Before she can stop herself, then, she’s answering for her dad, too: beer, and reliving high school. For her mom, though?
What does her mom use to check out?
“Dollar store customers,” Jade mumbles, trying for a smart-ass grin but probably easing more into the “constipated grimace” category.
She hates herself more than a little for giving that voice, and slips through the staging area’s fence for a third time. There’s bodies lumbering back and forth, calling orders and stacking things, rounding out the day’s work, but they’re on the other side of the lot, the active side. Over here on the dead side, Jade’s alone.
She chooses the least-used storage shed, the one with pallets teetering in front of the door so she has to slide sideways to get in, and with her phone light she inspects her new home. It’s just junk sheathed in cobwebs. But some of the junk has a crackly-stiff tarp over it, who knows why. Jade peels the tarp, folds it into a sleeping pad of sorts, and nestles into it, not letting herself sniffle, not letting herself think of the way Mr.
Holmes would look up when she was late again, and then pretend to count her tardy. Except those tardies never quite added up to detention, did they?
Goddamn him.
But at least there’s no windows in here. And, really? It’s a shed, sure, but that’s a skip and jump from a shack in the woods. All she needs now is Pamela Voorhees’ head in a tableau of flickering candles on an upturned spool. Or, you know: her father’s. If you’re gonna dream, right?
Anyway, at least now she knows Mr. Holmes wasn’t working with Hardy to drive the Terra Novans away. He had the hatred, though, didn’t he? He needed the revenge, had the investment in the community, and there’s probably some personal history Jade can’t even guess at.
“Unless I was right all along,” Jade says to herself, sitting up in the darkness. Maybe Mr. Holmes’s plane wreck was staged, is supposed to remove him from suspicion. Maybe this is just another cog of their plan, part of the setup for Saturday’s Grand Guignol, Proofrock’s version of Demons.
“You wish,” Jade says into the tarp.
Except it might explain why Hardy let her keep the sandwiches in her cargo pockets, that are pretty well flattened in their baggies now: because he knew she was going to run, and figured she might need some calories to get her through to Saturday’s big party in the water. Because… because he needs her there? They both do? To, what, frame her?
Jade has to call bullshit on that.
Though, at the same time, was it really any accident that she got that pink phone right when it could convince her all of this was real? And, aside from her, who else in Proofrock would know the slasher any better than Mr. Holmes, who took Letha’s final girl crash course over the last four years?
Jade doesn’t know which version of Mr. Holmes she wants to believe in, the one who died out on the water, or the one with a score to settle, and a blade to settle it with. And… and she doesn’t even know what color this tarp is, does she? It can’t be “dust-colored,” even though that’s what it keeps sighing up, coating her with.
Whatever.
She zones out not by listing giallos in her head like usual but by pretending she can hear the kids playing on the park that’s going to be here someday. By imagining what it would have been like to have had a park like this when she was young enough for it to matter. But she would have still ended up sitting alone in a swing at three in the morning, smoking a cigarette, wouldn’t she have?
“Run, little bear,” she says again, into the dusty crunchiness of the tarp.
She wakes with the shift change at four in the morning but nobody opens the door to toss any cutters or pry rods in on top of her, and nobody needs the tarp to cover the equipment, and Shooting Glasses’s radar doesn’t lead him to her a second time. She’s not sure what exactly she’d say to him if he did open the door, though. Probably bluster and lie, hide that she’s homeless now—homeless, jobless, and escaped from jail, sort of.
Before dawn—“Just before dawn,” she tells herself, patting herself for that tape, which is also still there—Jade is gnawing on the second sandwich （either the first was appetizer or this one’s dessert） and moving through the dark trees for the dam, to tightrope across one more time. If she’d thought ahead she’d have a pair of binoculars and more cigarettes. If she’d thought even more ahead she would have just braved the dark, bunked in Camp Blood with the rest of the ghosts, and her stolen axe. Then she’d already be most of the way over to Terra Nova. Not that there would have been any electrical sockets to charge a phone with at the abandoned camp. Not that there were in the shed, either.