She puts her eyeliner on thick as hell.
The next three hours she spends stalking the halls, playing Slaughter High. At least in her head. But she finally ends up being John Bender, escaped from detention in the library, using terrible form to shoot some hoops in the gym.
And then it’s Mr. Holmes’s old history classroom.
It’s empty now. Empty of him. His corny posters, the part of the chalkboard he had marked off for that day’s bullshit quote.
The drawers of his desk are all stray paper clips and leftover staples.
Jade sort of wants to cry.
“Fuck you,” she says instead, and leaves not by the door she used to get in but by throwing a trashcan through the glass of the front doors, ducking through that crashed-open hole.
This is graduation, she tells herself, crunching through the glass like the four misfits on the cover of her The Craft videotape. All the ceremony she needs.
It’s night now. Pretty soon the streets of Proofrock will roll up, dousing all the lights. Jade cocks a hip out, glares down the empty streets. She’s not worried about dying and going to hell for all her sins. She’s not worried because she’s been living in hell for seventeen years already.
She pushes through the darkness, her hands deep in the pockets of her coveralls.
It was worth it, she decides all at once. Getting fired.
Getting fired for memorializing this slasher cycle on the bathroom stall.
Somebody had to, right?
Anyway, “The Lake Witch Slayings” is a killer name for what’s going on, and what’s still going on. She has to smile about that, which makes her… yes: there is a pack of cigarettes in the chest pocket of the coveralls. Fucking salvation. Thank you, tiny brown sleeve birds.
Jade fires up in the alley behind the drugstore. Through the smoke she can just see the Umiak bobbing at the pier, dwarfing Hardy’s little airboat, two of the Founders in town, it looks like. They’re stepping off the pier like just ferried across, anyway. Letha and Tiara are up at the boat cockpit, whatever it’s called, Tiara even wearing a captain’s hat like she’s in a Playboy spread. But Jade only has eyes for these two Founders. Is this the closest she’s actually been to them? It’s hard to look away. The way they move—“fifty” doesn’t mean the same thing at their tax bracket as it does in Proofrock.
There’s actual spring in their step, and they’re yoga-limber, almost svelte, even, like they didn’t just step down from a cigarette boat but up from the pages of a magazine.
Jade leans against the back of the drugstore, takes the most slit-eyed, noirish drag she can, and watches them walk to the Porsche, the Range Rover.
Neither of them are Theo Mondragon, she can tell, he’s got those football shoulders, those dodgy hips. So… it’s Mars Baker, right? The other one’s either Ross Pangborne or Lewellyn Singleton, she can’t really tell those two apart so well at distance. They’re supposed to be grieving for Deacon Samuels, that’s got to be why they’ve converged on Terra Nova, but they’re not stooped with grief, they’re not dragging, they’re not sad and broken. That bounce in their long strides, really, it’s almost like they’re thrilled it wasn’t them.
“But it will be,” Jade says to them, and blows smoke out, spins away fast, trying not to let herself get caught up in their shine, their polish, their remove from real actual life.
Walking purposefully away from the road out of town to pay a visit to Camp Blood gets her going alongside the Terra Nova staging area again. She checks both ways and then, on impulse, why not, she steps in through the laid-over fence panel, walks fast in among the big equipment, the dozers and front-end loaders. Another time she might climb those big tires, sit in the cracked vinyl seats, pretend she’s Godzilla’ing down Main on a righteous rampage.
She has adult responsibilities now, though, doesn’t she, Sheriff? Civic pride, all that bullshit. To prove it she drops her cigarette, grinds it out under her boot like a proper citizen, and keeps stepping, trying the door of one of the storage sheds— padlocked—then cutting across a pile of junk to a more likely shed, just on the chance she can get eyes on whatever bladed weapon or chainsaw is probably going to be in play on Saturday. Halfway across the pile of junk, though, headlights stab on right beside her. She freezes, telling herself that if she can be still enough, then she’s just another broken pallet, just another torn-off pull of shrink wrap.
But then the driver’s door opens, and she realizes two things at once. The first is that this isn’t Hardy’s Bronco or some rent-a-cop the Founders have hired to patrol their lot. If it were, a dummy light would be pinning her in place right now, or at least a Maglite.