The Last Final Girl Read online

  “Fuck me,” Izzy says, looking around, impressed. “Spontaneous pep-rally to mourn the dead, or—yeah. To celebrate the queen, right?”

  “Titans!” Brittney screams, just to get on Izzy’s nerves.

  Izzy shakes her head in wonder, in disgust, and then the chant dies faster than it should have.

  The PA system.

  Something’s coming through.

  Murmurs from the people. The sound of Masters breathing through his bullhorn.

  “Stay calm,” he says.

  It’s Billie Jean. The song. The drums then the bass, then the synth.

  On cue, like he’s stepping on a glowing sidewalk, a Billie Jean—red jacket, fedora, sparkly glove, Michael Jackson mask—steps around the corner behind Lindsay. At first we allow that it could be the real Billie Jean, but then this one’s trying too hard, digging back for that signature leg kick, the crotch grab, the toe stand, then bringing it home with a moonwalk that traces a square.

  Silence.

  This Billie Jean looks up to the silent crowd, takes his poorly fitting fedora off and swirls it back on perfectly, first time, peers out through the eyeholes, waiting for the applause to roll in.

  Nothing.

  He takes the hat off again, frisbees it out into the crowd in disgust but holds on a fraction of a moment too long, so that the hat tags Lindsay. On her hurt shoulder.

  She falls back into Masters’ waiting arms, and Masters levels his eyes on Billie Jean about this, and a Ken-doll of a coach steps out.

  Billie Jean nods about this eventuality and starts to step back, the coach committing to cut him off by crossing the stage.

  Billie Jean turns around neatly, in rhythm, and weaves into the crowd, peeling out of the jacket, and, a few steps later, out of the mask as well.

  It’s Jake, from Biology.

  He comes out of the press of people exactly where Izzy is, a burly woodshop teacher fighting through the bodies to catch him, the red jacket held high.

  “Hey, girl,” Jake says to Izzy, still kind of moving with the beat, which hasn’t stopped. He makes his free hand into a loose fist, nudges her under the chin with his inside knuckle. “Purple?” he says, turning her head from side to side, to study her hair. “Thought it was white?”

  “Different week,” Izzy says.

  “Guys,” Brittney says, ‘accidentally’ stepping in behind Jake.

  “Run,” Izzy tells him, taking the mask he wasn’t offering, and she’s still holding it when the woodshop teacher pushes through, looks from the mask to her then back again.

  “Thought you were taller,” he says.

  “I am,” she says to him, and he takes her into the high school version of custody,

  → pulling her past the reception counter of the main office. He’s about to open the principal’s door to properly deliver her when the secretary is suddenly standing in his way.

  “She’s the perp,” the woodshop teacher growls.

  “Principal Masters is already occupied,” the secretary says back, discreetly.

  The woodshop teacher and Izzy look around the secretary.

  There’s a tie hanging on the principal’s doorknob.

  “Seriously?” Izzy says.

  “He’s attending to her,” the secretary says, thinning her lips in insult.

  “I’m sure he is,” Izzy says.

  “She’d probably be hunky-dory without your fool-headed antics,” the woodshop teacher says. Then, to the secretary: “I’ve got to teach class, Marty.”

  “Birdhouses aren’t going to build themselves,” Izzy adds.

  The woodshop teacher settles his humorless gaze on her.

  “Mrs. Graves’ office,” the secretary suggests, rattling some keys into her hand. “She’s doing counseling in the library for the foreseeable future.”

  “Lots of grief,” Izzy says, and

  → like that, the guidance counselor’s door is closed on her. She turns the light on. Is alone.

  “‘I just want to, I just want to say,’” she repeats, in swooning-Lindsay falsetto, “‘I just want to say that it could have been any of you . . . ’”

  She takes stock of this office again.

  Specifically, the wall of lateral file cabinets.

  “Except it wasn’t any of us, was it?”

  Cut to

  → Izzy shoulder-deep in these files.

  Inset, we flash on her permanent record—it’s thick, unforgiving, rubber-banded together—but now she’s paging through the folder of “Lindsay Baker.”

