The Last Final Girl Read online

  Snap. Keep her like that forever.

  “So I know you can’t tell me about anything active, Deputy Dante,” Jamie says. “But can you confirm reports that the girl’s father, in a persistent vegetative state for three months, went missing from Rivershead Hospital two weekends ago, and has yet to be, um, recovered?”

  “Yeah, I’m that stupid,” Dante says, turning around to all these high schoolers not getting to class. “Any of you delinquents repeat that, you’ll answer to me, hear?”

  The purple-haired girl jackboots her heels, salutes.

  “We never heard you were stupid, sir!” she says.

  Dante rolls his gunfighter toothpick from one corner of his lips to the other, and we get a hint of that lonesome Old West whistle in the score for a moment.

  “You’re new in Rivershead, aren’t you?” he says just loud enough for Jamie.

  “Just here for the story,” Jamie says, clicking that shutter again. “A little quid pro quo, Deputy?”

  “Trying to bribe me, son?”

  “That’s Latin, sir.”

  “You’re going to fit right in,” Dante tells him, shutting this operation down, and is the only one in the hall not to flinch when the bell rings. And keeps on ringing.

  When the sound dies away, we’re tracking along something . . . something strange.

  It’s jars on a shelf, fetuses inside, in alcohol.

  Offscreen, some joker snorts twice, fast and pig-like.

  This is Biology class.

  That joker snorts again. He’s tall, good enough looking, little rough around the edges maybe, kind of like Calvin all grown up, no Hobbes anymore to keep his bad ideas in check. He flashes his eyes up to his lab partner to be sure he’s right there—it’s that Anthony Michael Hall kid—then slashes into his pig fetus, a jet of fluid spurting up onto his lab partner’s lab glasses.

  “And that’s why we wear safety equipment, people,” the biology teacher says drolly, strolling among the tables, his hands behind his back.

  The girl with the purple-streaked hairs sighs, takes her Buddy Hollies off, makes a production of settling the unflattering goggles on her face.

  “I’m probably going to dissect into my finger now,” she says to her lab partner.

  “Brittney,” the teacher says to that friend, tapping his own safety goggles, and Brittney pulls hers down as well, even though there’s already cartoon eyes carved into the plastic lenses.

  “Cute,” the purple-streaked girl says.

  “It’s not about looks, Izzy,” the teacher says, suddenly there between them, a hand on each of their shoulders.

  “Is this about my nose ring again?” Izzy says, mock offended, but doesn’t get to complete the gesture: some piece of a fetal pig splashes onto the table in front of her.

  She tracks up from it up to that joker, wiping his hand on his lab partner’s back and eeking his mouth out. “Jake,” she says, kind of thrilled for this attention from him.

  He shrugs about his lab partner, pretending it was him who threw the pig part across the room, and Izzy smiles, bites her lower lip in.

  “Earth to Izzy,” Brittney says, nudging her, reminding us once more of her name.

  “Mr. Stadler,” the teacher scolds, Jake shrinking enough that the teacher can catch his lab partner, doing something on his phone.

  “Stuart Stuart Stuart,” the teacher says, angling over to their station, his hand waiting for that phone.

  “But, Mr. Victor,” Stuart jerks, his elbow going deep into the opened-up pig, “I was just—I was seeing if you can catch anything from, from . . . ”

  This, his face. That spurt of formaldehyde or whatever it was, still leaking down his goggles.

  “Might embalm you a little,” Mr. Victor smiles, dropping the phone unceremoniously into his lab coat pocket then turning to the rest of the class, flashing both his hands by his face: “Ten minutes, people. Snip snip.”

  “So you been grief counseled yet?” Brittney asks Izzy.

  “They’re seriously doing that?”

  “Just because it happens in the movies doesn’t mean it doesn’t really happen, know?”

  “Like Lindsay and them even knew my name.”

  “So you’re, like, not grieving then?” Brittney says, her cheerleader voice practically drilling dimples into her cheeks.

  “Surprised they don’t think I did it,” Izzy says, making the first cut on their pig.

  Blood squirts up onto her goggles.

