But these girls—the driver’s Bethany Manx, Jade’s pretty sure —are making it easy. The way they’re hugging the shore, the only place they can be going is Banner Tompkins’s house, right on the lake. His parents aren’t jet-setters or anything, but it is bowling night up the road in Ammon, and bowling usually takes until two in the morning to weave back from. Leaving time to invite a few friends over. Say, twenty of them, and all the booze they can carry?
Jade knows it’ll be swim trunks and bikinis until about midnight. After which it’ll be nothing but smiles.
On the twenty-minute walk to get there, skirting the Bay and Devil’s Creek, Jade keeps finding herself looking to the left, across the lake. She tries to come back, watch for tripping hazards, keep from busting her face on a tree root, but her chin keeps cranking over, her eyes tunneling across all that water, to Terra Nova.
She hates it on principle, sure, but it’s also what’s delivering a final girl to town, so maybe she should give it a sort of grudging pass. At least until this slasher cycle is over. After that it can burn, be a haunted husk in the cold open of the sequel, where that installment’s blood sacrifice happens, well away from prying eyes that might try to shut things down before they even get going proper.
Why is she watching it now, though?
She actually stumbles when the obviousness of it hits her: she’s not watching Terra Nova at all. She’s glaring back at Letha’s father, Theo Mondragon, the one who rolled his arm forward for the graduation crowd, telling Proofrock it could get on with its little ceremony.
The chip on her shoulder for him isn’t only about that, though. It’s… it’s that he’s a father of a sort-of young girl, isn’t it? An innocent girl, at least.
Shit.
Jade collects herself, walks faster, with more purpose.
Her job here, it’s not only to educate Letha on what’s coming. It’s also to keep her safe so it all can happen.
That includes keeping her safe from her father, who, by marrying a woman half his age, is already whispering to the world that he’s not averse to stepping well outside his age group. Maybe even has a taste for it.
Is this the chink in Letha Mondragon’s otherwise impervious armor? Final girls these days do have those pesky pre-existing issues, Jade knows. She thought it was whatever happened to Letha’s real mom, which would be enough, but— no no no—she has something more intense, doesn’t she?
Something in her past, in her childhood, that’s left her skittish, that fundamentally broke her confidence in the world.
Her father.
It all tracks, doesn’t it? Letha isn’t timid and conservative and right-moral’d from nature, but because she’s trying to make up for something, trying to cover it with good deeds.
Something that wasn’t even her fault. She was just a little girl left alone with her dad for the afternoon.
Jade is crashing through the bushes now.
Chancing another look across the water, she can nearly see Theo Mondragon up in his office in their yacht, getting off scot-free one more time, skating like he always has with his wealth, his privilege, his good looks and charm. His funny excuses, his believable lies.
He’s smug because no one is ever going to know. Letha sure isn’t going to tell, and, from what Jade hears, it’s just them over there—the Mondragons. The other Founders swing through on and off to check on the progress of Terra Nova, but they’ve got empires to run, and their yachts are probably cutting through other waters anyway, the world being their playground and all.
“You’re being paranoid,” Jade tries to tell herself. But she doesn’t slow down any. What she’s seeing now that she’s deeper in the trees, cutting across to the flickering bonfire at Banner Tompkins’s, what she can’t help but picture, is Theo Mondragon in what he would probably call a skiff or a dinghy, with a silent little trolling motor. Not the Umiak, as everybody knows that one, and of course not the pontoon boat with all the seats that they use when the other Founders are in town. It’s got festive lights strung all over it now anyway. And the catamaran with the big sail would be like advertising his progress across the lake, and the gondola boat tied to their dock has to be purely for show, and wouldn’t last out in Indian Lake’s chop anyway, and the canoe and rowboat are too slow, too labor intensive for a CEO, and the stupid white pedal boat with the high arching swan neck and tiny aristocratic swan head has to be just for any kids who show up, doesn’t it?