Close one.
Jade lies back, her heart pounding, and watches the sun climb the sheet that’s her curtain, calms herself down beat by slower beat with the knowledge that on one side of Indian Lake or the other, maybe halfway around at Camp Blood, this same piercing light is sifting down over the slasher as well, his mask of a face probably looking over to the glowing horizon right now, his eyes still locked in shadow.
Jade can’t help but smile, and feel a certain spring in her step.
Two hours later she’s using rubbing compound on the graffiti scratched into the main men’s bathroom in the high school—so she is setting foot there again—four hours later she’s across the hall at the SKANK STATION, applying eyeliner but also clocking the background of her reflection for if Rexall’s got an eye in the sky, and then six hours after daybreak she’s clocking out for lunch. Her make-up is good, her ruined hair hidden under a different cap, and—“Shit,” she says, catching a wavering image of herself in the glass of the double doors she’s about to push through.
Jade pulls her cap down lower, trying to get her hair under control, and knows full well she’s stalling, that here in the middle of this unscary day, she’s scared. Not of Letha Mondragon, but of… of talking to her?
What if she laughs about Jade telling her she’s a final girl? What if she read that letter out loud to Cinn and Ginny over French toast this morning, the three of them laughing so hard they had to be excused from the breakfast table? Of course she won’t have a taste for horror, final girls never do, that makes the horror coming for them even scarier, but… what if the prospect of a slasher cycle happening right here in Proofrock doesn’t even track to her, just sounds like a weak attempt at a bad joke?
“So she’ll feel sorry for me, then,” Jade mumbles. Which isn’t exactly better than being laughed at. It’s kind of worse, even.
Maybe she just shouldn’t go, right? If Letha’s a real and true final girl, she’ll rise when it’s time to rise, she’ll fight the good fight for all of them. Well, either that or she’ll bounce down into the cellar to check out that weird noise, get gutted or decapped or bisected or flayed, and then—then Jade can’t be sure: would Ezekiel have to come up from Drown Town to put a cap on this slasher cycle? Can an evil preacher count as good when he’s stopping a masked killer from slicing a town open?
Jade shakes her head no, she can’t let it come to that. Meaning she has no choice but to try to talk Letha into being the final girl she’s meant to be. Everybody has a function, everybody in a slasher cycle has a role—isn’t that a line from the Bible, even? Not the over-the-top violent one Craven and Carpenter wrote, with all the massacres and gore, but the other violent one with all the massacres and gore. The one where revenge comes not in a hulking shape lurking at the edge of the light but as a series of plagues that starts out feeling random, come to feel a lot more like justice, like the scales rebalancing.
Same thing, different church.
Jade pats herself on the back for that and takes the alley behind the drugstore because alleys are where custodians lurk, because alleys are where the horror crowd holds its dark masses. And because Hardy’s white Bronco is at the bank.
Seventy-five yards ahead, Letha Mondragon is already on Melanie’s bench, the Umiak bobbing by the pier. Meaning this rich daughter of Terra Nova gets to take it out on her own, is trusted with a three-hundred-thousand-dollar cigarette boat.
Jade wonders if a girl like Letha’s ever even had to clean a toilet. Probably to the filthy rich, toilets are disposable. Mario and Luigi are always standing by to switch a new one in after each use.
“You’re still stalling…” Jade tells herself.
She broaches a timid foot out into the gravel of the parking lot between her and the lake then steps in all the way, damn the torpedoes, whatever that means. The gravel holds her, lets her crunch across its warm back.
Letha is just sitting there staring across at, Jade guesses, her house coming together on the point over there? It’ll just be a summer crashpad for her, though, most likely. A place to decompress between semesters. A place to throw epic spring break parties if her dad and stepmom are in Bali that week, or can agree to be.
