My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  He shrugs a noncommittal shrug.

  “What’s the history there, teach?” Jade asks.

  “No history.”

  “There’s always history,” Jade says back. “A certain somebody might have impressed that upon my just-forming psyche once upon a freshman year. Nothing just pops into existence. Everything comes from somewhere. It’s all got a story. Just a matter of if we’re committed enough to dig it up.”

  Mr. Holmes shakes his head in amusement, genuinely impressed for once, it seems.

  “Won’t say you were my best student over all these years,” he tells her, measuring his words. “But you are the one I’m going to remember.”

  “Voted most likely to die in a horror movie, right?”

  “And I apologize for not—for not realizing what you were really saying, Jennifer.”

  “Jade.”

  “I should have, I mean. I could have helped stop all this from—”

  “History needs documentation to be history,” Jade cites back at him, her eyes flashing. “Documents, testimony, artifacts—the holy trinity. Otherwise it’s just a pretty story. Compelling but empty, that’s what you said, isn’t it?”

  “We haven’t questioned him yet,” Mr. Holmes says right back, licking his lips at the end in what Jade thinks could be anticipation, which she reads as him wanting to protect her from the “him” in question: her dad. It almost makes her feel something, but she can’t allow that.

  Instead she breathes in, says, “You haven’t asked why this princess of Terra Nova is all bent out of shape by the possibility of a father going Chester the Molester over here in Proofrock. Or, in our case, all Rexall the… the—”

  “Guinea pig,” Mr. Holmes fills in. “It’s an Italian slur. What they used to call him in high school, because of his weight.”

  “It’s not his Italian-ness that makes my skin crawl. It’s his Krugness.”

  “Are you talking your Nightmare on Elm Street or that one, the… Last House on the Left?”

  “Good old Springfield Slasher his wisecracking self,” Jade says, surprised Mr. Holmes has kept all those titles in his head. “Fred, Freddy, the Mr. Rogers of Elm Street. He was the one into kids.”

  “But the other one was a rapist, right?”

  “Not a lot of nice bad guys in horror, no.”

  “And you say you recognize Rexall for being like that,” Mr. Holmes says with a shrug. “Must we then ask why your senses are dialed in in that particular way?”

  “I can’t say anything to make you believe, can I?”

  “To get me to disbelieve?” Mr. Holmes asks back. “Ms. Mondragon in there makes a good case, a strong and telling textual analysis. All the symptoms and characteristics are there, Jennifer.”

  “Not everything with spots is a leopard,” Jade says. “Now where did I hear that particular nugget?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t care.”

  “Rather be flying,” Jade says. “I understand.”

  Mr. Holmes snickers, caught. Says, like finally giving up, giving in, “When I was a kid, we had a fort over there.”

  He tosses his chin across Indian Lake, to Terra Nova.

  Jade takes another drag and holds it, not wanting to wreck this moment.

  “We built this raft, had a pirate flag and everything,” Mr. Holmes goes on. “We’d meet on this side at the new pier—it was new then—we’d meet at midnight, have candles and everything, our parents asleep, and we’d paddle across to our secret clubhouse.”

  “So they’re messing with your childhood by building their fancy houses, that’s it?” Jade says, turning her head again to exhale.

  “Clubhouse was long gone by the time Theo Mondragon and his… his lords of what counts as industry got there,” Mr. Holmes says. “I mean, childhood, sure, that’s gone before you even realize it’s slipping away, blink and you’ve got a mortgage. But the fort was long gone as well. Burned.”

  “The fire,” Jade says, ashing between them discreetly, just tapping the cigarette with her index finger the way people in movies do. And in real life.

  “How about this?” Mr. Holmes says, looking up to catch her eye, let her know this is for-real, not just their usual parrying and thrusting. “I’ll trade you. Honesty for honesty. Nobody knows this anymore except—”

  He hooks his head behind them again, meaning Family Dollar. Meaning Sheriff Hardy.

  “He was in your pirate club?” Jade asks.

