Next and 4th is the Signature Weapon. Jason has his machete, Michael has his kitchen knife, Ghostface has a hunting knife, Freddy has his glove, Cropsy has those hedge clippers, the Fisherman who still knows what you did last summer has that hook, and, 5th, the pentagram number, you need someone to WIELD that weapon, sir.
Enter the Slasher and his opposite the Final Girl, our #6, who you know from me telling you when I was a freshman.
So in conclusion once a slasher comes back from the "dead" and does the Blood Sacrifice with a Signature Weapon, then the Adults go incompetent, there's an Overnight Party, and a Final Girl stumbles out of the library and into this meat grinder, but don't forget about #7.
That's the Sequel, Mr. Holmes, which this paper will ALSO have, where you'll be thrilled to learn all about 2 other necessary things, Masks and SlasherCam, but that's next semester, since right now I have to either do this interview project for half my history grade or die trying.
GRADUATION DAY
Jade’s dad doesn’t sit for the ceremony, but he’s there with Clate Rodgers, onetime Henderson Hawk, now working out of a garage over in Ammon. The two of them are stationed against the fence right by the grooved aluminum steps leading up to the stands, are Chuck from Footloose and Wooderson from Dazed and Confused—walking, talking, drinking cautionary tales, seemingly there specifically to scare this next graduating class straight, make sure they get those college applications in, lest they end up stationed at this fence as well. At least that’s what the two of them are until Sheriff Hardy saunters past then slows as if he’s just smelled something but doesn’t exactly want to turn around, see what it might be—see if Clate Rodgers is actually daring to show his face in Proofrock after all these years.
Tab lifts his coozied can to Hardy, daring him to check if it’s beer or not, Clate snickers and rubs his nose with the whole side of his index finger, and with that they slope away to some less public place. Jade, pretending not to have clocked this sad but typical interaction, lets her eyes keep roving across the crowd, up into the bleachers.
The way graduation usually works is that the thirty-odd seniors’ parents get to the football field early enough to stake out the middle seats with blankets and thermoses of coffee, but this morning was different. Some of the construction grunts were already there, and had been there since before dawn, or so Jade gathers from all the grumbling. But there’s some awe there too, isn’t there? So far the incoming residents of Terra Nova have just been a golf cap moving down an aisle at the drugstore, a tanned and Rolex’d forearm at the diner, an Aston Martin nosed into a slot down by the banks—all sightings have been one at a time, but never all of them together. Even the newspaper articles just had them in their own frames, not grouped together like some superhero team.
Word now, though, is that the construction grunts still staking out the center seats up in the bleachers aren’t there for themselves, don’t have any graduates in this particular race yet, are just holding these seats, are just yellow-vested harbingers of the fable about to unfold at this graduation.
Because of that, the buzz and whisper is different. Both more hushed and more thrilled, like a formation of Oprah Winfreys are about to parachute down through the clouds, giving cars out to you, and you, and also you.
Jade tells herself that, should that happen, she won’t be one of those simpletons grubbing for outflung pennies, but, at the same time, she one hundred percent knows that it’s easy to be aloof when those pennies aren’t in play yet.
Where she’s seated is front row behind the low stage, and what she’s wearing underneath her gown are her custodian coveralls, because she’s on-duty right after this. It’s stupid that real life is having to start the moment all this so-called magic is over, but, at the same time, it’s like she’s in a music video too, isn’t it? The kind where you walk fast away from graduation into a montage of what’s waiting for you next, the bassline charting your steps: unmopped hallways, horrorshow restrooms, chalkboards needing a good Etch A Sketch shaking, to be blank for the next round of students.
Jade bobs her head two or three times, starring in that video, but then stops when she clocks the line of Bentleys rolling into the parking lot.
“Oh, shit,” she says.
“What?” Greta Dimmons asks, touching her hair, her hat, and her shoulders all in fast succession.
Jade doesn’t answer, has already turned away from the Bentleys, to who they’ll matter the most to: Mr. Holmes, up on stage.
