My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(59)

“My turn to what? Turn in another paper?”

“You can play dumb with him,” Mr. Holmes says. “You can play dumb with everyone, doesn’t matter to me. But I know, Jennifer. You’re not dumb.”

“Thanks, I guess?”

“I told you some painful truth, now you tell me some.”

“Quid pro quo,” Jade says with a snicker.

“Latin,” Mr. Holmes says. “You never fail to surprise, Jennifer.”

“Or disappoint,” Jade adds. “And it’s Jade, thanks.”

“It’s your turn, I mean.”

“I haven’t started any fires visible from space.”

“On the walk over, it hit me,” Mr. Holmes says. “The one horror genre you never broached in your papers and essays and creative pieces. How it was no accident that you avoided it.”

“I do slashers, you know that. All kinds of subgenres I haven’t written about. I mean—exorcisms are boring, just confirm western religion, and vampires and werewolves have so much lore they’re practically fantasy, no matter how many throats they rip open, and haunted houses are just standins for —”

“I’m talking about rape-revenge, Jennifer.”

“That’s not my name.”

“Why’d you never delve into that subgenre?”

Jade lets her eyes unfocus so she can burn through what he’s asking: rape-revenge is where a raped woman is left for dead but climbs back to life to take brutal revenge on her attackers, often using poetic justice, and usually a lot of primal screaming.

“Okay, so… if rape-revenge is going to be slasher-adjacent,” she says, figuring this out as she goes, “then you’re saying the rape is the prank, right?”

“You tell me.”

“And you’re saying that this woman, she becomes the spirit of vengeance personified,” Jade says. “All that’s missing is…

is a mask—”

“She doesn’t need one,” Mr. Holmes says. “She’s supposed to be dead. And the rapists weren’t exactly interested in her face anyway. Or maybe their violence gave her a mask? The bruises, the black eyes, the fat lip.”

“Okay, okay,” Jade says. “But this is usually the same weekend, too, right? Raped on a Friday, killing all through Saturday and Sunday? There’s no five or ten years where the pranksters can forget their crime even happened.”

“They forgot her the moment they were done with her,” Mr.

Holmes says, seemingly ready for whatever Jade might have.

Meaning his silence earlier was really thinking. Preparing.

Scallywag indeed.

“Okay, I’ll give you that,” Jade says, though she knows this is a trap.

“But if you elect to exclude it from being one of your slashers,” Mr. Holmes goes on, “if you say it’s from a different shelf altogether, then you’re saying that the crime itself doesn’t warrant revenge, aren’t you? That rape gets a pass.

That sexual violation isn’t beholden to the scales of justice you’re always talking about, is somehow outside its purview.”

Jade just stares at a bird prying something from a sewer grate.

“Either that or you’re acknowledging that a minor can’t take that revenge,” Mr. Holmes adds, quieter. Because this is where he was going all along.

Jade kind of hates him right now.

It doesn’t mean he gets to win, though.

“The reason rape-revenge isn’t a slasher is that the slasher and the final girl would have to be the same person,” she says, pushing off the front of Family Dollar with her butt. “Problem with that is that the final girl and the spirit of vengeance are forever locked in opposition, not the same jumpsuit. That’d— that’d be like Batman peeling his cowl off and being the Joker.

Would that even work?”

Mr. Holmes is just watching her.

Jade shakes her head, says, “But really, is there anything I could say right now that might make you believe she’s wrong?”

“She being her,” Mr. Holmes says, tilting his head back to the store, to Letha.

“She not able not to be her,” Jade says with a snort.

“There is one thing,” Mr. Holmes says after a long consideration. “You were asking about documents or PDFs in my inbox? Well, when I got my degree in education, the final hurdle I had to clear to get my diploma was my orals. The out-loud part of the test.”

“I was listening in class, I promise, but I can’t remember all the dates.”

“Just one question. No dates.”

“So you’re holding my diploma hostage,” Jade says after thinking this through.

“That would be unethical,” Mr. Holmes says, pushing away from Family Dollar now as well, and stepping out to study the street, his hands behind him, which means he’s back in teacher mode. “But you have been petitioning for me to allow you to make up for your eight weeks’ absence.”

“I meant with more papers.”

“About slashers.”

“This a trick?”

“It’s a gift.”

Jade breathes in, shakes her head no about this—it’s not a trick, it’s a trap—but… just one question, and she graduates?