Hardy chuckles like he’d been expecting that, pulls the mic down from its hook by the rearview mirror, says before he thumbs the line open, “Filing for Meg, cleaning the coffee pot, I don’t know. She’ll find something for you to do. Let’s say…
hour a day, next couple weeks, get it over with?”
Meg Koenig, Tiffany Koenig’s mom.
“Yippee,” Jade monotones.
“Hardy here,” Hardy says into the mic, either just like a movie cop or… or maybe the movies aren’t that made-up.
Jade steps down, shuts the door, and Hardy waits until she’s on the porch and really for sure going home to roll away.
Jade’s still standing there staring down into her dad’s muddy boots— fresh muddy?—when the door she’s facing flashes red and blue: a few houses down, Hardy’s turned his lights on, is accelerating hard, screeching around the corner to some emergency.
In Proofrock, at two in the morning?
Jade steps back down to track him, can’t, so keeps walking to the end of the street, where she can look across the lake, see Terra Nova.
It’s just the same glittering lights as it’s been for the last few weeks: giant yacht, night construction.
“Hunh,” she says, and studies her dark neighborhood, the darker town.
It has to be Blondie, she finally decides. The Dutch girl. She finally floated in.
Jade looks down to the pages fluttering in her hand. She flips to her own random line somewhere in the middle of the sheaf, sees an eight-year-old girl named Stacey Graves living like a cat in some pioneer version of Proofrock, always looking across the rising lake for the mother who abandoned her.
Who’s to say, though, right?
Life isn’t like the nature shows. In the documentaries the coaches play in biology, the mother rabbit will stand up to the snake or the coyote or the hawk when it’s after her baby rabbit, will stand up to them when she doesn’t have even one chance in all of hell at fighting off this perfect predator, but she throws her little body into those claws and fangs all the same and kicks for all she’s worth, for all her baby’s worth to her, which is… everything?
“Not likely,” Jade mumbles, and is glad she doesn’t have a stupid diploma, because that would mean she took some test where she answered yes to “this is how a mother rabbit protects her young,” which would have been a lie.
But fuck it.
Not every mom is a Pamela Voorhees, going after all camp counselors because one or two of them let her baby drown.
And Jade is far from a baby anymore, either.
She steps forward again, again, drilling her eyes across the lake, trying to picture what Holmes painted for them one seventh period: the fire of 1965, coming right up to the shore over there, Proofrock holding its breath, all of Idaho ready to burn.
But it didn’t.
It never does.
Jade shrugs like just wait, spins on a combat heel, and slouches back up her street almost grinning. All in all, this night’s been almost a win, hasn’t it? Hardy could have confiscated her papers, meaning she’d have had to have broken into one of the schools to reprint them from her email, and, who knows, she might have walked in on Rexall cleaning the lenses of all his hidden cameras.
No thank you.
Jade kicks dramatically across her lawn—no, she Holden Caulfields it across her lawn. As far as Jade knows, nobody at Henderson High ever turned that into a way of walking, an attitude of walking, so it can be all hers.
She Holden Caulfields it up onto her ramshackle porch again, endures the gauntlet of the living room, her dad making a show of pausing The Night of the Hunter to let her pass, and then she clamps her headphones on, pulls her little television close, and pushes the The Hitcher tape in, tells herself it’s Prom Night II after that, hating the whole time that she kind of wants to sneak back into the living room, see if she can catch any of The Night of the Hunter—see if that old-time preacher in it is maybe some figuration of Ezekiel. Maybe him being on-screen in her own house is a sign, even, that she shouldn’t dismiss Drown Town so fast for this slasher cycle. Jade pauses Rutger Hauer on her thirteen-inch, tries to eavesdrop on Robert Mitchum in there on the twenty-seven inch, and it takes enough effort that part of her sort of drifts off, is partially awake on the couch in the living room, her dad quietly spreading a blanket over her.
Jade jerks awake blinking hard, trying to shake that image, flush it, and scans her videotapes for that orange pumpkin sticker she put on the spine of Halloween years ago, so it can be the last thing she sees before conking, so she can take it with her into sleep, and the next time she opens her eyes it’s nearly noon, meaning she’s sleeping through today’s litter-stabbing expedition. But fuck it. Let the trash stab itself for one day. Like Rexall’s watching her time card that close? No, his cameras are more zoomed in on her chestal area.