My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(31)

Jade wipes her eyes, tries to keep her chin from being a stupid prune, and tells him she’s sorry, okay? She’s sorry, she couldn’t help it. And she hopes he fucking kills the goddamn shit out of Clate Rodgers.

Maybe some of his friends too.

She sniffles in, stands up against the post office wall, and wonders if that’s it, then: will the slasher this time be dressed like a local cop, like the melty terminator from Judgment Day?

Maybe that’s what this slasher cycle will be called when it breaks on the national news: “Judgment Day.” Except it’ll probably be “Wilderness Massacre,” something insulting like that.

No, of course: “Camp Blood, Chapter 2.” Because, like Randy says in Scream 2, the sequels always have to be bloodier. Unless whoever it is is actually wearing some giant Stacey Graves getup, in which case: The Lake Witch Slayings.

Jade likes the ring of that one.

That’s all later, though. Right now she needs to clock out, always keeping her eyes on the floor so she doesn’t accidentally look into any of Rexall’s— She flattens herself against the post office wall, holding the litter stick across her chest in both hands, her lips set.

A Jeep is blasting past, top down, packed with former Hawks cheerleaders.

It’s on a collision course with the Umiak, surging across the lake, Tiara Mondragon at the flashing chrome steering wheel, her hips wrapped in a gossamer sarong from a fashion catalog, her top a black string bikini, her eyes in, of all things, ski goggles.

When the Umiak slides in for a sideways stop, washing water over the top of the pier, Letha Mondragon rises from below.

Jade steps away from the wall to see better.

The cheerleaders in the Jeep are standing, calling Letha over. Jade catches “finally” and “it’s going to be great!” For them, two weeks after graduation is still a celebration. But that’s probably because their tassels are in frames on the wall already, not burned string by string with a series of cigarettes, just to watch that soft nylon curl up in pain, try to get away, climb back into the safety of high school.

Letha looks back to Tiara, and Tiara shrugs, washing her hands of this, so Letha hops down from the tall side of the boat as graceful as any cat burglar, touches down on the slick wet boards like sticking this landing is no big thing, just everyday for her.

Jade cannot wait to see her go up against the tall shape on her dance card. It won’t matter if he’s got a chainsaw or a harpoon gun or is two-fisting machetes like nunchucks, faster and faster. Letha Mondragon, final girl extraordinaire, will walk open-eyed into those whirling blades, come out with a dark heart in her hands.

She’s everything Jade always wished she could have been, had she not grown up where she did, how she did, with who she did.

It’s going to be epic, this final-girl-against-slasher high noon.

Unless Jade’s just making it all up, she reminds herself.

To prove she’s not, when Letha Mondragon chocks her sneaker up onto the rear tire of the Jeep and vaults in, sitting under the roll bar not on it, Jade steps out from the wall she’s been hiding against, tracks the Jeep’s exit to get a read on where the party is tonight. Right before the shadows take Letha, she looks longingly back across the lake, as if beaming apology over to the yacht, to her family, for doing something for herself for once.

Jade knows that look.

She outgrew it in fifth grade, but still, she remembers not wanting to leave the house, broach into the big scary world.

“But everything’s scary,” she reminds herself, gathering her coveralls at her throat because too much exposure to Proofrock might finally just do her in. When the Jeep’s headlights finally kiss each other goodbye, fold themselves into the dusk, Jade beats the darkness back by lighting a cigarette. It flares harsh orange, and, her lungs swirling with death, her litter stick hidden far up under the bushes, she falls in behind the Jeep and just goes ahead and says it out loud: “The party was great on… Girls Nite Out.” It’s the slasher where the killer wears the bear suit with whackadoodle eyes. But, extra points for the blades hidden in the paw, right? 1982 too, a couple of years before the Springwood Slasher would have knife fingers. But Jade can’t get lost in her head, needs to keep up with the Jeep long enough to get a read on where this party’s going to be.

But these girls—the driver’s Bethany Manx, Jade’s pretty sure —are making it easy. The way they’re hugging the shore, the only place they can be going is Banner Tompkins’s house, right on the lake. His parents aren’t jet-setters or anything, but it is bowling night up the road in Ammon, and bowling usually takes until two in the morning to weave back from. Leaving time to invite a few friends over. Say, twenty of them, and all the booze they can carry?

Jade knows it’ll be swim trunks and bikinis until about midnight. After which it’ll be nothing but smiles.

On the twenty-minute walk to get there, skirting the Bay and Devil’s Creek, Jade keeps finding herself looking to the left, across the lake. She tries to come back, watch for tripping hazards, keep from busting her face on a tree root, but her chin keeps cranking over, her eyes tunneling across all that water, to Terra Nova.

She hates it on principle, sure, but it’s also what’s delivering a final girl to town, so maybe she should give it a sort of grudging pass. At least until this slasher cycle is over. After that it can burn, be a haunted husk in the cold open of the sequel, where that installment’s blood sacrifice happens, well away from prying eyes that might try to shut things down before they even get going proper.