The Final Girl Support Group

by Grady Hendrix

  I look up and see Garrett standing next to the Christmas tree. When he sees me watching, he flips me the bird.

  It’s funny, but he’s the only man I’ve ever loved.

  Christmas Eve, 1988, American Fork, Utah. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses is everywhere, but I prefer “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley because I’m a cheerleader, and I’m happy all the time, and I’m in love. Tommy Burkhardt looks just like Jordan Knight and my mom calls us Charles and Diana because she thinks he treats me like a princess. Even though we’ve only been dating for six weeks, it’s six weeks that started in mid-November and takes me right through Christmas, and I know he’s going to get me an awesome Christmas present.

  My parents would probably have gotten a divorce if my dad didn’t care so much about appearances. He’s the chief of police of a small town and he’s invested in that Norman Rockwell thing, so he hides at the office while Mom plays happy homemaker and makes everything as perfect as possible all the time. It drives us all crazy. They’re doing the best they can, but Gillian and I both know something’s got to give.

  She’s eleven, and we’ve talked about what’s going to happen when Mom and Dad get divorced and we’ve decided weekends with Dad, weekdays with Mom, and we’re not splitting up. Sisters stick together. Both of us hope it’ll happen soon because right now we’re walking on eggshells.

  Christmas Eve comes, and Dad won dinner for two at that Italian place downtown, and he read in a magazine that they should try to have some together time, so he comes to Gillian and me all serious and asks for our blessing. The restaurant is where they had their first date, and he’s so nervous his hands are sweating, and of course we say yes, and as he’s leaving for their dinner he asks me to make sure his tie is straight and then he says, “Wish me luck,” and suddenly he’s not my dad at all, he’s a guy going on a date, and I melt inside and actually pray they figure it out, kneeling beside my bed with my hands folded and everything.

  I loved Christmas. I loved the nonstop Tabernacle Choir Christmas carols playing at the mall; I loved the animated movies about elf dentists and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on TV; I loved Mom going into baking overdrive so the house always smelled like hot sugar and warm butter; I loved wrapping presents. It made me feel like peace on Earth was possible. It made me feel like a fancy dinner could solve Mom and Dad’s marriage.

  Tommy called to say he’s bringing me my present, and I sent Gillian upstairs.

  “Watch TV in Mom and Dad’s room,” I said. “Do not come downstairs.”

  “You’ve got a date,” she said, and I hate her for being annoying and love her for being a kid.

  I opened the door for Tommy and I’m totally blown away by how good-looking he is. I’m not bad, but I never thought I’d do this well, especially since Shasheena Grotepas had her eye on him. We made out for a while, and then he gave me my present: a Christmas tree pin with ruby and emerald decorations.

  Twenty-two years later I know they’re fake stones, but we were on the pool table in the rec room and I had my shirt off and he set it on the curve of my breast and I remember how the gold glowed against my skin and, like I said, I loved Christmas more than anything.

  Mom and Dad weren’t due back until eleven p.m., and it was only eight p.m., so even if they fought I figured we had at least two hours, and so I decided this would be the night we went all the way. Things got hot and heavy on that pool table, but I planned to move to the sofa upstairs. It was super-soft and had a ton of afghans so we could make a nest and take our time.

  Then the doorbell rang.

  “Is that your folks?” Tommy asked, sitting bolt upright.

  “They have keys,” I said.

  I pulled his face back to mine. Sweat ran down my chest and pooled between my breasts. Dad always turned the heat up too high in the house. He hated the cold.

  The doorbell rang again.

  With a groan I rolled out from under Tommy, grabbed his hockey jersey, and pinned my Christmas brooch to the collar.

  “Hurry back,” he said as I pulled on my stirrup pants and started up the stairs.

  Those were his last words to me.

  I was sixteen, and kind of stupid, and we knew everyone in American Fork, so I just opened the door without looking out the window.

