It makes Jade breathe in, to get ready for the next part, her hand finding the handle of the machete on pure instinct.
“One last scare,” she recites.
On cue, a great splash rises behind her, and, because she’s ready, because she fucking knows this genre, Jade is already coming up to her knees and spinning, already swinging, already screaming for all she’s worth.
But, again, her machete doesn’t cut all the way through.
Because evidently machetes don’t really do that.
What they are good at, it would seem, is going a few inches in and stopping.
Except—except this isn’t Stacey Graves?
It’s Jade’s dad, it’s Tab Daniels, somehow floated out here too, just trying to survive, one eye and part of his head gone, the rest of him latching on to whatever he can, grabbing on to Jade to pull her back into the past with him. Because of course Letha’s nail-plus-board didn’t really kill him, now that Jade’s having to think it through. Letha’s too pure to kill unprovoked like that. The world won’t let her deliver a blow that deep, that permanent.
Leave that for the Jades of the world.
The machete isn’t even halfway through his neck, but that’s far enough.
His blood—his life—slips out for real this time, coats the blade, and the one eye he has left is locked on Jade’s, and she says it to him at last, what she always meant to, the only thing she ever had: “I trusted you, Dad.”
When she pulls the machete back, he slips under, Indian Lake slurping him down, Drown Town calling his name, and Jade, the guilty party now, the Indian with her ear to the train tracks, feels her senses prickling, looks over to the side.
She’s not as far from the pier as she thought, is she?
And, who she felt watching her, it’s—it’s Tiffany Koenig.
She’s still recording all this on her phone.
“No,” Jade says to her, trying to explain but not nearly loud enough, “you don’t understand, he—he—”
She gives up.
Why even try?
Instead she covers her face with her hands and screams into her palms, screams and kicks, and when she looks up the next time, she’s drifted farther out, and there’s red and blue lights in Proofrock now, there’s helicopters beating in over the trees.
So it begins.
Jade watches, her heart reaching across the water but her bloody hands staying right here. She uses one of them to pat her chest pocket for a cigarette she knows isn’t going to be there, and then she works the lid off the little cooler, uses it like a paddle, two groaning pulls on the right side, two on the left, and going gradual like that, gradual and silent, she drags herself across the dark water.
She’s crying again, because this is it. This is her last time to run away. No way can she go back now, not with what Tiff’s got recorded on her phone. With Jade’s luck, all the stories of this night’s massacre are going to coalesce around her until she didn’t just kill her dad, but everyone else too—all this blood in the water was her calculated revenge against the town that never accepted her, that treated her like it had treated Stacey Graves, once upon a time. They can even dig in her old history teacher’s student files for her papers. They’ll be all the proof needed, and more.
Theo and Letha weren’t framing Jade, Jade’s been doing that all on her own, all these years.
No, there’s no going back. This is it. It has to be. Mr.
Holmes is dead, Sheriff Hardy’s dead, and she’s officially a killer now.
Even if Proofrock would have her, there’s nothing for her there.
She ships her oar—the cooler lid—runs her fingers up to the name-patch on her coveralls, works the two earrings loose.
One’s the comedy face, one’s the tragedy face, right? Add them together and you’ve got a slasher, pretty much. That would have been her last paper for Mr. Holmes, she thinks.
How the slasher is a bloody coin flipping through the air, showing a smile for a flash, then a frown, and then another smile.
Jade would have that coin never land.
She makes one last fist around the two earrings, the back of her fingers seeping from Stacey Graves’s teeth, and then she holds her hand out over the water, lets the earrings go, closing her eyes for that small plunk, and so she can see them in her head, swirling and sinking, one laughing, one crying.
Before her on shore is a string of dark cabins against a chalky bluff. Camp Blood. If she had a best friend with her, or any friend at all, she’d point ahead with her lips, say how she was conceived there one bonfire night, she’s pretty sure. And now—now they’ll find her starved and frozen in one of those dark cabins, won’t they? The horror chick turned into a leathery mummy, scavenged on by turtles and raccoons and crows, her knees still hugged to her chest, her heart finally buried in the only soil that would have it.