My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Indian Lake Trilogy, #1)

by Stephen Graham Jones

Rexall’s name is because he used to deal, back in whatever his day was, and Jade’s pretty sure it was exactly that: one single day.

It’s sacrilege, she tells anyone who’ll listen, which is mostly just Mr. Holmes, her state history teacher. You don’t remake The Exorcist, you don’t sequel Rosemary’s Baby, and you don’t be disrespectful about soil an actual slasher has walked across. Some things you just don’t touch.

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.

“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.

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.

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?

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.

lol is this her gay awakening

And, stacked like she most definitely is, she probably can’t press too many books to her chest, Jade guesses. Nobody’s arms could be that long. But even covering up like that, there’s still her legs, which, even in jeans, are obviously the human version of “gazelle,” probably from volleyball or water polo or the four-hundred, and the rest of her is perfectly proportioned just the same, almost sculpted, all… five feet eleven of her? Shit, man. Is she even real? Jade tries to focus on the business end of the eyeliner, halfway wondering if somebody dosed it. Because—can there actually be specimens like Letha Mondragon in the actual world, not just in the airbrushed jack-off fantasies of every wishful-thinking penis-haver out there?

Most heterosexual inner monologue

If “Greyson Brust” is as killer as Harry Warden, then “Letha Mondragon” is easily as inviolable as Laurie Strode, as Sidney Prescott, both of whom dress conservatively, neither of whom would ever bleach her hair with stolen peroxide in a hospital sink, then dye it electric blue. No, Jade will never be any kind of final girl, she knows, and has known for years.

First and this goes without saying, final girls have the coolest names. Ripley, Sidney. Strode, Stretch. Connor, Crane, Cotton. Even Julie James from I Know What You Did Last Summer has that double initials thing going on, that kind of gets your mouth addicted to saying her name. They're more than cool names though. As you can tell by what they're called, they're also the last girl alive. But that only means she's last, maybe by luck, and not "best," when the actual REASON she's last is that she IS the best of us all.

The REASON she's final is her resolve, sir. Her will and her insistence not to die. She runs and falls of course, and probably screams and cries too, but this is because she's started her horror journey out bookish and timid, with good values, the home by nine-thirty good big sister type. But of everybody in the movie she's the one with "more" inside her, by which I mean at a certain point in all the running away, during all the stalking and slashing, when the bloodletting's reached a sort of crazed frenzy where the bodies are just falling left and right and between, this Final Girl stands up through the heart of it all, through the fragile shell of her old self, and she goes toe to toe with this bad evil.

To put it in conclusion, sir, final girls are the vessel we keep all our hope in. Bad guys don't just die by themselves, I mean. Sometimes they need help in the form of a furie running at them, her mouth open in scream, her eyes white hot, her heart forever pure.

Like he’s always saying, though, we all become history at some point or another, right? And, if Jade’s right about there being a final girl in town at long last—if that’s in fact what Letha Mondragon, sitting two rows up and one over, is—then what that means is that a slasher cycle is trying to get started, meaning life’s about to get real cheap around these parts. A lot of people’s insides are about to start being on the outside. Jade can hardly help smiling. Best graduation present ever.

So in conclusion once a slasher comes back from the "dead" and does the Blood Sacrifice with a Signature Weapon, then the Adults go incompetent, there's an Overnight Party, and a Final Girl stumbles out of the library and into this meat grinder, but don't forget about #7. That's the Sequel, Mr. Holmes, which this paper will ALSO have, where you'll be thrilled to learn all about 2 other necessary things, Masks and SlasherCam, but that's next semester, since right now I have to either do this interview project for half my history grade or die trying.

Jade cannot wait to see her go up against the tall shape on her dance card. It won’t matter if he’s got a chainsaw or a harpoon gun or is two-fisting machetes like nunchucks, faster and faster. Letha Mondragon, final girl extraordinaire, will walk open-eyed into those whirling blades, come out with a dark heart in her hands. She’s everything Jade always wished she could have been, had she not grown up where she did, how she did, with who she did. It’s going to be epic, this final-girl-against-slasher high noon. Unless Jade’s just making it all up, she reminds herself.

Watching like this, a mask just feels better. It’s not the first time she’s done it, of course—she treats parties like anthropology field work, taking mental notes the whole time—but it’s the first time she’s doing it for a reason that might make sense later.

They’re watching movies in there, then. Horror movies, probably. What else would you watch in a garage, with a group, at this time of night? It’s something she’s seen, Jade knows—she’s seen everything twice—but still, she wants worse than anything to just catch a glimpse, to make the movie out from a single frame. One of the Child’s Plays, maybe? Ringu? Dialing all the way back to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? She wants worse than anything to speak up from the back of the garage, let them in on the true story of this cursed production, on the trivia about the movie’s limited engagement in Italy, about how the soundtrack in the theatrical release isn’t the same as the one that was released on VHS. For reasons she can explain and trace and unfold for however long they’ll sit there listening. Wasn’t meant to be, though. Either she’s one of the flock, or she knows horror movies. Not both.

Jade turns, her breath heavy and close in her mask, knows that as soon as she’s twenty steps away she’s going to be lighting up, breathing deep, holding the smoke in for as long as janitorially possible—but then she stops, cocks her head back to the lake. Someone’s walking through the water? It’s Letha. “What?” Jade says out loud, on accident, but nobody looks her way. The problem here is that this isn’t on-script, this isn’t in the genre, isn’t a trope. The final girl in the first act isn’t curious. Curiosity is what’s going to get all those other girls killed, not her.

