Sitting at the sagging table in the kitchen, the sandwich on her right thigh, she leans her head back, stops chewing, wonders what it would be like to choke alone in the house like this—what regrets reel through your head?—and then jerks hard when the screen door rattles. By the time the front door swings open, Jade’s rolled off the chair, is crouched by the fridge, sandwich in-hand, eyes wide.
Rexall belches into the living room. She’d know that burp anywhere.
“Dude,” her dad says about it, his keys jingling into his pocket.
“That’s nothing,” a third voice slurs, one Jade doesn’t know.
Fucking great. Her dad’s not at Terra Nova for fifteen an hour, and Rexall, with nobody to supervise anymore, isn’t working either. It’s a drinking day. Another “high school never ended” day. Perfect. Wonderful. And the side door out of the kitchen involves the hallway, which is one of two directions these three can take, as the bathroom’s that way.
The other way they can take is right here, into the kitchen.
Jade’s heart hammers in her chest. Not only is she only wearing a bra and panties, but these aren’t even good ones, are even particularly bad ones.
And the voices are getting closer. Meaning they didn’t swing by to crash on the couch for an hour or two, watch one of her dad’s old westerns. This is a pit-stop, a refuel. They won’t be staying in the living room, are definitely coming this way.
But, which way?
Or, which of them is going to find Jade crouched in her underwear by the fridge, holding half a bologna and mustard sandwich, her eyes wide, pasty black hair everywhere?
Shit. Shit shit shit.
Jade takes stock again, clocking both doors, and then… no, she can’t.
The back door?
When footsteps start both crunching up the hall and resounding on the hollow part of the living room floor that leads to her, there’s no choice: still crouched, she scurries for the back door, twists the weak deadbolt over and falls out as quietly as she can, pulling the door shut softly behind her.
Voices in the kitchen now.
Two beers cracking open, then a third.
And—no, no, no: the door handle Jade’s still gripping, it twists under her hand.
She swings with it when the door opens, is dangling over the open space past the cement block under the door, is trying to flatten herself to the side of the house, and then has to hold that trembling position while one of them pisses a pale yellow line out into the grass already burned by a thousand other pees.
Jade risks a look up through the back door’s window and…
Clate Rodgers? Would Hardy let her have her mop back if she called in, whispered that his daughter’s killer was back in town again? Or does Hardy’s skin crawl all on its own every time Clate steps over the county line?
When Clate finally dribbles down, grunts through his shake-off, and hauls the door back over, Jade lets go, falls into the sharp weeds that grow by the house, and makes herself as small as possible, hopes nobody across the way’s looking out their window.
Two seconds later, footsteps still crunching in the kitchen, the window over the sink opening to blow cigarette smoke from, Jade sees her salvation billowing on the laundry line: the coveralls Hardy didn’t think to ask her to surrender. Unlike Michael Myers, she won’t even have to kill a mechanic to step into them.
Pulling them on in the shade of the house, she falls down like a boneless thing when a little brown bird explodes up from the leg. It’s so close to Jade’s face she feels the air from its beating wings, her hand coming up hours too late to protect her eyes. She pats down the arms for if this was a flock, then pulls the coveralls the rest of the way on and creeps around to the front, lifts her dad’s backup muck boots from the bed of his truck, which she bets Hardy would just love to hear about.
A block down, almost to the lake, she realizes she’s still holding the bologna sandwich. She takes a bite but her dad’s mustard is too sharp, too warm. She tosses the sandwich in front of her, steps purposefully on it, mashing it into the concrete, and then shimmies through the gym door of the high school, which Hardy explained was strictly off limits to her.
Forever.
Like he didn’t know that was an invitation?
Jade goes through Lost and Found for mismatched socks, a confiscated t-shirt—green, a seventies Corvette dramatic on the chest—then does her make-up as best she can in the usual mirror, but only after roundly flipping Rexall off.
“Go ahead, turn me in,” Jade tells him, enunciating clearly in case he’s having to lip-read. “I’ll just ask Hardy how he thinks you knew I was here.”