But, Jade has to admit, she guesses the reason she hasn’t approached Letha Mondragon yet is that she’s not a hundred and ten percent absolute certain that this isn’t all just in her head, that she isn’t a victim of wishful thinking. Maybe all her videotapes have rotted her mind. Maybe all the hatred balled up inside her has started sending tendrils out into her thinking, to blacken her thoughts, dim her perception of the actual world.
If she starts seeing tracking lines in the sky, that’s when she’ll know, she tells herself.
Until then, she’ll just keep watching, and waiting.
Except—except it has to be true this time, doesn’t it? Letha Mondragon wouldn’t be here if there weren’t a slasher in the vicinity, would she? That’s not the way it works. Jade guesses she doesn’t know which came first, the slasher or the final girl, the chicken or the bloody egg, but she does know that where there’s one, there’s gonna be the other, so it doesn’t really matter.
And, okay, she does know which came first: the slasher, of course. It rises to right the wrongs, then when it gets all carried away, nature spits up its governor, its throttle, its one-woman police force, its fiercest angel: the final girl. She’s the only cap the slasher cycle recognizes.
But Jade’s not writing her cute little papers for Mr. Holmes anymore. Those days are over, gone forever.
Now she’s in a slasher.
Stab.
This time it’s a dead bird. The meaty feel and muted crunch comes up through the fiberglass pole into Jade’s palm, and she makes it last as long as she can, imagines a paternal hand spread on the ground, fatherly fingers clutching at the gravel, a left work boot jerking involuntarily, blood leaking down into the whorls of an ear. Right or left, it doesn’t matter.
Instead of burying the bird in the trash bag at her hip, she uses her heel and the point of the stick to scrape a deep-enough hole under a bush by the post office. It’s Saturday, so nobody’s there to ask her what she’s doing.
She pushes the dead bird in, covers it up, then studies the dark blood on her stainless steel prod.
It makes a lump swell in her throat. This is what stories mean by “gorge,” she knows.
She turns away, spits long and stringy but doesn’t quite throw up. Technically.
Just from a one-ounce bird, yeah.
Real brave, Jennifer, she tells herself. Very metal.
To deal with the trauma, she works her way around to the side of the post office then sits there for an hour she measures in cigarettes smoked, the shadows lengthening all around her, the temperature clicking down with the sun.
If she doesn’t get back to Golding Elementary in time to turn her stick back in, big loss. It’ll just mean not being in Rexall’s hidden camera, and that can’t be the worst thing in the world. And Hardy’s not even in his office to catch her not working. From here she can see him out on the water, skipping around in the airboat he bought with the insurance money for his daughter’s death back when.
“Get him, sir,” Jade says.
She’s talking about Clate Rodgers, Hardy’s daughter’s junior high boyfriend at the time of her drowning.
What was her name? Jade’s mom used to say it sometimes, as if, had this dead girl lived, the whole town would be different, better, as if, with that one girl walking down its streets, Proofrock could be what it was meant to have been.
Not the current thing it is.
Melanie, that’s it.
It’s lettered right there on the sides of Hardy’s airboat, were Jade close enough to see. The first time she sounded the name out, just trying to make it be a word, not a jumble of blue letters stuck to his hull, she was… second grade? But it could have been first, she supposes. In the summer, it’s tradition for all the kids who don’t think they’re too old to line up on the pier in their swimsuits, line up and hold hands, Sheriff Hardy coasting his airboat back and forth before them like a drill sergeant, informing them about water safety, about how all of them, if they follow his instructions to a T, can have the best, and safest, summer ever.
The whole time the kids are flinching and trying not to run away, especially when he hauls the rudder over fast and guns his big fan, performing a neat little kick turn on the water.
They’re waiting, they’re holding their breath over and over, but they have to breathe too. Jade remembers it so well, so clearly. She was holding Bethany Manx’s hand on one side, Tim Lawson’s on the other, and she wasn’t that weird horror chick yet, was just another kid, nine years old, the whole summer spread out before her, waiting.