“I’m taking you to—” Shooting Glasses says from the driver’s seat, grubbing the keys up from the passenger seatback pocket, which makes it feel like his fingertips are touching her back. “Are you really, like, running from something?”
Jade considers this question for long enough that it becomes an answer.
“Where can I take you, then?” Shooting Glasses asks, cranking the engine.
“This your car?” Jade asks him back, wiping her face, finally breathing, and breathing too much now, too deep, like she’s about to just collapse into a girl-shaped column of tears and wishes.
“It’s like Cody out there,” Shooting Glasses says, nodding back to either Mismatched Gloves or Cowboy Boots. “We adopted it.”
Cowboy Boots, then.
“Adopted it your ass,” Jade says, pausing for a slice of a moment to clock if he hears that she’s talking like them.
“Adopting a car means—it means you s-s-stole it.”
She hates shivering like this, showing weakness like this, having to have a body like this. But it’ll pass, she knows. You only shiver for a bit, when your body still has hope it can get back to warm.
“It was in the way of loading the barge last weekend,”
Shooting Glasses says with an easy shrug. “We moved it in here to keep it from getting dinged up.”
“That d-doesn’t mean it’s y-y-yours.”
“We’ll give it back whenever whoever’s it is comes for it.”
“Maybe it’s m-mine,” Jade says, her shoulders jerking in spite of the jacket she’s wrapped in.
In answer to that, Shooting Glasses plucks a glittery pink Deadwood shirt off the dash, holds it up.
Jade has to smile, caught. No way can a horror fan claim a shirt like that.
“Now where we going, final girl?” Shooting Glasses says.
Jade’s heart stops, being called that. It stops and then inflates like a balloon in her chest. But, “That’s not me,” she has to say, looking out the side of the car, through her own reflection. “F-final girls are virg—they’re p-p-pure… they’re not like me.”
“Question stands.”
“I’ll show you,” Jade says, and nods to the right, into downtown Proofrock, then says to Shooting Glasses, “N-now you.”
“Me what?” Shooting Glasses says, easing the car one tire at a time over the fence panel laid on its side that Jade guesses is a gate. Close enough. When he turns the headlights on, though, she reaches across, touches his arm, shakes her head no. He sucks the light back into the front of the car. It makes it feel like they’re driving through church.
“I’d never even been here before,” Shooting Glasses says about Proofrock, sleeping all around them.
“Lucky,” Jade says, a wave of shivers rolling up her back again, her lips set against this physical betrayal. “Here.”
Shooting Glasses hand-over-hands the wheel to the left again, easing them past the drugstore, past the bank, and it’s not like church anymore. Now it’s like they’re coasting through a painting: “Quaint Mountain Towns.” “Lakeside Pastoral.” “What If 1965 Never Stopped Happening?”
“Your turn,” Jade tells Shooting Glasses. “I told you—I told you some stuff. Now you tell me some stuff. That’s how it works. Quid pro quo, Clarice.”
Shooting Glasses shakes his head side to side slow, apparently impressed that, in spite of these early stages of hypothermia, the girl’s still got it.
Jade nods that, yes, this is her, this is what she does.
“Where were you the last four years?” she says to him, kind of accidentally out loud.
“I was—” he starts, then hears it like she means it, just purses his lips, peers ahead into the unheadlit darkness.
“This is where you tell me about your buddy,” Jade explains to him. “The one that wasn’t a wake for back there. The one who didn’t die all the way or whatever.”
“Greyson.”
“Did he go live with a distant aunt to recover? Was her barn full of pitchforks, her hands full of s-sewing needles, her head full of bad ideas?”
Shooting Glasses looks over to her about this.
“That’s how it usually goes, I mean,” Jade explains, trying to show she means no insult. “The wronged party, victim of the prank, has to go somewhere long enough that everyone else can forget all about him, so it can be a s-s-surprise when he’s back.”