My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(25)

As if confirming how stupid it is, Principal Manx, trying to salvage graduation, motions for Rexall to rise, accept his certificate for going, as Manx says into the mic, “Above and beyond the duties of a custodian.” The applause continues, and Jade knows that out in the parking lot, her dad’s lifting a can for Rexall, which has to be why he was there. Not for his only daughter, the second Indian non-graduate in twenty years. The only words the two of them have had about graduation at all is when Tab asked her where she was moving out this summer.

What Jade told him was that it was none of his concern, thanks.

What she didn’t tell him was that it would pretty much either be Camp Blood or the couch of whoever her mom was living with.

Rexall shuffles up to the podium, his phone still tight in his hand like a life preserver, but when Manx steps to the side to formally present him, Misty Christy stands up from the crowd, waving her hand back and forth like can Principal Manx please call on her?

It stops the ceremony, everyone looking to Misty Christy.

Misty Christy is shaking her head no, pointing past the podium.

To Jade.

Jade shrinks, slouches, licks her lip, probably frying her lipstick, blackening her tongue. For the first time in maybe ever, she wishes her hair wasn’t so easy to find in a crowd.

“It was her, not him!” Misty Christy is saying, her voice unamplified but loud enough.

Principal Manx looks back to Jade and Jade has to look past him, past the bleachers, past all of it.

“I saw too!” Lucky says, from another part of the bleachers.

He drives the school bus. He was the one who almost hit Misty Christy’s daughter.

“Me too!” Judd Tambor, Proofrock’s other realtor, calls out, his voice booming.

Jade’s ninety-nine to a hundred-and-fifty-percent certain he wasn’t there that day, but this is his chance to stand up for the unstood-up-for, and no way in hell does he let his main rival get all the good will for that.

And now, after Judd Tambor, Jade can’t clock all the other Proofrockers chiming in that they were there, they saw, they know. Part of it’s that herd-thing Mr. Holmes is always telling them about, Jade knows, which is like the underbelly of mob mentality, but part of it too is that, if they don’t stand in support of her, then Rexall gets that certificate, and they probably know him and his high school days and further exploits better than Jade ever will.

She closes her eyes, counts to three for all of this to be over, but then she looks again at the count of two. Not to Misty Christy, not to Judd Tambor, holding his toddler daughter up and waving her back and forth like some sort of proof of the hero Jade is, not to everyone clapping now, but to the very top corner of the bleachers. At her mom.

She’s smiling that close-lipped smile she has.

Jade closes her eyes tighter, is not going to fucking cry right here, in front of everybody. And then, right on cue, her dad steps out from under the bleachers, not in from the parking lot.

He’s banging two trashcan lids together like cymbals, his beer clenched between his teeth, splashing onto his face and down his shirt.

It shuts the rest of the clapping down, but he keeps clanging those lids until Hardy thins his lips, walks down along the fence that direction.

Jade closes her eyes again, harder. Reminds herself that with every good, there’s two bads. That’s just the way it is. Maybe it’s a thing with Indians, or maybe it’s just her, it doesn’t really matter. True’s true.

When she finally looks again, peering up from under her bangs, Rexall’s seated and Principal Manx is leaning down to the mic to “Get these degrees handed out!”

Because the alphabet is what it is, Jade’s second to walk the stage, second to have to shake Manx’s hand, and the first and only to receive no hoots or applause or confetti cannons going off, since her dad’s been removed from the premises, and her mom couldn’t handle everyone looking up to her, has slunk away under cover of all that clapping.

When Letha walks, though, in heels for once—she’s got to be six-plus feet in them—the yacht nobody realized was drifting in behind them does a long airhorn blast that sends a choreographed whole flock of white doves up from some hidden place on shore.

Of course.

Sidestepping down the second row to take her seat, Letha squeezes Jade’s right shoulder in a sisterly way, a supportive way, and Jade hates more than anything the way her eyes heat up from this contact.

Where were you all my life? Jade says to Letha in her head, which is when she remembers having said that once before, or close to it.

Shooting Glasses.

Jade scans right to left for a yellow safety vest that hasn’t made a complete exit, and sure enough, there he is leaning against a stanchion of the bleachers on the right side, as if he hasn’t earned a seat up in the bleachers. Not after having stolen them from their rightful owners.

Jade nods once to him and he nods back, tips the shallow brim of his hardhat in congratulations, then steps away, and she realizes that’s all he was waiting for: her.

Because she’s the one he saved, and he wants to see her all the way through?

Because he…

Jade shakes her head no, not that, not her. No way can he be into her. She shakes the possibility off, finds her eyes locked on Theo Mondragon again. He looks for all the world like Bruce Wayne, with Batman just under his tasteful suit. He’s entrancing, has to own every boardroom he sweeps into, every shareholders’ meeting he graces, every dinner table he settles down at.