hearing damage | YELLOWJACKETS

one.

Talia Turner | 1996
Wiskayok, New Jersey

"Who wants to report on Yellowjackets soccer?"

Talia Turner looked around the classroom to find that none of her peers wanted to take on the task of writing about the women's soccer team. Her own hand sat in her lap as though weighed down with lead.

"Seriously? No one?"

Talia's eyes drop to her lap. If she can avoid eye contact, then she can avoid the task. She taps her fingers anxiously against her leg as she waits for someone's name to be called and for them to have the unfortunate duty to focus on all things Yellowjacket soccer, as though her life wasn't already that.

"Talia?"

Talia's breath catches and she looks up with a start. She locks eyes with Chase Anderson, who was standing before the whiteboard with the newspaper's plan for the school year. It was Talia's senior year and she'd hoped to spend it doing something unrelated to her twin sister, but she should have known that the two of them were fucking bound to one another.

"Just because you're sister's on the team?" Chase tries to justify, "Easy access and all that."

"Yeah yeah sure," Talia responds.

Chase smiles and claps his hands together, "Awesome, you're great Turner." He makes finger guns at her, and Talia doesn't react as she leans back in her seat with a sigh, "Okay who wants to report on baseball?"

Hands fly into the air and Talia can't help the twisting in her stomach. It's anger, it's always anger. But it never surfaces. Talia knows better. She is dependable and reliable. She cleans up the shit of others so when no one wants to report on the soccer team, Talia takes it. That is her purpose, to take shit.

When the meeting concludes, Talia lingers in the room as everyone clears out. She walks up to the board and looks at her name beside Women's Yellowjacket Soccer. As she reads it over, the words begin to shift. It's not Women's Soccer that her name is next to, but Taissa's. Always bound. Always together. The way twins were born are the way that they live.

Talia looks away from the board and heads out of the room. She makes her way to her locker, grabbing the textbooks that she needed for the night. She grabs her Calculus textbook, American History and she's about to grab her Literature textbook when she spots a forgotten black notebook in her locker. She stares at it momentarily before grabbing it and shoving it in her back and quickly zipping it.

She makes her way down to the soccer field where her sister and her team were wrapping up practice. Taissa and Talia had both begged for cars when they turned sixteen, but their parents had given them one to share. They always had to move together. 

She climbs the bleachers and takes a seat looking down at the field. She knew all of the girls on the team. They were frequent guests at her home, just as Taissa was frequent guests in most of theirs.

Jackie Taylor, the leader of the team and truthfully of the high school. She was the type of popular that people didn't earn. It just fell into their lap because they were pretty and smiled at the right people. She wasn't the best player on the team, but she was the best at telling people what to do.

This was evident with Jackie's best friend and shadow, Shauna Shipman. Shauna was smart. That was evident on and off the field. She was in several honor societies and as far as soccer IQs went, Shauna had the best, knowing when and where to pass, and how to pass it. She may have been the brightest player on the team, but the desire for the game didn't burn bright in her, not the way that it did for other girls.