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

by Stephen Graham Jones

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. But it’s not a for-sure thing yet, she reminds herself. It can still be wishful thinking on her part. When you’re wearing slasher goggles, everything can look like a slasher.

Anyway, she doesn’t need the stupid rituals of parties like these, does she? All the laughter is nervous and forced, all the come-ons and invitations so inelegant. It’s better to just watch, she tells herself. It’s better to hide in the trees, part the leaves, take notes in her head, not missing a single thing, because you never know what’s going to matter. And then when it’s time, she’ll step out with that sharp piece of rebar, step out and drive it through a thick fatherly chest, and the blood is going to mist across her graduating class’s faces, and they’re going to thank her, because this night could have gone the complete other way.

If Jade had any wishes left, if she hadn’t burned them all just to get a slasher to Indian Lake in the first place, she would want a few more hours of life, please. She’d wish to be there at the movie with the rest of Proofrock. To thrill in the carnage and narrate it all in her head, but… now that she’s dying she can say it, at least to herself: the reason she needed a slasher to come to town, it was so he could cleave through her dad at some point in the rampage. Or, failing that, Jade could do that cleaving herself, and let Hardy assume the slasher did it. That being a trick he’s already used himself, Tab Daniels being no friend to law enforcement, maybe Hardy’d let it slide, right?