My Heart Is a Chainsaw Read online

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?

  That’s all Jade needs in the world, she knows.

  Instead she’s got Tab Daniels for a father, Proofrock for a prison, and high school for a torture chamber.

  Kill em all, she says in her heart of hearts. Let God sort them out.

  Or just leave them unsorted, floating facedown in the shallows. That works too.

  Jade chuckles to herself through the tears, pats her chest pocket for the cigarette she doesn’t have, because these coveralls were just hanging on the line.

  Once she’s drifted far enough out that the light from the pier can’t reach her, she sits up, takes stock, and keeps monologuing even though the trashfire is just a flickering speck of light on shore: “Did you know that kid the shark eats in Jaws, his name’s ‘Voorhees’ too?” she asks the construction grunts, all three of them so ready to smile with wonder at this. “Yeah, yeah, Voorhees kids should maybe stay out of the water, think? But that’s not even what I meant to say, okay, sorry. I was just—when Jason comes up out of the water in mossy slow motion for Alice, floating there in her safe canoe, roll-the-credits music already cueing up, that’s Friday’s Carrie moment right there, that’s the stinger that would set the mold for the Golden Age of the slasher, the eighties, and, and… the way he comes up and hugs her from behind, it’s not because he means her any violence, any harm, it’s just that he’s—he’s a little kid, goddamnit, he’s a helpless messed-up little kid and he’s fucking drowning, he’s terrified, he’s holding on to whatever he can, right? He’s scared, and she’s… she’s supposed to protect him, save him, keep him safe.”

  Jade lowers her face, because the air at her chest has to be warmer. Her lungs feel like they’re iced over, filling with something solid and permanent.

  This isn’t just going to be hypothermia, Sheriff Hardy, Mr. Holmes.

  She’s Alice at the end of Friday the 13th now, she knows, when Friday’s starting to be Saturday, she’s Alice and she’s floating out on the lake in her canoe, waiting for the magic to happen, trying to stay out there long enough that Jason notices her up at the surface, starts rising, rising—

  “Here I am,” Jade says, loopy with cold now, smiling because it doesn’t hurt anymore, and just to give Jason some color to find her, some of what he likes, she holds her left wrist out, uses her right hand to flick the razor from the utility knife like a sharp little tongue, and she cuts longways and deep like opening a fountain, doesn’t scratch some side-to-side plea-for-help gash.

  Her blood pours steaming from the fishbelly part of her left forearm and she studies it, says, “Here I am, I’m—I’m…”

  What stops her is how fascinating her blood is, pooled on the surface of the gelid lake. She’s seventy percent certain a misshapen face is looking up at her from the murk, its mouthful of gravestone teeth trying to grin. She smiles back, looks all around in farewell, to Proofrock where she grew up, to Terra Nova where she’s never been, to Camp Blood, where her heart is.

  “Momma I’m coming home,” she says with that Ozzy lilt, and she knows no arms are coming up from behind her for her big finale, for the slasher version of a death roll, which is really just a hug, but she closes her eyes all the same, pretends.

  SLASHER 101

  And then there was one. Of me, I mean, Mr. Holmes, one Jade Daniels to take you by the hand and walk you up and down the video rental aisles of slasherland to make up for what I missed from the Freddy Glove Incident at freshman detention, which wasn't even really my fault, and that Freddy glove has PLASTIC blades anyway. It's almost October though, and horror is my religion. Can I not celebrate orthodoxly and honor my church's holy days?

  But I need to explain SLASHERS to you now, in under 2 pages.

  It's easy to think that the slasher started with Halloween, previously called The Babysitter Murders, or that it got a face when Friday the 13th III put a certain Black Christmas hockey mask on, but still, a lot fans and true believers will go back to Psycho and Peeping Tom. However though if you ask yourself "Who was the first masked killer?" then you can go all the long way back to Phantom of the Opera, which you might remember seeing on a high school outing probably.

  What's first and almost first isn't as important as what's INSIDE the slasher though, sir. And that is REVENGE plain and simple.

