The question mark and the exaggerated drama are all Hardy.
He considers Jade over his specs, flips to the next paper— Jade stapled them all one by one, so Letha wouldn’t get lost: “Don’t feel bad, Mr. Holmes. Not everybody knows about the Final Girl? What’s that, the ‘final girl’？”
“It’s just a thing for history class,” Jade says, shoulders seriously sagging.
“Actually the slasher isn’t impossible or just in the movies, sir,” Hardy reads next, hitting “sir” especially hard and dropping his glasses back, his neck strap taking their slight weight, the glasses hardly bouncing. Jade knows because that’s where she’s looking. Not up into his face.
That doesn’t mean she can’t feel him watching her.
“Slasher? ” he finally says.
Mentally backpedaling, Jade stumbles into the hole she’d always meant to bury her high school diploma in, and, because that’s all she’s got to save her life here, she uses it. “Summer work for Sherlock,” she mumbles, looking out across the black-black waters of Indian Lake.
It’s a Hail Mary pie-in-the-sky flying fuck at a rolling donut, but it’s all Jade has in the world right now. Her first last and only prayer.
“Last I heard, Bea—Mr. Holmes doesn’t let students call him that,” Hardy says, holding her door open because cops are always directing traffic. “Former students either.”
“I’m not exactly former,” Jade says, her voice dwindling down into the sincere, embarrassed octaves. “Still need a history credit to graduate.”
“But you were there for the ceremony,” Hardy explains— objects.
Jade steps up into the truck.
Hardy, still not sold, still standing there, flips deeper into Jade’s stack of print-outs, spiraling Jade deep into pre-wince mode, since shuffled in there somewhere, she’s not sure where —stapling got complicated—is “Hello, Letha Mondragon,”
and that letter’s so damning that Hardy’ll probably just read the whole thing out loud like entering it into evidence.
“How—how about we just consider this the very end of my…” he reads, having to breathe in for the next part: “Extra credit career, if that works for you, Mr. Holmes. ” He looks up to recite the last part: “The end?” he says incredulously, flopping the pages closed and then riffling their edges as if counting, or weighing. “How long has this career been?”
“He keeps a basket on his desk,” Jade says. “He calls it the extra credit kitty.”
Hardy’s shoulders shake with some internal amusement and he closes her door, rounds the Bronco, climbs up himself.
“So you figured to play to your strengths,” he says, firing the truck up. “Blood and guts, werewolves and zombies.”
“Just slashers,” Jade says, probably not even loud enough to make it across to him.
Hardy backs the Bronco out, swings them around, only turning the headlights on when they’re on blacktop, and Jade doesn’t know if she’s being hand-delivered back to the hospital in Idaho Falls or down to the holding cell behind his office or what, at least not until he turns onto her street. He pulls up in front of her house, doesn’t take his truck out of gear, so everything in Jade’s mirror is washed red.
“I won’t tell Connie about the janitorial staff using her ink and copy paper up, I don’t guess,” he says, handing Jade her stolen paper and ink. “But I probably will mention it to Bear next time I see him down at Dot’s, make sure this is schoolwork, not personal.”
Grady “Bear” Holmes, aka “Sherlock,” the flying history teacher and secret cigarette fiend.
Fucking Idaho.
The radio under Hardy’s dash squawks, straightening Jade’s back again, and she of all people is supposed to know jumpscares more or less. But maybe that just makes her more vulnerable to them, not less.
Meg Koenig’s voice comes through fuzzy and urgent. Hardy dials it down and leans over the wheel with both arms, hugging it to him so he can study the front of Jade’s house without having to stare at the side of her face as well.
“He working across the lake these days?” he asks, about Tab.
Jade nods once.
“All righty then, I guess I’ll see you…” Hardy leads off, pausing to narrow his eyes, do some mental calculations, “Friday to start your community service. How’s that sound?”
“Can’t wait,” Jade says. “Guessing I should wear clothes I don’t care about?”