It smells like hairspray and floor cleaner and secret cigarette smoke.
“Woodsboro High, here I am,” she says.
Nobody notices.
The gauze on her arm itches, wants to just come off already, but the gauze is her armor for the day, so it can’t come off.
And Hardy was too gentlemanly to even question it, though Jade did catch him looking: Why would Suicide Girl still need dressing over stitches that had long been pulled, over a skin-weld of scar tissue she’s already considering getting a tattoo around, a tattoo of dead fingers clawing their way up and out?
The answer of course is that she doesn’t need it. But she also really-really does.
The mummy-wrap is stolen, of course. All the best things in life are stolen, Jade knows. Like this envelope.
Since nobody’s got eyes on her, she steps into the Quiet Room by the main office, which any student can retreat to if anxiety has their thoughts circling the drain, from their parents getting divorced, from their boyfriend or girlfriend not texting them back, from finals or “life,” whatever.
Jade unwraps the red string keeping the envelope closed and reaches in for this so-called property.
First is the name-patch from her custodial coveralls, probably all that was left after the medics attacked her with their blunt-nosed scissors. Jade tucks it into her front pocket, to carry ahead to her next pair of coveralls. Next is a plastic baggie with the earrings she was wearing the night-of. One’s a pearly-white smiling face maybe a half-inch across, and the other’s the same face, just sobbing blood, a pentagram Manson’d between its eyes. Because: the Crüe. She chocks the envelope under her arm and reinserts Theatre of Pain into her ears, apologizing to Vince and Nikki and Tommy and Mick that she never even missed them.
But the patch and the earrings aren’t the real weight in this envelope. The real weight is a sandwich baggie with a rhinestone-and-pink phone inside.
“What are you?” Jade says, shaking the phone out, trying to wake it but it’s been dead since the night-of, she guesses. Or earlier.
Why would Hardy think this is hers, though? Was it in the canoe? Is it one of the medics’？ Why does it smell like peanut butter?
Jade peels the pink case off for the ID or emergency credit card tucked in back. Instead there’s just an if-found sticker, with a +31 phone number and a name that probably goes with that country code: “Sven.”
Jade dials the number into her own phone, listens to it ring and ring, finally landing at a voicemail in a language she doesn’t understand. She looks “+31” up, lands on “Netherlands.”
“Any way,” she says, and, now that the phone number’s in her call list, peels the if-found sticker, crumbles it into the trash so that, as far as teachers or principals or sheriffs might know, this is her phone. To prove it, she shoves it into her right rear pocket, moving her own phone to her bra, which she knows is some sort of breast cancer danger, but screw it.
Maybe her imaginary best friend will text and Jade will feel that buzz immediately in her heart, right?
Right.
All the same, she guesses it was pure luck she wasn’t checking her phone on the ride in with Hardy. He might have clocked the phone in her lap, had questions about the one in the bag, with the pink case Jade would never have for herself, now that she’s thinking about it.
That pink, though, it reminds her of… what?
Jade squints, trying to dredge the memory up, connect it to something, and zombies back out into the bustle of two minutes before first bell. She’s not going to chemistry, though.
Not yet. First it’s the ladies’ room by the men’s gym, because it’s always the least crowded. The whole way there she’s expecting conversation to stop around her, for feet to shuffle to a stop when she scowls past, but instead it’s just the usual treatment: eyes flicking away when they realize it’s Jennifer Daniels again, or Jade, or JD, or whatever she’s going by this year. Even her beacon of an arm hardly draws a second glance.
What, did somebody else suicide after her, and better? Is she old news already?
She ducks into the ladies’ room and pulls down the community eyeliner from the top of the far mirror, the one with SKANK STATION scratched into the tile above it, either by one of the rah-rahs who would never stoop to risk an eye infection, or by that rah-rah’s mother, fifteen years ago.
No way can Jade face the day without her black binoculars to look through, though.
She opens wide, traces it on raccoon-thick, has her face right to the mirror when the voice comes from behind her: “Oh. So there will be thirty-two Hawks this year, I guess.”