“Are you saying—？” Letha starts, and Jade finishes for her: “I’d be like this anyway, yeah.”
It’s only when she looks up to Mr. Holmes that she hears what Letha tricked her into saying. It’s the same story you hear about drunks on a traffic stop, arguing how they can’t even say the alphabet backwards when they’re sober. Meaning what Jade just said to all three of them was: Even if my dad hadn’ t done that to me when I was eleven, I still would have fallen hard for horror.
And trying to backpedal would just be protesting too much, she knows.
“Ask my mom, then,” she says, just plucking the idea straight from the air without running it through the fire first.
“Kimmy?” Hardy asks.
“She’s at work,” Jade says, pointing with her lips down Main, to the dollar store.
All three of them look, and in that moment Jade knows she can run, that none of them can catch her, untied laces or no. As full of hatred as she is now, she could probably even run on top of the water, because no way would Ezekiel let her pollute his lake.
But her mom is her ace.
“She’s got no reason to lie for him,” Jade adds, to sell it.
“Tell me I’m lying.”
Hardy just keeps looking up Main.
“She’s got a point,” Mr. Holmes says. “The mom would know.”
“It’s a small house,” Jade says. “And it was back then too.
You hear everything.”
“I don’t like this,” Hardy says, coming around to the three of them. “She can—she can warn him. Kimmy, I mean. She can warn Tab.”
“Tab?” Letha says.
Nobody answers her.
“Just because he’s Indian doesn’t mean he can turn to smoke,” Jade says. “If anything, he’d turn into a puddle of beer. But there won’t be anything to warn him about. Just false accusations.”
“If it matters, I don’t think they talk anymore,” Mr. Holmes adds, just to Hardy.
“All you have to do is admit it for the process to start,”
Letha says, like reading from a pamphlet.
“I know you’re trying to help,” Jade says, studying the gravel between her boots now, “and I thank you, really. I’m a stranger, I’m nobody, I’m the town reject, the weird girl, the walking suicide, the Indian who shouldn’t even be alive, and you’re—you are who you are, what you are. But you’ve got this all wrong, trust me.”
“There are tests,” Letha says. “Kits, the hospital can—”
“Test if I’m a virgin?” Jade scoffs. “Do you really think anybody in this town suspects that the custodian with different hair color every week has been able to keep her legs closed all these years? That she’s even tried to?”
Neither Hardy nor Holmes can push back against this.
“I asked around,” Letha says at last, like a card she didn’t want to have to play. “You’ve never dated, never had a boyfr —”
“Maybe I’m not into guys,” Jade cuts in.
“It’s not about—” Letha says, trying to start this whole line over. “It’s perfectly natural for you to want to defend him, it’s the… it’s like you consider yourself an accomplice just because you were involved. But your involvement wasn’t complicit, wasn’t voluntary, it never is, it can’t be, you don’t even know you can say no to a parent. Parents are good, parents are shining and right, they’re the gods of our world, so whatever they do can never be wrong. It must be your feelings that are wrong. Their mask is that they’re parents. Some of them are more, though. Some of them are monsters. But now, all these years later—”
“ ‘ Our’？ ” Jade says.
All eyes shift to Letha.
“We all think our parents are perfect,” she says, blinking a touch faster than she has been, a tell Jade logs. “They feed us, clothe us, keep us safe—”
“Bring in another mother when the original’s…？” Jade says, leaving that blank for Letha to fill in: Just what happened to your mother, final girl?
Letha’s own face becomes a mask then. Nothing changes about it exactly, just, now she’s hiding behind it. But she can’t be owning up to all this yet either, Jade knows. There’s a time and a place for everything. Both bibles agree on that.
“Family Dollar,” Jade says, letting the pressure off. “Her break’s in ten, so we might want to get there.”