The Final Girl Support Group

by Grady Hendrix

  Just then my cell phone rings. I check it, and know that I do not want to talk to that particular individual right now. I need to decompress. I need to settle down with something comfortable. I’m switching to Netflix and clicking through for Love Actually when I hear a sound that still scares me, even after all this time.

  Something thumps against my front door.

  I turn to Fine. He’s as scared as I am. I click over to my security screen. There was no way I was going to let my door become a blind spot, so after I moved in I put a pinhole camera in my peephole.

  No one’s at my door.

  There’s another thump.

  I put Fine on my desk, out of the way where he won’t get hurt, and then I have my .38 in my hand and the safety off. There’s a second concealed camera outside my door, this one lower down. When I switch to it I realize why I didn’t see them before. The other camera was too high to see Julia in her wheelchair, knocking on my door.

  I close my eyes and wish her away. She knocks louder.

  “I know you’re in there, Lynnette,” she says, and I can hear her through the door, through my cage, across the empty room, penetrating my one safe place.

  “She’ll go away,” I whisper to Fine. “If we just hold still and don’t make a sound, she’ll go away.”

  No one knows where I live. I don’t drive because I don’t trust the DMV to keep my address safe. I don’t have a library card. I don’t vote. I do everything in my power to stay off state databases. Federal I can’t do anything about, so I can only pray they’re more secure. The downside of no one knowing where I live is how would they know if I went missing? How long before someone noticed? What would he be doing to me in the meantime?

  So eight years ago I took a gamble. Julia was the newest member of group, and I guess I picked her because she’s the youngest. I thought that meant she’d be more likely to do what I said. I check in with her twice a day via text, at nine a.m. and at nine p.m., so she knows I’m alive. If I miss a check-in I’ve left her a sealed envelope. I made her promise never to open it otherwise. It contains directions to my apartment.

  On the screen, Julia stops knocking and rolls herself back a foot. She’s giving up. She’s going away. She plays with something in her lap and then my cell phone rings. I desperately search my phone for the mute switch and silence it, but it’s too late. She knows I’m home.

  Pixilated Julia yells at me through my door.

  “Lynnette, stop being a freak, it’s important!”

  Fine and I don’t move, we don’t make a sound, we don’t breathe. Alerts bloom on my screen as this traitor calls my phone again and again. After the eighth time, she goes away.

  I let out my breath and Fine lets out his and we look at each other. Now what? Our location is compromised. Do we stay in place or run? If Julia came here I have to assume that someone might have followed her and now they’re watching my apartment. But I can’t leave. This is my only safe space.

  I’ve got enough food to last three weeks. I don’t have to open my curtains. I’ll turn off my phone and hunker down. No one can get inside. It’ll be safe enough. Let the other ones handle Julia’s “emergency.” I need to stay alive.

  * * *

  —

  Halfway through Love Actually, there’s another knock on my door. I cut the volume, switch on my screen, and call up the lower camera, wishing Julia would just leave me alone. My skin goes tight and my muscles lock. The hand holding my gun goes numb. It’s Julia, and crouched by her side is the Ghost in his black robe and white mask, pressing a knife to her throat.

  It’s not real, it’s a movie, I must still be on Netflix and I accidentally clicked on one of Julia’s Stab flicks. This girl onscreen playing Julia is doing a great job with fear, her eyes wide, her mouth open, chest hitching, and I’m mirroring her hyperventilation.

  It’s a movie. That’s all. I’m watching a movie, because this can’t be real because I take precautions. I’m careful. I don’t take risks.

  Then the Ghost turns its black eye holes to the camera and pulls out a sheet of printer paper.

  “Open the door or she dies, Lynnette,” the paper says in Magic Marker.

  We all have a deal. We’ve never spoken about it, but I know it exists the same way I knew that my parents loved me and that my apartment is safe and that Fine’s my best friend: when the monsters come, we help each other. No matter whose monster it is. No matter what needs doing. This is what happens when you’re a final girl, and group is a monthly reminder of our bargain.

