Jade full-body convulses, her traitorous mouth opening to suck water in, the lake suffusing her chest, with its icy-everywhere-at-once fingers, and, and this is what death is like, some part of her realizes, and it’s not soft or easy at all, it’s a panic you’re both trapped in and distant from, and it’s— Another hand coalesces a foot in front of Jade, which is…
which is up, from above, not from below? Before Jade can process it anymore it has her by the front of her coveralls, is ripping her to the surface.
It’s Letha Mondragon.
She’s not slow-motioning it through the science hallway of Henderson High, though, her shampoo-commercial hair billowing behind her. No, now she’s gasping, blood sheeting down over her face from a gouge across what used to be her eyebrow, and that eye’s not moving with her other one anymore, but that’s nothing—her jaw. It’s been wrenched out of place, cracked away at the hinges, so her chin’s hanging low and crooked. The only reason it’s still even close to in place, isn’t torn away and tossed aside to sink, is… it’s her moisturizer regimen, isn’t it?
Her skin was elastic enough to hold on.
And if she can make it through that kind of violence, then taking a header into a boat isn’t going to end her.
Some girls just don’t know how to die.
Jade wants to reach for Letha, to hold on to her, to be held by her, but there’s a coldness surging up through her chest, there’s a new burning she knows is air, wonderful air, and then she’s puking lake water onto Letha. And Letha just lets her, lets her, doesn’t drop her or anything. At least not until she has to, the last of her strength spent on Jade.
Jade reaches for her, for real now, to try to save her back, but she doesn’t have to: Banner Tompkins is standing with her in his arms, is the one doing the saving here, his surge of water pushing Jade away.
“She—she did it! ” Banner calls out, turning around so everyone left can see the hero, Letha Mondragon.
The final girl.
“She did it! ” Banner repeats, louder, standing higher now with Letha, holding her like a trophy, like a hero, and Letha’s a good-enough person to shake her head no about this, try to give slasher credit where slasher credit’s due, but the effort to try to rise from Banner’s arms to direct attention back to Jade is finally too much. Letha passes out into Banner’s heaving chest, her long hair trailing down into the water, which somehow makes the whole scene more dramatic, more perfect.
Jade wouldn’t just be the bad guy for messing with it, she’d be the worst guy.
Worse than Proofrock already thinks she is, anyway.
She lowers herself into the cold water so as to disappear and frog swims to the side, having to navigate all the half-sunken floats, all the cold dead arms hanging down, all the blood swirling around her outstretched fingers.
Underwater, it’s not really crying.
But it is cold, now.
Jade surfaces with a gasp, the night air not doing much to warm her, and stabs a hand out for something to help her stay up.
The town canoe.
Jade clambers up, over, in, shoulder screaming, fingers throbbing, her hurt leg dead and heavy.
Collapsed down between the seats, her face to the green fiberglass, she laughs and sobs and hates everything, but she loves it all too, wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Finally she rolls over and there’s nothing but stars overhead.
She drifts like that, just checked out, spent, imagining she’s on a raft of the dead, imagining there’s credits rolling somewhere in her foreground, imagining— Her hand finds the machete under the bench.
She lifts it, inspects it like the wondrous thing it is, and, trying to be cool like Quint, slams it down into the side of the canoe. It falls over so she tries again, standing to swing, and just gets the edge to chisel in enough so the machete can stay there like it’s supposed to.
Sideways in the canoe now, Jade hooks her legs over one side, hangs her head back over the other side, and for the thousandth time she’s Alice at the end of Friday the 13th, Alice in the long sigh after all the screaming, Alice reclining back into that dream which would wedge the door of sleep open for Freddy, for this whole Golden Age.
Just for a moment, before Jason bursts up from the water, hugs her from behind, everything’s pretty all right, isn’t it?
Pretty perfect, really. The horror’s been dealt with, this long night is over, and there aren’t even any hard questions to be answering yet.
It’s the best tease in the long and storied history of teases.