Who cares.
The better to stare you down with, Jade hisses inside, her daily affirmation, and stalks into her room, ransacking it for whatever other papers she can slip to Letha, and then, and then —she has to decide what movie’s going to be next in this Final Girl extension course, doesn’t she?
She clamps her headphones on again, works her way through The Slumber Party Massacre and April Fool’s Day and Happy Birthday to Me for the rest of the day, and somewhere in there she blisses out, only comes to when the screen fizzes its blue soul up. It’s the same exact shade Casey Becker’s television screen is early on in Scream. Meaning…
does that mean that her movie’s starting now, that Jade’s Proofrock slasher is officially cueing up, the preliminary stages all checked off at last? And… and if she had the same stovetop brand of popcorn as Casey Becker, would it pop at the same rate? Does Casey’s stalking and death move in real time or movie time?
It’s worth investigating, even with just a normal bag of microwave popcorn. In the kitchen, though, her dad is cooking eggs, his whole face bleary.
He rubs his hand up and down over it, still trying to wake up all the way.
“Doesn’t work like it used to,” he says for Jade about his get-sober trick, and then smiles with the left side of his mouth, which is an invitation for her to smile with him about how much mornings suck. She almost does, just manages to look away instead, to the front door, cocked open to let the air in, which is something her mom used to do when she was up first, doing chores. For half an instant, Jade’s ten again.
As if reading the moment right for once in his life, her dad, guiding his eggs from pan to plate, falls into a story Jade already knows, that he used to tell when she was a kid and the time before she was born was mythic, and the only reason her dad could walk across it was that he was a titan, ten stories tall.
“We used to hide under the pier on days like these, each of us with a sixer floating besides us,” he says, miming the beer at chest-level.
“ ‘We?’ ” Jade prompts, though she knows: Rexall, Clate, anybody else stupid enough to get roped in.
Her dad keeps going, says, “This was before Deputy Hardy had that swamp boat, see?”
“Deputy Hardy” is what Sheriff Hardy was back then, but it’s also the only rank Tab Daniels allows him.
“Listen, I’m sure this story’s going to be better this time, but I—” Jade starts.
“The department had that long bass boat with the twin Evinrudes,” her dad says, scrounging in the cabinet for the pepper even though it’s right there on the counter. “Could have pulled a house off its pylons if you tied the knot right.”
“And you would—”
“And we would float there all day, our ski ropes tied to that boat, waiting for your mom or somebody to call in the emergency on the other side of the lake.”
“Like on a schedule?” Jade asks. She’s never thought to ask this question before.
“More like whenever she got around to it,” her dad says, leaning back to fork his first runny bite of egg in. “Kimbat knew we were down there, would torture us by not calling in.”
“Kimbat” is Kimmy plus Batman, because her purse was her utility belt, something like that, it’s all dim and distant for Jade.
“And then the sheriff—” she says, trying to get this over with already.
“Deputy,” her dad corrects, holding his fork up like to cross that T.
Jade makes her voice as bored and flat as possible, finishes his story: “He would blast off for the other side of the lake for this emergency call, and you and Rexall and Clate and whoever would come up from under the pier on those ski ropes, barefoot skiing until he looked back to see what the drag was.”
“We’d have had cameras in our phones back then, there’d be proof,” her dad says, bringing his plate up to his face because the yolks are just gelid enough to string. “Or if we’d have had phones at all,” he adds with a smile-and-eyebrow thing that Jade would bet everything she owns is the exact same smile that lured her mom over to Camp Blood for a party one night, at the right-wrong time in her uterine cycle.
But it always starts like that, doesn’t it? Some randy dude making eyes when he should be making tracks? Even when she dials up old Indian stories online, there’s always some goofy old dude smiling exactly like Tab Daniels while he scraps the world together from goopy mud, making deals with muskrats and beavers, ducks and crows, anybody stupid enough to listen to him.