My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(97)

Jade should most definitely not be in here with them right now, though. It’s too early. But still, and mostly just because she’s seen Scream 3, Jade pushes her hand into the belly of each hanging outfit just to be sure none of them are going to reach out for her as soon as she turns her back. She turns the overhead light off, listens hard for footsteps or breathing in the hall, and steps out again, darts across to the bathroom, which is to the right from Letha’s bedroom, but is on the left.

She’s just done, is dealing with the many complications of coveralls and this impossibly soft robe, when she takes stock of the counter, and the beauty toolkit exploded all over it. No, this isn’t a workbench, she decides, it’s an artist’s station. She touches a smudged sponge, runs her fingertip along the spine of a brush, and… what’s this? Cylindrical, electric, surely not…

Jade picks it up as delicately as she can: Oh, clippers. Phew.

Meaning… she stares at the door, is thinking about the halls beyond it, and all the rooms it connects to, and Letha saying the yacht’s full tonight, because everybody’s in town for Deacon Samuels, and for the Fourth.

This is a dude’s clippers. She can tell because they’re big to fit big hands, and don’t have any feminine accents. And… the only one of the Founders with a roguish soul patch that probably needs constant attention is Mars Baker.

So: Mars Baker is close enough to also be using this bathroom.

Jade swallows hard, looks at herself in the mirror, and has to touch her hair to make sure it’s real. It looks more like she smeared glue all over her scalp and thrashed her head around in a New Year’s Eve dumpster.

Touching it just leaves her fingers oily, too. She’s probably ruining Letha’s expensive pillow.

“Fuck it,” she says, and before she can think twice, she takes Mars Baker’s clippers, peels the guard away, and stares herself down while shaving off hank after hank of hair. It’s supposed to turn her into Ripley from Alien 3, when space lice were an issue, but she’s really just a stubbly mess now, a slightly taller Tommy Jarvis, her scalp still unevenly stained from the shoe polish. Her head looks like a kindergarten class’s pottery project.

“Well you asked for it,” she tells herself, and runs the faucet to try to swirl all the hair down the drain. When it clogs, she has to reach into the mucky water, grainy with the spit-out toothpaste of probably ten people, and grab onto the oily clump of her hair, deliver it to the trashcan like the drowned rat it is.

Finally the water gurgles and burps down, leaving the rest of her split-ends all over the steep walls of the sink. Jade runs more water, guides those strays down as best she can, and almost has them all gone—no evidence—when the knob rattles and a shoulder thunks into the metal door.

“Um?” she says.

“Hurry,” someone whispers—female, thank you, not old and male and litigious.

Still, someone’s standing right out there now, waiting.

“Okay, okay,” Jade says in her best Letha-sleep voice, which she knows can’t be very convincing, because final girls don’t let their frustration and grogginess make them snappy.

Jade runs water over her hands, pats them dry on her cloud-soft hips, wraps the towel back around her prickly scalp—a completely new sensation—and turns the light off. She breathes once, twice, and on three she spins out, keeping her back to whoever this is, stepping around them in a way that’s also kind of pushing them into the bathroom they evidently need in a desperate way.

For a flash she sees that it’s one of the twins, either Cinnamon or Ginger, which is the best she could hope for: kids. Not Mars Baker, not Ladybird Samuels or Macy Todd, not Ross Pangborne or Lewellyn Singleton, not Lana Singleton, not—not whatever Ross Pangborne’s wife is named. Donna?

Lemmy, though, Lemmy Singleton would have been all right. Him or Galatea. Kids she can deal with. Kids she can bluff.

“Thanks,” either Cinnamon or Ginger says to Jade’s back, stepping into the bathroom, and Jade nods, keeps moving, the hallway surely free and clear all the way back to— Facing her now is the other twin, either Cinnamon or Ginger.

She’s looking Jade full in the face, not recognizing her.

“Who—who are you?” this other twin asks.

“Letha’s friend,” Jade mumbles.

“There’s hair in here!” the first twin announces from the toilet.

“Does her dad know you’re spending the night?” the other asks.

“He ordered us a movie,” Jade says, turning sideways to slip past.

“The bathroom’s not even steamy,” this other twin says, which is the same as asking why Jade has a towel wound around her head.

Jade doesn’t explain, just keeps on trucking down to Letha’s room, ducks in breathing hard, feels exactly like Justine in Kristy, always hiding behind this door, in that locker room, certain death around every corner.

She feels for the lock on Letha’s door, twists it over, falls back onto the bed.

Her heart thumps slower and slower, the adrenaline flushing out, and in its wake is lavender and melatonin to inhale. Jade fights through it as best she can, Letha’s light snoring not helping.

“Friday the 13th,” she whispers into the remote, and pulls up The Final Chapter which wasn’t, hoping the carrot of counting machete-strikes into Jason’s head at the end will keep her awake. It’s the scene she always imagined watching with a garageful of classmates, all of them chanting the numbers higher and higher, some of them acting it out, all of them killing Jason together, because it takes a village.