My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(56)

The truth? And if she says she wasn’t scared, then what she did to Hardy was just cruel.

There’s no way to win. Same as ever.

Why she even gets her hopes up anymore, who knows.

“We’re just trying to help,” Letha says.

Jade opens her eyes to the brightness and tears spill down both cheeks. Tears she fucking hates.

Instead of wiping them away, she slashes her right hand back in the direction of Mr. Holmes, because she can smell his nicotine on the air. He slips the butt between her waiting fingers.

“It’s not your fault,” Letha says again, still right there.

“No,” Jade says again, breathing smoke out, finally turning around so they can see her wet face, see what they’re doing to her here. “It’s not what you think. Fathers don’t do that to daughters, not even fathers as sucky as mine, as Indian as mine. I would say you’ve seen too many Lifetime movies, but if you’ve seen too many movies, what does that mean about me and my slashers?”

After maybe three seconds, Letha has to smile about this.

Jade grins with her, takes another long drag, handing the cigarette back to Mr. Holmes before exhaling.

“Just saying,” Hardy says, getting his own cigarette going, having to lean down into his cupped hand the way cowboys in westerns always do, “it would explain an awful lot. Your—all this gothic stuff, the way you dress, your attitude, the trouble you’re always—”

“That’s just me,” Jade tells him, blowing her smoke out now, as underline. “Horror’s not a symptom, it’s a love affair.”

“Are you saying—?” Letha starts, and Jade finishes for her: “I’d be like this anyway, yeah.”

It’s only when she looks up to Mr. Holmes that she hears what Letha tricked her into saying. It’s the same story you hear about drunks on a traffic stop, arguing how they can’t even say the alphabet backwards when they’re sober. Meaning what Jade just said to all three of them was: Even if my dad hadn’ t done that to me when I was eleven, I still would have fallen hard for horror.

And trying to backpedal would just be protesting too much, she knows.

“Ask my mom, then,” she says, just plucking the idea straight from the air without running it through the fire first.

“Kimmy?” Hardy asks.

“She’s at work,” Jade says, pointing with her lips down Main, to the dollar store.

All three of them look, and in that moment Jade knows she can run, that none of them can catch her, untied laces or no. As full of hatred as she is now, she could probably even run on top of the water, because no way would Ezekiel let her pollute his lake.

But her mom is her ace.

“She’s got no reason to lie for him,” Jade adds, to sell it.

“Tell me I’m lying.”

Hardy just keeps looking up Main.

“She’s got a point,” Mr. Holmes says. “The mom would know.”

“It’s a small house,” Jade says. “And it was back then too.

You hear everything.”

“I don’t like this,” Hardy says, coming around to the three of them. “She can—she can warn him. Kimmy, I mean. She can warn Tab.”

“Tab?” Letha says.

Nobody answers her.

“Just because he’s Indian doesn’t mean he can turn to smoke,” Jade says. “If anything, he’d turn into a puddle of beer. But there won’t be anything to warn him about. Just false accusations.”

“If it matters, I don’t think they talk anymore,” Mr. Holmes adds, just to Hardy.

“All you have to do is admit it for the process to start,”

Letha says, like reading from a pamphlet.

“I know you’re trying to help,” Jade says, studying the gravel between her boots now, “and I thank you, really. I’m a stranger, I’m nobody, I’m the town reject, the weird girl, the walking suicide, the Indian who shouldn’t even be alive, and you’re—you are who you are, what you are. But you’ve got this all wrong, trust me.”

“There are tests,” Letha says. “Kits, the hospital can—”

“Test if I’m a virgin?” Jade scoffs. “Do you really think anybody in this town suspects that the custodian with different hair color every week has been able to keep her legs closed all these years? That she’s even tried to?”

Neither Hardy nor Holmes can push back against this.

“I asked around,” Letha says at last, like a card she didn’t want to have to play. “You’ve never dated, never had a boyfr —”

“Maybe I’m not into guys,” Jade cuts in.

“It’s not about—” Letha says, trying to start this whole line over. “It’s perfectly natural for you to want to defend him, it’s the… it’s like you consider yourself an accomplice just because you were involved. But your involvement wasn’t complicit, wasn’t voluntary, it never is, it can’t be, you don’t even know you can say no to a parent. Parents are good, parents are shining and right, they’re the gods of our world, so whatever they do can never be wrong. It must be your feelings that are wrong. Their mask is that they’re parents. Some of them are more, though. Some of them are monsters. But now, all these years later—”