  To explain, years ago there was some prank or crime that hurt someone and then the slasher comes back to dispense his violent brand of justice, and he's not listening to excuses or apologies because there's not one single one that could ever be even halfway enough, his mission is carving and he's not stopping until he's stopped.

  So in the case of Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, what made them into a slasher is that Jason DROWNS through massive and obviously wrong neglect, and Freddy is EXECUTED by a mob illegally, and the counselors who allowed this drowning and the parents who became this mob never get punished, just get to keep on keeping on, and it's that unfairness that powers the slasher. As for Michael Myers, his Ahab Dr. Loomis says he's evil, but he's been MADE evil, Mr. Holmes. The crime done to him is that his sister his BABYSITTER should have been watching him closer not stripping down and sexing it up. Michael could have been run over in the street. He could have choked on candy. He could have found a knife and got all stabby.

  Only one of those three ended up happening, Mr. Holmes. It would have been a pretty short movie otherwise.

  As for Ghostface from Scream, sure Billy aka Ghostface says it's scarier when there isn't a motive, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have one, sir. Final Girl Sidney's mom had an affair with his dad, breaking his family up, so a year later all the revenge starts up.

  So what I'm saying is that in the slasher, wrongs are always punished. The crew that did the Bad Prank years ago gets the just dessert they deserve, with a bloody cherry on top, and when they least expect it, making it all better, which should convert you to my side of the movie aisle and the water's fine over here, Mr. Holmes, really. A little bloody maybe, but all the dead people are people who were asking for it. Which is my argument in a gory nutshell.

  SLAUGHTER HIGH

  Eight weeks is the vacation Henderson High gives you for attempted suicide, apparently—seven, really, Jade thinks, since spring break was one of those weeks.

  Still, seven works, even if she had to spend them in a psych ward down in Idaho Falls. She should have thought of this particular scam years ago. Better yet? She’s kind of an escaped mental patient now, she thinks. Close enough.

  And that story only ends one way.

  “What’s so funny?” Sheriff Hardy asks her across the console of his OJ-white county Bronco—the chariot delivering Jade back for the last week of class, so she can go through the motions of finishing out her senior year.

  “This,” Jade says, hooking her chin out to the hug-n-go lane they’re mired in.

  “But you understand about the community service?” he asks, switching hands on the wheel with a groan, a wet cartilaginous pop coming from the depths of his lower back.

  “Twelve hours,” Jade recites for the third time this trip. Twelve hours picking trash for—

  Get this, she would say to her best friend, if she had one: the community service is for “Unauthorized Use of the Town Canoe.”

  “Is that really what it’s called?” her imaginary best friend would hiss back with just the right amount of thrilled outrage.

  “Exactly,” Jade would say, this interchange nearly making those twelve hours of picking trash worth it.

  Instead, they just sort of pre-suck.

  Still, she guesses she’s going to be a star at school today, right? This will be her
official fifteen minutes. The returning antihero. The teen every parent fears the worst. The one who almost got away, before Hardy got Shooting Glasses’s frantic call and fired his airboat up, skipped out to Jade’s frozen spot on the lake, kept her wrist compressed just long enough for the LifeFlight to touch down on shore, all of Proofrock gathered behind it in their slippers and robes and, for all Jade knows, half-dead as she was, wearing those sleep caps with the long cartoon tails trailing behind, that, in real life, would have been dipped into toilet water five hundred times already.

  It’s a fun enough image to dwell on, and Jade’s had weeks and weeks at the Teton Peaks Residential Treatment Center to do it, but what she always finds herself watching instead of the crowd that night is Sheriff Hardy, coming up out of the shallows with her in his arms, giving her all the body heat he has to give, his sixty-one-year-old jowls quivering with each bellow he lets out about how this girl is goddamn well not going to die, not on his watch.

  In slashers, the local cops are always useless. It’s a hard and fast rule of the genre. Sheriff Hardy not sticking to that is just one more nail in the coffin of Jade’s dreams.

  By now that coffin’s pretty much all nails.

