My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(38)
Jade leans forward, out over open space. She really did bury a heavy-ass double bit axe over here in junior high, “for future use.” And also because it was stolen. But… no. Hardy wouldn’t scramble all available units and rope in civilians just because Proofrock’s high school drop-out of a janitor told him to look under the floorboards of cabin 6.
Would he?
Jade leans out over the open space even more, that soft chalky bluff crumbling down and down under the toe of her right boot, and… Letha, in that blanket. Her hated stepmom, consoling her.
Consoling her.
From what?
“The next kill,” Jade says in wonder, and then in the same instant, she feels it: eyes on her.
She looks down, around, finally finds those eyes: Theo Mondragon in khaki shorts and an unbuttoned shirt, like he didn’t have time to attire himself properly for whatever this is.
Like he just ran out to whoever was screaming. Jade can almost see him powering the monstrous yacht across the lake, never mind checking depth or battening pitchers and glasses down in the state rooms.
He’s out at the edge of Camp Blood now, cell pushed up against the side of his head, and he’s looking up at Jade, her off-color half-bleached hair—all the purple’s gone—probably an ash-blond beacon for him to fix on.
Jade steps back, tightropes it across the rail-less spine of the dam again, and runs all the way home, her chest heaving, spends the next hour coloring her hair black-black with shoe polish, which is all she can find. It’s the hugest mess. The sink looks like a demon exploded in it, like this is a problem only Ben Affleck can solve.
Except Ben Affleck, as usual, isn’t here.
Jade hauls out the cleaning shit, does janitor duty for the next hour, wiping up her own mess for once. By the end of it her hair should be dry, but it’s all gummy and oily instead. She goes out to the yard, uses the hose this time, and vinegar, then rubbing alcohol, but some situations are just basically unsalvageable. Evidently deep black and the non-color her burned-out rat’s nest of hair’s been strained down to come together in a weird shade of orangey-brown, like… carrot with undertones of vomit? Leftover tendrils of black are shot through as well, and her scalp looks like the top of a scabby dress shoe, one cheap enough to have bubbled up in the sun.
Who cares.
The better to stare you down with, Jade hisses inside, her daily affirmation, and stalks into her room, ransacking it for whatever other papers she can slip to Letha, and then, and then —she has to decide what movie’s going to be next in this Final Girl extension course, doesn’t she?
She clamps her headphones on again, works her way through The Slumber Party Massacre and April Fool’s Day and Happy Birthday to Me for the rest of the day, and somewhere in there she blisses out, only comes to when the screen fizzes its blue soul up. It’s the same exact shade Casey Becker’s television screen is early on in Scream. Meaning…
does that mean that her movie’s starting now, that Jade’s Proofrock slasher is officially cueing up, the preliminary stages all checked off at last? And… and if she had the same stovetop brand of popcorn as Casey Becker, would it pop at the same rate? Does Casey’s stalking and death move in real time or movie time?
It’s worth investigating, even with just a normal bag of microwave popcorn. In the kitchen, though, her dad is cooking eggs, his whole face bleary.
He rubs his hand up and down over it, still trying to wake up all the way.
“Doesn’t work like it used to,” he says for Jade about his get-sober trick, and then smiles with the left side of his mouth, which is an invitation for her to smile with him about how much mornings suck. She almost does, just manages to look away instead, to the front door, cocked open to let the air in, which is something her mom used to do when she was up first, doing chores. For half an instant, Jade’s ten again.
As if reading the moment right for once in his life, her dad, guiding his eggs from pan to plate, falls into a story Jade already knows, that he used to tell when she was a kid and the time before she was born was mythic, and the only reason her dad could walk across it was that he was a titan, ten stories tall.
“We used to hide under the pier on days like these, each of us with a sixer floating besides us,” he says, miming the beer at chest-level.
“ ‘We?’ ” Jade prompts, though she knows: Rexall, Clate, anybody else stupid enough to get roped in.
Her dad keeps going, says, “This was before Deputy Hardy had that swamp boat, see?”
“Deputy Hardy” is what Sheriff Hardy was back then, but it’s also the only rank Tab Daniels allows him.
“Listen, I’m sure this story’s going to be better this time, but I—” Jade starts.
“The department had that long bass boat with the twin Evinrudes,” her dad says, scrounging in the cabinet for the pepper even though it’s right there on the counter. “Could have pulled a house off its pylons if you tied the knot right.”
“And you would—”
“And we would float there all day, our ski ropes tied to that boat, waiting for your mom or somebody to call in the emergency on the other side of the lake.”
“Like on a schedule?” Jade asks. She’s never thought to ask this question before.
“More like whenever she got around to it,” her dad says, leaning back to fork his first runny bite of egg in. “Kimbat knew we were down there, would torture us by not calling in.”