“Well, fuck,” he says loud enough for even the row behind Jade to pick it up, judging by the snickers. Judging by how Principal Manx’s back straightens, it was loud enough for him, too.
Fuck is the only response, though. The Terra Novans are finally showing their faces in town. Jade hates it, but her back is sort of straightening too, to see better, to not miss a thing.
The Bentleys ease up to the gate and the tycoons and magnates step out in their languorous way. The women aren’t wearing gowns, but hip-hugging skirts and trim little blazers, effortless heels. The men aren’t wearing tuxes, but suits tailored and then tailored again, sunglasses that ride just low enough to look casual, accidental. The packed dirt path wending from the gate to the bleachers is a red carpet for them to pick down, hand in hand.
First is Mars Baker, the founding partner of some storied law firm in Boston, whose legal maneuvering is, according to the papers, what carved Terra Nova out from the national forest. He’s mid-fifties like all of them, mostly bald, and beaming, his severe wife, Macy Todd, holding his arm—the Macy Todd, who skated on a tabloid murder back in the nineties, then married the brilliant lawyer who’d gotten her off. Their twin girls Cinn and Ginny, twelve or thirteen if Jade remembers right from the profile in the newspaper, are tagging along, wearing matching flower-girl-looking dresses, though there are no flowers.
After them is tall gangly Ross Pangborne, with all his Bill Gates awkwardness and matching boyish charm. Also bald, Jade notes, and wonders if hair-burning testosterone and financial domination are somehow related. In the profile she read of him at the drugstore, instead of carrying a phone that can keep him up to date on the social media juggernaut he started for kicks and grins, he carries a simple flip phone, and sometimes not even that. His wife Donna is the female version of him. They look like brother and sister more than husband and wife, but Jade suspects maybe it’s just the same way a dog will come to look like its owner after enough years. Not that she can tell which of them is that dog. Their ten-year-old daughter, Galatea, whose name means something fancy, Jade can’t remember, is slouching behind in blue jeans and a sweater, probably the most formal they could convince her to get. Good for you, girl, Jade sends across the bouncy red track. Don’t ever change.
Next is Deacon Samuels, full head of hair and a hundred-watt smile. It’s what he’s used to become a real estate magnate, apparently—well, obviously—and it’s also what he flashes on the cover of all the golf magazines whose covers he graces. Jade scoffs in her head. Holding hands with Deacon Samuels is his famous ex-model of a wife, Ladybird, the “first lady of style” or something vapid like that, though Jade does have to appreciate how smoothly she navigates the bleacher steps in those impossible heels. When Deacon gets to the seats Terra Nova’s workers have been saving, he makes a show of passing discreet but not too discreet bills to each of them, which is their dismissal.
Hundreds, probably. Good work if you can get it.
When the construction grunts start to try to squeeze past the Terra Novans flowing in—the papers have been calling them the “Founders,” since they’re founding a new community—Macy Todd, somehow with just her eyes, informs them that they’ll be going the other way, the long and awkward way down and out, thank you.
While they’re retreating, cowed, their yellow vests practically glowing with humiliation, two or three of their slouching manners familiar to Jade, Llewellyn Singleton makes his timid entrance up the bleacher stairs, smiling with embarrassment from all the eyes
on him and his wife, Lana. He’s not used to public scrutiny, probably, would rather be in the office at his chain of banks, or franchise of banks—they’re like eggs the Aliens mother laid all across America, careful to leave one in each town. No, actually in, as the ad used to famously say, “every single town,” ha, ha, ha. Ha. But either Llewellyn or Lana must have a cool bone somewhere in their body, or at least their sordid past: their son, six years old, is “Lemmy,” which has to be after Motörhead’s frontman, as there can be no other Lemmys.