  She looks away disgusted that the teacher was right.

  “What, do they pressure these up before class?” she says.

  “I heard last year Jake put one in the microwave, popcorn setting, so that it wouldn’t stop cooking until the microwave heard—”

  “Ms. Daniels?” Mr. Victor calls across to Brittney. “You’re not letting Ms. Stratford make all the incisions now, are you?”

  “She’s number one with a blade, sir.” “I love bacon, she means,” Izzy adds.

  The class chuckles.

  “Five minutes,” Mr. Victor says, spreading his fingers to show.

  “This is going to leave a vacuum, you know?” Izzy says.

  “This one little pig?”

  “Savage weekend, Lindsay and them,” Izzy says, cutting again, apparently at random, and not uncruelly. “They were the big fish in our diagram. But they ran into a shark, oops. Now our social order’s all out of whack. There’s going to be a couple of weeks before the good ship high school rights itself, not counting the week and a half we skipped. Especially in this pressure cooker called homecoming. When things finally settle down, the nerds will be jocks, the stoners will be cheerleaders, the goths will switch to menthols, the sluts . . . well, we’ll still be sluts, don’t worry.”

  “To mix about a thousand metaphors.”

  “I’m saying there’s room to climb the corporate ladder,” Izzy hisses, under the class bell.

  “Since when are you the upwardly mobile kind?” Brittney asks, gathering her books.

  “Since you wish,” Izzy says, sneaking another look across the room, to Jake, dancing his pig through the air behind Stuart, about to nudge him in the ear with that cold wet nose.

  “You know this is his second senior year,” Brittney says, standing because class is over, her books clutched to her chest.

  “Maybe he can help me with my homework,” Izzy says, biting her lip. “I’m excessively stupid, you know?”

  Brittney takes her by the sleeve, pulls her away as if saving her from herself.

  Meanwhile, and even though this is the digital age, Izzy’s photo from the trophy case reflection is in a developing pan, the rippling surface of that chemical bath becoming

  → the sun-bright surface of the river, an aluminum Sheriff’s boat tugging through it, dragging a line.

  Deputy Dante is steely-eyed and grim in the bow.

  Behind him, the sheriff is kicked back with a beer, has a fishing line in the water, is reading a Playboy.

  “How long we going to do this, Sheriff?” Dante says, extracting his latest toothpick from his mouth, studying its wet end. “Not like we don’t know who it was.”

  “This is gravy detail, son,” the sheriff says, turning the page and holding it away from himself, to see better.

  “But—”

  “Let the county mounties stay up there at the old Ramsey place and jack off into their test tubes, son. It’s not going to bring any of those kids back.”

  “Neither’s finding her dad. Sir.”

  “Shit,” the sheriff says, looking over his magazine. “I come into town hauling that kind of trophy, I’m getting more action than the quarterback.”

  “Quarterback’s dead, sir. He was the—”

  Dante mimes a decap.

  The sheriff shuffles the magazine down, leaves it way too close to the lip of the boat.

  “Does Coach Johnson know about this?” he says, some real fear in his voice. “Who they going to run with now? Not that Tolliver kid, he’
s got an arm like a librarian, I saw him throw once at the end of that game over in—”

  “Sir,” Dante says, seeing the sheriff’s rod tip bending.

  The sheriff hauls it in.

  At first—the music riding it for all it’s worth—it’s Billie Jean, but at second it’s just that red and gold letterman’s jacket.

  “This might net us both some tail, Deputy.”

  Dante looks at all the water ahead.

  “You can have mine, sir,” he says, and brings the radio up to his mouth, keys it open to make their report.

  Tight on two pairs of boots standing beside each other: the combat ones we know are Izzy’s and, right beside them, tippy-toe, some distinctive cowboy boots, the kill-a-spider-in-the-corner kind, white with brown toes, brown heel cups. We climb from those boots up to Izzy’s face in the wide mirror of the girl’s restroom, Brittney right beside her, applying maroon lipstick.

  “You’re shitting me,” Izzy’s saying, adjusting her nose ring. “What about the volleyball players?” Brittney says back, on a completely different track, it sounds like. “Where are they in this high school food chain?”