  I just didn’t think Julia would be the first one to call in her chips.

  I tighten the grip on my .38 Special. I make sure the safety is off. Then I press the button that opens my front door and I wait for the monster to come inside.

  —“Women Are Our Meat, and the Eating’s Good” by Deborah Ballin, published in the Last Word on the Final Girls anthology, 1989

  THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP IV:

  Return of the Final Girls

  BZZT goes the buzzer that releases the latch on my apartment door. I take the shooter’s stance that I practice every night, the one that means everything has gone wrong if I’m taking it inside my apartment. I aim the barrel well above Julia’s head, exactly where I think the center of the Ghost’s torso will be, and my arms are shaking, my wrists are weak, my fingers are numb. I can’t tell if my forefinger is on the trigger or outside the trigger guard but I’m too scared to take my eyes off the door to check. The cage will be my kill zone. I can’t worry about my backstop now. I can’t think about what happens to the bullets that punch through the front walls of the apartment across the hall.

  I feel embarrassed.

  I’m overcommitted. I’m overreacting. I’ve made a mistake. I’ve never pointed a gun at a human being in my life. You don’t do things like this, not in a city, not in my house, but I’m too scared to put my stiff arms back down so I stand there like an asshole, holding my gun like I think I’m some kind of badass, like my world isn’t falling apart.

  The feet of Julia’s wheelchair push the door open as she enters the cage, and my muscles make a microscopic snap-contraction but I don’t shoot. I need to take some deep breaths before I pass out. The mesh is too thick for me to see Julia’s face, but I know exactly how she feels. I’ve felt it before. Until you’ve been through what we’ve been through you have no idea how scared a human being can get.

  There’s a high-pitched ringing in my ears. I see the cage in the center of my vision and everything around it is covered in gray haze.

  I’ll protect you, I reassure Fine in my mind. He can’t get through the cage.

  I don’t know if I’m talking to Fine or to myself.

  The Ghost enters behind Julia. I don’t think, I pull the trigger, and that’s when I learn the answer to my question: my finger was outside the trigger guard. Sweat-slicked, my finger slips off the gun and my ice-cold hands lose their grip and I fumble. I squat fast and catch my slippery gun with my fingertips right before it hits the floor and I don’t even bother to stand up or get a firm grip; my finger finds the trigger.

  “Lynnette! Lynnette!” Julia’s shouting.

  I’ll save us, Fine.

  The Ghost tears at its mask, and it’s weird behavior, but I’m not stopping until I’m safe.

  “Lynnette! Stop!” Julia shouts.

  I squeeze the trigger.

  The sound stabs me in both eardrums. The room fills with smoke. My wrists snap backward and I punch myself in the face, I taste metal on my teeth. Suddenly I’m sitting on the floor.

  “I pissed,” a muffled male voice shouts. “I pissed myself.”

  “Lynnette! It’s Russ. It’s Russell Thorn!”

  I’m climbing to my feet again, gun in my left hand. I switch it to my right.

  “Lynnette,” Julia shouts again. “Jesus Christ. Don’t shoot. Don’t sho
ot. What’s your safe word? Jesus Christ.”

  I raise my gun again. The Ghost is tangled up in its black robes, trying to open the door back out into the hall, but it’s stuck between the door and Julia’s chair.

  “Help me!” it screams. “Helpmehelpmehelpme!”

  I find the center of its torso with the barrel of my gun.

  “Lynnette,” Julia shouts. “This is Russell Thorn. He interviewed you.”

  I know that name.

  “Russell Thorn,” I repeat, but mostly I’m wondering what stopped my bullet. Why isn’t the Ghost dead? Why is the Ghost Russell Thorn?

  I pull the trigger again.

  The cage shakes but this time I keep my stance. This time it only feels like I broke my wrists.

  “Stop shooting at us!” Russell Thorn screams.

  His mask is off and I see his ginger beard and he’s climbing over Julia in her wheelchair, and inside the cage it’s a writhing mess of arms and legs.