  “Let’s see what issues our final girl is hiding, now . . . ”

  As it turns out: none.

  Lindsay’s folder is as skinny as she is, just has pre-college junk in it.

  Izzy rams it back home, chances on another: “Crystal Blake.”

  “Well well well,” she says, and studies the door for a breath.

  Nobody comes in, but there’s something looming about it, the way it keeps being in the frame.

  And, yep: keys rattle out there.

  Izzy shoves Crystal’s file into her shirt, sits back into a rolling chair and pushes the drawer shut with her foot, that same motion pushing her across to her assigned place in front of the desk.

  It’s close, and Mrs. Graves looks over to the file wall as if interrogating it. But then she comes back to Izzy.

  “I was acting out earlier,” Izzy says. “I can’t, it’s like I can’t process it, all the violence. Maybe I didn’t know how to cry, so I cried the only way I could, by trying to make everybody laugh?”

  “Oh, dear, dear,” Mrs. Graves says, and comes forward, is reaching to hug Izzy when Principal Masters is leaning on the doorknob, tying his tie.

  “Constance,” he warns, “remember?”

  Mrs. Graves reels her arms back in.

  “I initiated it,” Izzy says, all vulnerability and puppy eyes. “I’m sure Lindsay needed a hug as well, didn’t she? We all go a little huggy sometimes.”

  “Little lady,” Masters starts.

  “This is my office, Jim,” Mrs. Graves says, and reaches a hand across to Izzy. Who takes it.

  Masters doesn’t like this whole scene, but all he can do is glare and judge, finally leave, making a show of keeping the door open, for propriety.

  “Now,” Mrs. Graves says, giving Izzy her full attention again.

  “I keep asking myself, Why them?” Izzy says, something prim about the grin on her lips, and we don’t really need to see the rest.

  Across town, some sixth graders are fishing off a creek bridge. The bridge isn’t covered, is just concrete poured across four wide, corrugated pipes, for the water to sluice through. Because we can’t tell if it’s the same river we know from the cliff, something comes floating past: a magazine.

  The sheriff’s waterlogged Playboy.

  As it passes, the boys are taut on that glossy centerfold girl, her eyes smoldering up at them. And the rest of her.

  “Look at the articles on that one,” one of them says.

  “Go go go!” another says to the rest when the magazine’s past them, and as one they dive for the other side of the bridge with their poles, slinging their hooks into the water, covering all four holes, ready to snag this booty.

  Except it doesn’t come through. And it doesn’t come through.

  One of the boys leans down off the edge, just barely holding on

  → his POV searching that blackness.

  “Who’s going?” that POV kid says, hauling himself back up, his bangs wet.

  Plenty of averted eyes, shuffling feet, bit lips. “Ben?” he says, to one kid in particular.

  “Pussies,” Ben says all around, stripping out of his shirt.

  He strides over to where they were, is getting his nerves together for this.

  “We haven’t done this since fourth grade,” one of the boys squeaks out.

  “Then it should be easy now,” Ben says, and steps over the edge

  → comes back up in a splash, his foot alread
y pushing against the concrete to keep from getting sucked through the pipe before he’s ready, the water surging up over his shoulders.

  Now it’s scary.

  But everybody’s watching, too.

  “Drop something to be sure,” he says, and a handful of leaves flutter down.

  Up-top, the boys race for the other side of the bridge.

  The leaves ride the water out the other side.

  “He’s bigger than a leaf, though,” one of the boys says.

  “Shh,” the boy he was talking to says back, then

  → leaning over, from Ben’s unsteady POV, that leaf boy says down that “It’s cool!”

  “You don’t have to!” that hesitant kid adds, cupping his hand around his mouth. “My dad, we can steal one of his if you want.”

  “Now you tell me,” Ben mumbles, and nods to himself, pushes hard away from the concrete with his feet so he can situate himself on the surface properly: arms crossed over his chest grave style, so we’re all holding our breath for him, don’t want a kid to die.

  But he does it anyway, pulls his feet together, the water sucking him into that darkness.

