Would that even work?”
Mr. Holmes is just watching her.
Jade shakes her head, says, “But really, is there anything I could say right now that might make you believe she’s wrong?”
“She being her,” Mr. Holmes says, tilting his head back to the store, to Letha.
“She not able not to be her,” Jade says with a snort.
“There is one thing,” Mr. Holmes says after a long consideration. “You were asking about documents or PDFs in my inbox? Well, when I got my degree in education, the final hurdle I had to clear to get my diploma was my orals. The out-loud part of the test.”
“I was listening in class, I promise, but I can’t remember all the dates.”
“Just one question. No dates.”
“So you’re holding my diploma hostage,” Jade says after thinking this through.
“That would be unethical,” Mr. Holmes says, pushing away from Family Dollar now as well, and stepping out to study the street, his hands behind him, which means he’s back in teacher mode. “But you have been petitioning for me to allow you to make up for your eight weeks’ absence.”
“I meant with more papers.”
“About slashers.”
“This a trick?”
“It’s a gift.”
Jade breathes in, shakes her head no about this—it’s not a trick, it’s a trap—but… just one question, and she graduates?
“Shoot,” she says.
“You’ve got to be honest.”
“Swear on my father’s life?”
Mr. Holmes chuckles, asks the question: “Will she or won’t she what? Your mom, I mean. Down in Idaho Falls that day, when you found that videotape in the clearance bin.”
“A Bay of Blood,” Jade fills in.
“That’s not the answer I’m looking for,” Mr. Holmes says.
Jade looks at him with just her eyes, weighing this all out in her head, full-on hating being in this corner, in this discussion, in this day, and then, before she can make something up, “sell him a bill of goods” as he wrote in the margin of one of her papers once, the glass door of Family Dollar opens all at once, spilling Hardy and Letha and a long sigh of air-conditioning.
“So?” Jade says to Hardy and Letha. “I some posterchild victim in an afterschool special, or was I just born bad?”
“It’s never that simple,” Letha says, and that’s all the answer Jade needs.
Hardy puts his sunglasses back on one leg at a time, says, “According to your mother, and she’s promised to get me the papers on it, that doctor’s visit in Idaho Falls wasn’t for…
what we were thinking, based on your letter to Ms.
Mondragon. You were there for a private reason, yes, but that private reason was getting your stomach pumped, wasn’t it?”
Jade swallows, the sound loud in her ears.
“Getting your stomach pumped isn’t a pleasant thing,” she says.
“This isn’t over,” Mr. Holmes says to Jade, just for Jade— meaning her one-answer out-loud test is still coming, and probably when she least expects it, so he can feel like he’s getting a real answer.
“Not supposed to be pleasant,” Hardy goes on, about the stomach-pumping thing, his eyes boring into Jade’s. “It was, there’d be no reason not to eat a whole bottle of aspirin.”
“It was cherry flavored,” Jade mutters.
“So it was an accident?” Letha asks.
Jade swallows, the sound loud in her ears, and holds her suicide-wrist up like a badge. “You all thought this was my first time, didn’t you?” she says with the most superior, judgmental sneer she can muster.
Letha’s eyes are shiny wet, about to spill over with concern, Mr. Holmes is just staring in through the front door of Family Dollar, probably wishing he were two hundred feet up in the air right now, and Hardy’s got his eyes behind chrome lenses, meaning he could be anywhere. A thousand miles away already. Skimming across Indian Lake, the hull of his airboat only touching water every thirty feet or so.
So this is what winning feels like, Jade tells herself.
Minus the jubilation and accomplishment and impulse to cry tears of joy, she guesses it’s pretty much what she expected. Give her ten, twenty minutes of scrubbing cusswords from bathroom stalls and it’ll just be part of the background hum, the usual suckage of Proofrock.
And no, this lunch hour hasn’t gone exactly as planned.
Right now Letha’s supposed to be slackjawed on the bench, one hundred percent believing that this slasher is real, that all of Indian Lake is in jeopardy, and that she’s the one pre-ordained to stop it all. Instead she’s standing there with her arms crossed, her right hand over her mouth, her eyebrows up in worry. About Jade.