He could dream, couldn’t he?
Tweed clung to Dex.
She missed her father’s melodious voice.
At first, her house had seemed empty without him. But Dex’s love for her had so filled it, and so filled her heart, that the ache of her father’s death had lost its edge in recent months.
Jenna’s presence helped too.
Their sisterly rivalry, always minor, had vanished completely in the sudden maturity prom night had brought on.
Jenna had recently taken up with Bo Meacham, whose outsized nose and dorkish grins were more than offset by his dropdead looks and a stellar career this year as lead quarterback. She had dropped hints to Tweed, snickering over popcorn while Dex was off hitting the bars with his work buddies, that noselength, at least in Bo’s case, did indeed nicely correspond to genlength.
But more important to Tweed was her sister’s near-certain crowning as prom queen. Next spring, the designated slasher’s victim would come as usual from the pool of the non-exempt, a pool which would not include Jenna.
Proper protocol would be observed at Corundum High. Mr. Buttweiler would see to it. No doubt, the entire Demented States of America would tune in that night to witness the restoration of order in Corundum, Kansas.
Pillowed on Dex’s thigh on the floor, Jenna was following intensely the how-shall-we-kill-her debate which filled the living room.
Tweed watched a lightbulb struggle to go on in her sister’s head. Later, she swore she heard the tinny tinsel clink of the pullchain as Jenna’s eyes lit up.
“Wait! I’ve got it!” she said, interrupting a savage suggestion from Jonquil Brindisi. Jenna had always been bold with adults. “We mustn’t rip her apart. Not quickly. Not slowly. Not with drops of acid steaming pain into her wounds. Not with starved, rabid rats dangling within a jaw’s bite of her flesh. Nope! We’ve got to keep her skin intact!”
A razor stropped in Miss Brindisi’s voice. “The woman deserves slow dismemberment.” End of argument.
Had Jenna already taken her course in the greater vices? Yes. Tweed remembered the B+ on her sister’s report card the winter before. No reprisals were possible from that quarter.
“Jonquil,” said Mr. Buttweiler, “let’s hear what Jenna has to say, shall we?”
“She’s a real pistol,” whispered Tweed to Dex, who nodded and squeezed her hand.
Jenna’s prodigious zest, her zeal when she latched onto the meat of an idea, was a favorite topic of conversation between them. That, even more than Jenna’s beauty, explained her popularity.
“ Here’s how we’ll kill her!”
Tweed observed the others as Jenna talked.
Trilby and Brest, torn by warring emotions, nodded with enthusiasm as her plan unfolded. Miss Phipps’ eyes saucered behind her gold wire rims. Futzy Buttweiler’s eyebrows looked like a couple of fat caterpillars working overtime at pushups. Claude Versailles and his formerly homeless lovers were utterly enthralled by Jenna’s words.
Even Jonquil Brindisi’s defiance softened to neutrality there in that armchair. Her sips grew more deliberate, her body shifting in what Tweed suspected was growing arousal.
“Once she’s dead,” said Jenna, “we’ll have her fluxidermed. Her body will be on display just inside Corundum High’s front door. Kids’ll get to paint her. Or scrawl graffiti on her. Or maybe do some other stuff the prom committee thinks up or approves. But nobody’s allowed to steal her. And no one can, like, remove her arms or legs or anything, because everyone will understand what her role at the prom will be and just be dying of anticipation all year.”
Jonquil Brindisi’s long legs dandled against one another as she leaned forward.
“Her role at the prom?” she asked.
Ms. Brindisi’s friendship lobe blushed with bloodlust, her lovelobe’s gray-paisley bag seeming to throb with a stung-thumb swelling.
Tweed’s pride in Jenna flowered as her plan spilled out with renewed energy. The living room, once solemn, was now abuzz with fresh dreams of collective revenge. Jenna’s stunning imagination pictured the gym, months in the future.
She showed them, all of them, how it would be on that terror-filled night.
Where precisely the slaughtered couple would pillow their heads.
And how the climax of the evening would at last put the community’s anguish-and the anguish of an entire nation-to rest.
EPILOGUE. Atonement and Payback
Futzy Buttweiler and Adora Phipps, bundled up in overcoats, observed from the sidewalk in front of the Bleak residence, where Gerber Waddell had once been housed and fed.
“It’s marvelous,” said Futzy, “how everything came together in little more than a day.”
“It is, darling,” came Adora’s reply. “I’m glad Tweed and Dexter suggested it.”
Adora had softened him.
Students he had thought of as rapscallionly turdsuckers on prom night, he now saw anew.
On this chilly Halloween eve, an hour after sunset, candles wuttering in one hand, Futterware containers clutched in the other, grim-faced grads made their way in slow procession along the street and up onto the lawn.
Singles, couples, and triples, Futzy forgave them all, loved them all.
The Bleaks, touched by the attention, stood on their front porch. Shyler Bleak, looking old and stooped, waved and nodded at no one in particular. His hefty wife dabbed at her eyes with the corner of a hanky. From all accounts, they had treated Gerber well.
Along Halloween sidewalks, costumed rug-rats, some holding a parent’s hand, roved from house to house, ringing doorbells, shouting a high-pitched threat, and suffering the toss and smack against face or torso of twisted bags of candy, coins, or God knows what, before the doors slammed in their masked faces.
Sensing perhaps that an event of great import was transpiring outside the Bleak residence, not one of them crossed the long parade of processing students to demand treats there.
Dex and Tweed did them all proud.
They stood at one corner of an old brown comforter unfolded on the lawn, softly greeting each penitent, or simply nodding, as he or she laid down a futtered cut of janitor within the stenciled outline of the slain man.
Bits of bone.
Nubs of sun-dried flesh.
Snailings of some internal organ.
Only by an extraordinary feat of imagination could this symbolic feint at defuttering be said to reconstitute the poor man these promgoers had hacked to pieces.
Yet it felt to Futzy that Gerber Waddell did indeed, in some significant way, manifest in these feeble tailings.
Amidst the moonlit scumble of his flesh, good old Gerber returned to forgive and forget, to fire them up for the revenge that lay ahead.
A lone child in a skeleton suit and mask, its pre-teen lobes absurdly scored with painted bone-shapes, stopped to tug on the principal’s sleeve and ask, “Aren’t you Futzy Buttweiler?”