Jade pulls her cap down lower, trying to get her hair under control, and knows full well she’s stalling, that here in the middle of this unscary day, she’s scared. Not of Letha Mondragon, but of… of talking to her?
What if she laughs about Jade telling her she’s a final girl?
What if she read that letter out loud to Cinn and Ginny over French toast this morning, the three of them laughing so hard they had to be excused from the breakfast table? Of course she won’t have a taste for horror, final girls never do, that makes the horror coming for them even scarier, but… what if the prospect of a slasher cycle happening right here in Proofrock doesn’t even track to her, just sounds like a weak attempt at a bad joke?
“So she’ll feel sorry for me, then,” Jade mumbles. Which isn’t exactly better than being laughed at. It’s kind of worse, even.
Maybe she just shouldn’t go, right? If Letha’s a real and true final girl, she’ll rise when it’s time to rise, she’ll fight the good fight for all of them. Well, either that or she’ll bounce down into the cellar to check out that weird noise, get gutted or decapped or bisected or flayed, and then—then Jade can’t be sure: would Ezekiel have to come up from Drown Town to put a cap on this slasher cycle? Can an evil preacher count as good when he’s stopping a masked killer from slicing a town open?
Jade shakes her head no, she can’t let it come to that.
Meaning she has no choice but to try to talk Letha into being the final girl she’s meant to be. Everybody has a function, everybody in a slasher cycle has a role—isn’t that a line from the Bible, even? Not the over-the-top violent one Craven and Carpenter wrote, with all the massacres and gore, but the other violent one with all the massacres and gore. The one where revenge comes not in a hulking shape lurking at the edge of the light but as a series of plagues that starts out feeling random, come to feel a lot more like justice, like the scales rebalancing.
Same thing, different church.
Jade pats herself on the back for that and takes the alley behind the drugstore because alleys are where custodians lurk, because alleys are where the horror crowd holds its dark masses. And because Hardy’s white Bronco is at the bank.
Seventy-five yards ahead, Letha Mondragon is already on Melanie’s bench, the Umiak bobbing by the pier. Meaning this rich daughter of Terra Nova gets to take it out on her own, is trusted with a three-hundred-thousand-dollar cigarette boat.
Jade wonders if a girl like Letha’s ever even had to clean a toilet. Probably to the filthy rich, toilets are disposable. Mario and Luigi are always standing by to switch a new one in after each use.
“You’re still stalling…” Jade tells herself.
She broaches a timid foot out into the gravel of the parking lot between her and the lake then steps in all the way, damn the torpedoes, whatever that means. The gravel holds her, lets her crunch across its warm back.
Letha is just sitting there staring across at, Jade guesses, her house coming together on the point over there? It’ll just be a summer crashpad for her, though, most likely. A place to decompress between semesters. A place to throw epic spring break parties if her dad and stepmom are in Bali that week, or can agree to be.
Unless of course Indian Lake comes to hold bad memories.
Which is pretty much a foregone conclusion. There’s nothing to be done about it, though. It’s just the way a good slasher cycle works: the first death or two are people way outside the final girl’s periphery—a Dutch boy, a Dutch girl—but then the shadow starts to fall closer and closer to home. Deacon Samuels, just a hop and a skip from where Letha sleeps. And it’ll get much closer than that. Before it’s over, any cherished pets Letha has will definitely be history, and… Theo Mondragon? Tiara? If it’s only one of them, then Tiara is both the intruder into the family unit and probably the most disposable to Letha. Factor in the added benefit that her getting the blade can draw Letha and her father closer, facilitate some healing, and, well: Tiara’s got X’s for eyes, pretty much. Jade hates it for Letha—you’re supposed to have a mom—but it’s not like she makes the rules. She just happens to know them all.
She shouldn’t open with that right now, though. Coming in hard like that will scare Letha off. No, what you do with someone like Letha is lure her in like you do a bird in the backyard: with closer and closer pinches of a single piece of white bread.
And, though she wants to with every last fiber of her being, Jade doesn’t look back to see if Hardy’s behind the wheel of his Bronco yet, just sitting there watching one picturesque girl find a moment of repose on the bench he dotes over, another girl sulking in to shatter that peace forever.