Letha smiles too, has to cover it with her hand as if embarrassed, shaking her head fast that no, no, she’ll never eat it again either.
“Or maggots either,” Jade can’t help but add.
“Stop!” Letha pleads.
Now it’s Jade who’s having to blink the feelings away.
“Everybody bumps their boats into each other for this part,”
she says, chucking her chin ahead of them, to the movie. It’s all the wannabe trophy hunters crowding the boating lanes of Brody’s harbor to catch the killer shark, get that reward money. Invariably some seventh-grader drops an M-80 into the water, in honor of the dynamite one of those fishermen have.
Even the adults bring buckets of chum: red Jell-O run through the blender.
“Why that movie, though?” Letha asks, pedaling slower either from fatigue or inattention. In that lull, a bottle rocket arcs up into the velvety sky, its sparks drifting behind it. Jade feels the muted pop in her chest.
“Because of that,” she says. “I mean, Jaws happens on the Fourth.”
“Wouldn’t a monster-bear movie fit better up here, though?”
“Prophecy, 1979, yeah,” Jade tells her. “But we’ve got bears. Bears are a fact of life. Sharks aren’t. Sharks are the fantasy. It’s fun to scream about them.”
“Fun?”
“Fun,” Jade says, grinning in the dark, and doesn’t even fall into some involved lecture about where Jaws can fit on the slasher evolutionary chart.
Letha holds the top of Jade’s hand again, and keeps holding it, and Jade doesn’t pull away, just rides, and watches the movie. It’s not quite on mute anymore for them, but on “distant burble.” She pictures Hardy up on the pier, trying to zero in on who that is on shore with the roman candle. “I thought I was going to die back there,” she says all at once, surprising herself. “I guess I thought I already was dead, sort of.”
“I wouldn’t let that happen,” Letha tells her, and she’s so earnest that Jade almost has to chuckle, just as counterweight.
“How’d you get out?” she asks instead.
When Letha doesn’t answer at first, Jade looks over just casually, catches her blinking a touch faster than she has been —like Jade just was. Except, Jade was trying not to let her emotions get the better of her, wasn’t she? And… Jade’s dialing back, back—back to Melanie’s bench a week ago, yeah. When she clocked this exact tell from Letha.
“What?” Letha’s asking.
“How’d you get out of the pile of elk?” Jade hears herself asking, a coldness washing up her, gripping her heart, her face, her hand slithering back into her lap. She can’t remember how many of the who’s-doing-it breed of slashers have been eureka’d just this way: a dumb, inconsequential question that exposes some simple gap in logic.
“I wasn’t as deep in as you?” Letha is saying from what seems like far away.
“Because you’re faster,” Jade hears herself saying back, just to finish what she knows Letha is going to say. “You were almost all the way out when it fell down.”
“Lucky,” Letha says.
Jade looks behind them into the darkness, as if she should be able to see Theo Mondragon slouching along the shore, dragging that shiny axe behind him. Or, she can’t lie to herself: she’s studying the shore for even just a distant glint of that axe, please. Because that would mean that she’s just light-headed from lack of calories, lack of real sleep, a concussion—that she’s thinking wrong. That she’s not sitting right by the one somehow behind it all.
Did Letha see her dad in that bear trap too, and walk away?
Is this all a ruse? Did it really take her all day to dig Jade out, or did she need that time to bash holes in a few hulls? Was the swan boat really there by accident? Is the machete tucked behind the seat?
“What’s wrong?” Letha asks.
“Somebody threw your stepmother,” Jade blurts out, clasping hard to that certainty. Because no way was that Letha.
And how to have choreographed that shotgun blast through the wall? Why cut it so close just to convince the horror chick, whom she could have just killed easy as anything?
Unless she can’t. Unless that horror chick’s about to get framed.
Unless that horror chick’s been the patsy all along.
Speaking of, shouldn’t Letha have been reduced to a crying ball of fear by now, not relaxed enough to be idly talking about horror movies?