My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Oh, hey,” the girl says as easy as anything, of course not offering to shake hands—this is a bathroom—“I’m Letha. Letha Mondragon?”

  The question mark hanging between them now translates out as You’ve heard of me, yes? but not in an off-putting way, not in a way that’s assuming anything.

  Jade feels her face flushing warm in response. It’s maybe the first time in her life that’s ever actually happened to her. She wonders if it shows on her Indian skin or not, and then she’s wondering if this “Letha Mondragon,” being Black, is even accustomed to reading people’s emotional states from the blood rushing to the surface of their skin.

  In the same instant she decides this is racist as hell, gulps it down as best she can. All the same, she still hasn’t managed to look away from this Letha Mondragon’s reflection in her own mirror, has she?

  It’s not because she’s Black, either. Black isn’t completely unheard of in Idaho, though it is less and less heard of the higher the elevation gets. No, the reason she’s caught in this vortex of staring, it’s… is it Letha Mondragon’s hair?

  It’s not just glamorous and perfect, flowing down her back but kind of spiral-curled too, it’s, it’s—oh, Jade knows what it is, yeah, of course: online at four in some bleary morning, lost in the wishing well of her phone, she’d chanced onto a smuggled-out snapshot from the set of a shampoo commercial. One of those ones where the model’s long luxuriant locks are cascading in slow-motion waves all around her, a silky bronze extension of her dopey smile.

  What Jade had always assumed had to be strategically-placed fans blowing and lifting all these models’ too-beautiful hair turned out to be a faceless green humanoid—someone in a skinhugging bright green turtleneck and thin green gloves, with green nylon pulled tight over their head so they can disappear in the camera’s eye. So they can guide the model’s hair up like this, and like that.

  Letha Mondragon must have a whole crew of those green humanoids following her around, always underfoot, lifting her hair up, around, everywhere.

  And, the thing is? Jade can tell by the polite way Letha’s just waiting for Jade’s response, lips pursed, eyes big, hands sudsing up, that she doesn’t see the little green people. She isn’t even aware of them.

  “And you are?” she says to Jade, her face hopeful for some interaction but not being pushy about it. “I don’t think I’ve seen you here before, have I?”

  Jade makes herself lean back into the mirror with her face, her numb fingers grubbing the eyeliner pencil up, fully aware now of the SKANK STATION carved above her. And, as if her own grudging awareness of that heading has made it blink, Letha Mondragon’s eyes flick up to it and then down just as fast, almost demurely, and now it’s not just Jade’s face glowing with heat, with awareness, with knowledge, with possibility, it’s—and she could never say this out loud, not in a thousand-million years—it’s her heart.

  Letha Mondragon is embarrassed, not of the profanity, but that it even has to exist. Because that’s the kind of pure she is. That’s the only answer here. She probably, Jade knows—no, she surely already has a job volunteering somewhere in town. Not a church, but that’s just because churches, in spite of their own good intentions, have their own bad history. And that’s not for one such as Letha Mondragon. She would never sully herself that way, even by association. No, she’s probably volunteering… not at the high school library, Mrs. Jennings is a famous drunk and smokes menthols besides, and no candy-striping at Doc Wilson’s either, as handsy as he gets late in the afternoon, and there’s no thrift store where Letha could fold third-hand clothes after school, no animal shelter she can bottle-feed kittens at. Wherever it is she’s doing her good and necessary work, she walks there with purpose, Jade can tell, her books pressed tight to her chest, but Jade can see under that as well: Letha Mondragon is volunteering to help, yes, that’s most important, of course of course, but she’s also volunteering because, if she weren’t busy, then she wouldn’t have any acceptable excuse for not showing up when Randi Randall’s parents are gone for the weekend. If she wasn’t already busy, she’d have zero reason not to step down into Bethany Manx’s famously-smoky basement whenever Principal Manx is at a conference.