After them is Theo Mondragon and his shiny-new wife, the aptly-named Tiara. Theo holds Tiara’s elbow as she balances on her even more impossible heels up the aluminum steps, and with his other hand he sneaks a single wave into the wall of graduates—to Letha. As near as Jade can tell, and not counting her own dad, who’s just Indian-dark and already skulked back into deeper and danker shadows anyway, Theo’s the only Black person in the bleachers at all. But he’d stand out anywhere, she’s pretty sure. His college-football shoulders tapering down to a thirty-year-old’s waist, the short work he’s making of the stairs, and just the fact that he’s the headliner, here. Not that it’s a bank-account pissing contest, but it kind of is, Jade suspects. And in today’s world, a media empire trumps banks and law firms and real estate brokerages, maybe even social media.
The five couples take their seats, and, because this is what kings do at these kind of functions, Theo Mondragon, the alpha of this group of alphas, stands and rolls his right hand in a sort of restrained amusement, kindly telling everyone they can proceed. Carry on, carry on.
Jade does, or tries to, but… it’s like gravity was explained to her, sophomore year: each planet is a bowling ball on the trampoline that spacetime is, and all smaller bodies roll downhill to it, just naturally, helplessly, the same way all eyes at this graduation, including hers, keep finding these Founders and their wives. It’s why Brad Pitt doesn’t eat at Burger King, she knows—all the eyes, all the attention—but bowling balls are going to do what bowling balls are going to do, aren’t they? People in Proofrock have never even seen anyone like these Founders, and now they’re literally, physically rubbing shoulders with them.
Which is to say, all of Mr. Holmes’s prophecies about Terra Nova’s disastrous impact are coming true.
Jade manages to look away from Theo Mondragon, find her history teacher now in the speaker area kind of off to the side—because this is Mr. Holmes’s last go-round, Principal Manx is giving him the mic to say his farewells, lay down his final pronouncements and prognostications, deliver one last lecture, who knows. His left hand is patting his jacket pocket over and over, like being sure his cigarettes are going to be there the moment this ceremony is done. To get over what’s happening right now up in the bleachers, though, Jade bets he’s going to have to chainsmoke the whole pack, crushing the butts underfoot until he’s standing in a pile of dead soldiers. And maybe that won’t even be enough.
To add to his woes—and delay his retirement—Jade’s got a petition in with him to let her please please please complete her coursework for his class. All the other teachers were happy enough to let her slide on the last couple months’ work, but Mr. Holmes is Mr. Holmes, and so far he’s not letting his last act as a teacher involve sacrificing the “no excuses, no forgiveness” policy he’s always been known for. What that means for Jade is that this ceremony is a sham, as she still doesn’t have her last history credit done, and now, with Mr. Holmes’s replacement not here until August, when can she finish it? And will the replacement let her fudge the assignments, write about history through the lens of slashers, and never exactly get around to state history, so much?
She knows the answer to that.
Without meaning to, she rubs the inside of her unscarred wrist, wonders if a matching set is what she, and the world, really needs.
Sitting beside Mr. Holmes, wildly enough, is Rexall, in something approximating a suit. He’s being honored as well. It’s sick: Misty Christy, whose daughter almost got slapped by that bus, wrote a letter to the superintendent of the district, thanking and praising that “elementary school janitor” for saving her daughter’s life, and somehow never quite using a pronoun in the process.
When Rexall’s radar pings on Jade’s glare, he looks back, gives her a nasty smile and a slimy nod, and then waggles something suggestively at her from his lap. Before Jade can help it, she’s already looked: his phone. He found it. Meaning it can’t be used against him anymore, shit. Also meaning that, since he couldn’t have found it by calling it or pinging it, there must have been a pinhole camera in Main Supplies, watching her. Which would be the only reason he left her there “all by herself” so easy, just on the chance she might change bras in slow motion.
Jade’s skin wants to crawl off her, slither away. She shivers, shakes her shoulders, and tips her head back to see the top row of the bleachers, which she’s telling herself is where she’d rather be. And she sort of is—a pale version of her, anyway: her mom is up there in the high corner, sitting off by herself even in the crowd.
