I Was a Teenage Slasher

by Stephen Graham Jones

In 1989, a thing happened in Lamesa, Texas. No, a thing happened to Lamesa, Texas. And to me. And to six people of the graduating class, some of whom I’d known since kindergarten. It also happened to my best friend, Amber.

Don’t look at me like that, please. That’s not who I really was. That’s just what I ended up doing. I was a teenage slasher, yeah, okay. I said it.

I know you paid for being my friend, Amber Big Plume Dennison. You stood by me when everyone else would have cut me down. You believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. And then you saved my life. And now I don’t even know where you are. If you’re happy. If you’re not. If you also think about that party out at Deek’s. I do wish we’d never gone. In some ways, though, I guess I’m sort of still there.

My big plan to not be so fragile had been working, too. Until my dad, close enough to town to sneak home for a surprise lunch, tried to pass a knifing rig just north of Stanton and met another tractor head-on, which was the joke I wasn’t supposed to know about: he met the John Deere head-on, and it took his head right off. Now, so far as Lamesa was concerned, I had so many “fragile” stickers on me I was pretty much a mummy. People were “sorry,” “was there anything they could do,” “their uncle died three years ago,” “that road should be wider,” and on and on.

We were sort of outcasts together, you could say. On the outside looking in. But? Stand at that tall chain link fence long enough, peering through those metal diamonds, and the hand you have hooked up higher than your head might nudge into someone else’s, and then the two of you can maybe nod, don’t even have to say anything.

the only reason Lamesa didn’t lose Stace Goodkin that night was that Abel Martinez, all-district linebacker, did a flying tackle into her midsection. But as soon as she hit the caliche, Stace was climbing back up, fighting to save Justin Joss, whose various stumps were burbling and gouting slower and slower. Finally, the big weights came to a stop. I imagine a bullbat diving down into Stace’s headlights, to snatch a bug up. Or maybe Justin Joss’s soul.

I won’t bore you with all the speeches and crying. With all the oilfield workers there in their best clothes. With the feeling in my chest that day. With how Amber stood right there beside me, her hair pulled back and braided down her back, which had to have taken her mom a half hour to get right. Amber even had lipstick on, which doesn’t exactly fit with someone still known for dipping. It wasn’t red, but darker purple, I guess like fits for a funeral. I don’t know if she picked her outfit, if her mom told her what to wear, if they spent the whole night before trying stuff on, what. 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.

Anyway, if you can’t tell, what I’m trying to do here is document each small little step of this night, this party. Just, I have to be careful. I mean, I can try to blame it all on Grandlin at the funeral, for flicking that blood onto Justin Joss’s headstone, I can try to say it was that farmer taking up both lanes on the backside of that slight rise my dad was cresting, I can say it was Brushpopper veering my future one way and not the other, I can even say Trey shouldn’t have given me that first rum and coke, but it starts with me, I know. I’m the archduke, standing up from his car in the parade, and then falling right back down.

I drank. At this point in the night, I didn’t need even one drop more, but I could still swallow, still gulp. Maybe it would help me forget, right? Maybe it would blot the whole summer out. But no––sorry, Ambs. That would mean losing you as well. And I wouldn’t trade you, or us that summer, for anything. Seriously.

I was a clown, sure, but I had no intentions of ever being a rodeo clown.

there’s a line about how she, Barbara Mandrell, the holdout with unassailable country roots, was putting peanuts in her coke. Seriously. Go look it up, it’s the stupidest thing.

it still is lol. The idea of someone learning about coke peanuts like this is very funny to me

“It’s… it’s Justin,” I said back, in pure wonder. Because? If he could come back, then… what about my dad, right? But not like this, please.

It was Lamesa, Texas. Just, one where the dead could walk, and get revenge.

A few seconds later, Amber plopped down into the mud beside me, her arm around my back, and we were huddled out there like two nobodies trying to survive Russia’s warheads, even though there was no chance. But, really? It’s less about survival, more about who you’re holding when that big irradiated shockwave blows you to ash.

so scarecrow by mcr

It does accumulate inside you, though, the weight of all these bodies you’ve left behind. You carry them with you, like. You remember how this one died, how that one didn’t. But you also remember the first time you saw your final girl in her true light, and how your vision tunneled down, your mind pulsing her, her, her. In all the world, there’s no feeling so pure. But the way there, it’s brutal.

One time when it was my turn back there, up there, the wind whipping my hair, my shirt billowing and flapping around me, the road straightened out enough that Amber sucked the lights back into the truck and just plummeted us ahead into the inky darkness, and my eyes were watering and my cheeks were slapping my teeth and my gloved fingers were hurting from the edges of the rust craters, but I could have stood there forever, I think. Someone I trusted more than myself was at the wheel, I mean, and her foot was in it, and the whole world, it was sort of ours. For the last time.