Unless of course Indian Lake comes to hold bad memories. Which is pretty much a foregone conclusion. There’s nothing to be done about it, though. It’s just the way a good slasher cycle works: the first death or two are people way outside the final girl’s periphery—a Dutch boy, a Dutch girl—but then the shadow starts to fall closer and closer to home. Deacon Samuels, just a hop and a skip from where Letha sleeps. And it’ll get much closer than that. Before it’s over, any cherished pets Letha has will definitely be history, and… Theo Mondragon? Tiara? If it’s only one of them, then Tiara is both the intruder into the family unit and probably the most disposable to Letha. Factor in the added benefit that her getting the blade can draw Letha and her father closer, facilitate some healing, and, well: Tiara’s got X’s for eyes, pretty much. Jade hates it for Letha—you’re supposed to have a mom—but it’s not like she makes the rules. She just happens to know them all.
She shouldn’t open with that right now, though. Coming in hard like that will scare Letha off. No, what you do with someone like Letha is lure her in like you do a bird in the backyard: with closer and closer pinches of a single piece of white bread.
And, though she wants to with every last fiber of her being, Jade doesn’t look back to see if Hardy’s behind the wheel of his Bronco yet, just sitting there watching one picturesque girl find a moment of repose on the bench he dotes over, another girl sulking in to shatter that peace forever.
Better than the alternative, Jade tells him. Anyway, wouldn’t it be even crueler to let Letha just keep bouncing through her skippy-drippy unicorn daydream of a perfect world, not tell her about the shadow creeping in behind her?
“Hey,” she says, catching her hand on the backrest of the bench.
Letha’s eating from a baggie of baby carrots. Of course.
“Oh, good,” she says, and makes a motion that means she’s scooting over, but she’s already left room, would never have sat down in a way that didn’t invite company and conversation.
Jade takes her seat, tries to take a wind-reading to see if the harsh scent her hair’s still manufacturing is going to waft left or right.
Blame it on the coveralls. Blame it on work.
“Now we can shake hands,” Letha says, extending hers after wiping the idea of carrots from it.
Jade takes her hand, says, “Town reject, nice to meet you.”
Letha’s dimples suck in and she shakes her head no about that, sets her bag of carrots down on her other side, says, “Jade Daniels, the legend.”
Jade has to blink, look into her lap. At the leg suddenly so close to hers.
“Nice pants,” she says.
They’re the ones A Bay of Blood was wrapped in, the ones that were supposed to just be an excuse for making a delivery. On Letha, rolled up to just under the knee like that, they’re cute and baggy, of course. On Letha, they’re killer.
“A friend gave them to me,” Letha says, patting the top of Jade’s hand. “And… I don’t mean this in… in any negative way either,” she adds. “Really it only casts a negative light on me, or where I’m from, how I’ve lived. But, if I don’t say it—you’re the first Native American I’ve ever known, I think.”
Jade breathes out, relaxes a touch. Somewhere in town behind them, there’s the regular thunk of an axe into wood, because, at this elevation, winter is always coming.
“Indian dude backed his tow truck down that pier right there once,” Jade says, proud.
“Relative of yours?” Letha asks, her tone glad to have elicited this reply.
Jade is studying the Umiak now. A umiak is an Inuit whaling boat, according to her phone’s dictionary. To better hunt the giant catfish that’s supposed to drift past the windows down in Drown Town, maybe.
“I got your letter, yes,” Letha says, sign
aling to Jade that the bullshit’s over.
Jade nods, is ready.
“I—” Letha starts, doesn’t know where to go, how to finish. “Stacey Graves,” she finally gets out, batting her deer eyelashes. “That was the paper you wanted me to read, right?”
“All of them can save your life,” Jade mumbles.
“But that little girl,” Letha says. “What I’m—why is she so important, I guess that’s what I’m asking.”
“Because whoever’s doing this is probably dressing up like—”
“To you, I mean. I read your letter six times, standing by the mailbox. By the end I was crying.”
Jade has to press her lips together to keep from smiling like an idiot. If you cry writing it, maybe someone will cry reading it. It’s more than she could have hoped for, is all she was wishing for.
“That bargain bin in Idaho Falls…” Letha says, kind of shrugging with her voice.