  “She’s seriously coming back today?” Izzy goes on. “Just, what? Nine, ten days after she was human shish-kabobbed? Don’t you get an automatic A if a maniac killer stalks you for forty-eight hours of terror?”

  “Just a flesh wound, apparently,” Brittney says, popping her lips, “and of course she can beauty-pageant her way through the psychological trauma. Anyway, Lindsay Baker miss homecoming? Would the sky fall down too?”

  “I never thought my high school would be TJ Hooker,” Izzy says, disgusted.

  “You think she looks like Heather Locklear?” Brittney says, parentheses around her eyes.

  The answer comes from the stall: “Little miss obscure reference is talking about Adrian Zmed.”

  The stall door creaks open slowly and it’s a drop-dead gorgeous woman of a girl, wearing a Catholic schoolgirl outfit that’s about two sizes too small.

  She’s sitting on the toilet, angling a line of smoke to the levered- open window, an actual dagger in her hands. She’s using it to idly carve into the stall wall, above the toilet paper dispenser. It doesn’t interrupt her speech, though: “From TJ Hooker, you know? Think a slightly older Patrick Dempsey. Zmed got shot every other episode, but it never really mattered. Usually in the shoulder, too, just like our homecoming queen in-waiting.”

  “I’d say he’s more like if Dempsey and C. Thomas Howell had a lovechild,” Izzy says, not unimpressed here.

  “I’d pay to see that,” the girl says, spinning her blade on her palm, catching it cleanly.

  “Crystal,” Brittney says, announcing her for us. “Since when did they let you back in?”

  “All depends on who you know,” she says, standing, “and, you know. How you know them . . .”

  Interpretative beat.

  “Not Masters . . . ” Izzy finally says.

  “The principal?” Brittney adds, eyebrows up with disbelief.

  “Good girls don’t tell,” Crystal says, sheathing her knife high enough up on her thigh that Izzy’s

  → POV turns chastely away.

  Which seems odd, but there’s no time.

  “And who’s to say it was a guy in the first place?” Crystal’s already saying, coming up to her full runway-model height so we can remember her from the trophy case reflection.

  “Mrs. Graves!” Izzy and Brittney chime together, for the thrill of it.

  When Crystal’s close enough, Izzy takes her cigarette boldly, breathes it in as if trying to make up for having looked away from that flash of thigh.

  “So you watch TJ Hooker?” she says to Crystal.

  “Title suggested something completely different,” Crystal says. “Isn’t it fourth period, now? Second lunch or something? Is daycare not over yet?”

  “Grief counseling,” Brittney says. “Nobody’s serious about attendance.”

  “Lindsay Lindsay Lindsay,” Crystal says, sick of it all as well.

  “Should have been me,” Izzy says.

  Both Crystal and Brittney look over, wait for this explanation. “Just saying,” Izzy says. “You’ve got to have the right backstory for this kind of thing, too. Me? I used to have a twin brother when I was like six. And when I was five and four and three and two and one, I guess. And fetal.”

  “You mean you didn’t, like, adopt a twin?” Crystal says, obviously.

  “What happened?” Brittney says, concerned, taking Crystal’s cigarette from Izzy.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Izzy says.

  “Or you wouldn’t have brought it up,” Crystal adds, taking her cigarette back.

  Izzy accepts this challenge. “Okay. This was before we lived here. Maybe that’s the problem, you have to stay local for the rules to apply.”

  “You shouldn’t think like that,” Crystal says.

  Izzy flashes her eyes to Crystal but rolls on anyway: “It was my dad’s fault. He was drunk and stupid at the lake, dropped his jambox in, went after it, stayed down there hiding, being funny. But my brother didn’t get it. You know kids, stupid. He went down after my dad. Didn’t come back up.”

  “God,” Brittney says, touching her fingertips to the hollow of her chest. “Why didn’t you ever tell—”

  “It’s okay,” Izzy says. “Good thing about twins is my mom had a spare, you know?”

