Lifting gently, slowly, she guides them all into her bag of infinite holding. Infinite smelly holding.
Stacey Graves does make sense out on the water, she supposes. But it’s not like Ezekiel doesn’t. The lake is both of their territory, and probably the shore too.
Jade looks out across the lake and mimes poling ahead with her litter stick, both hands, has to jog to catch a candy wrapper trying to make it to the tall grass. Candy wrappers are always the fastest. Something about their no-friction paper and their basic weightlessness, and how each upflung tatter is another sail.
Stab. Stab.
When the candy wrapper flits up into the air instead of riding her spear into the bag, Jade tries to move slow enough to impale it at eight feet high and spiraling. When she misses three times in a row, just scaring it higher away, she takes a couple of running steps and hurls her stick like a spear at it.
One one-hundredth of a second after the handle’s gone from her hand, she thinks to look ahead to where her litter stick might be landing.
Time slows for her, hardly even moving at all.
At the other end of this not-a-javelin’s arc is—is… there’s the sheriff’s big plate glass window, there’s two county vehicles, there’s the light pole with the frosted glass bulb by the sidewalk leading to the sheriff’s building, there’s a blue post office box which it’s probably a federal crime to puncture.
Jade turns her head away to not have to witness this, and, when it has to be over, her future decided, she takes a timid peek.
The litter stick landed point-first in the hump of grass. A small brown bird flutters down, perches on it, and gives Jade the eye, like this new and unexpected vantage point is his, now, thank you very much. Jade looks past the bird to Sheriff Hardy’s window, which has to be like his big television screen, the one always tuned to “Proofrock.” Just, now it’s got this one girl traipsing across it.
This one girl who owes him some community service.
Which she can’t dodge anymore, can she?
“Might as well,” she says. She has to go over there anyway to collect her litter stick, doesn’t she? Maybe signing up for some hours can be her payment for the luck of not having broken out any windows, perforated any car roofs.
Jade waves the bird away, its sharp claws not letting go of the stick’s handle until the last possible instant.
That would for sure be scary, Jade thinks, tracking the bird zigging and zagging away: a human body with a sparrow head, like the owl-head dude in Stage Fright.
Slashers these days tend to be more off-the-shelf, though, don’t they?
As if to prove this, Jade pulls the so-called lapel of her coveralls over on the left side, to check if the dull white Michael Myers mask she’s got stashed there is riding well. It’s just a hard plastic shell with a wimpy elastic band, your basic face eraser, but no way can she risk carrying a sixty-dollar pull-on full-head bleached-out Captain Kirk around in her pocket just for kicks and grins. No, in circumstances like hers, keep a little two-dollar clearance job that you can leave behind if need be. It’s not like she paid the two dollars for it anyway.
Now that she’s actually here at Hardy’s building, though, this close to the threat of community service, she’s kind of having second and third thoughts.
What if he wants her to wash his Bronco? What if he tells her to use her litter stick out in the shallows of Indian Lake, where every third piece of flotsam is going to be not just a rubber, but the rubber of someone she knows?
No thank you.
Maybe she can just cross the summer with those twelve hours untouched. What’s he going to do, arrest her? Keep her from graduating any more than she’s already not graduating?
Moving sneaky, she dislodges the gross tissue from the top of her canvas bag o’smells, lets it go in a gust of wind, then jogs backwards-like, being as conscientious a litter-stabber as she is, she has no choice but to run catch it. Except it keeps being one stab ahead of her stick. And again, again, until she has to be out of sight of Hardy’s office window.
The life of the summer janitor, yeah. Gloriouser and gloriouser, until she can’t contain the gloriousness anymore, has to burst with sunshine from the pure joy welling up inside her.
Which is only halfway a lie: the longer this slasher takes to rise, the more her anticipation has been ratcheting up. Time and again, watching Letha Mondragon walk from her stepmother’s slick little Audi to the pier for their cigarette boat the Umiak, Jade’s reached out for her, to warn her, to explain it all to her, but she’s never reaching with her hands, quite. Just with her eyes. She’s going to have to actually tell her at some point, though. It’s not stacking the deck, it’s just common courtesy.