  All we hear from inside is his scream.

  On top of the bridge again, the boys are in a panic, don’t know what to do.

  They’re all leaning over the backside of the bridge, where the water comes out.

  “Shit shit shit,” the hesitant kid says. “My mom’s going to kill me.”

  “He’s just fucking with us,” leaf boy says, talking himself into it. “Wait, look,” a third says, and he’s right.

  Something’s coming.

  Slowly, as if grinning at them, a Michael Myers masks floats past. Then Jason, and Freddy, and Ghostface, and finally a whole dislodged clump of werewolves and zombies, devils and clowns.

  The leaf boy jerks back, scareder than any of them, and what he finds for leverage, to push back against, it’s the hesitant kid.

  The hesitant kid goes tumbling into the water. He comes up splashing, finds he’s able to stand.

  “Do you see him?” the leaf boy calls down. The hesitant kid gathers himself, peers in

  → his POV just showing darkness, rushing water, but then

  → reversed so we’re in that darkness, looking at him face-on such that he’s framed by the mouth of the corrugated pipe. On cue and in scary-slow motion, Billie Jean erupts from the water behind him, his arms just like kid-Jason’s, pulling the hesitant kid down.

  Except—not down, but back.

  It’s not Billie Jean. It’s Ben, fooling around.

  On the bridge, the two kids left are rolling with laughter.

  Until they realize a tall, dark shape is standing over them.

  In their POV, it’s . . . at first it wants to be Deputy Dante, but at second glance it’s Jamie, the reporter.

  “So all the water around here is connected, I take it?” he says, lowering a hand to help leaf boy up.

  Leaf boy takes it. The other kid’s still pushing back from Jamie, getting closer to the edge.

  Jamie looks over, his POV taking in Ben in the river, removing the Billie Jean mask, looking up.

  “What?” Ben says, a challenge.

  “Do y’all even know any Michael Jackson songs?” he says.

  “PYT,” leaf boy says.

  “More like Beat It,” Ben says pointedly, clambering back up, mask in hand.

  “That’s evidence,” Jamie says, about the mask.

  “Of my bad-assness,” Ben says.

  “I can take it to them for you, I mean,” Jamie says. “I’m going there right now for something else anyway.”

  Beat, beat.

  “Or, I mean,” Jamie goes on, taking out his pack of cigarettes. “I could tell him where to find it, either way. Tell that big deputy I know some pretty young things down here have something they maybe shouldn’t. I’m sure he won’t mind knocking on a few doors.”

  “Dante?” leaf boy asks, his voice somehow cringing.

  Jamie lights his cigarette, draws it deep. Shrugs one shoulder.

  “How do we know you’re not just going to sell it on eBay?” Ben asks.

  “Hadn’t thought of that,” Jamie says, then switches gears: “You know, Lindsay Baker—I’m guessing y’all’ve imagined her a time or two, in high detail?”

  Reluctant grins all around.

  “She told me that, that right at the end—I can’t put this in the paper, but she said she took her bikini top off, used it like a, like a slingshot. Picture that?”

  He acts it out so they have no choice but to imagine her breasts, swinging.

  “Bullshit,” Ben says.

  “She wouldn’t,” leaf boy says.

  “She teaches my Sunday school,” the other kid objects.

  Jamie shrugs, not concerned whether they buy it or not.

  He shakes his pack out to Ben, offering a smoke.

  Ben, after a moment of deliberation, accepts the challenge, threads a cigarette up like this is what he always does.

  “And?” Jamie adds.

  Ben passes the dripping mask across.

  “In the movie of this, nobody’ll see your face in this part,” leaf boy says. “You’ll just take it. Be a shadow, like.”

  “See any cameras?” Jamie says, playacting a look around, then tosses the whole pack across to leaf boy. “And you found those in a parking lot. Same as I found this,” the mask. “Cool?”

  “Who are you?” Ben asks, in return.

  “Wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” Jamie says, and, reaching for his car keys, manages to fumble his lighter out, onto the ground.

