“He wants hard copy too?” Meg asks, probably because, being Tiff’s mom, she knows Mr. Holmes prefers paper over digital. Probably so he can stand outside and smoke while grading.
“Do you mind?” Jade asks.
Meg motions for Jade to continue being the burden she already is, so Jade hits print, and— shit shit shit, that’s right.
This is one of her lists, could be either giallos in order of descending title length or “Actors Whose First Role Was in a Slasher”！
Neither are her best side, she’s pretty sure.
The printer spools up high, higher, and then starts spitting out not a single page, which would be the stack of giallos, but the three-or four-pager, with Tom Hanks and George Clooney, Jennifer Aniston and Daphne Zuniga probably so prominent that no way can Meg not say something about them.
Meg, reading a memo, wanders over, plucks the stack-so-far up, and gives it a cursory scan.
“Johnny Depp?” she says to Jade.
“Nightmare on My Street,” Jade mumbles, sucking her top lip in.
Meg breathes in deep, blows it out slow, and walks the pages over to Jade, says, “Using office supplies costs fifteen minutes on your time card.”
“Thank you,” Jade says, and logs out of the computer much more carefully, spins around in her chair like a real long-time county employee, her coveralls magically in her lap already.
“And he is cute, I’ll give him that,” Meg calls after her.
Jade looks back, He? evidently painted on her face.
“Johnny Depp,” Meg says, complete with playful eyebrows.
“I used to have a poster of him on my wall.”
“Brad Pitt was in Cutting Class,” Jade throws out there.
Meg considers this, finally seems to decide she’s not sure they’re each in the same conversation, so ends it with, “It’s between you and him of course. Mr. Holmes, I mean.”
“And the school district,” Jade adds, rolling her list of slasher debuts into a tube and popping it on the end, which is Meg’s cue to usher her the rest of the way out of the front office, apparently.
“Has it been twelve hours already?” Jade play-asks, electing to push the door open before her rather than have her face smushed into it.
“Just wait,” Meg says, sweeping the problem Jade is from her office. “When you’re my age, you’d pay anything to have these hours back.”
Jade chocks her coveralls under her arm with the roll of pages, and, maybe fifteen steps from the building, all her attention pouring into her phone, waiting for this sound file to load from her email, she hears the single worst possible sound to hear: a lamb, bleating from the darkness to her immediate right.
Jade gasps and gulps in the same instant somehow, which sends her coughing, ends with her bent over, hands on her knees so she can dry-heave.
The bleat comes again, maybe a touch slower this time, as if aware of the response it’s provoking.
Her eyes adjusting to the night now, Jade can just make out a shape stepping forward out of the gathered shadows, and, because she is who she is and knows what she knows, she’d bet her last breath—which she just coughed up, pretty much— that that shadowy figure’s about to go bandy-legged, its arms stretching out farther and farther from its sides, until the knives-for-fingers on the right hand can scratch into a wall, a tree, her throat, it doesn’t matter.
“Whoah, whoah,” this Freddy says, though.
Bit by bit, Jade assembles this voice into one she’s known since kindergarten.
“Banner?” she says. Banner Tompkins?
He steps forward, flipping the hourglass in his hand, which… isn’t an hourglass at all. It’s a deer-call, one of those little cans with some air-driven mechanism inside that bleats out a deer call when you turn it over.
And—and Banner, he’s got a rifle slung over his shoulder, warpaint under his eyes, hunting pants tucked into his boots.
“Jade,” he says back, and then they both look up when the world goes halogen-white: two pickups screeching in, the lead truck hiking a front tire up onto the grass. The beds of both trucks are lined with more hunters.
“What?” Jade says, just in general.
“Bye now,” Banner says, and touches the brim of his straw cowboy hat, vaults up into the bed of the lead truck, which is already peeling out.
“Who?” Jade says then, because her first question was so effective.
She steps out of the way for the trucks to barrel past, and the grim faces of all these high school graduates and their dads sitting across from each other in the beds, the butts of their rifles riding their knees, long barrels tilting into the sky— they’re soldiers, aren’t they? This is some kind of war.