  “It wasn’t my idea!” Julia shouts. “But you wouldn’t open the door for me.”

  I am very, very tired. My tongue is thick. My eyelids are made of lead. The room is dim from gunsmoke, and it burns my eyes, makes me sleepy.

  “I opened your envelope,” Julia says. “Because we have to talk.”

  I have lived here quietly for so long, and now I have fired a gun twice, and in five minutes the police will come, and more people will enter this apartment in the next half hour than have come through that door in sixteen years.

  My face goes numb. I punch the code into the keypad and the locks slap open. Julia wheels inside.

  “You need to get a towel for Russ,” she says, voice shaking. “I can’t believe you shot at me. Holy crap, I’m having a heart attack.”

  “That doesn’t come in,” I say, pointing at the Ghost mask and robe.

  I’m still holding the gun. Russell drops the robe like it’s on fire.

  “In the hall,” I tell him.

  He falls all over himself throwing it outside, and then he slams the door. Fine doesn’t like this. He prefers when it’s just us. He doesn’t want strangers in here.

  “It’s too late,” I tell him.

  “What?” Julia asks, one hand pressed to her chest.

  Russell is looking at me the way you look at a crazy person. He’s measuring the distance to the door. I walk over, slam the cage door shut, and the bolts bang home. Russell jumps. When I turn back from the cage he’s sitting in my chair.

  “Sit on the treadmill,” I say. “Your pants are wet.”

  His face turns red beneath his beard but he moves. He’s taking in everything at once, and his sticky eyes crawl all over my walls, my computer, my screens, taking notes inside his head, composing sentences about me (“A spartan one-bedroom with industrial-yellow walls”), writing paragraphs that judge me (“Curtains tightly closed as if she fears the sunlight almost as much as she fears the man who hurt her all those years ago . . .”), coming up with pat thesis statements (“A woman trapped inside her apartment, serving a sentence much like the man who . . .”).

  He pretends we weren’t speaking just last week.

  I study my cage. There’re two scorched dents. The guy who built it assured me that a round from a .38 would have no problem penetrating it, but he either lied or was stupid. How many other plans have I made based on wrong information?

  “Wow,” Julia says, trying to sound brave, fingering the dents with one shaking finger. “You really shot at us.”

  “It was supposed to penetrate the mesh,” I say.

  “Well I, for one, am really fucking glad that it didn’t,” Russell says from down by the floor where he sits on the treadmill.

  “You’re not supposed to open my letter unless I miss a check-in,” I say to Julia.

  “It’s urgent,” she says.

  “This is a violation,” I say. “A total violation.”

  “Someone in group is writing a book,” Julia says. “Mr. Volker’s nephew knew about it.”

  Suddenly, I have the flu.

  “Why’d you come here?” I mumble.

  Someone starts banging on my door.

  “Go away!” I shout.

  “I’m calling the police,” a woman’s voice shouts back.

  I check my camera. It’s the actress who lives down the hall, wearing sweatpants and unlaced running shoes.

  “We’re rehearsing a scene,” I shout at her.

  We all watch on the screen as she walks back down the hall and goes into her apartment.

  “Why did you come?” I repeat.

  “Because I know it’s Heather,” Julia says. “I need you to help find her.”

  Russell glares at me from down by the floor, getting his confidence back. Julia wants answers. The man who killed Adrienne knows that someone in our group is writing a book. Julia thinks Heather is writing a book?

  “I need a minute,” I say. “I need you both to shut up for a minute.”

  Julia’s killer was the Ghost. He wore black robes and a Halloween mask and he turned out to be her boyfriend, a horror buff who wanted to transform her into his very own final girl their senior year of high school. He shared his Ghost costume with his best friend and together they carved their way through the student body of their graduating class. To them, all those dead girls were one big meta-joke.

