My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(114)

Jade tries to fix on the shape of his head, track what part of the crowd he’s going to drift into first, but then has to whip her head around again, sure that great white swan’s about to pedal her under. By the time she spins back around to the crowd, locates a head bobbing in the water, there’s… two more beside it?

“No! ” Jade says, trying to climb out of the water.

What she saw for an instant, she’s ninety percent sure, is the glint of glasses on that face barely holding itself above water.

Yellow glasses.

Shooting Glasses.

He had been deeper underwater than Theo Mondragon’s golden nails could reach, hadn’t he? Because it’s steeper on that side of the lake. It drops off faster.

He’s alive.

And… and those two smaller heads it looks like he’s carrying, that must be Cinnamon and Ginger, the twins? Mars Baker’s daughters. Shooting Glasses has been swimming them across the lake for the last who knows how many hours, because… he’s not the final girl, is he? Not because boy final girls are illegal or break the machine, but because… because if Theo Mondragon’s the one with the machete, then that means that Letha can be what she was meant to be. What Jade meant for her to be.

Except Letha’s own words are echoing: this is the real world, not a movie, and the real world doesn’t have to follow any special rules. It just does what it does. You can’t pick your genre, no. Has that been what Jade’s been doing all along?

Trying to shape an unwieldy string of dead people into a movie, just so she can have a minor role? So she can feel some sense of control?

If so, all her slasher homework has just been to delude herself, not to live through this night. Or, if she does live, then she lives knowing that there never was any slasher cycle, that slashers aren’t real, are just pretend, and what kind of life would that be?

Jade closes her eyes, shakes her head no, balls her fists by her face and sinks under, doesn’t know if she’s crying or not.

Hanging under the surface like that the world’s so quiet that…

what is that she’s hearing?

A choir? Ezekiel’s still down there in Drown Town, holding his last mass. And—and if that can be real, if Jade’s really and actually hearing music, then… then anything can be true, can’t it?

She reaches up, climbs the water handful by handful, finally surfaces a third time, her lungs hungry, her vision blurred, her nose running, skin number than numb.

She bobs, bobs, tries to jump up to see higher, not sure if her teeth are chattering from cold or from excitement.

He’s almost to the back of the crowd, Shooting Glasses.

And, maybe twenty yards to the left of him, unaware of his escape, so is Theo Mondragon. And Letha must be already in the crowd, her unsteerable swan just another ridiculous float in a night of ridiculous floats. On-screen, Quint is screaming, the giant pissed-off shark chomping him in bite by bite, leg by leg, shutting him up once and for all.

“Somebody! ” Jade screams, clapping her hand on the water, but she wasn’t lying: the movie really is cranked. And this is everybody’s favorite scene, anyway. In honor, the Proofrockers are singing farewell to Spanish ladies, their arms hooked into other arms over gunwales, across bows—was this what Jade was hearing underwater? And, zero surprise here, isn’t this where she’s always been? Way on the outside, everyone deaf to her cries? Deaf when she cried?

She screams in fury, just to be heard, and when no official flashlight stabs a dusty beam of light out into the darkness to guide her in, she leans sideways, does her best approximation of a freestyle stroke until she pulls close enough to hear distinct words from the speakers.

And—oh shit.

This cannot be happening, can it?

Every year there’s a sort of last-minute theme, circulated in the halls of both schools, scribbled on bathroom walls, left in code on the bulletin board at the drugstore: this year’s costume. It’s a game the whole town plays.

The year she saw the high schooler in the Jigsaw getup, the reason he stood out was that everyone was wearing nun costumes.

This year, some of those long black habits have been recycled, but mixed with hag masks, with zombie make-up, with long stringy J-horror wigs.

The theme this year is “Lake Witch.” Stacey Graves.

Because of course.

Right as Jade drifts in behind the last line of floats, one of those Lake Witches even comes flying across the screen, which is another tradition: dressing up, pole-vaulting off shore, into the stretch of water left free specifically for this year’s jumper to splash down into.

Because jocks and the black t-shirt crowd don’t exactly trade phone numbers and social calendars, Jade didn’t track who this year’s Henderson High Graduation Day pole vaulter was going to be, but whoever it is—Lee Scanlon, maybe?— he’s silhouetted in front of the bright-bright screen now, his robe ragged and backswept, never going to catch him, and it’s like Stacey Graves has come back.

Good for her.

Just, this time, this cycle, the slasher’s more mundane, more human. More real. Sorry, Stacey, Jade says in her heart—she’s already seen this year’s killer, and he’s more from the Ghostface era than the Golden Age.

That doesn’t mean his blade is any less sharp, though.

Jade latches onto the first hull she can and uses it to pull ahead. It’s the librarian float: the boat’s papier-maché’d into a giant open book, but the gluey paper is mushy under Jade’s hand already.