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, G.o.d 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 o.r.g.a.s.ms 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 pa.s.sed through her.

Out of hundreds of couplesa"those that had naturally coalesced and the pairs decreed by the princ.i.p.al the week beforea"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 ma.s.s murderers promised to be extra special, he told them.

Then Dex shook his hand, a.s.sured 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 pa.s.senger 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 ordeala"once they had used the tiny cleavers hanging at their waists, once the ma.s.s futtering had stained their clothing, their legs were danced to exhaustion, and they sat side by side parked on some bluffa"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."

"I like your mom," Tweed said.

Dex took his eyes off the road. "She likes you too."

"I'm glad." She snuggled closer. "Do you think Mr. Jones'll make us play a lot?"

"Nah," said Dex. "He's rehea.r.s.ed our b.u.t.ts off, but I think he'll do like last year. Give us a solid hour of playing, bust our chops, then let the seniors go, and play the remaining sets with a smaller group, him on trumpeta""

Tweed groaned. "He's so awful!"

"Old blubber lips." Dex laughed. "Around ten, he'll throw in the towel and give the rest of the night over to slap'n'smack and dreamy ballads off the turntable."

Tweed caressed Dex's tuxedo'd arm. "I hope he plays loads of dreamy ballads."

Dex smiled. "It's going to be a special night, isn't it?"

"We get past the ordeal, you bet it will be." She put lots of promise in her look. Elation rose in her sweetheart's eyes.

They had their whole lives ahead of them. Once the fear lifted, the chosen couple had been slaughtered and futtered, and they knew what positions the killings at tomorrow's corporate picnics opened up, she and Dex could think about directions.

About the future.

About tripling up with someone known or not yet known, someone who would augment their twosome in a splendid new way.

"I love you, Dex," she said, and he shyly said, "Well shucks, me too, right back at ya."

Gerber Waddell loved taking showers. Hot water thundered down. n.o.body swatted his hand away from his naked s.e.xlobe. And he didn't have to hide his anger behind a benign smile.

Gerber tugged at his roused lefty like a bell-pull. In his mind's eye, the generous lips of Jonquil Brindisi, teacher of big sins, teased his s.e.xlobe.

This phantom Jonquil rose from the billowing steam, slurping him in, disgorging him. Her eyes hungered for payback.

Like a panther she padded before him, one hand spanning to finger her nipples, the other down-and-in where she rocked.

But as she sucked his lobe, her skin veined, red and cracked, falling in chunks to the stippled floor. The scalding water needled her until she bled, pain everywhere upon that gorgeous body.

Still, she endured it, her lips fixed on his pleasure, though every suck trebled her agony and plashed the floor hot with crimson.

"Eat it, you snooty little b.i.t.c.h!" he muttered. How she deserved her pain, after years of an aloofness that screamed, I'm better than any lowlife janitor.

Then Gerber Waddell rose heavenward, careful to damp down his howls of joy. Beating streams of water sculpted perfect o.r.g.a.s.m from the oval of his mouth.

Drifting down, Gerber stayed with his hatred. Tiles cooled along his spine as he bent at the waist, a jogger st.i.tched for wind. His hair twisted in thunderous waterfalls.

Past torments paraded by.

The corporate heights from which he had once judged others.

The picnic murder of a woman he had loved, his own hand on the knife, and a lethal slash at the jealous b.a.s.t.a.r.d who had contrived for her to be chosen.

The pet.i.tions.

The forgiveness.

Sojourns in white rooms where they pried out chunks of his brain, taught him docility, thrust a mop and a bucket into his hands. And, after many years, tools.

Tools had their uses. Lately, Gerber had pondered them, how they might express impulses too long damped down and denied.

He slammed the faucet shut. Blasts of water shuddered to a halt.

Gerber rumbled the opaque door open and snagged a towel off the rack. Them green-coated sc.u.msuckers had made a mistake. For all their hacking and hewing, they had missed a spot.

The urge.

Mild Gerber, feeble yes-man at Corundum High.

He'd teach them. He'd whip their fannies. Any more cheek and he would reach into his utility belt and tin-snip their lovelobes off.

Gerber stood before the steam-coated mirror, savagely brushing his teeth. His left hand sawed vigorous and wild across his jaw. The fingers of his right hand stilted against the counter, bamboo shoots white with tension.

When he emerged, the Bleaks were watching TV in their bedroom at the end of the hall. Missus Bleak chirped, "Water okay, Gerber?" and he said "Yes'm, it was," a hand concealing his left lobe, a towel tucked about his waist.

Gerber went into his room, where Mister and Missus Bleak's grown son had lived. Blue-black janitor duds lay like a dead flat man on the bed, undies and socks beside them. Off days, he wore Salvation Army c.r.a.p, clothes that felt more like him than these did. Deceptive comfort for the normals. Put Gerber in somebody else's house, somebody else's uniform. Peg him. Make him safe for mobocracy.

But when he wore thrift store hand-me-downs, his thoughts came more easily. And when he wore nothing at all, they tumbled about in his head, wild, nasty, and free. Lull the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Put him in safe togs, slip a denim lobebag over his lefty.

But a game had two players, he thought. One day, one night, he would break a few rules and loose the demon again.

Maybe tonight. Prom night. A night of beauty and savagery. It would be easy to throw a wrench or two into the cogs. All it would take was simply to give in. To act, once more, upon those suppressed urges.

Gerber pictured Missus Bleak coming through the door. Like a pork-bomb, she flew straight apart, warming the air with outflung spews of gore as her pudgy face exploded.

Somehow, it made this more like home.