  They were clever kids with good SAT scores and college in their future, kids who didn’t take anything seriously because they assumed they were smarter than everyone else. The one thing they didn’t think through was that if Julia was going to be their final girl she had to kill them. Turned out Julia didn’t have a problem with that. She said the worst thing was their quips. No matter how many times she shot her boyfriend he kept making stupid quips.

  America had lost its taste for final girls by the nineties, but when Julia went to college her sequel happened and suddenly America perked up. We call it a sequel because they almost always come back. One of her classmates, hungry for his fifteen minutes of fame, took on the Ghost disguise. He killed five people, got arrested, got his capital sentence commuted to life, and made Julia a star in the process. Everyone loves a comeback queen.

  The way she stopped the second Ghost was by tackling him out a window to save her roommate’s life. She received an incomplete fracture of her L1 vertebra for her trouble. Ever since, she’s been in a wheelchair with only partial mobility of her upper legs. They left that part out of the movie when they cast a doe-eyed, able-bodied ballerina in her place. And it turns out she broke her back for nothing. Her roommate died on the way to the hospital. That’s life: always kicking you when you’re down.

  Julia’s physiotherapist got promoted to husband and convinced her to hit the talk show circuit. I know what it’s like. You don’t want someone angry at you, especially a man, so you say yes to things you don’t want to do because there’s no road map for where you are, nothing to guide you except a neon sign in your head that says Do not make men angry.

  The talk show circuit didn’t count on how pissed Julia was. She says she didn’t realize it either. Her first appearance was with Sally Jessy Raphaël. Sally called her an inspiration. Julia looked her dead in the eye and said, “Then why don’t you get inspired to put in some goddamn wheelchair ramps around here.” The producer for her next booking called halfway through the show and left a voicemail saying they were so sorry but she was being bumped for Ed Begley Jr. and his biodiesel car. They never rescheduled.

  Adrienne was the one who brought Julia into group. We almost didn’t take her because all she did was pick fights. Julia even fought with Heather, and within ten minutes of meeting her you know that fighting with Heather is a waste of time. Then, after a session in which Julia spent fifteen minutes lecturing Marilyn about American imperialism, Adrienne invited her out to Camp Red Lake for the weekend. Julia stayed for a week. S
he won’t say what happened, but whatever it was worked. When she came back she buried herself in books and earned her paralegal degree, got a master’s in sports medicine, took self-defense classes, learned to shoot from her chair. She started shutting up, as much as Julia is capable of shutting up.

  She also figured out that her former physiotherapist, and current husband, had “misappropriated” all her money. A divorce kept things from getting worse, but it took a while to put her life back together. Once a year, Ray Carlton, the second Ghost, files an appeal and once a year, the judge swats it down. Julia does the paralegal work on her own case. The prosecutor’s office is happy to get the free set of hands, and it gives Julia a sense of satisfaction.

  “You’ve endangered my life,” I say to her.

  “It’s a plastic knife,” Russell says.

  “That’s not the issue.”

  “We’ve got bigger problems than your paranoia,” Julia says.

  “You endangered my safety,” I repeat.

  “Ladies,” Russell says. “Before the catfight commences, maybe we can have a more substantive discussion.”

  His tougher-than-leather attitude is undermined by his whiny voice and wet crotch.

  “How do you know someone’s writing a book?” I ask Julia.

  “I told her,” Russell says.

  I am at a loss for words. Whatever script I was given, he just took it in a direction I don’t understand. My go bag hangs from a hook by the cage. I can grab it and be out of here in seconds.

  “Christophe Volker,” Julia says. “You’ve seen the news? You heard what he did to Adrienne?”

  I don’t trust myself to speak, so I nod.

  “That Stephanie Fugate, the survivor in yesterday’s Camp Red Lake killings,” Julia says. “She told the police that Christophe was a Chatty Cathy. The entire time he was coming after her he would not shut up about women this, single mothers that, the homosexual agenda, Obama’s birth certificate, FEMA death camps. One of the things she remembers him saying is that he’d talked to someone in our group. That they were writing a book and asked him for details about his lawsuits with Adrienne.”