Jade weighs waking her for Kristy’s excellent lessons against the final girl being tired for her big fight tomorrow night but decides sleep will be the best thing, as each minute in a massacre uses twice as much adrenaline as the previous minute, and it’s probably even harder if you’re having to actually fight the slasher, not just get away from him.
That doesn’t mean Jade’s tired yet, though. But, not like she can step outside and blow smoke up at the stars, either.
Anyway, at this point in the game, standing alone in any dark place would be setting out a formal invitation for a beheading.
Cigarettes are great and all, but her head staying attached to her body is even better.
Because her fidgety hands need to be doing something, she snoops through the shelf by the bed—Letha’s sleepytime reading. Which are all the extra-credit history papers Jade hand-delivered. The whole sheaf is still folded in the middle.
Jade opens them, is ready to be thrilled by all the highlights Letha has to have done, because final girls always do their homework. But these haven’t been read at all, it doesn’t look like. They’re even… Jade checks every third page: yep.
Except for the letter Letha evidently keyed on, they’re in the same order even, from revenge and pranks to final girls, on through the big interview debacle of sophomore year, then adding it all together into Jaws: a whole slasher crash course in thirty pages. Just, a crash course Letha doesn’t seem to have bothered with yet, as Jade’s letter was, evidently, so much more fascinating, so much more “revealing.”
Jade has to chuckle. The kind with no smile.
She weighs again the pros and cons of waking Letha to maybe do this Very Important Homework, but finally pulls her phone out instead. Letha wasn’t lying, either: signal’s fine, now. Three bars, same as Proofrock. Not that being connected does anything but remind her that her inbox has zero new messages.
Jade opens her photos, swipes up and up until she finds what she wants: a snapshot of a photograph from that paper they had at the treatment center down in Idaho Falls… Post Register, yeah. The story about Mr. Holmes. The one photo was of him in his ultralight, the sky clear behind him.
Jade touches the heart under the picture, so it’ll be easier to find next time, and then she tries to blink away all the feelings trying to crowd in.
This isn’t the time for that.
Instead, she catalogs the day’s events, plugging them into and out of this or that slasher to see what might fit, and finds herself early on in Scream again. Not the Casey Becker kill, but the Sid-scare, where Sid shows the first glimmer of the survivor she is: when she can’t call the police to her house, she uses her computer to get them there.
Jade’s phone has battery and signal, though. Meaning— meaning she could just dial Hardy up right now, couldn’t she?
There are dead bodies over here. And she is a witness, at least to Shooting Glasses. She owes it to him to call Theo Mondragon in, doesn’t she? But if she does, then tomorrow night doesn’t happen like it’s supposed to, either.
Jade studies Letha’s memory wall, all the printed-out photos of her with friends. They’re at dances, scaling cliffs, just walking down streets that don’t mean anything to Jade, but probably mean everything to Letha. And of course there she is with her dad, with Theo Mondragon, both of them with scuba goggles cocked up on their heads, nothing but empty blue water behind them.
If Jade calls Hardy in, then Letha will be taking that photo down, at least. And blaming Jade for it?
Maybe, yeah. Probably.
A half hour later Kristy crescendoes in a beautiful necessary fireball—killing the killer feels so good—then scratches into the credits, and Jade salutes Justine, the bad-ass survivor girl, but all she can think about is Didn’t she have to pee at some point in all that running?
Jade has to pee so bad she can’t keep her legs still, which is only tangling her up deeper in the sheet, making this emergency situation worse.
Instead of jarring Letha awake by pausing the credits— ripping that sound away would have to startle her—Jade uses the remote to bump it back all the way to the pool scene, which gives her like forty minutes to pee. Which, judging by how the whites of her eyes are going yellow, feels like about how much time she’ll need. And the bathroom, Letha was sure to say, is just down the hall to the right.
Jade pulls Letha’s door in, chances a look out into this narrow little Dead Calm, Donkey Punch hallway. It’s just as empty as she hoped, and Jade supposes that, all in all, being in a Dead Calm or a Donkey Punch at least means you’re on top of the water, not down in all that DeepStar Six, Leviathan pressure. Though up here there’s always Triangle and Ghost Ship and Virus. But at some point you just have to find something to pee in, too, ideally a toilet. Jade steps out into the tight hall, immediately feels too exposed. She ducks back into the room, steps out a moment later in Letha’s Italian silk robe, a towel wrapped around her hair. Letha’s tall enough that the robe covers Jade’s combat boots. Score one for the good guys.