Familiar streets peeled away, the same houses he passed whenever he drove to Tweed’s place, rang her doorbell, and gave a “Hello, sir” to her dad, Mr. Megrim, Dex’s eleventh-grade history teacher.
Tonight, house fronts glistened with street light. Clusters of people peered from windows or lingered on front porches, watching passing cars and wondering about who rode in them.
Moms and dads driving their kids to the prom? Spiffed-up promgoers possibly high on drugs? Or some over-curious night-cruisers?
Perhaps they relived their own memories of prom night, memories that fiercely glowed or gave off pale flares of longing for lost loved ones.
Dex released a sigh, not realizing how tight he had held his breath in. He checked his face in the rearview mirror, lobebag stylishly rakish, his skin zit-free from hairline to jaw.
He smoothed through a turn.
The headlights of an approaching car blinded him and passed by.
Dex checked his watch.
Time to spare.
In ten minutes, Tweed would float into his arms, her pink-sequined gown swaying as they went out the door and headed toward the prom and a new life together.
4. Relinquishment
Tweed Megrim twirled before the mirrored door of her rumble-back closet. A pink-sequined vision twirled there in reverse.
Such fluffery looked weird on her, yet she found it strangely beguiling.
She knew her boyfriend felt likewise about his tuxedo. She and Dex were Christmas baubles, gussied up for one another, for public display, and, God help them, for potential sacrifice. It gave Tweed a whole heap of scaring.
To be honest, it thrilled her too.
Dex. Dear Dex.
Elsewhere in the house, Daddy was singing as always a happy song. Visions of Dexter Poindexter swam dreamily before her. Awkward in lobeplay, a heartmelt whenever they engaged in secret bouts of flay’n’heal, Dex was the guy she wanted to cling to forever.
Soon he would arrive.
Tweed scrutinized her face and hair. Not a strand out of place, her complexion peach-perfect all over, her lips bowed and demure.
Condor Plasch, arm in arm with Blayne Coom, intruded on her thoughts. The pierced-in zippers along their lips made her shudder.
Pierced skin was one thing. But one’s lips were permanent, neither growing nor healing with the removal of earring or barbell. Once disfigured, they remained so.
Worse rumors had spread about Altoona and Pimlico, a couple of female punks who had the hots for Condor and Blayne. What they had done to themselves…
Her father knocked.
The door opened a crack. “Hon?”
“It’s okay,” Tweed said. “Come in.”
Daddy lumbered through the door like a burly brown bear. “Tweed, O Tweed, my daughter Tweed,” he sang, “I saw your boyfriend’s car pull up. And by the bye, you move the night to tears.”
Daddy looked none the worse for his non-stop activity: dropping her kid sister off at school for parking duty (Jenna’s prom was a year away, but a healthy streak of morbidity had drawn her to the periphery of this one), and spending an exhausting day at the mall with Tweed, having to put up with the consumerist orgasms of screaming mallgoers, not to mention the tiny squeakers Tweed had done her best to squelch.
She gave her dad a peck on the cheek. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
He trilled an okay and was gone.
For the umpteenth time, Tweed gave herself the once-over.
Downstairs, a doorbell chimed.
The lights in the mirror seemed suddenly to dim. A premonition passed through her.
Out of hundreds of couples-those that had naturally coalesced and the pairs decreed by the principal the week before-she and Dex had been chosen.
Tonight was their last night on earth. They would be murdered by some teacher, a colleague of her father’s and maybe a favorite of hers, oh let it not be Claude Versailles.
Laid before the Ice Ghoul, they would bleed and release. Then, as midnight chimed, they would be hacked and futtered into a frenzy of pieces, their blood staining survivors’ garments, their sundered flesh sun-dried and saved as mementos of escape.
Tweed flushed.
Light rushed back in around her.
It couldn’t be them.
The odds favored their survival.
The same odds favored everyone’s survival.
In a rare moment of mean spirit, she wished that Cobra and Peach, the couple least liked by anyone at school, had been chosen. Then she nixed the thought, touched a fingertip to her friendship lobe for luck, and swished out the bedroom door.
Dex was standing near the piano in his white tux, holding a corsage, looking spiffed up and out of place and beautiful. As her father beamed and hummed, she let her boyfriend’s warm lips cup the tip of her right lobe, then did likewise to him, a chaste gesture of public affection.
Above her left breast, Dex pinned the pastel carnations.
“Perfect, perfect,” sang her father.
He whipped out his camera, a mercifully brief moment, Dex’s arm around her and a goofy grin on his face. Snap. Whirr. Her father’s song turned grim, a rolling barcarole: “If they kill you, you know, I’ll just back!”
People found her father’s habitual singing strange. His history students especially. But though he claimed he had spoken normally before he turned twenty, his singing was all Tweed had ever known.
It seemed perfectly… well… like Dad to her.
“Don’t worry, sir,” said Dex. “We’re not the ones. We can’t be. But if we are, we’ll survive it. I’ve been working on my moves. Any teacher who touches Tweed is dead meat.”
Dex exuded more confidence than Tweed thought justified, but she blushed with pride.
Dad sang about the TV show Notorious, how they saved the yummiest executions for prom night. Tonight’s fry of a pair of mass murderers promised to be extra special, he told them.
Then Dex shook his hand, assured him he would have Tweed back by midnight, and they were out the front door.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Oh, sure.” Tweed swept her prom dress clear of the passenger door slam.
When Dex slid behind the wheel, she felt impelled to elaborate. “To tell you the truth, I’m scared. Not about the prom so much as about losing you. But if I have to go through this, and jeez I guess I do, you’re the one I want beside me more than anybody in the whole wide world.”
Dex kissed her. “Me too.” His left hand gave her lobebag a quick feel. Tweed gasped at her sudden arousal and turned away. “Not here,” she said. “Not yet.”
He mumbled an apology.
“No problem,” she said.
After the ordeal-once they had used the tiny cleavers hanging at their waists, once the mass futtering had stained their clothing, their legs were danced to exhaustion, and they sat side by side parked on some bluff-only then would she sanction Dex’s loving feints toward lobeplay. Perhaps she would initiate a few herself.
Dex fired up his coupe and grinned. “Your dad sure is hyped.”
“He’s nervous. He really hates prom night.”
“Of course,” Dex said. “There’s you and your sister.”
Tweed shook her head. “He’s never liked it. We make it worse, of course, me being in jeopardy this year, Jenna next. But Dad contributes to the anti-slasher cause. Sometimes, he attends their meetings.” She raised a finger to her lips. “Our secret.”
“Sure thing.” Dex signaled a turn.
“There’s no telling with parents,” he went on. My mom’s really into dog-cracking. We went to a contest at the fairgrounds last week and she screamed her lungs out for this swung sheepdog. Poor thing didn’t have a prayer against a Saint Bernard maneuvered by a Scotsman. At home, Jesus the Lion is forever on her lips. She likes to shout at sit-com characters to ‘throw the other fist.’ But get her off by herself, just you and her? She’s as quiet and kind and considerate as anybody you could name.”