@exjacket gets approached by Jackie in the wilderness...
Day by day, Jackie was losing everything. Everything but herself, it felt like.
She couldn't help but turn over Coach Martinez's words in her head. Do you know why I made you team captain this year? It's not because you're our best player. Shauna is faster. Lottie has better footwork by a mile. But you have influence. Yeah, some great influence, when she couldn't stop everyone from buying fully into this back to the land bullshit.
Yeah, okay -- Tai made a lucky call about the lake. And Natalie was shockingly good with a rifle. Misty was like a Girl Scout on cocaine going after medical merit badges that shouldn't exist. Even Shauna had turned into some knife-wielding badass who didn't even blink when skinning deer. Like, where the fuck did that come from, right?
But what scared her most was the way she was watching her best friend shrink away and hide secrets from her -- Shauna was going behind her back. Fucking her boyfriend and getting pregnant. And Jackie had always tried to protect Shauna, but this was a consequence the brown-eyed girl had to bear all on her own. She kind of deserved it, didn't she? And yet, Jackie wanted nothing more than for her friend to be okay. To still need her. That was the problem out here, wasn't it?
No one needed her.
And maybe it wasn't exactly charitable of her to imagine that she might find sympathy from Audrey in her downward spiral. She had a little more tact than to ask, "Hey, how did you cope with losing your role as team leader? Was that also the only thing that gave you any value to these girls?" She wasn't... mad at Audrey, per se, even if she felt a tension with the change in regime. How funny, huh? It wasn't Jackie's fault Audrey had to be replaced -- but now it felt like a concerted effort by the team to now displace Jackie.
"Hey, Audrey... can we talk? Captain to captain," she said, one of the two 'captain's having more weight than the other. "I don't feel like this is a conversation for the team, if that's alright with you."