  And, stacked like she most definitely is, she probably can’t press too many books to her chest, Jade guesses. Nobody’s arms could be that long. But even covering up like that, there’s still her legs, which, even in jeans, are obviously the human version of “gazelle,” probably from volleyball or water polo or the four-hundred, and the rest of her is perfectly proportioned just the same, almost sculpted, all… five feet eleven of her?

  Shit, man. Is she even real? Jade tries to focus on the business end of the eyeliner, halfway wondering if somebody dosed it. Because—can there actually be specimens like Letha Mondragon in the actual world, not just in the airbrushed jack-off fantasies of every wishful-thinking penis-haver out there?

  But, as if designed by those dreams, she’s not too tall either, is she? That would be intimidating to the insecure male set. And, though pigtails and poodle skirts aren’t the order of the day even in high-valley Idaho, “pigtails and poodle skirt” is still the impression Jade’s getting from Letha Mondragon. Maybe that’s just because there’s no visible piercings, Jade tells herself. Maybe it’s just because there are no tattoos peeking up from a collar or flicking a sharp forked tongue down from a shirtsleeve.

  No, Letha Mondragon would never even consider such self-mutilation, such external expression of “inner turmoil,” such obvious pleas for help. She doesn’t even wear her jeans too tight, or have big rhinestone crosses on the rear pockets like every second ass out in the hall, because placing shiny crosshairs on yourself, well, that’s for other girls.

  Jade wants to hate her for that, for all of it at once, she wants to lash out from instant jealousy or the basic unfairness of random biology, but she can’t seem to muster it, is anesthetized just from being this close, is still saying that name over and over in her head: Mondragon, Mondragon, Mondragon.

  If “Greyson Brust” is as killer as Harry Warden, then “Letha Mondragon” is easily as inviolable as Laurie Strode, as Sidney Prescott, both of whom dress conservatively, neither of whom would ever bleach her hair with stolen peroxide in a hospital sink, then dye it electric blue.

  No, Jade will never be any kind of final girl, she knows, and has known for years.

  Final girls don’t wear combat boots to school, untied in honor of John Bender. Final girls’ wrists aren’t open to the world. Final girls are all, of course—this goes without saying—virgins. Final girls don’t wear “Metal Up Your Ass” shirts to school, with the indelible image of a knife thrusting up from the toilet. Final girls never select the SKANK STATION mirror, or wear this much eyeliner—they don’t need to. Their eyes are already piercing and perfect.

  Instead of getting lost in Letha’s, Jade sneaks a quick look down to the shoes this impossible girl-woman has to have all the way down there, and, yep: no pumps, nothing stiletto or even near-stiletto. Because she’s too young for that, is still Cheerleader Sandy, not Leather Sandy.

  Jade could puke, except she also wants to cry, and isn’t sure which is maybe going to happen, is just watching Letha’s hands under that solid sluice of water now, the suds sliding away, the hands tending each other, the nails unpainted, of course, and neither long nor French.

  “Jade,” Jade manages to cough out, her throat clenching shut again immediately after.

  Letha turns the water off, reaches the other way for a paper towel.

  “Jade,” she says, her eyes practically glittering. “That’s my birthstone, wow.”

  “You’re—you’re—”

  “From Terra Nova,” Letha says, shrugging as if embarrassed by all this unasked-for notoriety. “Or, once our house gets finished, I will be. So I guess we’re neighbors then, aren’t we? Just across the lake? Maybe we can hang out some afternoon?”

  “Terra Nova,” Jade says, stabbing the soft dull point
of the eyeliner into the white of her eye and not letting herself flinch from the burn. Relishing it, actually. Using it to ground herself in this moment, not float away.

  “I better—” Letha says, leaning sideways towards the door, and like that she’s gone, the bell probably holding its breath for her to find her classroom, then ringing in celebration.

  Letha Mondragon, the new girl, the final girl.

  “Unauthorized Use of the Town Canoe,” Jade whispers to her moments after she’s gone, and it takes her a halting breath or two to understand what the black drips are in the sink she’s holding on to by both sides.

  Tears.

  She’s crying and smiling, everything all at once.

