She never turned that one in, though. She burned it half-written and flushed the ashes, because no mothers are actually like that.
What about Letha, though? Will she continually fall down on Saturday, so as to draw the slasher away from the floating masses? There will be lots of kids in the water that night, Jade knows. Lots of innocents.
She turns to go in, spinning at the last moment to catch the screen door, keep it from waking the living room, but then she stops: the smallest, saddest bottle rocket is tumbling down out of the sky. Which is to say: a lit cigarette.
“I’m telling your wife,” Jade says up to Mr. Holmes with a smile, and, when the cigarette spools a trail of smoke up out of the tall dry grass, she steps over and stomps it out, saving the whole town, probably. “And that’s how you do it,” she says to the idea of Letha, and then leaves Mr. Holmes up there to court lung cancer and fight bats.
The kitchen is empty, the living room still asleep.
Jade pads through to her bedroom to cue something up and crash, and— Shit. Really?
All her videotapes and clothes and posters are in two black trashbags on her bed.
Jade just stares at them, stares at them some more, and finally comes up with the only possibility: her dad heard about her OK Corral walk down Main with Hardy.
“But I didn’t bring him here,” Jade says, picking through the jumbled tapes, finally lucking onto Just Before Dawn. She can’t carry the whole bag around the lake to Letha as one last lesson, but she can at least leave her with that one. Technically —chronologically— Halloween should probably be next in her education, and that’s only if they skip over Black Christmas, but… this isn’t the full course anymore, is it? This is a crash course, a late-night cram session. And if Letha’s going to have to pick one final girl to follow, then don’t pick the one who hides in a closet, don’t pick the one who leaves the killer’s knife behind, don’t pick the one who has to get saved by a dude with a gun at the end. Pick the one who becomes rage, the one who climbs the front of that hillbilly slashing machine and jams her arm down his throat up to her fucking elbow, looking him in the eye the whole time.
Just Before Dawn, then. That and…
Jade reaches around under her bed, frees up the machete weaved into the mattress’s undercarriage. It’s from the flea market in Idaho Falls, still has the factory edge. Jade looks around for what else she might need, finally decides to change everything she’s wearing under her coveralls. Because who knows.
Instead of throwing the dirties in the laundry corner, she stuffs them back in the bag.
After that, the only thing left is to dig out the food coloring in the kitchen, dye her hair one last time in the sink, being sure to lock the door first.
The food coloring’s dark green, the result more aquamarine shading into turquoise, and temporary as hell. Still, it’s something, right?
On the way out the front door, a fresh sandwich in each pocket, two garbage bags glistening over her shoulder, she flips the living room off roundly, walks backwards off the porch still doing it.
School’s out forever.
Instead of trying to brave the trees and the muck in the pitch black—there is a rogue bear out there somewhere—Jade asks Terra Nova to wait until the light of morning, please. Maybe she can crash out in a storage shed in the staging area until then? Except, on the way there… of course.
The screen for the big July Fourth celebration is already inflated, for everybody to watch from the lake. They do it early like this now, since the time in sixth grade when they did it the afternoon-of, and had to keep the compressor running all through the movie because of some new holes in the vinyl, which kind of killed the whole “movie on the lake” charm. It was more like “movie nobody can hear over the air compressor.”
Jade doesn’t key on the screen just because it’s up, though.
It’s also glowing.
On-screen is the giant version of someone’s laptop screen, it looks like. Mac, not PC. Jade steps back into the shadows to watch, cues in that the two Founders who were getting dropped off earlier, they’re back on the deck of the Umiak now —probably with whatever cable or adapter they needed for the projector, it being a few years old, their ports all next-gen.
It is Mars Baker, and, Jade finally decides, Llewellyn Singleton. Their little laptop screen is glowing onto their faces, and they look for all the world like two twelve-year-olds hunched over a video clip between classes. Hanging a few feet back from them, hands on the rail, is Letha Mondragon, her eyes cupped in the Jackie O sunglasses and pale wrap pretty much mandated for someone who’s now found three dead people since moving to town.