My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(10)

“Lucky,” Jade says, a wave of shivers rolling up her back again, her lips set against this physical betrayal. “Here.”

Shooting Glasses hand-over-hands the wheel to the left again, easing them past the drugstore, past the bank, and it’s not like church anymore. Now it’s like they’re coasting through a painting: “Quaint Mountain Towns.” “Lakeside Pastoral.” “What If 1965 Never Stopped Happening?”

“Your turn,” Jade tells Shooting Glasses. “I told you—I told you some stuff. Now you tell me some stuff. That’s how it works. Quid pro quo, Clarice.”

Shooting Glasses shakes his head side to side slow, apparently impressed that, in spite of these early stages of hypothermia, the girl’s still got it.

Jade nods that, yes, this is her, this is what she does.

“Where were you the last four years?” she says to him, kind of accidentally out loud.

“I was—” he starts, then hears it like she means it, just purses his lips, peers ahead into the unheadlit darkness.

“This is where you tell me about your buddy,” Jade explains to him. “The one that wasn’t a wake for back there. The one who didn’t die all the way or whatever.”

“Greyson.”

“Did he go live with a distant aunt to recover? Was her barn full of pitchforks, her hands full of s-sewing needles, her head full of bad ideas?”

Shooting Glasses looks over to her about this.

“That’s how it usually goes, I mean,” Jade explains, trying to show she means no insult. “The wronged party, victim of the prank, has to go somewhere long enough that everyone else can forget all about him, so it can be a s-s-surprise when he’s back.”

“You said this place was haunted,” Shooting Glasses tells her.

“By all the ghosts of who everybody used to want to be, before they died inside,” Jade says.

“What were you doing out here?” Shooting Glasses asks.

“Did you know Friday the 13th, it was trying to cash in on Halloween, yeah, sure, but then right at the very end it forgot what it was doing, started thinking it was Carrie?”

“Why do you talk about horror so much?”

“Slashers,” Jade corrects, is always correcting.

“I mean, and don’t take this the wrong way, but, have you considered that maybe you’re just hiding be—”

“Can’t I just like horror because it’s great? Does there have to be some big explanation?”

“I’m just, your leg, I think maybe that’s blood. I think maybe I should—”

Jade doesn’t hear the end because she’s popped the door, is rolling out into the cold, can’t take any more of this—her dad, this town, high school. Questions, glances, judgments. The sad way stupid Sheriff Hardy looks at her. The way Mr. Holmes is always asking her these exact same questions, every time she turns in a paper. Now even construction grunts she doesn’t know are treating her like she’s in need of special-delicate handling.

Fuck that. Fuck all of them.

She falls on the heels of her hands and her knees, doesn’t let that stop her, is already running like a ragdoll down the town pier, that kind of running that’s all untied boots, that you have to lift your chin for, because you know you’re going so fast.

Halfway to the end of the pier, the stolen car’s brights blast on, throwing her shadow out ahead of her, where it plunges past the wooden planks, into the water.

Jade tries to stop but it’s slick, so, yeah, the perfect capper to the perfect night: she goes flailing over the end, just like every kid all summer long, except it’s not summer yet, and she’s seventeen, and it’s cold-thirty in the dead-dead morning.

The last thing she thinks as she’s slipping over the end is how stupid it is that that shaky light is steady for once, isn’t flickering out, and then she’s holding her breath for the icy plunge, is trying to insulate herself with slashers that happen in the snow but can only come up with Cold Prey and Cold Prey 2, and that’s not going to be enough to keep her blood from freezing.

Instead of splashing into the lake or cracking through the thin sheet of ice that has to be there, she thunks into the bottom of the green canoe always tied there, BYOP-style: Bring Your Own Paddle.

The canoe rocks and founders, doesn’t quite roll.

Jade sits up holding the back of her head, the world blurry and getting blurrier, then, hearing footsteps coming for her, she lets the scratchy nylon rope loose, reaches out with one boot to push off into the darkness, the scrim of ice on the surface crackling around her in large, slow sheets. So she won’t have to see Shooting Glasses standing there looking for her, she fetals down on her side in the bottom of the canoe, the gunwales to either side hiding her and her orange hair, her blue lips, her red left leg, her pitch-black heart.

And she hates it more than anything, but she’s sobbing now.

No, she can never be a final girl.

Final girls are good, they’re uncomplicated, they have these reserves of courage coiled up inside them, not layer after layer of shame, or guilt, or whatever this festering poison is.

Real final girls only want the horror to be over. They don’t stay up late praying to Craven and Carpenter to send one of their savage angels down, just for a weekend maybe. Just for one night. Just for one dance, please? One last dance?