I Was a Teenage Slasher

by Stephen Graham Jones

It was the best of times––high school––and it was the suckiest of times: high school.

I was a teenage slasher, yeah, okay. I said it. And it wasn’t because my career placement test told me what I was, and it wasn’t because I’d been harboring secret resentments since sixth grade, about some traumatic prank. It was because I had, and still live with, a peanut allergy. How’s that for motivation?

Amber said with a devious grin, and leaned against the steering wheel to shove her own hand down under the front of her seat, closing her eyes to let her fingers see better.

But I know that when I looked up that day, to her wending her way to me through the headstones, all I wanted to do was walk over to meet her, turn the two of us around, and run and run and keep running. And Amber, she would have done it, too. I could see it in her eyes. In the hesitant way she was holding her mouth, unsure what exactly her lips looked like, all dark purple. We would have run until her braid came loose, until my stupid new loafers fell behind us, until the mesquite had scratched our arms and faces so much that our outsides could sort of match our torn-up insides. And she wouldn’t have told anybody how she held my head to her chest when I started crying, couldn’t stop.

I want to ask how could Grandlin have missed where he was flicking his blood––how he could have missed something so out-of-place as that drillbit––but… I’m pretty sure part of being Grandlin Chalmers is being blissfully unaware of the china shop you’re crashing through. Not so for the Tolly Drivers of the world.

Still? I’d just lost my dad a year ago, hadn’t I? This––me being an idiot––was probably some stage of grief, wasn’t it? Just let the kid do what he needs to, and be sure to turn his head to the side if he passes out, so we don’t have to bury him as well.

I was trying to give her a way out, where she could climb over her own good intentions, come into Tolly-land, where you’re not exactly proud of how you are. But you’re around to feel that shame, anyway. Not locked in Sheriff Burke’s cell for the night.

Someone not necessarily full of promise, but full of promises, anyway.

Being a dude in Texas in 1989 was needlessly complicated, yeah. But I have to suspect that being the first woman sheriff was even more complicated.

When Sheriff Burke let me and Amber run inside to change into clean clothes, not trash the back seat of her cruiser up, I called my mom, told her I was fine, great. I’d been there, been at Deek’s, but I left when everyone did, didn’t see any dead people, nothing to worry about. Lies, man, they come so easy, don’t they? To me, anyway.

Right then, though, standing back to give her some air, I happened to look at a flash of brightness in among the giant counterbalances: Justin Joss’s twice-dead, balloon-white face. I’m pretty sure he was staring at me. You recognize your own, I mean.