Chapter 25 Patrick #2
Terror gripped Patrick by the throat, as tightly as Clare’s strangler must have held her.
His flashlight’s beam bounced desperately across the shelves.
Shit. If only he could find that machete.
Jason sent the remaining cheerleading pom-pom flying, as well as a deflated football.
Carrie smacked them away with the axe. Patrick swept a stack of small boxes to the floor, and ballpoint pens spilled at her feet.
For a glorious moment she was forced to do jazz hands as the pens rolled beneath her boots.
Patrick took the opportunity to hustle Jason further down the aisle.
It didn’t help that Mikey had blundered into the shelves in his retreat, sending an avalanche of Slasher Summer pin-back buttons skittering across the floor.
Too terrified to turn around and break eye contact with Carrie, Patrick and Jason clung to each other for balance as they skidded over what had to be a hundred glossy Slasher faces.
“Freddy got me high,” Carrie snarled as she regained her balance. “Patrick and Jen persuaded me to take the photo—”
Patrick was so shocked he almost stopped in his tracks. “What? I had nothing to do with—”
“You looked at Jason and said love was worth taking risks for.”
The chill creeping across Patrick’s skin heated to a burn and flushed right up to the tips of his ears. Oh God. He had said that. A moment of weakness, under the influence of a couple of beers and one of Freddy’s brownies, encouraged by his encounter with Jason in the toolshed.
Patrick swallowed around the lump in his throat. He was conscious of Jason’s body pressed near his in the narrow aisle but was too afraid to gauge his reaction. “I—I wasn’t talking about you and Jason when I said that.”
Jason stiffened behind him. Patrick glanced frantically at the shelves, praying the machete would appear, if only so he could put an end to his own embarrassment. A little death was better than having his deepest, most repressed feelings outed.
But what the hell. If they were going to die, Jason might as well know how Patrick really felt. Patrick regretted not letting him know sooner, if only so Jason could’ve turned him down and Patrick could’ve moved on with his life.
Although Jason had rejected Carrie, and she obviously hadn’t moved on.
Carrie didn’t register Patrick’s confession. She was on a roll. “Tiffany led the smear campaign that drove people to harass me, and you—” Her voice broke as she sneezed, but she pointed the axe blade accusingly at Jason.
Mikey finished her sentence, wonder and accusation in his voice. “Jason shared the photo and it got put up all over school.”
“That was Tiffany.” Patrick had never believed Jason had printed out all those copies. “It was Tiffany, wasn’t it? You were protecting her.”
Jason said nothing, conflict and guilt running across his face. Patrick’s stomach sank, and he wondered if he’d been blinded by his feelings for Jason, the same way Jason had been blinded by Tiffany and Mikey by Carrie.
Carrie sniffled, either from her allergies or the memory of Jason’s betrayal.
“Not one of you stuck up for me,” she said, prowling forward like a large and graceful cat.
“No one did, after everything I did for this town. You only liked me when I was the good girl, the Jordan Knox. Outside of Slasher, outside of the movie theater, you couldn’t care less.
Well, you wouldn’t love Slasher so much if such awful things happened in real life. ”
“You don’t have to do this.” Patrick desperately pulled a number of banners off the shelves.
They dropped and unrolled, putting more blessed distance between themselves and Carrie.
Slasher Summer 2009. Slasher Summer 2010.
Slasher Summer 2011. Dust stung his eyes and nose.
Carrie’s face scrunched up like she was trying to prevent another sneeze.
Yet she kept coming, stomping over the heavy vinyl with her hiking boots.
“Yes, I do. Wes told me I had to cut all toxic relationships out of my life.”
“Who’s Wes? Another boyfriend you murdered?”
Carrie said two words Patrick would have never expected.
“My therapist. He’s helped me so much. I was so sad when I first started talking to him.
” Her mouth turned downward in a parody of sorrow.
“A sad little girl who let others walk all over her. But he showed me I needed to get mad. I needed to get angry.”
A therapist had driven her to this madness?
Patrick continued to back away, dragging Jason with him.
Carrie stepped onto the last unfurled banner, inadvertently and appropriately placing herself right between the words Slasher and Summer.
“I have you to thank, Patrick. All those slasher movies we watched. The killer’s always the bad guy, right?
But I recently rewatched Friday the 13th and I had an epiphany.
Those kids deserved to die for their carelessness. ”
Patrick couldn’t believe she was saying that. “You’re a monster!”
“And who made me? Nightmare on Elm Street, Candyman, even Frankenstein—the killers weren’t monsters, they were made into monsters.”
“Freddy Krueger was a child murderer! He was already a monster!”
Carrie ignored him. “All these monsters want is revenge on a world that was cruel to them. It’s too bad Jen’s dead. She would’ve understood, being the expert on all things dark and gothic.”
Jen had never made it to the motel. Patrick’s legs threatened to crumple and he blinked back hot tears. “Carrie,” he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking. Maybe she would listen to reason. Maybe the fragile, angelic Care Bear was still in there.
Or maybe he and everyone else had only seen what they’d wanted to see, what they’d wanted her to be. Like yelling Virgin! at Jordan Knox whenever she appeared on screen. Maybe, like Freddy Krueger, Carrie had already been a monster.
He had to try, nonetheless, to right the old wrongs. “I get it. We hurt you, and you’re lashing out.”
Behind him, Jason made a strangled noise deep in his throat. Lashing out was the understatement of the century. But Patrick continued. He held out his hands, palms up, like he was approaching a skittish animal.