Holmes’s replacement not here until August, when can she finish it? And will the replacement let her fudge the assignments, write about history through the lens of slashers, and never exactly get around to state history, so much?
She knows the answer to that.
Without meaning to, she rubs the inside of her un scarred wrist, wonders if a matching set is what she, and the world, really needs.
Sitting beside Mr. Holmes, wildly enough, is Rexall, in something approximating a suit. He’s being honored as well.
It’s sick: Misty Christy, whose daughter almost got slapped by that bus, wrote a letter to the superintendent of the district, thanking and praising that “elementary school janitor” for saving her daughter’s life, and somehow never quite using a pronoun in the process.
When Rexall’s radar pings on Jade’s glare, he looks back, gives her a nasty smile and a slimy nod, and then waggles something suggestively at her from his lap. Before Jade can help it, she’s already looked: his phone. He found it. Meaning it can’t be used against him anymore, shit. Also meaning that, since he couldn’t have found it by calling it or pinging it, there must have been a pinhole camera in Main Supplies, watching her. Which would be the only reason he left her there “all by herself” so easy, just on the chance she might change bras in slow motion.
Jade’s skin wants to crawl off her, slither away. She shivers, shakes her shoulders, and tips her head back to see the top row of the bleachers, which she’s telling herself is where she’d rather be. And she sort of is—a pale version of her, anyway: her mom is up there in the high corner, sitting off by herself even in the crowd.
It’s the first time Jade’s seen her… since just after Christmas maybe? Since her last slide and skulk through Family Dollar, anyway. Kimmy Daniels. Technically she and Jade’s dad are still married, but she’s been living in a trailer with some other Tab for nearly five years now. As far as Jade knows—and she guesses she does know—her mom is the most senior check-out girl at Family Dollar, or in its history altogether, probably. More important, if the store’s not crowded, and if the manager’s putting out some fire in a far aisle, Kimmy will let Jade walk past without paying for the hair dye she’s always needing. Jade’s never been sure if she’s stealing it or if her mom pays for the hair supplies herself, but that’s mostly because they never speak. Jade just walks and glares, and Kimmy just drinks Jade’s every step in, her own leg muscles maybe tensing and relaxing, because she remembers being that old, that young.
The reason she’s up in the bleachers now, Jade imagines, is because Jade’s doing what she never did, as she was pregnant with Jade by what would have been her own graduation.
Pregnant and staking out the hospital over in Idaho Falls, to see if the love of her life was going to wake up after his big wreck or not.
If only you knew, Mom, Jade sends across to her. I’m not really graduating. This is all fake for me.
Which is to say: it’s a fitting end for her high school career.
Maybe Jade should have used her roll of masking tape to say all that to her mom on the top of her mortarboard cap instead of doing her standard happy face with X’s for eyes, but screw it, right? Being here one day out of a whole childhood doesn’t exactly make up for anything. Next cruise through Family Dollar, Jade’s taking the whole shelf of hair bullshit.
Take that, Mom.
As for the color she got special for today, for the big day— bright pink—it’s not dye, but spray-on Halloween paint.
Because Indian hair won’t go light enough for full-on electric pink. But screw it. It’s not like anybody’s going to be touching her hair, or studying the hatband of her mortarboard.
Her earrings are full-size dangling dice, because life’s a gamble and then you die, and her lipstick’s black like her heart —sticky, too—her fingernails blood-red.
Soon enough Letha Mondragon, the new girl with no real history as a Hawk, is up at the mic, delivering the commencement speech to louder and louder rounds of applause. The loudest is when she cedes her valedictorian medal to Alison Chambers, since “Grade-point averages transferred in don’t reflect feet-on-the-ground grades, do they?”
She really is perfect, isn’t she?
If Jade had any doubts about her final girl status, they’re melting away more and more with each word of the speech, each round of applause.
When it finally dies down, Principal Manx saunters up to the podium, holds two fingers up for eventual silence—his V’d fingers are wolf ears, which means “stop howling, listen”—and then shuffles his papers, tells the crowd this next speaker needs no introduction. At the institution of Henderson High, he is an institution, teaching wave after wave of students Idaho state history, because, “as everybody knows, if we don’t know what’s happened before, we’re doomed to repeat it.”