“You gonna breathe?” Shooting Glasses asks from his side of the car, which is approximately fourteen miles away at the moment. And Jade isn’t sure she can breathe right now, really.
She’s spent the last couple of days feeling sorry for herself, not sure what to do now that Letha won’t accept she’s the final girl. But this washes all of that away, doesn’t it?
Saturday’s three days away now, leaving her one day for reconnaissance, one day to sneak over to Terra Nova, get a sight line on Theo Mondragon, see if he’s sharpening a blade or not, and one day to show that blade to Letha somehow.
It feels good to be back on track.
It sucked getting banned from Saturday’s big party on the water, yeah, and she felt like a traitor, not being able to sit all the way through any of her slashers, but that’s just because she’s in an actual hand-to-God slasher. Not at the front, but not in the final tally yet, either. Just hanging around in the between-parts, which is right where she wants to be. With all her viewing, all her self-assigned homework, all she’s ever seen with slashers is the main part of the story, right? The part everybody knows, the final cut. But now she’s moving through the hidden parts, the connective tissue. The real guts, the actual terra nova.
“Watch a few movies, take a few notes,” she says in her best Stu.
“You okay?” Shooting Glasses asks.
It’s the same thing he asked her last time, right before she bailed. And now she’s got her finger on the door handle again.
“I didn’t do it because I wanted to die,” Jade says, the rise of scar tissue on her left wrist practically glowing in the sleeve of her coveralls. They’re watching ghost-versions of each other in the windshield now. Ghost versions that can waver away with one wrong breath. “I did it because I wanted to be part of the movie. Part of all of them. What was the day that it happened, you remember?”
“Friday, we were just off work.”
“Date, I mean.”
“March?”
“The number.”
Shooting Glasses squints, trying to dredge it up, finally gloms onto it, says, “Friday the thirteenth, yeah. Radio kept talking about it.”
Jade nods once, says, “Jason was supposed to rise up behind me, pull me across to Crystal Lake. Things make more sense there.”
“That’s that old camp?”
Shooting Glasses chin-points across the water.
“Pretty much,” Jade says.
“But everybody dies in those movies…” he says, pulling the headlights on now, blasting white out across the water.
“But they really live first,” Jade says, popping her door open to fade into the night. “Now, remember what I told you, be somewhere else this Saturday, cool?”
“What about you?”
Jade presses her lips together and stands from the car, is about to shut the door on this, which feels one hundred percent like the perfect gesture, like what would happen in a movie, but then she flinches halfway around instead.
It’s not Hardy standing there—since the library, she’s been spooky—but a long sustained scream.
It’s not close, but it’s close enough.
Shooting Glasses stands from his side of the car.
“They’re playing my music,” Jade says to him, and leaves her door open, is already running for the pier, Shooting Glasses’s work boots pounding in after her. Behind the drugstore she smacks into her dad and Rexall, hustling the other way, eyes wide, Rexall still carrying a beer bottle, her dad’s jeans wet, maybe… all of him wet?
The impact knocks Jade down but her dad doesn’t stop, is already gone.
“Who—？” Shooting Glasses asks. She shrugs his helping hands away, wipes her dad’s gross wetness off and gets up herself.
“Town drunks,” she says, casting a single disparaging look after them.
Shooting Glasses turns to look as well, like there’s anything to see—Indians really can turn to smoke—and Jade’s already running again, is the first Proofrocker to get to the pier, though porch and window lights are glowing on up and down the shore.
Jade leans onto her knees breathing hard, taking in everything she can.
The Umiak is still there, too big to even really bob, and the screaming—yes. Yes yes yes.
It’s Letha, not at the steering wheel anymore, but the back of the big white boat. Tiara’s trying to hug her away from whatever’s below them in the water but Letha’s pushing her away, can’t suffer contact right now. It’s like she’s trying to crawl inside herself, shut the world out.