Lemmy, though, Lemmy Singleton would have been all right. Him or Galatea. Kids she can deal with. Kids she can bluff.
“Thanks,” either Cinnamon or Ginger says to Jade’s back, stepping into the bathroom, and Jade nods, keeps moving, the hallway surely free and clear all the way back to— Facing her now is the other twin, either Cinnamon or Ginger.
She’s looking Jade full in the face, not recognizing her.
“Who—who are you?” this other twin asks.
“Letha’s friend,” Jade mumbles.
“There’s hair in here!” the first twin announces from the toilet.
“Does her dad know you’re spending the night?” the other asks.
“He ordered us a movie,” Jade says, turning sideways to slip past.
“The bathroom’s not even steamy,” this other twin says, which is the same as asking why Jade has a towel wound around her head.
Jade doesn’t explain, just keeps on trucking down to Letha’s room, ducks in breathing hard, feels exactly like Justine in Kristy, always hiding behind this door, in that locker room, certain death around every corner.
She feels for the lock on Letha’s door, twists it over, falls back onto the bed.
Her heart thumps slower and slower, the adrenaline flushing out, and in its wake is lavender and melatonin to inhale. Jade fights through it as best she can, Letha’s light snoring not helping.
“Friday the 13th,” she whispers into the remote, and pulls up The Final Chapter which wasn’t, hoping the carrot of counting machete-strikes into Jason’s head at the end will keep her awake. It’s the scene she always imagined watching with a garageful of classmates, all of them chanting the numbers higher and higher, some of them acting it out, all of them killing Jason together, because it takes a village.
Jade makes it through, does the count alone in her head, then dials back to Part III, is in and out until the headstand, which she suspects is not actually part of sex, but when Jason splits that guy from crotch to head, one side of her falls away with him, and—because all the camera angles and compositions are built around 3-D—Jade tracks it down. To her phone, awake in her hand somehow.
No, not somehow. Very much on purpose.
This is the decision she’s been avoiding, isn’t it? Cutting all her hair off hasn’t made her forget, though. Not quite. Even Jason hasn’t distracted her enough.
She can save a lot of lives if she just makes one phone call, can’t she? If she just touches one phone number?
It means… it means all her slasher dreams don’t come true, but—if they do? Is it really winning if everybody dies? More to the point: if she’d have nipped this slasher cycle in the bud already, by turning that pink phone in, would Mr. Holmes have ended up dying in Indian Lake?
That decides it for her.
She calls Hardy’s office. Not 911, where a dispatcher will answer, give her time to lose her nerve, but the actual office.
It rings three times, four, and on five—
“Fremont County Sheriff’s Office,” Meg says, as chipper as the day is long.
“Ms. Koenig?” Jade says, not speaking too loud.
“Um, who is this?” Meg asks back.
“I just want to report something.”
“May I have your name, please?”
“I saw a—I saw someone die. I saw him get killed, I mean.”
For a moment, nothing, then, so cheery, “And where are you, dear?”
“Across the lake,” Jade says, obviously. “Terra Nova.”
“And who is this?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s…”—quieter, much quieter—“it’s Theo Mondragon who did it.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s the one who did it. Theo Mondragon.”
“This is Jade Daniels,” Meg says, switching ears it sounds like.
“I’m anonymous,” Jade says back.
“We do have caller ID, dear.”
Jade closes her eyes in pain.
“I’m sorry,” Meg says. “But the sheriff left specific instructions for if you called. He said it would be your next…
what was the word? Oh, yes. ‘Gambit.’ Your next gambit.
That’s like a gamble plus a ruse, it means—”
“I know what it means.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Grady… he had said you have a vocabulary on you.”
Grady, Bear, Sherlock, Holmes, pirate of Indian Lake, Night Flier—some history teachers have as many names as A Bay of Blood, don’t they?