  No one was there. It was freezing cold, but I stood for a minute, breathing in the woodsmoke from the neighbors’ chimneys, with my boyfriend in the basement, his gift on my collarbone, thinking I was hot stuff, imagining I had the whole world on a string.

  Then Santa Claus came around the corner carrying an axe.

  At first, I didn’t recognize Ricky Walker. All I saw was the Santa Claus suit and I thought it was someone on the hockey team playing a joke. I didn’t think it was funny so I slammed the door in his face and turned the thumb lock.

  It took him two swings to bust the door wide open and he came in with the cold. That was when I recognized him.

  “Ricky?” I asked.

  He came at me with his axe, and when I screamed Tommy came upstairs. He tried to protect me, but every time he got in the way, Ricky hit him with his axe. Finally, Tommy’s head was so misshapen that I begged him, “Tommy, stay down!”

  Ricky embedded his axe in Tommy’s neck, and then he came for me. I managed to scratch up his face, but he tore off my jersey, lifted me up, and carried me into the living room. My dad had been a big hunter before Gillian was born, and he’d bagged a white-tailed buck with a huge rack of antlers on a trip and mounted its head on the living room wall. That was what Ricky impaled me on.

  At first I didn’t understand what hurt so much, and then the antlers were pushing into me so hard I thought they’d tear me in half, and then they were inside me, and I watched them come out my front.

  I was a little tiny thing back then, barely ninety-five pounds, and the antlers went in just above my kidneys and came out just below my rib cage. I hung there for ten hours in shock, and the antlers and the weight of my body kept me from bleeding out. I slipped in and out of consciousness as I watched Gillian come downstairs, as my mom and dad came home, as Ricky took care of them all.

  When I was six I thought I was Gillian’s mom. They let me make her Jell-O, and get her ready in the mornings, and even give her a bath until I saw No More Tears on the side of her Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. I always tried to be so careful when I washed her baby hair, but then I saw that label and it smelled so good, and the thick yellow shampoo looked like honey, and I poured half the bottle in her eyes because I thought “No More Tears” was a magic formula that meant she’d never cry again. She howled so loud my eardrums rattled, and Mom swooped in and scooped her up and pressed her to the side of her neck and got so angry.

  “Lynnette,” she said. “You have to protect your sister.”

  I’m sorry, Gilly.

  He did things to her body, to their bodies, he performed scenarios, peeled the meat off their bones. At one point Mom and I locked eyes while Ricky was focused on Dad, and Mom saw the tears running down my face. She knew that if Ricky saw me crying he’d realize I was still alive, and so Mom attacked him. She took his attention. She got him to focus entirely on her for a long, long time. She was a good victim. I hope it didn’t hurt. I hope she was drunk.

  I’ll never find out if Mom and Dad’s date rekindled their romance. Ricky took the answer to that question away from me forever. And Mom never lived long enough to find out what happened to Charles and Diana.

  When the sun came up, Ricky snored inside the bloody nest he’d built out of my family. I couldn’t tell where Tommy’s body ended and my dad’s body began. Gillian was easy to keep track of, though. He’d put her head on the mantelpiece looking at me.

  Ricky woke up, shuffled to the kitchen, and pissed in our sink. He was still in the kitchen when the first cop walked into the living room.

  “Hello?” Mike M
iller called from the broken front door. “Anyone home? Karl? Carol? I’m coming in.”

  I wanted to warn him, but I didn’t want to give myself away. He got an axe through the chest. Garrett P. Cannon was the next cop through the door.

  “Mike?” Garrett called, walking into the house. “Mike? You better not be stealing Christmas presents from the chief.”

  He saw Ricky splitting open Mike’s rib cage with his axe. Ricky stood up and came at him. I heard Garrett drop his gun, cursing, and then he picked it up and fired five times. There was silence, and then Ricky came running back through the living room. I couldn’t tell if he’d been hit because he was already covered in so much blood.

