thinking ab nat being a nail/finger biter, she tries to use black nail polish to cover her fingers and take away attention away from her awful nails/fingertips. when she gets into the wilderness she bites at her nails even more due to stress and also hunger. during the periods of intense hunger, like the first winter, she bites at the skin around her fingers until it’s puffy, bloody, and raw, it hurts to bend her fingers around the trigger of the gun, but at least it satiates part of her hunger throughout the day. she knows travis notices her habit, though it’s hard for the other to tell since everyone’s fingers are red due to the cold. it’s only when they eat jackie, commit cannibalism for the first time, that nat realizes she’s done this before, to herself. but she also realizes, as she chews on jackie’s fingers, that her nails are also bitten short, and she thinks back to this game, they were down 3-1, morale was low, it was halftime, and jackie sat, her legs spread wide across the grass, her fingers in her mouth, teeth biting nails, as she scrambled for any words to say, a way to bring the girls the motivation for a comeback. it was then when she first felt human to nat, of course that was quickly wiped away after seeing her in school that monday, buzzing around all the popular kids, looking perfect as always. it irked her, how jackie had it all, maybe that made nat resent her back in wiskayok, even in the wilderness, but now she was just jackie, someone like nat, who also bit at her fingers, a nervous habit developed in childhood that neither of them could break, that jackie would never have the chance to break, and one that nat probably would never break…