Jade sneaks a look over at the carrots, can only see the top corner of the baggie. It’s open, meaning the carrots are drying out right now. Proofrock is killing them.
“I read between the lines, I mean,” Letha adds.
“Mr. Holmes makes us double-space,” Jade says, not following.
“To what you were really saying,” Letha says, her hand on top of Jade’s again. “And—it can’t be easy to ask for help, especially from a complete stranger. It’s really… it’s brave is what it is.”
Jade sneaks a look up, hoping that Letha’s face can decode this.
“When we first moved here, I didn’t know why,” Letha goes on. “It was my senior year, all my friends are back home—but I see now. I’m here for you, Jade.”
“In that I’m part of Proofrock and Terra Nova and Indian Lake,” Jade says. “Yeah. Final girls, they fight for everyone, and—”
Letha starts to reach a hand up Jade’s forearm to be even more consoling but Jade shifts away, unsure what’s happening here.
“I just wrote that because you have to know,” Jade tells her, the truth of that so obvious. “I can—if you’ll let me, I can walk you through everything that’s coming, I can—”
“I can help, Jade,” Letha says, which pretty much sets off every last one of Jade’s alarms.
“No, it’s me who can help you,” she says. “I’ve been watching these movies since, since junior high—”
“Textbook,” Letha says. “It makes perfect sense.”
“And it’s definitely you,” Jade insists, trying to push through Letha’s supportive tone. “Anybody who’s seen any of them, even the bad ones, they can tell right off what you are—who you are.”
“A friend,” Letha says, pouring her earnestness across, the palm of her hand warm on Jade’s forearm now. There’s something so Sunday school about it that Jade can almost feel the black paint on her fingernails steaming away.
“Sure, yeah,” Jade says, halfway trying to take her arm back but not making a show of it, “friends later, fine. We can—you and me, we’ll come to the ten-year reunion for the sequel, how’s that sound? That’s when Ezekiel will finally be coming up from the lake. We’ll stand back-to-back in the middle of the gym floor, crepe paper floating down all around us in slow motion, and—and you’ll have the sword from the trophy case, and I’ll have ripped the blade off the paper cutter in the main office, and we’ll, we’ll—”
“Don’t hate me,” Letha says, her eyes flicking up and to her right.
Jade can’t help but follow them over to the sudden grille of Hardy’s Bronco, maybe six feet from the bench. Its tires had to have announced it crunching in, but Jade must not have been checked in to her surroundings. Real good, horror girl. Shit.
As if on cue, like this has all been rehearsed, Hardy steps heavily down from the driver’s seat, the night’s lack of sleep weighing on him, it looks like. He peels out of his chrome aviators, blinks against the new brightness, then fixes his eyes on Jade, studying her for the first time all over again, it feels like.
“What is this?” Jade says to Letha, fight-or-flight kicking in.
Letha’s non-answer is answer enough. That and Mr. Holmes, climbing down from the passenger side of the Bronco.
Jade stands, looks back and forth between them, then to Letha.
“You, you—?” she manages to get out.
“I had to report it, Jade,” Letha says, pushing her lower lip up like explaining how this is for the best, really.
Jade turns to run but one of her boots is already back to its natural state, so the dragging laces tie her feet up right when she’s trying to find that hyperspace button. She faceplants, the heels of her hands instantly raw and dented from the gravel around the bench.
Letha is there to hold her by the shoulders, make sure she’s okay.
“You showed it to them?” Jade says, hoping her voice isn’t shrieking like her head is.
“Them?” Letha says with concern, looking up, taking stock.
“Them,” Jade confirms.
Hardy is running the pad of his index finger along the top of the backrest of his daughter’s bench, looking at that instead of Jade’s current indignity, and Mr. Holmes is just standing there, the end of his brown tie flapping in the wind, his flinty eyes fixed where they always are: across the lake.
“No, no,” Letha assures Jade. “I just—I read it to him over the phone, the sheriff, to… to show. To prove. So he could help.”