“You really hate it, don’t you?” Jade says to him. “Terra Nova, I mean.” He shrugs a noncommittal shrug. “What’s the history there, teach?” Jade asks. “No history.” “There’s always history,” Jade says back. “A certain somebody might have impressed that upon my just-forming psyche once upon a freshman year. Nothing just pops into existence. Everything comes from somewhere. It’s all got a story. Just a matter of if we’re committed enough to dig it up.” Mr. Holmes shakes his head in amusement, genuinely impressed for once, it seems. “Won’t say you were my best student over all these years,” he tells her, measuring his words. “But you are the one I’m going to remember.” “Voted most likely to die in a horror movie, right?”

“But if you elect to exclude it from being one of your slashers,” Mr. Holmes goes on, “if you say it’s from a different shelf altogether, then you’re saying that the crime itself doesn’t warrant revenge, aren’t you? That rape gets a pass. That sexual violation isn’t beholden to the scales of justice you’re always talking about, is somehow outside its purview.” Jade just stares at a bird prying something from a sewer grate. “Either that or you’re acknowledging that a minor can’t take that revenge,” Mr. Holmes adds, quieter. Because this is where he was going all along. Jade kind of hates him right now. It doesn’t mean he gets to win, though. “The reason rape-revenge isn’t a slasher is that the slasher and the final girl would have to be the same person,” she says, pushing off the front of Family Dollar with her butt. “Problem with that is that the final girl and the spirit of vengeance are forever locked in opposition, not the same jumpsuit. That’d—that’d be like Batman peeling his cowl off and being the Joker. Would that even work?”

One thing Mr. Holmes told the class one wistful seventh period was that nobody ever makes it past twenty with the same hopes and dreams and certainties they once thought so dear and vital and true at seventeen. Nobody except me, Jade had assured herself, but she’d also had to wonder if that was even a partially original thought—if every other student in history class that day wasn’t thinking the exact same thing.

This is the part in the movie where Jade’s supposed to rally, she knows. She’s not supposed to mope, she’s supposed to be gearing up, pouring black powder into lightbulbs, hammering nails into the business end of a bat, that kind of stuff. But there’s no camera on her, she knows. And there never was.

“This where y’all keep the explosives?” Jade asks back, shielding her eyes as best she can. “Or, no. The candlesticks, the lead pipes, the daggers?” “Who you looking to kill this time?” Shooting Glasses asks. This time. Because “last time” was herself.

“I didn’t do it because I wanted to die,” Jade says, the rise of scar tissue on her left wrist practically glowing in the sleeve of her coveralls. They’re watching ghost-versions of each other in the windshield now. Ghost versions that can waver away with one wrong breath. “I did it because I wanted to be part of the movie. Part of all of them. What was the day that it happened, you remember?” “Friday, we were just off work.” “Date, I mean.” “March?” “The number.” Shooting Glasses squints, trying to dredge it up, finally gloms onto it, says, “Friday the thirteenth, yeah. Radio kept talking about it.” Jade nods once, says, “Jason was supposed to rise up behind me, pull me across to Crystal Lake. Things make more sense there.” “That’s that old camp?” Shooting Glasses chin-points across the water. “Pretty much,” Jade says. “But everybody dies in those movies…” he says, pulling the headlights on now, blasting white out across the water. “But they really live first,” Jade says, popping her door open to fade into the night. “Now, remember what I told you, be somewhere else this Saturday, cool?” “What about you?” Jade presses her lips together and stands from the car, is about to shut the door on this, which feels one hundred percent like the perfect gesture, like what would happen in a movie, but then she flinches halfway around instead.

“Seen more deaths here in the last couple weeks than in the forty years previous,” Hardy says, leaning forward now, his elbows finding the desk. “Then I find the local horror fan running around at night with a machete that’s got a name scratched into the blade?” “Jamie Lee Curtis.” “Blue Steel, yeah. Don’t think Bogey’s in that one.” Jade takes this, tries not to let it show. “She’s kind of a final girl in that one too, you know?” she says, trying to keep it casual now. Just talking movies, not passing index card after index card of subtext back and forth, because pretty soon one of those index cards is going to have something to do with what she said to him the other day, about Melanie. Hardy just watches her, probably waiting to see if she’s going to go on about JLC being forever the final girl. That would be too easy, though. And she’s still got to pee.

Finally, after all these years, she understands Laurie Strode: you cringe, you fall, you shriek and you cry. Never because you want to, not because you intend to, but because it’s scary shit. The body’s gonna do what the body’s gonna do, and screams aren’t at all voluntary.

For reasons she can’t explain even to herself, she’s still being sure to lead with her right foot. Everything that made sense when she was watching slashers doesn’t seem to matter just one whole hell of a lot while walking through a slasher, does it? Worse, “It’s July fucking third,” she says aloud, like calling foul. None of this is even supposed to be happening yet. How many final rounds does Scream 4 have, though, right? Maybe, since the slasher’s been going for nearly four decades, the only way to still surprise is by breaking its own rules. It’s definitely working. Jade has no idea what’s coming.

She drinks from the faucet, only realizing afterward that the spigot is actually pull-down, pull-out—whatever the term is for those ones that come off, have a nifty little hose, can point wherever. Jade detaches it from its magnet base, aims it here and there around the room, understands it’s best she didn’t grow up with one of these. People with these over their sinks must be naive, overly trusting.

They’re alive, and they shouldn’t be. They made it through the night somehow. This is the other side, Jade lets herself think for a hopeful moment—this is the sun rising over Woodsboro, Gale Weathers narrating the terrible events of the night.

Some girls just don’t know how to die.

One’s the comedy face, one’s the tragedy face, right? Add them together and you’ve got a slasher, pretty much. That would have been her last paper for Mr. Holmes, she thinks. How the slasher is a bloody coin flipping through the air, showing a smile for a flash, then a frown, and then another smile. Jade would have that coin never land.