  “That fire was…” Mr. Holmes says, his mouth and neck contorting to finally be saying this out loud after all these years, “it was us. Our campfire that night. Burned for nine days. Two campers from Kansas died. One firefighter from here—his uncle.”

  Jade widens her eyes, seriously impressed.

  “You old scallywag,” she says. “So, by slasher logic, which is, you know, the logic, then one of the Founders, these lords of industry, should have been a Proofrocker fifty years ago, and a pirate too. That’s probably how they all heard about that virgin shore over there—no, no. One of their dads, right?”

  Mr. Holmes shakes his head, says, “You never stop, do you?”

  “That doesn’t sound like a no.”

  “Your turn now,” Mr. Holmes says, reaching across to take the cigarette from her, guide it shakily up to his own mouth.

  He cashes it, grinds the butt under the sole of his loafer longer than he needs to to rub the cherry out, but about the right amount of time to memorialize the monumental confession he just made.

  “My turn to what? Turn in another paper?”

  “You can play dumb with him,” Mr. Holmes says. “You can play dumb with everyone, doesn’t matter to me. But I know, Jennifer. You’re not dumb.”

  “Thanks, I guess?”

  “I told you some painful truth, now you tell me some.”

  “Quid pro quo,” Jade says with a snicker.

  “Latin,” Mr. Holmes says. “You never fail to surprise, Jennifer.”

  “Or disappoint,” Jade adds. “And it’s Jade, thanks.”

  “It’s your turn, I mean.”

  “I haven’t started any fires visible from space.”

  “On the walk over, it hit me,” Mr. Holmes says. “The one horror genre you never broached in your papers and essays and creative pieces. How it was no accident that you avoided it.”

  “I do slashers, you know that. All kinds of subgenres I haven’t written about. I mean—exorcisms are boring, just confirm western religion, and vampires and werewolves have so much lore they’re practically fantasy, no matter how many throats they rip open, and haunted houses are just stand-ins for—”

  “I’m talking about rape-revenge, Jennifer.”

  “That’s not my name.”

  “Why’d you never delve into that subgenre?”

  Jade lets her eyes unfocus so she can burn through what he’s asking: rape-revenge is where a raped woman is left for dead but climbs back to life to take brutal revenge on her attackers, often using poetic justice, and usually a lot of primal screaming.

  “Okay, so… if rape-revenge is going to be slasher-adjacent,” she says, figuring this out as she goes, “then you’re saying the rape is the prank, right?”

  “You tell me.”

  “And you’re saying that this woman, she becomes the spirit of vengeance personified,” Jade says. “All that’s missing is… is a mask—”

  “She doesn’t need one,” Mr. Holmes says. “She’s supposed to be dead. And the rapists weren’t exactly interested in her face anyway. Or maybe their violence gave her a mask? The bruises, the black eyes, the fat lip.”

  “Okay, okay,” Jade says. “But this is usually the same weekend, too, right? Raped on a Friday, killing all through Saturday and Sunday? There’s no five or ten years where the pranksters can forget their crime even happened.”

  “They forgot her the moment they were done with her,” Mr. Holmes says, seemingly ready for whatever Jade might have. Meaning his silence earlier was really thinking. Prep
aring. Scallywag indeed.

  “Okay, I’ll give you that,” Jade says, though she knows this is a trap.

  “But if you elect to exclude it from being one of your slashers,” Mr. Holmes goes on, “if you say it’s from a different shelf altogether, then you’re saying that the crime itself doesn’t warrant revenge, aren’t you? That rape gets a pass. That sexual violation isn’t beholden to the scales of justice you’re always talking about, is somehow outside its purview.”

  Jade just stares at a bird prying something from a sewer grate.

  “Either that or you’re acknowledging that a minor can’t take that revenge,” Mr. Holmes adds, quieter. Because this is where he was going all along.

  Jade kind of hates him right now.

  It doesn’t mean he gets to win, though.

  “The reason rape-revenge isn’t a slasher is that the slasher and the final girl would have to be the same person,” she says, pushing off the front of Family Dollar with her butt. “Problem with that is that the final girl and the spirit of vengeance are forever locked in opposition, not the same jumpsuit. That’d—that’d be like Batman peeling his cowl off and being the Joker. Would that even work?”