  Crystal takes her cigarette back, her eyes not moving from Izzy. “So you’re saying you should have got the slasher treatment, not Lindsay?”

  “You miss your brother is what it is, right?” Brittney says, her eyes Oprahing out hopefully.

  “Listen,” Crystal says, running her cherry under the tap. “I know it seems like fun and all, and especially since it happened to a go-girl cheerleader bot like Lindsay Baker, but—” She twists the tap off, looks hopelessly up to the window she’d been exhaling from.

  “But what?” Brittney prods.

  “You don’t want it,” Crystal says. “Trust me, okay?”

  “I was just—” Izzy says, but Crystal’s already pushing past.

  “I know what you were ‘just’ doing,” Crystal says, walking backwards now, the suicide scars on her wrists obvious now. “And stop, okay?” and then she’s through the door, gone.

  Izzy shakes her head in disgust.

  “Psycho cleanup, stall two,” she says, and steps up onto the toilet, pulls the window shut, flinches when the bathroom door slams open.

  “She’s here, she’s back!” that wholesome girl in pigtails squeals before moving on to the next door.

  “The conquering hero returns to claim her spoils,” Izzy says, stepping down, eyeballing the fresh-metal graffiti Crystal’s left:

  Inset, it’s just “slashers that aren’t?”

  Over to Brittney, her whole posture about leaving.

  “Like you’re not going to go see?” she says.

  “Everybody loves a parade,” Izzy says, touching a metal shaving off slasher, and

  → they’re there, at the far end of the hall, by the trophy case again.

  “People, people!” Principal Masters is saying through his bull- horn, trying to maintain order but he’s excited too, is considering himself Lindsay’s very personal chaperone, it looks like.

  And then there’s Lindsay, in all her wounded glory. The meek survivor. The guilty winner.

  “The final girl,” Izzy says to Brittney.

  Lindsay hoists her left arm up in victory and the hall explodes.

  Masters has one arm around her, making sure she doesn’t fall.

  “Pa-lease,” Brittney says.

  “Shh, she’s going to testify,” Izzy says, and she’s right. Lindsay is raising the bullhorn to her mouth.

  “It’s called witnessing,” Brittney says.

  “That’s for church.”

  “Does it get more holy than this?”

  Dead, dead quiet in the hall.

  “I just, I just want to say,�
�� Lindsay says, “I just want to say that it could have been any of you. I didn’t, I didn’t even want to go out there like that, I was, it was for the raccoons. And the fish. I was afraid the costumes and masks would poison their habitat.”

  “‘Habitat?’” Izzy echoes.

  “Virginal and ecological,” Brittney says.

  “Got us beat,” Izzy says.

  “What?” Brittney says. “I care about the . . . oh. Yeah.”

  “Bet she just wants world peace, too,” Izzy adds.

  “But please, the focus isn’t me,” Lindsay says, and almost sways over. Masters is already there for her. “The flag, you all saw that the flags were at half-mast today. We lost six of our, six of our precious candles. But don’t let their light go out. As long as we try to, try to exemplify their better values every day, then what they started can catch, can, it can become a wildfire, and change the world.”

  Everybody in the hall screams with joy.

  “Can’t say she can’t maintain a single metaphor, anyway . . . ” Brittney says.

  “This single enough for you?” Izzy says, flipping Brittney off.

  “You’re so not final girl material,” Brittney says.

  “Maybe I’ll be the killer instead,” Izzy says, directing Brittney’s attention up to Lindsay.

  “No way . . . ” Brittney says, but yes way: Lindsay’s hauling up the Titan sword, holding it up like she has the power.

  “It’s still got its evidence tag,” Izzy says, impressed.

  “And please don’t think this tragedy is going to, going to stop homecoming on Friday,” Lindsay says, falling again a little. “If—if we let it, then evil, evil wins . . . ”

  “Is that President Reagan?” Brittney says. “Can you still quote Reagan?”

  “He’s the muppet one, right?” Izzy says, not really wanting an answer.

  “Ti-tans! Ti-tans!” the people up front are already chanting.

  Masters gets the bullhorn back, leads the chant like it was his own idea.