  “And you don’t have any blades hidden here, right?” Sheriff Hardy confirms, nodding to the front doors of the school they’re finally stopped at.

  “Axes and machetes count?” Jade asks back with her best evil grin, her hand already to the door handle, but… there’s a manilla-brown PROPERTY envelope suddenly and unaccountably in Hardy’s right hand?

  Hardy breathes in like Jade’s paining him here, says, “You want, I can just take you back to—”

  “No, Sheriff, no weapons on school grounds. Everybody knows I keep my axes and machetes over at Camp Blood, right? Buried under the floorboards of cabin six?”

  Hardy licks his lips and Jade can tell he doesn’t know what to do with her.

  Just as she wants it.

  “That’s for me?” she says about the mystery envelope, and Hardy hands it across uncertainly.

  “I just want you to—to be safe, you know?” he says.

  Jade’s trying for all the world to hold his eyes while also weighing this strangely-heavy envelope in her hand. Property?

  “Consider me saved,” she says, her door open now, right foot reaching for the ground, and she’s no more than shut the door and spun around before a dad in a gold Honda kisses her shins with his plastic bumper, his tires chirping.

  Jade has to hop back to keep the contact from getting real, hop back and slam both hands onto the hood. She looks down through her electric blue bangs to her knees, to this insult of a near-disaster, and then she brings her eyes up slow across the hood, bores them through the windshield, and Hodders her head over to look into this father’s soul. It, like his chest, is pretty much just covered in coffee. She removes her hands one at a time, only looking away at the last moment. Holding her mummy-wrist high, envelope low and trailing, she stalks away, wades through the crush of bodies, under the wilting flags, and steps into the hallowed halls of learning one more time, breathes that morning napalm in.

  It smells like hairspray and floor cleaner and secret cigarette smoke.

  “Woodsboro High, here I am,” she says.

  Nobody notices.

  The gauze on her arm itches, wants to just come off already, but the gauze is her armor for the day, so it can’t come off. And Hardy was too gentlemanly to even question it, though Jade did catch him looking: Why would Suicide Girl still need dressing over stitches that had long been pulled, over a skin-weld of scar tissue she’s already considering getting a tattoo around, a tattoo of dead fingers clawing their way up and out? The answer of course is that she doesn’t need it. But she also really-really does.

  The mummy-wrap is stolen, of course. All the best things in life are stolen, Jade knows. Like this envelope.

  Since nobody’s got eyes on her, she steps into the Quiet Room by the main office, which any student can retreat to if anxiety has their thoughts circling the drain, from their parents getting divorced, from their boyfriend or girlfriend not texting them back, from finals or “life,” whatever.

  Jade unwraps the red string keeping the envelope closed and reaches in for this so-called property.

  First is the name-patch from her custodial coveralls, probably all that was left after the medics attacked her with their blunt-nosed scissors. Jade tucks it into her front pocket, to carry ahead to her next pair of coveralls. Next is a plastic baggie with the earrings she was wearing the night-of. One’s a pearly-white smiling face maybe a half-inch across, and the other’s the same face, just sobbing blood, a pentagram Manson’d between its eyes. Because: the Crüe. She chocks the envelope under her arm and reinserts Theatre of Pain into her ears, apologizing to Vince and Nikki and Tommy and Mick that she never even missed them.

  But the patch and the earrings aren’t the real weight in this envelope. The real weight is a sandwich baggie with a rhinestone-and-pink phone inside.

  “What are you?” Jade says, shaking the phone out, trying to wake it but it’s been dead since the night-of, she guesses. Or earlier.

  Why would Hardy think this is hers, though? Was it in the canoe? Is it one of the medics’? Why does it smell like peanut butter?

  Jade peels the pink case off for the ID or emergency credit card tucked in back. Instead there’s just an if-found sticker, with a +31 phone number and a name that probably goes with that country code: “Sven.”

  Jade dials the number into her own phone, listens to it ring and ring, finally landing at a voicemail in a language she doesn’t understand. She looks “+31” up, lands on “Netherlands.”

