“You old scallywag,” she says. “So, by slasher logic, which is, you know, the logic, then one of the Founders, these lords of industry, should have been a Proofrocker fifty years ago, and a pirate too. That’s probably how they all heard about that virgin shore over there—no, no. One of their dads, right?”
Mr. Holmes shakes his head, says, “You never stop, do you?”
“That doesn’t sound like a no.”
“Your turn now,” Mr. Holmes says, reaching across to take the cigarette from her, guide it shakily up to his own mouth.
He cashes it, grinds the butt under the sole of his loafer longer than he needs to to rub the cherry out, but about the right amount of time to memorialize the monumental confession he just made.
“My turn to what? Turn in another paper?”
“You can play dumb with him,” Mr. Holmes says. “You can play dumb with everyone, doesn’t matter to me. But I know, Jennifer. You’re not dumb.”
“Thanks, I guess?”
“I told you some painful truth, now you tell me some.”
“Quid pro quo,” Jade says with a snicker.
“Latin,” Mr. Holmes says. “You never fail to surprise, Jennifer.”
“Or disappoint,” Jade adds. “And it’s Jade, thanks.”
“It’s your turn, I mean.”
“I haven’t started any fires visible from space.”
“On the walk over, it hit me,” Mr. Holmes says. “The one horror genre you never broached in your papers and essays and creative pieces. How it was no accident that you avoided it.”
“I do slashers, you know that. All kinds of subgenres I haven’t written about. I mean—exorcisms are boring, just confirm western religion, and vampires and werewolves have so much lore they’re practically fantasy, no matter how many throats they rip open, and haunted houses are just standins for —”
“I’m talking about rape-revenge, Jennifer.”
“That’s not my name.”
“Why’d you never delve into that subgenre?”
Jade lets her eyes unfocus so she can burn through what he’s asking: rape-revenge is where a raped woman is left for dead but climbs back to life to take brutal revenge on her attackers, often using poetic justice, and usually a lot of primal screaming.
“Okay, so… if rape-revenge is going to be slasher-adjacent,” she says, figuring this out as she goes, “then you’re saying the rape is the prank, right?”
“You tell me.”
“And you’re saying that this woman, she becomes the spirit of vengeance personified,” Jade says. “All that’s missing is…
is a mask—”
“She doesn’t need one,” Mr. Holmes says. “She’s supposed to be dead. And the rapists weren’t exactly interested in her face anyway. Or maybe their violence gave her a mask? The bruises, the black eyes, the fat lip.”
“Okay, okay,” Jade says. “But this is usually the same weekend, too, right? Raped on a Friday, killing all through Saturday and Sunday? There’s no five or ten years where the pranksters can forget their crime even happened.”
“They forgot her the moment they were done with her,” Mr.
Holmes says, seemingly ready for whatever Jade might have.
Meaning his silence earlier was really thinking. Preparing.
Scallywag indeed.
“Okay, I’ll give you that,” Jade says, though she knows this is a trap.
“But if you elect to exclude it from being one of your slashers,” Mr. Holmes goes on, “if you say it’s from a different shelf altogether, then you’re saying that the crime itself doesn’t warrant revenge, aren’t you? That rape gets a pass.
That sexual violation isn’t beholden to the scales of justice you’re always talking about, is somehow outside its purview.”
Jade just stares at a bird prying something from a sewer grate.
“Either that or you’re acknowledging that a minor can’t take that revenge,” Mr. Holmes adds, quieter. Because this is where he was going all along.
Jade kind of hates him right now.
It doesn’t mean he gets to win, though.
“The reason rape-revenge isn’t a slasher is that the slasher and the final girl would have to be the same person,” she says, pushing off the front of Family Dollar with her butt. “Problem with that is that the final girl and the spirit of vengeance are forever locked in opposition, not the same jumpsuit. That’d— that’d be like Batman peeling his cowl off and being the Joker.