  Mr. Holmes is just watching her.

  Jade shakes her head, says, “But really, is there anything I could say right now that might make you believe she’s wrong?”

  “She being her,” Mr. Holmes says, tilting his head back to the store, to Letha.

  “She not able not to be her,” Jade says with a snort.

  “There is one thing,” Mr. Holmes says after a long consideration. “You were asking about documents or PDFs in my inbox? Well, when I got my degree in education, the final hurdle I had to clear to get my diploma was my orals. The out-loud part of the test.”

  “I was listening in class, I promise, but I can’t remember all the dates.”

  “Just one question. No dates.”

  “So you’re holding my diploma hostage,” Jade says after thinking this through.

  “That would be unethical,” Mr. Holmes says, pushing away from Family Dollar now as well, and stepping out to study the street, his hands behind him, which means he’s back in teacher mode. “But you have been petitioning for me to allow you to make up for your eight weeks’ absence.”

  “I meant with more papers.”

  “About slashers.”

  “This a trick?”

  “It’s a gift.”

  Jade breathes in, shakes her head no about this—it’s not a trick, it’s a trap—but… just one question, and she graduates?

  “Shoot,” she says.

  “You’ve got to be honest.”

  “Swear on my father’s life?”

  Mr. Holmes chuckles, asks the question: “Will she or won’t she what? Your mom, I mean. Down in Idaho Falls that day, when you found that videotape in the clearance bin.”

  “A Bay of Blood,” Jade fills in.

  “That’s not the answer I’m looking for,” Mr. Holmes says.

  Jade looks at him with just her eyes, weighing this all out in her head, full-on hating being in this corner, in this discussion, in this day, and then, before she can make something up, “sell him a bill of goods” as he wrote in the margin of one of her papers once, the glass door of Family Dollar opens all at once, spilling Hardy and Letha and a long sigh of air-conditioning.

  “So?” Jade says to Hardy and Letha. “I some posterchild victim in an afterschool special, or was I just born bad?”

  “It’s never that simple,” Letha says, and that’s all the answer Jade needs.

  Hardy puts his sunglasses back on one leg at a time, says, “According to your mother, and she’s promised to get me the papers on it, that doctor’s visit in Idaho Falls wasn’t for… what we were thinking, based on your letter to Ms. Mondragon. You were there for a private reason, yes, but that private reason was getting your stomach pumped, wasn’t it?”

  Jade swallows, the sound loud in her ears.

  “Getting your stomach pumped isn’t a pleasant thing,” she says.

  “This isn’t over,” Mr. Holmes says to Jade, just for Jade—meaning her one-answer out-loud test is still coming, and probably when she least expects it, so he can feel like he’s getting a real answer.

  “Not supposed to be pleasant,” Hardy goes on, about the stomach-pumping thing, his eyes boring into Jade’s. “It was, there’d be no reason not to eat a whole bottle of aspirin.”

  “It was cherry flavored,” Jade mutters.

  “So it was an accident?” Letha asks.

  Jade swallows, the sound loud in her ears, and holds her suicide-wrist up like a badge. “You all thought this was my first time, didn’t you?” she says with the most superior, judgmental sneer she can muster.

  Letha’s eyes are shiny wet, about to spill over with concern, Mr. Holmes is just staring in through the front door of Family Dollar, probably wishing he were two hundred feet up in the air right now, and Hardy’s got his eyes behind chrome lenses, meaning he could be anywhere. A thousand miles away already. Skimming across Indian Lake, the hull of his airboat only touching water every thirty feet or so.

  So this is what winning feels like, Jade tells herself.

  Minus the jubilation and accomplishment and impulse to cry tears of joy, she guesses it’s pretty much what she expected. Give her ten, twenty minutes of scrubbing cusswords from bathroom stalls and it’ll just be part of the background hum, the usual suckage of Proofrock.

  And no, this lunch hour hasn’t gone exactly as planned.