  “Anyway,” she says, and, now that the phone number’s in her call list, peels the if-found sticker, crumbles it into the trash so that, as far as teachers or principals or sheriffs might know, this is her phone. To prove it, she shoves it into her right rear pocket, moving her own phone to her bra, which she knows is some sort of breast cancer danger, but screw it. Maybe her imaginary best friend will text and Jade will feel that buzz immediately in her heart, right?

  Right.

  All the same, she guesses it was pure luck she wasn’t checking her phone on the ride in with Hardy. He might have clocked the phone in her lap, had questions about the one in the bag, with the pink case Jade would never have for herself, now that she’s thinking about it.

  That pink, though, it reminds her of… what?

  Jade squints, trying to dredge the memory up, connect it to something, and zombies back out into the bustle of two minutes before first bell. She’s not going to chemistry, though. Not yet. First it’s the ladies’ room by the men’s gym, because it’s always the least crowded. The whole way there she’s expecting conversation to stop around her, for feet to shuffle to a stop when she scowls past, but instead it’s just the usual treatment: eyes flicking away when they realize it’s Jennifer Daniels again, or Jade, or JD, or whatever she’s going by this year. Even her beacon of an arm hardly draws a second glance.

  What, did somebody else suicide after her, and better? Is she old news already?

  She ducks into the ladies’ room and pulls down the community eyeliner from the top of the far mirror, the one with SKANK STATION scratched into the tile above it, either by one of the rah-rahs who would never stoop to risk an eye infection, or by that rah-rah’s mother, fifteen years ago.

  No way can Jade face the day without her black binoculars to look through, though.

  She opens wide, traces it on raccoon-thick, has her face right to the mirror when the voice comes from behind her: “Oh. So there will be thirty-two Hawks this year, I guess.”

  Jade refocuses, sees the reflections of Rica Lawless and Greta Dimmons swishing for the exit, their word balloon practically hanging in the air behind them for Jade to study.

  Thirty-two Henderson Hawks?

  Counting Jade back into the graduating class… she’s no mathlete, but shouldn’t it be thirty seniors w
ithout her? Does she count twice now that she’s back from the dead, or did some salmon of an overachieving junior jump a grade?

  More important: does she care? Is she going to let Rica and Greta occupy even one one-hundredth of her precious headspace? The only reason they’re even counting graduates is because they’re both yearbook staff, meaning the class photo is their responsibility—that stupid series of wide snapshots by the trophy case that every group of seniors gets Shining’d into. It’s one of those cardboard cutout things like for coin collections, except the coins are the graduates’ faces, and each of their faces is set into an actual Henderson Hawk, brown feathers and all, the scroll at the bottom promising they’re all going to soar into the future or take the snake by the tail or have a bird’s-eye view of history, Jade forgets all the stupid embarrassing hawk stuff.

  But yeah, “I’m back, bitches,” she says out loud to the door closing behind Rica and Greta.

  It’s punctuated by a toilet flushing.

  Jade holds the eyeliner a smidge from her lower lid, waiting for a pair of combat boots to step down from a toilet, followed by a dark robe slowly descending over the ankles, but instead—

  Oh, shit, Jade nearly sputters out.

  This is why no one cares that Suicide Girl is stalking the halls again. This is why the count of graduating seniors is off by one.

  Jade’s eyeliner pencil goes clattering down into the sink, leaving slashes and dots of black in that porcelain whiteness.

  It’s from who’s pulling the stall door in, stepping around it, gliding effortlessly to the sink right by Jade’s. She’s nobody from Jade’s past, nobody Jade recognizes at all except by stature, by type, by bearing. If this girl had an aura, it would be “princess,” but the cut of her eyes is closer to “warrior,” the kind of face that’s just made to come alive when a spatter of blood mists across those perky, flawless, no-acne cheeks.

  Jade isn’t sure whether this girl actually reaches forward to turn the water on or if the water, knowing it needs to be on to better kiss these hands, just comes on all on its own. For half an accidental moment, Jade catches herself checking the air around them for cartoon bluebirds carrying a gossamer wrap.