  SLASHER 101

  Don't feel bad, Mr. Holmes. Not everybody knows about the Final Girl in the slasher. But let me give you this blood pass. It's like a hall pass, just all the lights are off.

  First and this goes without saying, final girls have the coolest names. Ripley, Sidney. Strode, Stretch. Connor, Crane, Cotton. Even Julie James from I Know What You Did Last Summer has that double initials thing going on, that kind of gets your mouth addicted to saying her name. They're more than cool names though. As you can tell by what they're called, they're also the last girl alive. But that only means she's last, maybe by luck, and not "best," when the actual REASON she's last is that she IS the best of us all.

  The REASON she's final is her resolve, sir. Her will and her insistence not to die. She runs and falls of course, and probably screams and cries too, but this is because she's started her horror journey out bookish and timid, with good values, the home by nine-thirty good big sister type. But of everybody in the movie she's the one with "more" inside her, by which I mean at a certain point in all the running away, during all the stalking and slashing, when the bloodletting's reached a sort of crazed frenzy where the bodies are just falling left and right and between, this Final Girl stands up through the heart of it all, through the fragile shell of her old self, and she goes toe to toe with this bad evil.

  The Final Girl is a hero for our times, sir, kind of like a certain student Principal Manx can't really prove was me leaving that bucket of pig's blood in the rafters of the Sadie Hawkins dance, that wasn't even really pig's blood.

  But the best ever example of a real and actual final girl is from Just Before Dawn where Constance finally turns to face her mountainous hillbilly slasher, who's already carved through the rest of her friends. She's had enough. Being attacked over and over, it hasn't weakened her, it's cut away her restraints. The slasher thought he was tormenting her. He thought he was the one in charge. Wrong. He was fashioning his own death. He was building the perfect killing machine.

  What this Final Girl does is turn around, scream into his face that she's so sick of this, that this is ENOUGH, that this is over. And then, in a move not matched in all the years since, not even by Sidney Prescott, not even by slow motion Alice when Pamela Voorhees won't stop coming at her, not even by Jamie Lee Curtis in that long dark night of Haddonfield, Constance climbs up her slasher's frontside and because she has no weapon, because she IS the weapon, she forces her hand into her slasher's mouth, down his throat, and then she reaches in deeper, and comes out with his life pulsing in her fist.

  To put it in conclusion, sir, final girls are the vessel we keep all our hope in. Bad guys don't just die by themselves, I mean. Sometimes they need help in the form of a furie running at them, her mouth open in scream, her eyes white hot, her heart forever pure.

  THE INITIATION

  The rest of the day blurs past for Jade. It’s like she’s moving at normal speed, but everyone else in the halls and classrooms and cafeteria are superfast ants. Either that or it’s her that’s going slow, her that’s trying to wade through syrup.

  In seventh period, probably because he’s tired of teaching the same old history unit—the Shoshone and the Oregon Trail, mining and Drown Town—Mr. Holmes shows them a video he’s taken from the ultralight little airplane he’s been buzzing around in all year, and sometimes parks in the parking lot even though his house is only three blocks away.

  Because there are no airspace laws over Indian Lake yet—“But wait, wait,” he says all sad-like—he can drift over to Terra Nova if the wind’s not too bad, report back on the progress of construction. That’s maybe why he built the ultralight in the first place, Terra Nova being his pre-retirement paranoia. But the ultralight’s pretty cool, Jade thinks—it’s pretty much just a sky go-cart. She’s surprised he hasn’t already killed himself with it.

  Now that he’s mounted one of the school’s videocameras to the frame, it won’t be long, she imagines. Tilting his fabric wings this way or that for a better angle, a longer shot, that’s a good way to take a header into a flagpole, a tree, the tall brick side of the drugstore, or even just the hard surface of the lake.

  Like he’s always saying, though, we all become history at some point or another, right? And, if Jade’s right about there being a final girl in town at long last—if that’s in fact what Letha Mondragon, sitting two rows up and one over, is—then what that means is that a slasher cycle is trying to get started, meaning life’s about to get real cheap around these parts. A lot of people’s insides are about to start being on the outside.