And, yeah, the reason I describe it in funeral terms is because of my dad. When will that stop being a key thing in my life? Am I just holding on to it because letting it go would also be letting him go?

I know, my head’s transparent, my skull’s glass, you can see right into all my desires and motivations and––you don’t even need to look in to see my regrets. I’m saying them all here, aren’t I? But, it’s not just my dad I’m sitting out there with. Behind me––I can feel them––are those six kids I killed in 1989.

You’d think that, dragging bodies behind you, at some point you wouldn’t be able to keep moving, wouldn’t you? Not so. They’re all there, they never go away, but they’re tin cans, they don’t weigh anything. Just make a lot of noise, get the crowd looking over to this commotion passing by. Just me, your friendly neighborhood slasher.

We all want to hide, don’t we? To not have to be constantly navigating between our true self and people’s expectations twenty-four seven?

“Tolly, you were dreaming! When you figure that out, you’re––you’re going to feel so bad, you’re…” The reason she couldn’t finish was her voice was breaking, her eyes were hot and watering. She was trying to save me, here, I know. In her way, she loved me, she only wanted what was best for me. You’d do anything for your best friend, wouldn’t you? “I swear on my dad,” I said again, quieter because she was right there and I wanted her to know I wasn’t just making this up, and she backed up like, for the first time, she was either afraid of me, or afraid for me, I couldn’t tell, and still can’t.

It’s six minutes of my life, tops, but some memories you don’t measure in minutes or miles, but by how much of yourself is still in that moment.

say slashers are all about revenge, but what’s revenge but balancing the scales, right? I think the world wants things to even out. So it lets my kind cheat.

Trick is, when I’ve got a limp and nobody’s looking, I’m faster. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but… it does for slashers.

Except gods don’t have anything to do with my kind, I don’t think. The Bible says vengeance is the Lord’s, yes? Not when I’m around.

And, that slasher logic Amber had been talking about… I could feel it now. It was whispering to me, like. No, Shannon and Lesley hadn’t deserved what I’d done to them, not even a little. But? Stand them up alongside the rest of the high school and they did deserve it just a little bit more than most everyone else. They shouldn’t have belted me to that lounge chair by Deek’s pool––they shouldn’t have enacted mob justice on me, made themselves judge, jury, and executioner. Well, jury and executioner, anyway. I guess Mel was the judge, for that. What I’m saying, though, is that they’d overstepped. And so, in a sense, they were asking for this––for me.

I was still considering myself a victim in all this, though. If that drop of blood doesn’t arc up from Justin Joss, I mean, splash into the cut on my forehead, then I never get infected, right? And if I never get infected, then I don’t have to transform at night, follow through on this whole vengeance thing. Again, please don’t let me tell you I’m a good person in any way. I don’t claim not to have done what I most definitely and really did. My hands are forever red, and my heart will always be black. But, for that second part anyway––having rot and corruption inside you––I think that, so long as you never act on it, then you’re maybe not that bad a person. You’ve just got to control these roiling evil impulses.

“Ether,” I said again, cupping my hand over my mouth and nose to show her what I meant. “Or freon. Freon works too, doesn’t it? Anyone ever tried to freeze a slasher?” Amber shut her eyes like if she couldn’t see me, she didn’t have to hear this. “It’s not your fault, though,” she said. “It’s not the dog’s fault it got rabies,” I said back. “But it’s still got to be put down, doesn’t it?”

Not static electricity, but… her touch made the whole world around us collapse away, like the two of us were standing at the end of time, like who we were or what we stood for has been fighting back and forth since the dawn of things, and this was the big final standoff, for all the chips. The slasher and the final girl, face-to-face. “No,” I said, looking up into Amber’s eyes.

Can I explain how intense and wonderful and fast and slow and beautiful and forever it is to have your actual final girl right there within reach? The world blurs away, just falls somewhere else, and she––she’s the only thing there is anymore. The only thing that matters. Your world is her her her. If that’s not love, then I guess I don’t know what love is.

Please don’t tell me his name, Amber. But I know it. I can see it from here, from how stupid he is, and how hopeful. You still remember. Thank you.

Thank you, Amber Big Plume Dennison, or whatever your name is now. Thank you for being my friend. We burned bright once upon a growing up, didn’t we? I’ve never loved anyone like I loved you, but I didn’t need to. You were enough for me, and I was lucky to know you for the few years I did.