“But the cops are always useless in cases like this!” Jade says, struggling to stand.
“I know it feels like that,” Letha says. “But you’ve lived alone with this for too long. How could I go out into the world knowing I’d walked away from—from someone asking for my help? Someone brave enough to ask for help?”
“It’s not me who’s gonna have to be brave!” Jade says, her voice panicking.
“This isn’t easy for any of us,” Hardy says, wading into this.
“Jennifer,” Mr. Holmes says in what sounds like the most reluctant, apologetic greeting.
“Jade,” Jade corrects, on automatic. It’s the call-and-response they’ve been flailing through since freshman year.
“Ms. Mondragon here was only doing what she thought best,” Hardy explains, his hat in his hands for some reason, even though he’s mostly bald and the sun’s shining.
“It’s just a—a personal letter and my old history papers,” Jade says. “I don’t know what you think—”
“Jade,” Letha says in a way that Jade has to look back over to her.
“Tell them,” she pleads.
“I did,” Letha says.
“She did,” Hardy confirms.
“Then we all know, right?” Jade says. “Good, good, might as well have it all out in the open, why not. Not that that’ll change anything. She’s the final girl, yes, and there’s a slasher around here somewhere, and, I don’t mean to speak bad of anybody, but after Deacon Samuels, it’s more than likely someone from over on the other side of—”
“Under that,” Letha says. “Before all that.”
“Okay, okay,” Jade says to Hardy. “What you caught me printing the other night at the library.”
“The extra credit?” Hardy says, scratching his head.
“I’m sure Mr. Holmes has already told you I was lying about that,” Jade continues, “because why wouldn’t he. Not like I can get detention anymore. That wasn’t a late paper for history. Mr. Holmes is retiring, doesn’t want to read any more of my bullshit. Which is fine, whatever, really. But—I had to tell Letha what was coming. I was trying to protect her. It’s no crime to try to keep someone safe. I can pay back for the paper, and Connie might not even care—”
“Connie’s known you do your schoolwork afterhours there for three years,” Mr. Holmes says, pursing his lips after saying it, and holding Jade’s eyes.
Jade opens her mouth to keep going, finds there’s nowhere to go.
So… so Connie the Librarian’s always known Jade’s hiding just on the other side of the audiobooks a
isle after lights out?
And then Jade sees what everybody else here has already seen: now that high school’s over and she can’t tell Mr. Holmes all her slasher theories, she’s trying to find someone else to latch onto, impress with her slasher Q.
“No, no,” Jade says, backing away from all three of them, which is just going to land her in the lake. “That Dutch boy she found in the water, he—him and his girlfriend, and… they were the blood sacrifice, see? They were the first ones, the proof, the promise of more to come, the appetizer that comes before the meal. That’s how it always works. They trespassed, were somewhere they weren’t supposed to be, so they paid the price, the ultimate price. That’s how it goes, sorry. Then—that Founder, Deacon Samuels. He—this proves that this is really happening, can’t you see?”
Hardy’s fingers worry the brim of his hat. Finally he looks up, says, “Are you saying the bear—”
“It wasn’t a bear, Sheriff,” Jade tells him, tells all of them. “Bears don’t have revenge arcs. The bear’s just being framed, but nobody’s going to believe that until—”
“A party,” Letha offers, meaning she’s read at least one of the papers.
Jade holds Letha’s eyes, nods slowly, asks her back, leading her so slowly, so carefully, “And… what’s the big party here every year?”
When Letha doesn’t answer, Jade turns to Hardy, to Mr. Holmes, says, “She’s not from here, she wouldn’t know.”
“Independence Day?” Hardy says with a shrug.
Jade fingershoots that correct, says, “Even in the form of a question.”
“July Fourth?” Letha says all around.
“You’ll see,” Jade tells her.
At which point Mr. Holmes wades into this debate, directing himself to Jade: “And so it was this, this slasher that killed that herd of elk over in Sheep’s Head, then?”
My Heart Is a Chainsaw Page 16