It’s the first time Jade’s seen her… since just after Christmas maybe? Since her last slide and skulk through Family Dollar, anyway. Kimmy Daniels. Technically she and Jade’s dad are still married, but she’s been living in a trailer with some other Tab for nearly five years now. As far as Jade knows—and she guesses she does know—her mom is the most senior check-out girl at Family Dollar, or in its history altogether, probably. More important, if the store’s not crowded, and if the manager’s putting out some fire in a far aisle, Kimmy will let Jade walk past without paying for the hair dye she’s always needing. Jade’s never been sure if she’s stealing it or if her mom pays for the hair supplies herself, but that’s mostly because they never speak. Jade just walks and glares, and Kimmy just drinks Jade’s every step in, her own leg muscles maybe tensing and relaxing, because she remembers being that old, that young.
The reason she’s up in the bleachers now, Jade imagines, is because Jade’s doing what she never did, as she was pregnant with Jade by what would have been her own graduation. Pregnant and staking out the hospital over in Idaho Falls, to see if the love of her life was going to wake up after his big wreck or not.
If only you knew, Mom, Jade sends across to her. I’m not really graduating. This is all fake for me.
Which is to say: it’s a fitting end for her high school career.
Maybe Jade should have used her roll of masking tape to say all that to her mom on the top of her mortarboard cap instead of doing her standard happy face with X’s for eyes, but screw it, right? Being here one day out of a whole childhood doesn’t exactly make up for anything. Next cruise through Family Dollar, Jade’s taking the whole shelf of hair bullshit.
Take that, Mom.
As for the color she got special for today, for the big day—bright pink—it’s not dye, but spray-on Halloween paint. Because Indian hair won’t go light enough for full-on electric pink. But screw it. It’s not like anybody’s going to be touching her hair, or studying the hatband of her mortarboard.
Her earrings are full-size dangling dice, because life’s a gamble and then you die, and her lipstick’s black like her heart—sticky, too—her fingernails blood-red.
Soon enough Letha Mondragon, the new girl with no real history as a Hawk, is up at the mic, delivering the commencement speech to louder and louder rounds of applause. The loudest is when she cedes her valedictorian medal to Alison Chambers, since “Grade-point averages transferred in don’t reflect feet-on-the-ground grades, do they?”
She really is perfect, isn’t she?
If Jade had any doubts about her final girl status, they’re melting away more and more with each word of the speech, each round of applause.
When it finally dies down, Principal Manx saunters up to the podium, holds two fingers up for eventual silence—his V’d fingers are wolf ears, which means “stop howling, listen”—and then shuffles his papers, tells the crowd this next speaker needs no in
troduction. At the institution of Henderson High, he is an institution, teaching wave after wave of students Idaho state history, because, “as everybody knows, if we don’t know what’s happened before, we’re doomed to repeat it.”
A smattering of compulsory applause follows Mr. Holmes up to the mic. The first thing he does is page through the sheets of paper Principal Manx left behind, holding them up just enough that the graduates behind him can see that they’re all blank—props. Because Manx has done this same ceremony so many times, he could sleepwalk through it.
Mr. Holmes straightens the papers, sets them back down, and then he turns, looks from left to right at all of the graduates before coming back around to stare down all the faces in the bleachers.
When it’s finally pin-drop silent, he leads off with, “The saying is actually ‘Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ ” To punctuate this never-asked-for correction, he clears his smoker’s throat, even has to sneak a hand up, tug at the loose skin over his Adam’s apple like trying to make room for the air he’s going to need here. “It’s from George Santayana, a Spanish-American philosopher from the first part of the twentieth century. He also famously said that history is a pack of lies about events that never happened, told by people who weren’t there.”
He takes the podium in his hands and leans onto it, glares out into the bleachers, adds, “We, however, are all here in this moment. Yes, in the months and years to come, our stories of this momentous day will become just that—stories—but for this, for right now, for the moment we’re in, perhaps we can, as a group, understand just what it is that’s happening here. Just a little.”
My Heart Is a Chainsaw Page 7