  He smashed through the sliding glass doors at the far end of the living room as Garrett came after him, fumbling with his reloader. He seated it and emptied his gun into Ricky’s back and I remember seeing Ricky flip over the railing on our deck, his feet going straight up in the air. They said he landed so hard it split his skull in two.

  Garrett just stood there for a minute in all the gunsmoke, looking at the slick of skin and muscle and splintered bone that had been my family and the boy I loved. My brain felt far away, but I managed to wave my left hand in little circles at the wrist until Garrett turned around.

  “Holy shit,” he breathed, looking up at me. Then he went outside and emptied the rest of his ammo into Ricky’s corpse. He got on the radio and called in all the backup he could find on Christmas morning.

  They shot me up on painkillers before they sawed the antlers off and took me to the hospital. I was unconscious for almost two days. Garrett didn’t leave my side the entire time.

  I woke up unable to lie on my back, sore in a way I didn’t think was possible. Even my toenails ached. Garrett brought me news and updates, he brought me flowers, he lied and said I’d been wearing a T-shirt when he found me. Topless unmarried girls making it with their boyfriends in Utah weren’t going to earn much sympathy back then, and Garrett wanted to make sure everyone saw me as the pure and innocent victim in this story.

  He sat next to me at my first press conference, the one where I leaned over and upchucked all over the table. He told my story for me, and on the interview circuit I sat next to him and smiled, and when they asked me questions I said he was “my hero,” he was “my everything,” he was “my knight in shining armor.” It was true. At the time, the only thing standing between me and screaming insanity was Garrett P. Cannon.

  Is it any surprise that I fell in love?

  * * *

  —

  For two years I was a happy little idiot who did what she was told. I put it all behind me. I tried not to dwell.

  “Why live in the past?” I chirped, smiling bravely.

  My foster parents were everything I could have wanted. The next Christmas, they almost convinced me that things were normal. We rented movies, went ice skating, stayed in the house and played marathon games of Monopoly, cooked elaborate meals, anything to keep my mind off Ricky.

  The following Christmas I gave Mike and Liz permission to try some Christmas decorations, and was secretly more thrilled than I expected when I saw wrapped presents with my name on them in the living room. I let myself think everything could be normal again. That Mike and Liz were going to help me have an actual life. I didn’t count on Ricky’s little brother, Billy. No one did.

  Billy was serving time in a locked psych ward for attacking his next-door neighbor in a fight over what day they put out their garbage cans, and he blamed me for what happened to his big brother. When Christmas rolled around, he decided he just had to let me know how he felt. He got a Santa suit from somewhere and strangled his roommate, then started a shootout in the intake room that killed two people, both of them cops. Of course, when people realized whose brother he was, everyone went on high alert. I was desperate to speak with Garrett, but he was busy telling the press how he had to be careful about gazing into the abyss because it also gazed into him.

  But he did take the time to post cops outside my foster family’s house. Four cops, actually, all outside the front door. Which meant that Billy came in the back. Carol was first. Then Mike.

  I was too scared to move, too scared to run, and my scars throbbed like fresh wounds for the three hours he kept me in the kitchen. At first he beat me whenever I made a noise. Then he beat me for fun. He used a cast-iron kitty-cat doorstop that Carol loved. The back of my skull was so pulped they had to put a metal plate in. The few times I’ve flown after that I usually set off the metal detector.

  I’m pretty sure he would have killed me if one of the cops hadn’t rung the doorbell to use the bathroom. Billy shot him and went out the back. It took them twenty-four hours to find him hiding in a Nativity scene at a Lutheran church. Garrett shot him at exactly 3:14 a.m. on a rainy Christmas morning, then dragged him out bleeding and tossed him in the back seat of his squad car. No full-clip-in-the-back treatment this time. By now, Garrett knew that a live killer made all the difference when it came to book deals.

  Once again, Garrett was waiting for me when I came out of surgery, ready to take credit for saving me a second time. Before, I’d worshipped the ground he walked on. It had been puppy love. This time I was eighteen and he wanted more than a puppy for his reward. The first time we had sex was in my hospital room. He was twenty-three years older than me. I didn’t care.

