No: had. Some history teachers had that many names.
More important, “He talked to you about me?” Jade asks, fully aware this is giving away that it’s really her.
“He was proud of you,” Meg says, her mouth closer to the phone now, but all Jade can hear is that past tense.
“This isn’t a gambit,” Jade says. “This is… I saw it, you’ve got to believe me.”
“Was it like a—a slasher movie?”
“Just because… that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. If you don’t—a lot of people are going to die tomorrow night.”
“Sheriff said you would say that,” Meg says. “Something about ‘closing the beaches,’ I believe?”
Jade lowers the phone to the sheets, watches her thumb end the useless stupid idiotic doomed call, and she decides to just count the seconds until her phone dims to half-bright, then completely blacks out: fifteen, then thirty. But to be sure she does it again, gets a count of fifteen and thirty-two, so has to do it again to be sure, but this time—or maybe the next?— when the screen goes dark, it takes her eyelids with it. As she’s sinking, she tells herself it doesn’t matter, she’s safe. The door’s locked, the yacht’s still as a tomb, this blanket is soft and warm, the twins haven’t rung the alarm, and, most important, you don’t slash where you live. Theo Mondragon must know that, it’s basic stuff. All she has to do is be sure and wake before dawn, sneak out through the tangle of halls, be gone before Letha can insist on a group breakfast up on deck.
Jade’s first thought when she wakes back up, though, which feels like the same moment she was just in, is the thesis of another paper she wrote for Mr. Holmes: “The Strange Algebra of Horror.” Her lead-in example, and where she got the title, was that hurting the leg of a slasher, instead of slowing it down, it actually makes the slasher faster, just, now it’s got a scary limp. But her main push, with many examples, was that proximity to the final girl greatly reduces your likelihood of survival. Meaning a fly on the wall might just have a chance of slipping through alive—like, talking Friday s, Ted, the prankster in Part 2 who kind of by convention has to die and die hard. Except he goes out drinking on the town, is safe from all the carnage specifically because he increases his distance from the final girl.
Instead of, say, sleeping right alongside her.
Jade yawns a long luxuriant yawn, her jaw nearly popping out of place from it, and apologizes in her head to Mr. Holmes, as that paper must have been wrong, since, right now, Jade’s as safe as she can be. But… what was it that woke her up, here?
A sound? Yeah, some sound, something jarring. A wrong sound. Her memory can categorize it as “sudden,” just can’t hear it again, quite.
She tunes in to the rest of the yacht as best she can, squinting to dial whatever it was in. Because she’s listening so hard, the footsteps suddenly pounding past the door are absolute thunder to her. She kicks back into the corner of the bed, eyes wide, mouth instantly dry, muscles tensed and getting tenser.
Moments later the doorknob rattles violently and someone slaps the door high and to the side like a cop.
Letha squirms on the futon, shaken awake.
“W-what?” she says, not able to completely open her eyes yet, her lids probably gummed together with airborne melatonin. She reaches up to rub them with the back of her wrist, which is exactly when the wall maybe six inches above her head disintegrates with a blast that can only be Mars Baker’s shotgun. One of the barrels, anyway.
Letha rolls away from the wall as if stung with shot. She spills onto the floor just as the next barrel unloads into where she was lying, leaving wisps of foam floating in the air. In the silence after the blast, a single flame flickers at the edge of the crater in the futon, and, through the hole in the wall, there’s a scream, a gurgle, and then that gurgle’s cut sharply off.
“Macy? ” Letha says about that gurgle.
Jade’s on the floor with her already, pulling her close, her breath fast and shallow, but when Letha sees her she pushes away, trying to escape.
“It’s me, it’s me!” Jade yells, running her hand over her scalp like that somehow proves she’s the same, just, with less hair.
“Jade?” Letha says, slowly getting it.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Jade hisses, fully aware her voice can now be heard through that hole in the wall.
“But—”
Letha’s cut off by a hammering on her door. Not a slap anymore but the side of a fist, pounding.