  Jade can hardly help smiling. Best graduation present ever.

  But it’s not a for-sure thing yet, she reminds herself. It can still be wishful thinking on her part. When you’re wearing slasher goggles, everything can look like a slasher.

  What she needs is proof the cycle’s starting, and in the slasher that proof only ever takes one form: a couple of randos getting eviscerated, usually while half-dressed. It’s the blood sacrifice the ritual needs to get going right.

  Who will it be, though?

  Jade cases history class, looking for any of the telltale signs of impending death: a water bottle sloshing with something a lot harsher than water (check); a text thread exploding with a party’s address (check); a pair of pupils dilated well past mellow (check, check, check); the purple corner of a condom wrapper sticking up from a wallet or purse (it’s already torn, but still: check).

  And—will this slasher be punishing the graduating class due to some long-ago forgotten prank their parents were part of, or will this have more to do with trespassing, with waking something that should have been left sleeping? If it’s the trespassing build, then Camp Blood will probably play a part, since that kind of horror always has tendrils connecting it to the black-and-white past. If the slasher’s here for something the parents have done and know they’ve done, though, then the slasher and the final girl will probably face off at the scene of the original prank, which will most likely be the lake.

  Either way works.

  Jade can’t help but smile.

  “Ms. Daniels?” Mr. Holmes says, reeling her back to class.

  “I’m watching, I’m watching,” Jade says, and she sort of even is. On the rolled-in television screen Mr. Holmes has tied the videocamera into, he’s just crossed the opposite shore of Indian Lake, is skimming the top of the pine trees about a quarter mile to the north of Terra Nova.

  “Wait for it, wait for it,” he says from the front of the classroom, and then dives forward for the pause button when he clears the last tree. “Trigger warning,” he turns around to announce, a mischievous glint to his eye. “All vegetarians, prepare to upchuck the celery and beets you had for lunch.”

  Mr. Holmes is always arguing that he wouldn’t eat cows if they weren’t made of meat, which is enough of a groaner to sort of wrap around to endearing, in a sad way.

  “More like cucumber, right, Ambs?” Lee Scanlon announces to the room single entendre–style, Amber Wayne kicking his chair from behind.

  “Now now,” Mr. Holmes says, and the way he does slow-motion with the playback is by tapping the pause button over and over, inching his flight forward. It’s like a slideshow now, Jade guesses, and settles in to see what he saw on his last big trip across the lake.<
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  From the front of the room, Tiffany Koenig, closest to the screen, gasps and covers her face, turns away. Mr. Holmes just smiles, tapping the pause button with delicious slowness.

  In the high sloping meadow just past the tall line of trees right on the shore, spread out so you can kind of still see the formation they were in, are ten or twenty dead elk, their legs and heads all twisted and contracted into grotesque configurations.

  Jade leans forward in her desk, because there was definitely some real and unique pain in this lonely meadow. Some roving Cenobite got its pound of flesh, and then the rest of the pounds of flesh as well.

  Banner Tompkins stands, crowds the screen, a couple of the other football players suddenly interested in history class as well. It’s kind of a first.

  “What—what did it?” Letha asks, and all heads turn to her.

  She’s not looking away, but the pain in her voice, on her face, is about to spill over into tears, it sounds like. For the sad innocent animals.

  “Such a tragedy,” Banner says, trying to match her emotion.

  “Please,” Jade hears herself scoffing, and Banner looks back to her, flashes his grin that she’s pretty sure means Shhh, shh, I’m almost into her pants, here.

  If only he knew who he was dealing with.

  “What did it, yes,” Mr. Holmes is saying, doing that thing where he thinks on his feet while the image is paused and trembling. “As you can see, there are no bullet or arrow holes, no holes at all.”

  “Beaver fever,” Lee says, and gets a high five from Banner, a sneer from most of the girls.

  “Giardiasis,” Mr. Holmes corrects, as if considering this possibility. “But… wouldn’t an elk’s four-chambered stomach take care of most parasites? Or, would nineteen elks’ stomachs fail to do so, and all at the same time?”