  He had a wife and kids, but when he wasn’t at my apartment I’d call his house crying, begging him to come protect me. Garrett told his wife I had “imprinted” on him like a duckling. It was her second marriage. Her first husband had gone to prison for shooting her brother. She wasn’t the kind of woman who asked too many questions.

  For two years, Garrett was my everything. He handled all my media requests, looked over all my contracts, went to all my meetings, and I did whatever he wanted. I felt cared for and protected. I didn’t see how much he was getting out of this, too.

  Getting me out to L.A. and into the first Slay Bells movie was a big deal for him at the time. The producers needed a gimmick to make people notice their bargain-bin production, and I was dumb enough to believe Garrett when he said it’d be good for me. I never thought to ask how much they’d paid him. At the last minute I had a panic attack, bailed, and drove back to American Fork. He said he didn’t mind that I’d screwed up his deal, but after that he stopped calling me as often, then he stopped coming by entirely, and after a while he forgot about me and I cried myself to sleep every night for a long, long time.

  I thought Garrett had left me alone, but eventually I realized I had always been alone. I had done everything they’d told me to do, and it had happened again. No one had been able to keep me safe. No one had watched out for me. I was the only person who could keep me safe. And so I did.

  Sometimes an entire year will go by when I believe that’s the whole story. But in my heart I know I deserve to be in prison. In my heart, I know I deserve to be in Hell.

  Of course, now that they have the letters, everyone else knows it, too.

  —Dr. Carol Elliott, private notes on session with Lynnette Tarkington, May 2002

  THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP XII:

  Hellbound

  It’s cold in here. The central air clutches my bones. No one talks to me. No one tells me what’s happening. Instead, they tape my letters to the glass wall so I can read every line. They’re photocopies, but I can still see sentences I remember writing on my Holly Hobbie stationery with its roses twining around the borders.

  Twice they take me out of my cell. Once to be photographed. Once for a cold shower. Both times when I come back, there are more copies of more letters taped to the glass wall. I do my best not to look.

  Three times a day, the door opens and a cop brings a stack of high-sided brown trays into my cell and leaves one on the floor with all the ceremony of a dog dropping a turd. I count them to track time. One comes every five hours, starti
ng at eight a.m.

  Somewhere out there my paperwork is being pushed through the digestive tract of the legal system, and soon they will open my door and instead of taking me to the shower they will take me to a courtroom where they will set bail too high for me to pay. When that happens, I’ll be sent into the general population to wait for my trial, where some no-hope lunatic will stab me to death with a sharpened toothbrush in her bid for fame. She’ll probably be able to sell the shiv that killed a final girl for a couple of hundred bucks online. Even a shiv that killed a not-quite-final-girl like me.

  And I deserve it.

  That’s what they always said about me: I’m not a real final girl. The other ones in group fought back and killed their monsters, but me? I just hung on those antlers like a piece of meat. I just lay there on the linoleum getting my skull pulped. I didn’t save anyone. Garrett P. Cannon saved me.

  Some cop drops a lunch tray: banana, apple, two slices of white bread, two slices of bologna, a packet of mayo, two sugar cookies, and a fruit punch. While I eat the apple, phrases from my letters jump out at me.

  “. . . wish you were here and we could escape . . .”

  “. . . how is your acting career, are you in anything I’ve seen . . .”

  “. . . did you hear the new Metallica album . . .”

  I remember being happy all the time in high school, but these letters tell a different story.

  “. . . Dad acts like we’re suspects and he’s just waiting for us to make a single mistake so he can send us to prison . . .”

  “. . . he made Gillian scrub the shower with her toothbrush . . .”

  “. . . wish someone stronger than him would show up and give him a taste of how . . .”

  “. . . I hate him . . .”

  “. . . this family is like being in Hell . . .”