Palmer comes begging you to do something it's really quite hard to refuse.

Van was Nat's closest (and only) friend in Wiskayok that had come to be after lonely lakeside nights and shitty parental figures. They were the same in many ways, each shaped by similar traumas, and yet so completely different in who they had become from them that, to most, they seemed an unlikely pair.

The girl had all the energy of everyone on the planet put together, but when it came to running, Van knew Nat surpassed her easily. So when she learned of the new girls soccer team, Van could think of only one person perfectly suited for the role.