SLAUGHTER HIGH
Eight weeks is the vacation Henderson High gives you for attempted suicide, apparently— seven, really, Jade thinks, since spring break was one of those weeks.
Still, seven works, even if she had to spend them in a psych ward down in Idaho Falls. She should have thought of this particular scam years ago. Better yet? She’s kind of an escaped mental patient now, she thinks. Close enough.
And that story only ends one way.
“What’s so funny?” Sheriff Hardy asks her across the console of his OJ-white county Bronco—the chariot delivering Jade back for the last week of class, so she can go through the motions of finishing out her senior year.
“This,” Jade says, hooking her chin out to the hug-n-go lane they’re mired in.
“But you understand about the community service?” he asks, switching hands on the wheel with a groan, a wet cartilaginous pop coming from the depths of his lower back.
“Twelve hours,” Jade recites for the third time this trip.
Twelve hours picking trash for—
Get this, she would say to her best friend, if she had one: the community service is for “Unauthorized Use of the Town Canoe.”
“Is that really what it’s called?” her imaginary best friend would hiss back with just the right amount of thrilled outrage.
“Exactly,” Jade would say, this interchange nearly making those twelve hours of picking trash worth it.
Instead, they just sort of pre-suck.
Still, she guesses she’s going to be a star at school today, right? This will be her official fifteen minutes. The returning antihero. The teen every parent fears the worst. The one who almost got away, before Hardy got Shooting Glasses’s frantic call and fired his airboat up, skipped out to Jade’s frozen spot on the lake, kept her wrist compressed just long enough for the LifeFlight to touch down on shore, all of Proofrock gathered behind it in their slippers and robes and, for all Jade knows, half-dead as she was, wearing those sleep caps with the long cartoon tails trailing behind, that, in real life, would have been dipped into toilet water five hundred times already.
It’s a fun enough image to dwell on, and Jade’s had weeks and weeks at the Teton Peaks Residential Treatment Center to do it, but what she always finds herself watching instead of the crowd that night is Sheriff Hardy, coming up out of the shallows with her in his arms, giving her all the body heat he has to give, his sixty-one-year-old jowls quivering with each bellow he lets out about how this girl is goddamn well not going to die, not on his watch.
In slashers, the local cops are always useless. It’s a hard and fast rule of the genre. Sheriff Hardy not sticking to that is just one more nail in the coffin of Jade’s dreams.
By now that coffin’s pretty much all nails.
“And you don’t have any blades hidden here, right?” Sheriff Hardy confirms, nodding to the front doors of the school they’re finally stopped at.
“Axes and machetes count?” Jade asks back with her best evil grin, her hand already to the door handle, but… there’s a manilla-brown
PROPERTY
envelope
suddenly
and
unaccountably in Hardy’s right hand?
Hardy breathes in like Jade’s paining him here, says, “You want, I can just take you back to—”
“No, Sheriff, no weapons on school grounds. Everybody knows I keep my axes and machetes over at Camp Blood, right? Buried under the floorboards of cabin six?”
Hardy licks his lips and Jade can tell he doesn’t know what to do with her.
Just as she wants it.
“That’s for me?” she says about the mystery envelope, and Hardy hands it across uncertainly.
“I just want you to—to be safe, you know?” he says.
Jade’s trying for all the world to hold his eyes while also weighing this strangely-heavy envelope in her hand. Property?
“Consider me saved,” she says, her door open now, right foot reaching for the ground, and she’s no more than shut the door and spun around before a dad in a gold Honda kisses her shins with his plastic bumper, his tires chirping.
Jade has to hop back to keep the contact from getting real, hop back and slam both hands onto the hood. She looks down through her electric blue bangs to her knees, to this insult of a near-disaster, and then she brings her eyes up slow across the hood, bores them through the windshield, and Hodders her head over to look into this father’s soul. It, like his chest, is pretty much just covered in coffee. She removes her hands one at a time, only looking away at the last moment. Holding her mummy-wrist high, envelope low and trailing, she stalks away, wades through the crush of bodies, under the wilting flags, and steps into the hallowed halls of learning one more time, breathes that morning napalm in.