  “‘Oops,’” he says, smiling, and

  → a flame gouts up from a lighter, caresses the end of a cigarette. Past it, we’re looking down on the river, suddenly so far down

  there. And no longer in town.

  Meaning this is that meaningful cliff Billie Jean fell from.

  A signature white and brown cowboy boot swings into view and we sweep around,

  → are with Izzy and Brittney sharing a smoke, round about dusk thirty.

  And, more importantly, reading a certain file, far away from prying eyes.

  “I knew she was fucked up,” Izzy says, taking a pull off the bottle they seem to have as well. “But this is beyond, right?”

  Inset, in what has to be Izzy’s POV, is a representative page of Crystal Blake’s file, the rest of the pages kind of fanned out as well. Photocopies of newspaper clippings. Therapist reports. Medication list. No real details, but we get the gist.

  Back to Brittney, trying to French inhale.

  She pulls it off, holds her cough in.

  “So are you Pink Lady material?” Izzy asks, not having to look up to see what Brittney just did.

  “And who are you supposed to be, Fiona Apple?” Brittney asks back.

  “Fiona Apple?”

  “Criminal,” Brittney explains.

  Behind them, all around them, police tape is fluttering.

  “This is like invasion of privacy,” Brittney says the next time Izzy turns a page.

  “More like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers,” Izzy says.

  “Which one?”

  “The Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer one,” Izzy says. “The one where the freshman girl gets bodysnatched.”

  “She was . . . an American girl,” Brittney sings, so perfectly on-key that it’s spooky. “I thought serial killers were yesterday, though?”

  “That’s what they want us to think.”

  “So it’s a marketing campaign.”

  “Shit,” Izzy says, about the next page.

  “What?” Brittney says, leaning in. “Spill it already.”

  “First, she’s nineteen . . . twenty this week. Tomorrow.”

  “Jake’s nineteen.”

  “We’re not talking about Jake.”

  “One of us isn’t.”

  “Where she used to go school. This happened there too.”

  “What, somebody stole he
r permanent record?”

  “Machete weekend. Bunch of kids lying to their parents, sneaking off to drink and screw and smoke it if they got it”—taking the cigarette from Brittney without looking up—“only they didn’t listen to any of the warnings, walked right into legend. A legend, I mean.”

  “You mean Crystal’s a final girl too?”

  “I don’t—I don’t think so. The paper says she died early, one of the first ones. Flashed her funbags and got punished for it. A first-reel sacrifice.”

  “It says that?”

  “I’m reading between the lines,” Izzy says, turning the page. “And factoring in what we know of her now.”

  “So . . . she’s dead now?” Brittney asks. “This is zombie high, what?”

  “She didn’t really die. Just got skewered for laughs, left for dead in some steaming pile of gore with her current boy toy.”

  “That’s why she never wears halvsies!” Brittney says, so excited about it. “She probably doesn’t even have a bellybutton anymore to put a ring in, does she?”

  “Always showing leg to compensate for a little midriff shyness,” Izzy agrees. “But it messed her up, don’t you think? Wouldn’t it, I mean, if you weren’t ready? Maybe she really was a Catholic school girl back then.”

  “Before the priest of blood found her . . . ” Brittney says in her best horror-host voice.

  “And now she’s here,” Izzy says, closing the file gently, almost reverently, as if with a new respect for Crystal.

  “And you are too,” Brittney says.

  “We all are,” a male voice says, suddenly behind them.

  Brittney startles around to a Billie Jean mask right at her level, which does about zero to unstartle her.

  Without even thinking she shouldn’t, she jerks away from it, off the cliff, and

  → would be dying already, definitely should be, except Izzy’s stabbed a hand out, has her by the flimsy shirt, exposing one black-bra’d breast.

  “What is it about this place and a PG-13 rating?” Jamie says, reaching down, helping Izzy pull Brittney in, his boot nudging their precious bottle over the edge.

  “Lookout Point,” Izzy says, straining to keep Brittney alive, and watches in instant regret as the bottle tumbles off into space, shatters. “Bare breasts are in the air. Can’t get to second base up here, you’re not even in the game.”