  Right now Letha’s supposed to be slackjawed on the bench, one hundred percent believing that this slasher is real, that all of Indian Lake is in jeopardy, and that she’s the one pre-ordained to stop it all. Instead she’s standing there with her arms crossed, her right hand over her mouth, her eyebrows up in worry. About Jade.

  But it’s not Letha’s fault, either. Jade should have anticipated this, shouldn’t she have? Letha’s a good-enough person—a pure-enough final girl—that if there’s even the possibility that what she thinks about Jade is true, then she has to try to right it. Balancing the world and avenging injustices is what the slasher does, after all, always and only. Yes, the slasher is the governor on unfairness, but the final girl is the governor’s governor, the one who puts a cap on the cycle once it threatens to bleed beyond its own initial scope, go full-on franchise. Which is to say: the final girl is all about justice as well, is all about righting wrong wherever wrong’s encountered. Even if it’s between the lines in a letter, if you squint just right.

  “This isn’t over,” Letha says, somehow holding both Jade’s hands like they’re about to drift out onto a dance floor.

  “You’re right about that,” Jade says, trying to make Important Eyes, except a crusty clump of black bangs is poking into her right pupil, it feels like. She bats it away, turns to sulk off but then stops, makes herself say it, to all of them: “Thank you. I know you’re trying to help. But, really, I just like horror. Not everything has some dark reason behind it. And I don’t even do pranks anymore.”

  “Except trying to convince us there’s a slasher on the loose,” Mr. Holmes can’t help but say.

  “That’s no joke,” Jade says right back to him.

  “I’ll give her a ride back,” Hardy announces, breaking the tension, his cop hand already around Jade’s left upper arm, so he can steer her.

  Jade lets it happen, only looking back once to Letha, who’s watching her retreat, her eyes all about how she could have done more, she should have done more, it doesn’t have to end like this.

  But it’s only just getting started, Jade assures her, then shakes free of Hardy, pulls ahead, hauling the passenger door of his Bronco open before he can.

  “I’m working at the high school this afternoon,” Jade tells him once he’s easing them from the parking lot.

  Hardy stops the left turn he was making, hauls the wheel over the other way.

  “Jade, never mind what your mom told us. If y
our dad has ever—”

  “Letha Mondragon’s the one with the overactive imagination,” Jade tells him, using his own words against him. “Some mother hen complex where she wants to take care of all of us. And I’m the least likely chicklet to survive, so that means I’m the first she has to save.”

  Hardy sighs, says, “I think what you mean there is ‘hatchling,’ maybe?”

  Jade slumps down in the seat, chocking her knees against the warm dash.

  “And she’s right,” Hardy goes on. “This isn’t over.”

  “I was just—”

  “I’ve got some questions, I mean.”

  Jade looks over to him but he’s watching the road with every last ounce of his remaining attention, as if he hasn’t driven this stretch of Main ten thousand times. He switches hands on the wheel, nods to himself that it’s finally right in his head, and says, “You knew about the Maruman at the old camp, meaning either you were there when or right after it happened, or you somehow got hold of Meg’s transcription.”

  Jade doesn’t say anything.

  “And if you were over there,” Hardy goes on, reaching into the backseat to plop something on the console between them, “I know what you were wearing.”

  It’s her dad’s muddy boots from the porch.

  “I would shoot myself in the face before touching his boots,” Jade says, elbowing them away to prove how gross they are to her.

  “History of suicide attempts, yes,” Hardy says.

  Jade opens her mouth to ask him why doesn’t he just haul her dad in, since they’re his boots? But that would just be setting a red herring up, wouldn’t it? Because no way could it really be Tab Daniels. Slashers, in their own way, are as pure as final girls.

  “What?” Hardy asks, letting his foot off the gas so Jade can say whatever she was about to.

  Jade shakes her head no, nothing.

  “Anyway, that’s not even the worst of it,” he goes on, stopping in the hug-n-go lane of the high school with her for the second time this month. “You said there was a Dutch boy and a girlfriend. When we only know about the boy, whose dental work is actually turning out to be European, at least in the forensic report that just hit my inbox two hours ago. Leading me to think you have some knowledge that we don’t.”